Category Archives: corporate news

Fauci and the Hagiographical Style of American Journalism

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By Justin Hart

Source: Brownstone Institute

Norah O’Donnell has known Dr. Fauci and his wife for ages: “How are you guys?” she starts her interview with Dr. Fauci for InStyle Magazine where Fauci posed for the most hubris-exuding photo of the pandemic.

“With all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective!” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, July 2020, InStyle Magazine

This was 3 years ago this past week:

Norah’s husband, Chef Geoff, owns the Georgetown restaurant, “Deluxe Hospitality” She admits in her opening that Dr. Fauci and his wife, the bioethicist, Dr. Christine Grady, are frequent patrons there.

“… these days mostly for takeout.” O’Donnell chuckles.

Revisiting this horrible puff piece you can’t help but see the obtuseness of the leader of the pandemic policy in stark relief.

First, as always, the man is incapable of actual reflection:

NO: What have we done wrong?

A F: You know, that’s almost an unanswerable question. There are so many possibilities. I don’t like to phrase it in the context of what we’ve done wrong, as opposed to let’s take a look at what happened and maybe we can have lessons learned.

Showing once again that Dr. Fauci (in July 2020) believed that we did NOT lock down hard enough:

If you look at the European countries, they shut down about 90 to 95 percent of the country. Whereas when we shut down, the calculation is that we shut down about 50 percent. So, put all of those factors together, I can’t say we did anything wrong, you know, but certainly we’ve got to do better.

Lambasting any move to “re-open” he continues: “What we need to do now is to learn the lesson of what happened with the recent surges. We’ve got to pause in the opening and maybe even take a step back in our phases…”

Pushing masks was a high priority for the man who months earlier admitted in an email that they don’t really do anything:

As we try to proceed, we need to really take seriously the issue of wearing masks all the time and not congregating in bars. I think we can stop that by just closing them, because they are certainly an important mechanism of this spread. Keep distances, wash hands, avoid crowds, wear a mask … I think if we diligently do those things, we can turn this around.

Norah asks him about the “noble lie” he told around masks (which is just ridiculous parsing):

NO: It’s been recently reminded to us by the White House that you advised against people wearing masks in public, and, of course, that was due to the surge because the concern was about saving PPEs for medical professionals. Do you regret that comment?

A F: No. I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct.

I’m always struck as to the casual and flippant manner in which Dr. Fauci proscribed the policies. Here he is continuing to defend his noble lie and pushing masks with assertions that STILL have no science behind them – in fact, quite the opposite.

And also, it soon became clear that we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from surgical supply stores.

The plan to vaccinate millions was already in place as this comments affirms:

By the beginning of the year we should have the first tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of doses. That being the case, I would think we could vaccinate a substantial portion of the population as we get into 2021 — if the vaccine is safe and effective.

The the hubris really kicks in:

NO: And how long do you see yourself at the NIAID?

A F: I don’t see any termination within the near future because I judge [my career] by my energy and my effectiveness. And right now, with all due modesty, I think I’m pretty effective.

Norah turns to Mrs. Fauci (Dr. Grady):

NO: Let me ask you, Chris, as a bioethicist, what do you make of this moment we’re in, when even a mask has become more of a divisive issue?

CG: Well, I would say that masks shouldn’t be divisive. It’s a relatively easy way to protect one’s self and others. And so for public health reasons, I think everybody should do it. From an ethical perspective there is always this tension between what you ask people to do that feels like a restriction of their liberty and what is required for public health. And in this case, it seems like a slam dunk. It’s not restricting liberty much, and it’s very helpful for public health.

She goes on to lament how “unfair” it all seems to her:

when he gets criticized, it feels unfair to me because he is working so hard for the right reasons.

NO: What feels unfair?

CG: That people are looking for things to criticize — I mean, for anything. They are making things up. They are not putting into perspective the contribution that he is making.

A curious aside, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Grady’s first encounter began with a lie – seems kind of appropriate if you’ll forgive my commentary on that.

CG: [laughs] I had just come back from spending two years with Project Hope in Brazil and came to work at the NIH. There was a patient, Pedro, on the unit at the time who was Brazilian and didn’t speak English. One day he asked me if I could speak to his doctors about sending him home because he really wanted to go home. So I set up a meeting with the fellows who were taking care of him and Tony, who was the attending physician. I had not met Tony before that. I was the interpreter. And Tony told him, “He may go home and be very careful about taking care of his health and doing his dressings and sitting with his leg up and things like that.” And when I told him that, Pedro said, “There’s no way I’m doing that. I’ve been in the hospital for months. I’m going to the beach, and I’m going dancing at night.” And I sort of in a split second decided to tell Tony, “He said he’d do exactly what you said.”

AF: She lied! [laughs]

CG: I lied! So the next day I was walking down the hall, and Dr. Fauci came by and said, “Can I see you in my office at the end of the day?” I thought I was going to get fired. But he asked me out to dinner. [laughs]

The entire hagiographical interview in hindsight is a classic look at the elitist bubble around the people in Washington, D.C. during the pandemic. Dr. Fauci’s contribution to history will not be seen in a kind light.

Julian Rose: ‘Humanity in Hypnotic Thrall to a Techno-Industrial God’

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By Julian Rose

Source: 21st Century Wire

So here we are. For yes, this is where we are – if by ‘we’ one understands the current materialistically imprisoned post industrial world – driven on by the relentless force of globalisation.

Brussels, still a remarkably human city by today’s standards, has the misfortune of housing the European Union HQ, which is not a very human conglomerate. And what goes on in it is equally devoid of humanity. For it is about being ‘big, central and dominating’.

Big, central and dominating is the future of the planet if you subscribe to the techno-industrial mind’s two dimensional determinism. In the soothing words of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari, it is to be an Information Technology/Artificial Intelligence future, in which Schwab tells us “we will have nothing and will be happy”.

The mobile phone tower and mast which tops the temple of techno-industrial prowess, is an ugly, spindly piece of steel which is an expression of dominance in its own right. The vast global infrastructure formed by these Saturnian steel structures carry with them a penetrating EMF amplified soup of toxicity.

It is this ‘network’ which acts as the gateway to the virtual reality world of those who depend on it for their ‘signals’. Signals that have an abstracted kind of dominance and pronounced tendency to thin the blood and blur the brain.

The majority of messages that come through this gateway concern how to get on in ‘the system’.

How to get from A to B faster; news faster; financial reports faster; connections with family and friends faster; everything faster.

Being permanently plugged-in to this hyper electromagnetic crossroads of life is said to be the only way to ‘stay in touch’, to be a participant in the mental matrix; to be part of ‘the programme’.

But already twenty years ago I decided to cut my ties with this programme. Dispensing with the mobile phone turned out to be an act of liberation, soon to be followed by the ousting of the TV.

Big Brother was consigned to the back seat and I saw that a life that belonged to myself still existed, all be it with the proviso that one prioritised one’s values with a solid dose of determination to be true to that which is ‘real’ in life.

Perhaps this is why I can see so clearly how those who continue to participate in the ‘programme’ are running blindly towards an uncompromisingly sheer cliff-face, and how their voracious demands on the natural environment are increasingly undermining her natural resilience.

I can see something particularly shocking – that this frenetic rush to the cliff face and the great consumption of finite resources it involves – has no other purpose than playing-out a quasi demonic fascination with ever more refined toys of distraction. Distraction from the real pulse of life.

Yet this techno-industrial suicide machine is staffed by humans who appear not to recognise that their joint mission is programmed to end in collapse.

On the contrary, they seem to think that by increasing the efficiency and speed of the means of travel, it will somehow consummate its own need to arrive at where it is headed for. Where or what that is – simply never gets asked.

However, the psychotic gods of insentient ‘progress’ who designed the programme have built into it a series of ‘events’ which reach a certain conclusion in something they call the Transhuman. A robotic state of computer connected and controlled brain power for those able to pay for it.

To pay for the right to be dehumanised and rendered devoid of the need – and indeed ability – to think. Freed from emotion and freed from a soul based link to one’s Creator.

Stations on the way to this dark point of human annulment are laid-out under the WEF creed known as ‘The Great Reset’. A ‘Reset’ from human to non human.

Here are some of stations along the Great Reset route to the Transhuman:

The cessation of food grown in soil and the manufacturing of synthetic food produced in laboratories (at least six of which are already in production).

The end of farming the land as we know it and the removal of redundant farmers and country dwellers into 5 and 6G controlled total surveillance ‘smart cities’.

Countryside and farm landscapes redesigned to accommodate ‘rewilding’ projects and gated access to designated ‘leisure sites’ for those who can afford access.

The end of bank notes and coinage, replaced by a centrally controlled digital currency whose availability will depend upon one’s ‘social credit’ a la China.

The confiscation of one’s assets and private property with the option to ‘rent’ aspects of them back from the corporate state that is to become the new owner.

‘Self-autonomous’ 5G guided transportation systems operating between major cities.

100% surveillance via satellite and ‘the internet of everything’ and the profligate use of algorithms to pick-up any signs of resistance in communications.

The repression of true spirituality in favour of a ‘one world religion’.

Deliberate blurring of sexual delineation ‘man/woman’ and the decline of normal sexual reproduction.

Sperm-counts further reduced due to de-vitaminised synthetic GMO foods, vaccinations and polluted air and water – population control.

Enforced ‘15 minute cities’ as centres of local authority control.

Designer gene-altered babies via laboratory cloning of DNA sequences and cell tissues.

The removal of certain words from the common language, particularly poetic and spiritual ones.

Real art reduced to pseudo art as an expression of the will of the state, including dark-side ritual.

‘Medical health’ seen as the sole domain of Big Pharma with natural medicine outlawed.

Further media/government control over the passing of public information.

There is more, much more. But this is enough to show the basic composition of the stations on the way to ‘Transhumanism’. The arrival point of which is said to be circa 2035.

Behind this in-your-face destruction of hard won human liberties is a vast global propaganda/indoctrination exercise already in existence for more than two decades and built around the now infamous ‘Zero carbon by 2045’ or ‘Net Zero’ in news-speak (Orwell).

When challenged by those still able to question the need for these deadly impositions, the answer is always the same “To save the world from Global Warming.”

This piece of acute brainwashing, initially devised at the Club of Rome in 1972, is key to the whole ‘programme’. As long as enough people buy into it for long enough, the slavery exercise will be irreversible. Based on the current rate of awakening, the discovery that anthropogenic Global Warming is a mega lie will likely be neutralised by the impositions already in place to prevent an uprising.

The techno-industrial god will then have served its purpose. Like the rocket booster that gets the capsule into orbit, it will have taken the majority of mankind over the brink into abject slavery to its hypnotic convenience culture, before imploding in on itself and taking much of humanity and nature’s life sustaining diversity with it.

BUT, all this can be avoided. It doesn’t have to happen. It won’t happen. Our lives do not depend upon adopting the smart technology of tomorrow, today. We won’t any longer be seduced by ‘convenience’ once we recognise it is leading to our self destruction, will we?

We will retain sufficient will-power to get shot of this addiction to the IT/AI life inhibiting distractions that make up the mind controlled road to Armageddon.

The only way to recognise just how diabolical is the trap that has been set for us – and that we have set for ourselves – is to get a grip on our sense of deeper purpose in this life. To make an unbreakable commitment to listen and respond to the call of our souls. The true self. And then pull this true self out of any association with the metaverse mincing machine.

Let no one in possession of a soul ever allow himself/herself to become processed into a sub human product of the techno-industrial behemoth. Stick with what’s solid, what’s real – and ditch the counterfeit virtual world that snares the unweary and turns once healthy minds into casualties of a blind rush to a dystopian digital nowhere land.

The Bizzarro Effect of Universal Insanity

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By Gary D. Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How many times in our lives has it been said or thought that things could not get worse, weirder, more absurd, more dangerous, more immoral, more brutal, more controlling, more restrictive, more perverted, more murderous, or more insane? Can those thoughts even be considered in this day and age of complete and total lunacy? What has happened to mankind, and can it all be blamed on brainwashing and indoctrination by the ruling class over the rest of society? I firmly believe that the causes for the inconceivable problems we see today, go much deeper than just blame on invited masters, and begin at the core of the psyche of humanity. If this is so, the struggle for man’s attempts to regain his sanity, morality, and freedom, are fully dependent on a large swath of society changing dramatically from one of total dependence and expectation of rule, to one of individual worth, and a mandatory acceptance of personal responsibility so overwhelming, as to lead to the total destruction of the State.

You might scoff at such a pronouncement as this, but at this stage of tyranny, indifference, and complete loss of integrity by the masses, nothing short of an absolute and unconditional reshaping of society will suffice in order to eliminate the threat of the extinction of humanity as we know it. We are teetering on the precipice of annihilation, and false hopes or prayers will never be enough to restore this so-called ‘civilization.’ Apathy is our enemy, and can only lead to an enslaved society at the hands of technocratic rulers.

Many might expect the State to implode given the pace of this takeover plot and reshaping of nation states, but what would take the place of the current systems should the weakest fall? Could that be the planned outcome, as with many failed State systems, a global restructuring by the strongest and most brutal countries, just as is the WEF plan indicates, would have a clear advantage in its new world order creation attempt? A transformation is necessary, but that transformation needs to be geared toward a Stateless structure created by individuals, instead of any new political governing scheme.

Real intelligence and critical thinking on this earth are missing in action, and what is disguised as intelligence is rarely ever anything other than State agenda-driven propaganda and lies. This is why what passes for ‘news’ is so unbelievably inaccurate, entirely incorrect, and child-like in nature. That is all that is necessary these days to fool the bulk of society. In other words, thinking is no longer required, as the masses have been conditioned and brainwashed to accept almost any claptrap being spewed by the rulers, fake ‘scientists,’ medical profession, politicians, government, and certainly the media circus made up of State sanctioning whores.

Any who still have the ability to think rationally and intelligently, go through each day in wonder at the wild, insane, and obscene things being reported to the mainstream population; that largest segment of society totally blinded by ignorance, apathy, and in many cases, stupidity. These attitudes make for easy fodder to feed the hopeless, gullible,  and compliant sheep, and are in turn, allowing this heinous State to continue its march toward a globalized world run by the very few.

The completely bogus idea of human-caused ‘global warming’ and fake ‘climate change,’ is now taking shape as the primary reasoning for control over everything and everybody  on earth by the technocrats. This ‘climate’ agenda will now be pursued until the end of life as we know it. It is not at the margin any longer, nor is it anymore hidden. Idiotic headlines concerning so-called weather terror, are expanding by the moment. Sensationalism can now be used universally, as one after another fake disaster looms according to these fraudulent so-called ‘scientists’ and imposters called ‘experts.’

Everything is on the table as extreme warmongers like to claim, but since this war is against all of us, this term takes on a new meaning. Completely asinine headlines continue, as now new and improved fear porn coming from the talking heads of the idiotic and imbecilic mainstream media abound, going so far as to label their fake paranoid ‘global warming’ nonsense as “global boiling.’

But there is so much more happening, as a myriad of false threats is ever upon us, or so the talking heads will claim. New plagues, diseases, ‘viruses,’ killer ticks, (if existent, they were likely to have been purposely created by the military) war threats, and especially ‘climate change’ absurdity. Climate and weather have become totally weaponized, and will be used to control life at most every level now and in the future.

Never forget the non-existent ‘covid pandemic’ lie. It will be revamped, whether as something the same or similar, or some new and approved killer on the loose; so scary as to drive everyone inside, supposedly away from the maddening crowd. Beware the ‘virus’ and emergency hype, as it will never end so long as the masses comply with rule, and obey as slaves.

Perusing just a few ‘news’ feeds will inundate the mind with nonsense, but most see these claims as real or possible; all without any legitimate accompanying evidence. The insane Trump saga leads the way of course, as this stupidity is followed by both sides of the political scam, which helps to keep most of the country at each other’s throats. But there is so much more. The banking sector is bankrupt, and personal and business accounts of many are being closed. Pensions and retirement funds are also being threatened. Cyber attacks are affecting large swaths of this country, and air travel is becoming impossible to deal with at times. The trans scam is continuing and will likely escalate after government schools open up this fall. More UFO reporting is being pursued every week, stores are closing nationwide, inflation is rampant, and the Ukraine false-flag war continues.

Incandescent lightbulbs have been banned, gas stoves and water heaters are targeted as well. There are more bank failures, more trucking company failures, savings are depleted, setting the stage for the digitization of America. CBDC trial and implementation will continue, and widespread default fears are increasing. Interest rates are still rising, as the U.S. credit rating has been downgraded.

The destruction of our world is upon us, as the crumbling of all that is natural and sane is being allowed to take place right before our eyes. All the things mentioned here are not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, as so many things are going awry in broad daylight, all with little notice by the sheeplike masses. Dependency and indifference are our mortal enemies, We are living in a madhouse; a world at great odds with all sanity, and one that has become indifferent and morally bankrupt. This is not the way forward, but the way to hell on earth.

Finding the individual inside, taking solace in self, and abandoning the State is a better way.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Silencing Voices for Peace

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By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

The U.S. Mainstream Media Is Almost Always Pro-War

In the “liberal” New York Times today, I saw an article on “Putin’s forever war” that has the following short synopsis: “Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?”

Is this true?  Does Putin truly seek a “civilizational conflict” with the West?  One that’s “far larger” than the Ukraine war?  It doesn’t seem likely.  Russian forces have struggled in Ukraine.  Already embroiled in a destructive regional war that’s become somewhat of a quagmire, why would Putin seek to widen it?  Is Putin always the aggressor, the bad guy, and the West always the aggrieved party, the good guys, holding back a “red storm rising”?  I thought the West won the Cold War more than 30 years ago.

It’s remarkable how easy it is to get alarmist articles about Russia or China published in the U.S. mainstream media (MSM).  Wars and rumors of war dominate.  The West is always portrayed as the defender of democracy; other countries such as China and Russia are portrayed as threats to civilization and its “rules-based order.”  Strictly speaking, this is simplistic, one-sided, propaganda.

Back in 2017, I wrote about how difficult it is in the MSM to read honest accounts of war.  In the runup to the Iraq War in 2003, critical voices were actively suppressed and punished.  Back then, I focused my article on MSNBC, which like the New York Times is allegedly “liberal.”  At “liberal” newspapers and networks, shouldn’t America expect at least a few critical critiques of war narratives?  The answer here is “no,” as I wrote here:

Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota (1999-2003), was a hot media commodity as the Bush/Cheney administration was preparing for its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ventura, a U.S. Navy veteran who gained notoriety as a professional wrestler before he entered politics, was both popular and outspoken. MSNBC won the bidding war for his services in 2003, signing him to a lucrative three-year contract to create his own show – until, that is, the network learned he was against the Iraq war. Ventura’s show quickly went away, even as the network paid him for three years to do nothing.

I heard this revealing story from a new podcast, the TARFU Report, hosted by Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene. By his own account, Jesse Ventura was bought off by the network, which back then was owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor that was due to make billions of dollars off the war.

Of course, Ventura was hardly the only war critic to run afoul of GE/NBC. Phil Donahue, the famous talk show host, saw his highly rated show cancelled when he gave dissenters and anti-war voices a fair hearing. Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter who covered the Iraq war, gave a speech in late April 2003 that criticized the antiseptic coverage of the war (extracts to follow below). For her perceptiveness and her honesty, she was reassigned and marginalized, demoted and silenced.

So much for freedom of speech, as well as the press.

As Phil Donahue said, his show “wasn’t good for business.” NBC didn’t want to lose ratings by being associated with “unpatriotic” elements when the other networks were waving the flag in support of the Iraq war. In sidelining Ventura and Donahue, NBC acted to squelch any serious dissent from the push for war, and punished Ashleigh Banfield in the immediate aftermath of the war for her honesty in criticizing the coverage shown (and constructed) by the mainstream media, coverage that was facilitated by the U.S. military and rubber-stamped by corporate ownership.

Speaking of Banfield’s critique, here are some excerpts from her speech on Iraq war coverage in April 2003. Note that her critique remains telling for all U.S. media war coverage since then:

That said, what didn’t you see [in U.S. media coverage of the Iraq war]? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story, it just means you’re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that’s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that.

With admirable honesty, Banfield spoke of the horrific face of war at Kansas State Univ. in 2003. Soon after her speech, she was demoted (Image courtesy of KSU)

I can’t tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you’ve got to be on both sides…

Some of the soldiers, according to our embeds had never seen a dead body throughout the entire three-week campaign. It was like Game Boy. I think that’s amazing in two different ways. It makes you a far more successful warrior because you can just barrel right along but it takes away a lot of what war is all about, which is what I mentioned earlier. The TV technology took that away too. We couldn’t see where the bullets landed. Nobody could see the horrors of this so that we seriously revisit the concept of warfare the next time we have to deal with it.

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized.

This TV show [Iraq invasion coverage] that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It’s a dangerous thing to propagate…

I’m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Nothing has changed since Banfield’s powerful critique. Indeed, the networks have only hired more retired generals and admirals to give “unbiased” coverage of America’s military actions. And reporters and “journalists” like Brian Williams have learned too. Recall how Williams cheered the “beautiful” U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles as they were launched against Syria earlier this year [2017].

It’s not just that U.S. media coverage actively suppresses dissent of America’s wars: it passively does so as well, which is arguably more insidious. Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful. Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.

When you consider that billions and billions of dollars are at stake, whether in weapons sales or in advertising revenue tied to ratings, none of this is that surprising. What’s surprising is that so few Americans know about how pro-authority and uncritical U.S. media coverage of war and its makers is. If anything, the narrative is often that the U.S. media is too critical of the military to the detriment of the generals. Talk about false narratives and alternative facts!

America’s greed-wars persist for many reasons, but certainly a big one is the lack of critical voices in the mainstream media. Today’s journalists, thinking about their career prospects and their salaries (and who is ultimately their boss at corporate HQ), learn to censor themselves, assuming they have any radical thoughts to begin with. Some, like Brian Williams, even learn how to stop worrying and love the beautiful bombs.

[After I wrote this in 2017, I added this comment at the site.]

One thing that troubles me is the mindset that criticism of America’s wars undermines the troops. That it could even be a form of betrayal. This mindset is very dangerous. It not only protects the decisions and actions of those at the highest levels of the military and government. It acts to prolong wars and to endanger the lives of the troops (and of their “enemies” as well).

During the Iraq war, I recall instances of U.S. troops speaking clearly and frankly against the war. Their voices were heard, yet their advice was not taken. Instead, generals like David Petraeus were trotted out to assure the American people that the war was being won, even if the gains were characterized by weasel words like “fragile” and “reversible.” And so those gains have proved — even so, Petraeus remains in demand, and is still trotted out, now in mufti, to explain how we must stay the course and continue to defer to the military.

There’s a powerful book to be written here, and it should focus in part on the silencing or marginalization of anti-war voices (even those that wear or wore the uniform), even as pro-war elements are given the main stage as the voices of probity and sanity.

Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are on that downward slope now.

The Dynamics of War Insanity: NATO’s Ukraine Roulette

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By Alfred de Zayas

Source: Information Clearing House

Deliberate provocations of a nuclear rival, coups d’état, colour revolutions, broken promises, broken treaties, escalation of tensions, demonization, invective, double-standards — all this while asserting adherence to international legal norms and playing innocent about our aggressions, our violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, of articles 1(2)[1], 2(3)[2], 2(4)[3] and 39[4] of the UN Charter.

Abrams tanks, Leopard tanks, F-16, indiscriminate weapons, depleted uranium, cluster bombs. Summits illustrate how the moral compass of the collective West is lost in the avalanche of fake news[5], fake history, fake law, bellicose rhetoric, media hyperbole, serial mobbing of dissenters, persecution of whistleblowers, censorship. The Western binary mindset continues to divide the world into good and bad countries, democracies and autocracies. There is little room to accommodate a comprehensive picture of the pre-history, root causes of conflicts, and nuances. One observes an almost total absence of a sense for proportions.

The Global Majority in Latin America, Africa and Asia is increasingly alarmed by the surrealistic spectacle of a collective West that seems out of control, developing its own lethal dynamic, displaying a paroxysm of Russophobia and Sinophobia, incitement to hatred, cancel culture, refusal to entertain serious dialogue, doubling-down on eschatological demands. Many non-Western thinkers and politicians are articulating justified warnings that the on-going intestinal conflicts in the West are adversely impacting the economies of third-world countries and may ultimately result in Apocalypse for the entire planet. The West is not playing the classical Russian roulette – it has developed its own version: Ukrainian roulette, compulsive apocalyptic vabanque.

Meanwhile the Western media, notably Reuters, AP, CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Le Monde, Figaro, FAZ, der Spiegel, even the Swiss NZZ ensure the daily indoctrination doses for the Western public, purveying skewed narratives that repeat and embellish what Washington and Brussels ordain, blithely ignoring other views and perspectives and the principle audiatur et altera pars. Freedom of the media in the collective West seems to mean the right to repeat NATO narratives ad nauseam, even when they have been proven wrong. This “freedom” also includes the freedom to ignore every critical voice about NATO and to refrain from asking critical questions at NATO press conferences.

Western media systematically fail to report on the fears of billions of human beings in the rest of the world, Brazilians, Mexicans, South Africans, Ugandans, Indians, Chinese, who want peace and stability in the world as well as a chance for sustainable development. Many in these countries blame not Russia but Washington and Brussels for provoking the Ukraine conflict. This Global majority is not interested in whether Crimea lies in Russia or Ukraine. They demand a peaceful solution to an internal Western strife, so that the spill-over does not dislocate the economies of non-Western countries. Peace must be sought and achieved at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

The power of propaganda

On the legal, moral and political arenas, truth is less important than the perception of truth. Since time immemorial language has shaped our perception of reality, coloured it according to the political agenda of the powerful. Propaganda was not invented in the 21st century. It has always existed and generated an opportunistic pseudo-reality, an epistemology that subverts our understanding of facts and events. Labels, caricatures, generalizations serve as shortcuts to judgment and influence our daily behaviour in making choices. We are not obliged to use these templates, but most people unthinkingly do so.

The narrative managers of the mainstream media are bent on persuading us into believing who is good and who is bad, what politicians we should like, whom we should despise, what “metaphysic” we should consider valid within the mainstream epistemology. Of course, we still have our own brains and can use them – sapere aude! As Horatius used to say[6]. The sad thing is that even highly educated persons, graduates of Harvard, Oxford, Science-Po, continue to put their trust in media outlets that do not deserve our trust. As Julius Caesar put it: quae volumus, ea credimus libenter — we believe what we want to believe[7]. Indeed, it takes temerity to realize that our own politicians and media lie to us, that they are purveyors of dis-information and practitioners of Orwellian doublethink.

The human being has an innate desire to believe in a positive metaphysic, wants to look up to some authority, needs to have benchmarks, orientation points. That is why we are all to some degree negationists, resilient to bad news. In spite of the egregious official dis-information that preceded Western aggressions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, we still want to believe that our governments are really champions of the rule of law and human rights, that they “mean well”, even if occasionally they inadvertently “make mistakes.”

Of course, it is painful to accept that some things that affect us are ugly, but the realization actually opens new vistas. If we reject blind faith in our leaders and practice a healthy scepticism, if we pro-actively look for other views and perspective, we grow up, become mature and experience a sense of liberation from illusions, acquiring a new purpose based on the facts as they stand, and not as we would like them to be.

The function of law

Law has an epistemological function in defining what is allowed and what is reprehensible. Law is not immutable or God-given, but constitutes a codification of the rules of the game at a particular moment in time and in a particular context. Law should not be confused with justice. Law is only the expression of a certain order of things, past and future generations and other civilizations may have entirely different legal orders and different ideas as to what justice entails.

Education teaches us to respect certain “red lines” established by the scribes of our society – the law makers in Parliaments, in the United Nations, in international conferences, such as those organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have concretized the ius in bello, the laws of war. These codifications include the rejection of indiscriminate weapons such as land mines and cluster bombs. The international Convention banning Cluster Munition (123 signatories, 111 states parties)[8] of 3 December 2008 was signed by many states that now consider furnishing cluster bombs to Ukraine. Go figure!

Judges apply the laws that have been codified by institutions possessing law-making authority. This is what we like to call the “rule of law”, which must not be confused with the “rule of justice”. Moreover, the “rule of law” is systematically undermined when the legal profession engages in brazen double-standards and international tribunals like the International Criminal Court[9] practice selectivity, investigating only some crimes, while letting the crimes committed by Western countries go unpunished.

Criminal Organizations

Articles 9 and 10 of the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, the Statute of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as well as the Nuremberg judgment of 1 October 1946[10] created a precedent for a previously uncodified crime – membership in a “criminal organization”. Several NAZI organizations including the SS, the Gestapo and the Reich Cabinet were found to be criminal organizations, a problematic concept that flies in the face of the legal principle of the presumption of innocence.

If we fast-forward to the 21st century and consider the activities of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, targeted assassinations, overt and covert actions in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, what is the relevance of the Nuremberg precedent to these organizations and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. If we compile the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by NATO forces over the past 30 years, this would largely suffice for the International Criminal Court to issue indictments for violations of article 7 (crimes against humanity) and 8 (war crimes) of the Statute of Rome.

Initially NATO had its raison d’être under its 1949 Treaty. But the moment that the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991 this justification fell away, and it gradually morphed into an imperialistic hegemonic military bloc, bent on imposing the Weltanschauung of the collective West on the rest of the world.

While Chapter VIII of the UN Charter recognizes the legitimacy of “regional arrangements” (articles 52-54) in the field of collective security, this requires that these regional arrangements be subordinated to the higher authority of the Security Council, which has a monopoly over the legal use of force. Since the 1990’s NATO has conspired to usurp the functions of the Security Council and thus far gotten away with it, although the NATO treaty must yield to the primacy of the UN Charter, pursuant to article 103 of the Charter, the “supremacy clause”. If States are dissatisfied with the current state of international law, it is for them to seek an amendment to the UN Charter pursuant to article 108.

Undoubtedly it was contrary to the UN Charter for NATO countries to use military force against Yugoslavia in 1999 in the absence of a Security Council resolution under Chapter VII and a finding under article 39 of the Charter that there had been a previous threat or breach of international peace and security and a failure of peaceful negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations. Without approval by the Security Council, NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia and elsewhere were simply illegal and engaged State civil and penal responsibility, including the obligation to pay reparations to the victims of the aggression. NATO actions since the entry into force of the Statute of Rome in 2001 deserve to be investigated under the rubric “crime of aggression” (article 5 off the Rome Statute) as complemented by the Kampala definition of aggression, and, of course under articles 7 and 8.

The end never justifies the means

The Florentine diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli never wrote the phrase “the end justifies the means” in his famous book The Prince. However, the thrust of the entire book is precisely that. Throughout the ages wielders of power have always claimed that because their goals were supposedly noble, the means to achieve those ends should be allowed. The same idea is expressed in the common idiom that you cannot make an omelette without cracking some eggs. But this is a lame excuse. What must be understood is that the evil means contaminate the end and render it evil as well.

Politicians and media in the collective West try to justify the unjustifiable, including the delivery of indiscriminate weapons to Ukraine, covering up the US involvement in the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines[11], the responsibility of Ukraine for the bombing of the Zaporozhe nuclear plant and the Kakhovka dam[12] and other dams[13]. Politicians and media systematically engage in apologetics about the war crimes committed by NATO forces. Beyond merely whitewashing the crimes, they engage in a form of totalitarian censorship and practice a vicious persecution of whistleblowers who tell us what crimes are being committed in our name. Indeed, secrecy is an enabler of crime. Few people know that the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the twentieth century, was largely perpetrated under the cover of secrecy, that Hitler’s Führerbefehl Nr. 1 required absolute secrecy about government practices[14], that the killers of the Einzatzgruppen had to sign on pain of death that they would never reveal anything about the killings, why Heinrich Himmler reminded the killers in his 1943 Posen speech of the absolute necessity of secrecy. That is why there was the Nazi Operation 1005[15] to attempt to erase the evidence of the killings by the Einsatzgruppen, digging up mass graves and churning the skeletons, why most concentration camps in the East were evacuated and destroyed before their capture by the Soviet Army. Secrecy and denial were indispensable elements of the criminal conspiracy[16].

UN Rapporteur Nils Melzer’s book The Trial of Julian Assange[17] documents the egregious violations of the rule of law in the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador in connection with the Assange frame-up and “prosecution”. Indeed, Nils Melzer is the Emile Zola of the 21st century, demonstrating far worse judicial misconduct than Zola revealed in the 1890’s in connection with the frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus by a French military court. The Assange scandal is much worse than the Dreyfus Affair[18], but the mainstream media today has totally failed in its watchdog duty and many journalists have even joined the wolves.

What future for NATO?

Professors like John Mearsheimer[19], Richard Falk[20], Jeffrey Sachs[21], Stephen Kinzer[22] and others have expressed their concern about the dangers that NATO poses for the survival of humanity, of the logic that it should be dismantled. The best that could be hoped for is that NATO be phased out and that the Global Majority will succeed in rejecting NATO’s ambition to further expand not only in Europe but also in the Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps if the Global Majority exposes the multiple war crimes of NATO forces over the past 30 years and demands accountability from NATO countries, the perception of NATO as a “defence alliance” will be replaced by the label “criminal organization”.

When the media indoctrination and propaganda about NATO is exposed as false, when the perception in Western countries moves from positive to negative, when people realize that NATO is a Machiavellian institution that has exhausted its usefulness, it will be possible to gradually wind it down.

Ultimately, NATO must be recognized not only as a criminal organization, a blustering vestige of a moribund Western imperialism, but as a mortal danger to the survival of civilization on Earth. NATO is on the wrong side of history.

==== 

1. Among the purposes of the UN “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace” ↑

2. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. ↑

3. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. ↑

4. The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace…. ↑

5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-13/key-takeaways-from-nato-day-two-putin-zelenskyy-matter/102595358.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/12/politics/biden-nato-summit/index.html.Compare https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-mask-is-off-why-ukraine-will-never-be-a-nato-member/ ↑

6. Dare to think by yourself, dare to know! Horatius, First book of Letters (20 BC). Immanuel Kant also used the expression in his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?”

7. De bello civile, 2, 27, 2 ↑

8. https://www.clusterconvention.org/ ↑

9. A. de Zayas, Chapter 4, The Human Rights History, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2023. ↑

10. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judgen.asp ↑

11. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream ↑

12. https://abcnews.go.com/International/strategically-vital-nova-khakovka-dam-blown-border-ukraine/story?id=99863763

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-accuses-ukraine-destroying-kakhovka-dam-behest-west-2023-06-07  / ↑

13. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/06/1121201310/ukraine-flooded-village-dam-blown-up  ↑

14. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/staatsgeheimnis-1989490.html  ↑

15. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/aktion-1005  ↑

16. A de Zayas, Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis, Olzog Verlag, Munich 2011. ↑

17. Verso Books, New York, 2022. ↑

18. https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-Dreyfus-Affair  ↑

19. The Great Delusion, Yale University Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306  ↑

20. https://richardfalk.org/2022/03/31/make-peace-not-war-in-ukraine/  ↑

21. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace  ↑

22. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stephen-kinzer-on-the-uss-immoral-proxy-war-in-ukraine/id1525433436?i=1000605659299  ↑ 

A Bonfire of the Vanities

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By Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.

The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.

Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.

Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.

The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.

But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.

The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.

The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.

It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.

For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.

Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.

So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.

Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.

If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.

The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.

This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.

Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.

The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.

Why You Should Stop Trusting ‘The Experts’

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We’re constantly told to “trust the experts”, but that is phenomenally bad advice.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyRHammond.com

“Trust the experts,” we are constantly being told, whatever the topic of discussion. The problem with this advice is that the so-called “experts” are frequently wrong, sometimes as a result of plain incompetence and other times because it is their function to propagandize rather than to educate.

For instance, I got my start doing citizen journalism speaking out against the US government’s planned war on Iraq. In 2002 and early 2003, the government claimed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, active weapons manufacturing programs, and an active nuclear program aimed at producing a nuclear bomb. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroted the government’s claims. All the “expert” analysts and commentators towed the official line.

When I would point out to people that there was no credible evidence to support the government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that the documentary record rather indicated that Iraq had been disarmed of the weapons it produced during the 1980s with the support of the US government, I was frequently confronted with the idea that we should trust the expert intelligence analysts because surely government policymakers must have classified information supporting their case that they just couldn’t share with the public.

Later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued its official report acknowledging that Iraq had indeed been disarmed by UN inspectors by 1991 and never restarted its weapons programs, a whole new propaganda narrative was developed to whitewash how the US government lied to the American people and the world. We were then fed the myth that there had been an “intelligence failure”, the truth being that the government had successfully waged a disinformation campaign against the public for the purpose of manufacturing consent for an illegal war of aggression that left Iraq devastated, with negative ripple effects throughout the Middle East, including the war’s precipitation of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Another example is the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The mainstream “experts” insisted that there was no bubble, that the economy was rolling along nicely. Right up to the bubble’s peak, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to see it. In the New York Times, throughout the 2000s, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman lauded the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy that was the principal cause of the housing bubble only to ludicrously blame the bubble on the forces of the free market after it burst.

Meanwhile, free market economists schooled in the ideas of Austrian economics, so called because its founders and early luminaries hailed from Austria, were accurately warning how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates—meaning rates below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market rather than by a roomful of policymakers—was fueling a housing bubble that would cause economic devastation when it inevitably burst. Congressman Ron Paul famously warned about this as early as 2001, yet we were consistently told by the mainstream “experts” that we shouldn’t listen to him or other advocates of liberty in the marketplace.

The preposterousness of the mainstream narrative was so overwhelming, it prompted me to write a book titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which ended up getting a rave review by none other than Barron’s. Gene Epstein, the former Economics and Books editor for Barron’s said of it:

Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.

Once again, we could see that there is a whole class of “experts” whose primary function was not to truly educate us about how the economy functions but to manufacture consent for the existence of central banking—the Fed being a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply.

That episode also once again illustrates how any non-expert willing to commit the time to self-education can easily see through the lies and deceptions propagated by the “experts”.

Arguably, there is no more perfect example of how the “experts” get things completely wrong than the governmental responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic. While I and others fervently opposed the lockdown measures from the start on the grounds that they would do more harm than good, the thought-controlling media insisted that we must trust the government’s “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci. We should “follow the science” we were told, while Fauci claimed to be science incarnate, deeming himself beyond reproach by proclaiming that to criticize him was to attack science itself.

Predictably, the proclaimed benefits of lockdowns never manifested in the data while the harms have been devastating, with negative consequences being disproportionately borne by children, who are at the lowest risk from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.

I was also warning people since March 2020 that the endgame of the lockdown measures was coerced mass vaccination, which was dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream media but nevertheless came to pass.

While all the “experts” in the so-called “public health” establishment were proclaiming that widespread acceptance of the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, dissident voices like my own were being censored for telling the truth that there was no scientific evidence that the vaccines would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.

I was also warning since very early into the mass vaccination campaign that the policy goal of getting everyone vaccinated could prolong the pandemic and worsen outcomes in the long-term because of the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin” and the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity. These warnings, too, proved prescient as we now know from the available scientific evidence that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines do result in an “immune imprinting” so that vaccinated individuals are stuck generating a suboptimal immune response to circulating SARS‑CoV‑2 variants.

After it became obvious from the data that the vaccines failed to prevent infection and transmission of the virus, the media went so far in their efforts to defend the criminal regime of lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination by gaslighting us and absurdly denying that the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.

We’re also supposed to trust doctors, but my own household’s experience with the medical establishment led us to the opposite conclusion. The doctors were not just unhelpful; they were less than useless. Especially in my wife’s case, listening to them caused more harm than good. In fact, it wasn’t until we learned to stop listening to the doctors and started trusting our own judgment that my wife and I both found a path to healing from the respective health problems we used to have (leaky gut in my case and mercury toxicity from dental amalgams in my wife’s).

Throughout the time that I was seeking help from the so-called “health care” system, I was repeatedly confronted by doctors whose ignorance was matched only by their arrogance and condescension. I ultimately bypassed the doctors by researching our symptoms directly in the medical literature; we diagnosed ourselves and successfully treated the root cause of our respective symptoms (taking steps to heal my gut and getting the mercury fillings safely removed followed by a two-year mercury detox regimen, respectively).

The supposed “experts” with an “MD” after their name were far more interested in lazily pushing pharmaceutical products on us to treat symptoms than in doing their job to try to figure out what the root cause was, much less in figuring out treatments aimed at addressing the underlying cause.

So, the next time you hear someone telling you to place your trust in the “experts”, emphasize the foolishness of placing blind faith in supposed authorities in lieu of doing one’s own research and thinking for oneself, and remind the person how the “experts” are frequently nothing more than professional propagandists serving a given political or financial agenda.