TRUST MACHINE is the first blockchain-funded, blockchain-distributed, and blockchain-focused documentary. It explores the evolution of cryptocurrency, blockchain and decentralization, including the technology’s role in addressing important real-world problems, such as world hunger and income inequality.
Watch the full film on Kanopy.
By Raul Diego
Source: Mint Press News
In 2014, former Blackstone and Goldman Sachs investment banker Ryan Williams got together with his “college buddy,” Joshua Kushner – Jared’s brother – to form a real estate investment platform they called Cadre. Cadre sought to disrupt the real estate industry in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis by tinderizing property deals through a tech platform that brought investors and sellers together. According to Williams, whose other investors include George Soros and Peter Theil, Cadre’s mission is “to level the playing field in an industry that is often tilted toward the biggest players” by taking an “offline” industry online and making it “transparent.”
A pre-Covid initiative to capitalize on its platform came in the form of the so-called “opportunity zones,” that Jared Kushner directly lobbied for inclusion in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, billed as a funding mechanism to help poor and distressed communities, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar land heist by the wealthiest Americans, like the Kushner family. The pandemic lockdown protocols forced Cadre to downsize, laying off 25 percent of its workforce in March.
But now, the company is restarting its predatory engines as the home eviction wave forming on the horizon signals potential windfalls for companies like Cadre, that are in a position to profit. It is doing so by launching a pop-up banking operation called “Cadre Cash,” which will try to lure deposits from “investors” by offering a three percent annualized “reward” to finance a new round of land-grabs as millions of Americans teeter on the edge of homelessness and landlords look to unload un-rentable properties.
Another company, Civvl, is tackling a different side of the burgeoning housing crisis in America with its on-demand service model for eviction crews. Just like Uber, the Civvl app lets “frustrated property owners and banks secure foreclosed residential properties” by connecting haulers and the rentier class.
Civvl’s parent company, OnQall, specializes in mobile app platforms that monetize side-hustles like moving, cleaning and lawn care services. The eviction crew app has, predictably, drawn a storm of criticism since Motherboard‘s article on Civvl this past Monday.
“It’s fucked up that there will be struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like furniture-hauling or process-serving,” exclaimed housing activist Helena Duncan, who also pointed out the clear dystopian contours evident in a scenario where working class people are paid to wage economic warfare on fellow working class people. Civvl puts up a disingenuous defense against the earned invectives, comparing itself to Monster.com. “They’re not evicting anyone,” a Civvl spokesperson told Motherboard, “they’re just the help.”
Both Cadre and Civvl are poised to make a killing as eviction moratoriums abate across the country and millions find themselves on one side or another of evictions – tenants forced onto the streets by small landlords who will have little choice but to sell in a depressed market. Only the CDC’s national eviction moratorium, issued three weeks ago, stands in the way of the avalanche of displacement and dispossession at our doorstep. But, even the risks of fines and jail time doesn’t seem to be discouraging companies like OnQall or landlords, in general.
Cadre, in particular, is at the head of the pack of “disruptive” real estate tech platforms mostly due to the favor it enjoys in the halls of the Trump administration. “Jared was one of the key people early on. And his contributions were critical,” says Cadre CEO Ryan Williams of Jared Kushner, whose stake is worth over $50 Million, according to 2018 SEC filings.
Despite claims that Kushner sold a “substantial portion” of his shares in the company and that the president’s son-in-law has no role in the business endeavor, recent history surrounding the so-called “opportunity zones” of Trump’s Tax bill revealed Cadre’s and Kushner’s central role in a multi-billion dollar land heist by the wealthiest Americans, like the Kushner family.
Paying lip service to the same “diversity” principles Cadre’s African American founder asserts underlie his company’s vision, the more than 200 federally-designated “opportunity zones” for disadvantaged communities that resulted from the legislation, Cadre’s machine-learning and processed census data was simply serving to make a “ridiculous loophole” available to wealthy investors to buy up land at a serious discount.
The bulk of the opportunity zone funding, some of which was set up by William’s former employer and Cadre investor, Goldman Sachs, went to high-end real estate development projects in affluent areas, retail developments and luxury hotels, such as Richard Branson’s 225-room hotel in William’s home state of Louisiana, less than two miles away from one of the poorest parts of New Orleans. The project had been announced by Branson a year before the tax-cut legislation was signed into law, but nevertheless qualified to participate in the opportunity zone program.
The housing catastrophe in the United States is barley gathering steam, and while many landlords and property owners still face legal challenges in cases where eviction moratoriums remain in place, the loose patchwork of laws governing property rights across the nation – not to mention foundational ideology – gives companies like Civvl and Cadre the chance to circumvent these and rely on naked power to drive people away from their homes or convince them to sell it to massive real estate concerns, like CBRE or Kushner’s rich buddies.
Civvl is confident that they can take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about their rights to make money as the eviction middle man. Indeed, the company is betting that municipal and federal authorities will see things their way. “This is something that has to be done,” says a company spokesman. “Listen,” he continued, “if someone is killed on the street, someone needs to go pick their body up.”
Related Video:
By Robert J. Burrowes
“If you tell a lie, tell a big one.”
“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, 1933 to 1945
Transhumanism is a set of beliefs based on the premise that human beings can be improved by genetic manipulation and/or implanting technologies into the brain and body to achieve enhanced capacities. Transhumanism has a long history as an idea but since 1990 it has attracted serious attention from an increasing number of technology-lovers and early advocates are readily identified. See ‘What is Transhumanism?’
As part of his research as an investigative reporter throughout his life, which included writing a comprehensive exposé of how the AIDS hoax was perpetrated in the 1980s, in 2001 Jon Rappoport interviewed a Cold War-era propagandist-turned-anonymous-whistleblower who had spent decades working for the medical and other cartels to promote their agendas to gain increasing control over the human population. Here, in part, is what the propagandist told Rappoport:
Look at the medical cartel. Do they ever declare victory? From now until the end of time they’ll be planting stories in the press about the latest medical advance that will make life better for every person in the world. Most of it is a lie, but that doesn’t stop them. Until the planet is depopulated down to under a billion people and every one left is a robot, these cartels [elsewhere identified as energy, government, intelligence, media, medical, military, money] are not going to quit. And even then, with a lobotomized world, they’ll still push their propaganda. This IS 1984, and people better realize it… The medical cartel. They’re planning to take over the mind… after which PR won’t really matter.… [pp.61-62 & 87.]
The cartels were using and creating and bolstering the Cold War as a means to an end. Making what you could call the enemy‐game a part of the human psyche at such a level that it would maintain itself as a living myth that could be tapped into at any time with any enemies inserted into the line‐up. The enemies‐game is as old as time itself. But this was the version of the moment. To install a rigid sense of national security as the overriding fact or that would damn well justify the deflating of individual freedom on many fronts. Make national security the thing you couldn’t refuse…. [p.70.]
A: Once you fatigue people enough with the strategies of 1984, they are set up for the medicalization of society. Which is the brain stuff. The altering of the human brain with drugs and other approaches. Genes, perhaps. A brain‐machine linkup. Creating a different perception of reality. Externally applied electromagnetic fields. In which people will feel happy even though they are slaves. You see, in 1984 it’s really all about hysteria. The people are being driven into the wall with lies about wars and lies about enemies and lies about political structure, and the control over individuals is very harsh, and the leaders are not looking to create real happiness, not the fluffy stuff. Redemption, yes. Forgiveness, perhaps. The people are being fed pain and big brother is commanding them like a drill sergeant through their TV sets. But after that, after people sink into an acceptance of the delusions that are being foisted on them, then comes the science. The making of some kind of replica of happiness. The old order is 1984. You can call that the Plan from the dawn of time to about 1945. After that is the transition to Brave New World.
Q: And that’s why the medical cartel is the prince of the cartels.
A: The prince, the king.
Q: 1984…
A: Leaves people with no moral conviction. It runs over that like a freight‐train. 1984 is dark. Brave New World is sunny and light and the control is applied so that the interior life changes.
Q: So you worked on medical stories.
A: Yes. Making the medical cartel look good, look humane, look rational, look like excellent science that works. Especially psychiatry and neurology. And pharmacology. That became a major job for me. Because…they’re experimenting on the human race, and they want their horrible mistakes which are legion, to look like advances and good science at every step until they get it right, until they have your brain in their hands from cradle to grave. [p.71.]
As noted earlier, the words above were penned in 2001. If you would like to read the full transcript of the interview, which offers a reasonably accurate explanation of what is happening around the world at the moment, you can do so in ‘The Matrix Revealed Volume 1, Jon Rappoport Interviews Ellis Medavoy (Part 1 of 3)’.
And if you would like to read about the AIDS hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent HIV) and how it was done, using much of the same formula being used to perpetrate the elite’s Covid-19 hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent SARS-CoV-2), you can do so in AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century.
Unfortunately, the Covid-19 hoax is being played for stakes that are infinitely higher than they were during the AIDS hoax.
After 200,000 years of Homo Sapiens, the species is about to ‘evolve’ rapidly and profoundly. But it won’t be a natural evolution. And it won’t be an improvement unless you don’t like the many qualities that make humans human, biologically and socially.
If the transhumanists have their way, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition. Homo Sapiens will be superseded by ‘Homo Cyborg’.
If this all sounds like science fiction or just plain ridiculous, let me invite you to consider the evidence below.
As ‘warned’ by scientist Andrew Herr in an article – see ‘This Scientist Wants Tomorrow’s Troops to Be Mutant-Powered’ – published in 2012:
Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance – and undermine – people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.
It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think.
Well, that time has arrived. The thin edge of the wedge, if we keep allowing it to happen, is the various restrictions and technologies being introduced under cover of Covid-19 which are supposedly being used to tackle the ‘virus’.
However, just as in the ‘AIDS epidemic’ when no (HIV) virus was ever scientifically demonstrated to exist, there is zero science to prove the existence of the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2. Instead, this elite coup is designed and being conducted to achieve a profound transformation in the nature of the human individual and human society, including a substantial ‘depopulation’. Moreover, it is proceeding rapidly because it entails a complexity and depth that is not easy to comprehend but also because it seems so preposterous that few people are inclined to contemplate the possibility objectively. Joseph Goebbels knew why. For some of the detail of essential elements of this coup, see ‘Covid-19 Does Not Exist: The Global Elite’s Campaign of Terror Against Humanity’ and ‘Halting our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.
But for another recent comprehensive history and critique of the coup being conducted by the ‘billionaire’s club’, see Dr. Jacob Nordangård’s insightful article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ which opens with the following words:
The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’.
In this article, however, I want to focus on the agenda of the transhumanists under cover of this coup and what this would mean for Homo Sapiens unless it is stopped.
Technotyranny
In one of his videos about the Covid-19 coup – watch ‘This Couldn’t Possibly Happen. Could it?’ the transcript for which can be accessed by clicking the ‘Health’ tab after entering his website – the UK’s Dr Vernon Coleman explains the sinister agenda of the technological control sought by the transhumanists:
If you were a mad doctor and you wanted to control an individual it would be a doddle.
You’d just tell them you were giving them an injection to protect them against the flu or something like that and in the syringe there would be a little receiver. And then you’d stick a transmitter on the roof of the house across the road from where they lived.And then you could send messages to make them do whatever you wanted them to do. You could make them sad or angry or happy or contented. You could make them run or fight or just spend all day in bed.
Remember, that’s what Dr Delgado was doing over half a century ago. It’s nothing new.
Of course, if you wanted to do the same thing for lots of people you’d need a whole lot of people to help you….
And you’d need something to inject into people. A medicine of some kind for example.
And then you’d need someone good at software to help with all the transmitting and the receiving and you’d need people with access to lots of tall poles or roofs where they could put the transmitter things.
But none of that would be any good unless you had a reason for injecting people. You can’t just go around injecting millions of people for no reason.
Ideally, you’d need them all to be frightened of something so that they were keen to let you inject them. And then you could put your tiny receivers into the stuff that was being injected. Or squirted up their noses or whatever.
Introducing her own careful explanation of the agenda of the transhumanists, in her video Dr. Carrie Madej opens with the following words:
So what do you think about going from human 1.0 to human 2.0?… Transhumanism… is about taking humans, as we know ourselves, and melding with artificial intelligence…. That might seem kinda cool to you, we might have some superhuman abilities… that’s the idea, that’s what you see in sci-fi movies… Thinking about this topic… I [had thought that it was] many years in the future.
However, this question, this idea is now right in this moment. We need to make a decision… because I investigated the proposed Covid-19 vaccine and this is my alarm call to the world. I looked at the pros and cons and it frightens me.
And I want you to know about this, you need to be very well informed because this new vaccine is not like your normal flu vaccine. This is something very different, this is something brand new, something completely experimental on the human race. And it’s not just about being a different vaccine. There are technologies that are being introduced with this vaccine that can change the way we live, who we are and what we are. And very quickly….
Some people… like Elon Musk, who is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Automotive, as well as Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the bigwigs of Google, … are self-proclaimed ‘transhumanists’. They believe that we should go to human 2.0 and they are very big proponents of this. There’s a lot of other people… involved with this…. I think the easiest way to explain this to you is to go with one of the frontrunners for the vaccine and go into a little bit of the history and tell you how they want to make the vaccine and I think that will speak volumes. So, for instance, Moderna is one of the frontrunners for the Covid-19 vaccine…. Watch ‘Human 2.0 – Transhumanist Vaccine – A Wake Up Call to the World’.
If you doubt the capacity of ‘medicine’ to achieve this level of human transformation, in this video produced in August 2020, transhumanist Elon Musk explains how his Neuralink microchip will be surgically implanted into the human brain, as has already been done with animals. While he specifically mentions the chip’s capacity to monitor certain health parameters and to play you music, he does not mention its intended uses for digitization of your identity, recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. Watch ‘This Is How Elon Musk’s Neuralink Microchip Will Be Put In Your Brain’.
As Raul Diego explains in his own article on this subject:
The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).
The revolutionary breakthrough… [involved devising] a way to ‘reprogram’ the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.
These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As [inventor, Professor Derek] Rossi, himself, puts it: ‘The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.’ See ‘A Transhumanist Dream: A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021’.
Moreover, as Patrick Wood, who has intensively studied and reported the efforts of the transhumanists for decades, explains in a recent article – ‘The Siamese Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism’ – and discusses in a related video – ‘Humans 2.0: GMO Vaccinations and Transhumanism’ – that draws out some of the more nuanced elements of their agenda:
Technocracy and Transhumanism have always been joined at the hip. Technocracy uses its ‘science of social engineering’ to merge technology and society. Transhumanism uses its field of NBIC to merge technology directly into humans. To put it another way, Technocracy is to society what Transhumanism is to the humans that live in it….
NBIC stands for Nano (nano-technology), Bio (bio-technology), Info (information technology) and Cogno (cognitive sciences). These four scientific disciplines remained separate avenues of study in Universities around the world until the early 1970s. Today, NBIC has become an established discipline of its own in most major universities with personnel contributed from each separate department….
All together, NBIC offers a scientific cauldron to Transhumans in their quest to create Humans 2.0….
It’s also no wonder that the upcoming vaccine for COVID-19 being produced by Moderna is also using NBIC science to accomplish a merging of the human body with advanced technology. The Trump Administration has contracted with Moderna – see ‘Trump Administration collaborates with Moderna to produce 100 million doses of COVID-19 investigational vaccine’ – to deliver 100 million doses of its investigational vaccine, ostensibly to be kitted and transported to the nation by the U.S. Military….
[Technocracy and Transhumanism are both] extremely dangerous for all of humankind and must be rejected before it is too late to stop them.
And Whitney Webb provides further insight into the elite intention in this regard. In one of her meticulously-researched articles – ‘Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ – she outlines the hidden technological agenda behind the Covid-19 coup that might well be delivered as part of any vaccination program by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). After carefully outlining the history and ‘logic’ of what is taking place – such as the development of ‘cyborg “super soldiers”’ and ‘injectable Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) with the capability to control one’s thoughts’ – she concludes with the chilling words:
Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…
Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.
In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.
Of course, if you want to read how involved corporations, DARPA and other elite agencies explain it, you can do so. But unless you dig beneath the surface you will only get their sanitized accounts which, just like Elon Musk, focus on seemingly benign elements like ‘digitized identity’ and health reporting while not mentioning the technology’s capacities and intended uses for the invasion of your privacy, the recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. See, for example, ‘Moderna’s mRNA Technology’, ‘Profusa is pioneering tissue-integrating biosensors for continuous monitoring of body chemistries’, ‘A Military-Funded Biosensor Could Be the Future of Pandemic Detection’ (which discusses the role of ‘hydrogel’) and DARPA’S ‘Developing novel, safe and efficacious treatments for COVID-19’ following its much earlier ‘In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN)’. For two elite presentations of the importance of your ‘digital identity’, see ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’ and ‘ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines’.
What is at Stake?
As discussed above, the technology now available after decades of effort enables receiver nanochips to be sprayed, injected or otherwise implanted into human bodies. With the ongoing deployment of 5G (which includes extensive space and ground-based technologies: see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’), just one outcome of these combined technologies is that it will be possible to direct the individual behaviour of each person so implanted. Given that the control technology will be owned by corporate executives, here is a list of examples of how the elite might direct that it be used (more or less as a ‘drone pilot’ sitting in the United States controls a drone flying in the Middle East that fires weapons on local people):
What can we do to halt this transhumanist agenda and the elite coup itself?
Fortunately, we can do a great deal.
For a detailed series of options on how to have strategic impact, see the end of the article ‘“Ye are Many, They are Few”: Nonviolent Resistance to the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.
Importantly, however, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup and prevent implementation of the transhumanist agenda, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes here: Coup Strategic Aims.
If you wish to nurture children to be far more able to critique society and elite propaganda, rather than be easily duped, see ‘My Promise to Children’.
If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.
Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
Conclusion
In the elegant words of South African liberation activist Steve Biko:
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
When he uttered these words before being tortured to death in an Apartheid prison, Biko presumably did not realize the profound meaning they would acquire in 2020.
The transhuman mind will be owned and controlled by the oppressor.
If we are to avert this fate, we must struggle with clarity and purpose.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
ISTANBUL, TURKEY – JANUARY 05: People hold posters showing the portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani and chant slogans during a protest outside the U.S. Consulate on January 05, 2020 in Istanbul, Turkey. Major General Qassem Soleimani, was killed by a U.S. drone strike outside the Baghdad Airport on January 3. Since the incident, tensions have risen across the Middle East. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
By Sander Hicks
Source: New York Megaphone
This is the investigation that prompted our publication to establish an online conference on Nonviolence, and the Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Oct. 2, 2020. It’s essential we understand how Pompeo and the GOP justify their violence in the name of Christianity. The future of nonviolence must stand apart from the “Christianity of Brutality.” That’s what Jesus would do.
Earlier this year, President Trump shocked the world by murdering a high-ranking Iranian government official. Pressured by Secretary Pompeo, Trump ordered the assassination of an Iranian general who enjoyed movie-star celebrity status in his home country, General Qassem Soleimani. The killing brought the world to the brink of a major new war. Among the many laws this act broke, it violated Iraqi sovereignty, as it took place in Iraq. It happened in the middle of the night on January 3rd, 2020, using an American MQ-6 Reaper drone.
Dexter Filkins, in the New Yorker, called the hit on Soleimani, “the most consequential act taken against the regime in Tehran in thirty years.” And that’s saying a lot, because the US has inflicted much suffering on Iran over time, from CIA coups, to pushing Iraq to kill a million Iranians in the “Iran-Iraq War,” to today’s harsh economic sanctions. Yet Iran has grown into an influential regional superpower able to stand toe-to-toe with US proxies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, to see through the hypocrisy and the posturing of the War on Terror.
Trump, earlier, wanted to re-open negotiations towards a new Nuclear Agreement with Iran. He was in contact with President Rhouhani. But killing the charismatic Soleimani shut down any chance of a new nuclear deal. Now the Iranians are free to develop their nuclear power capabilities, unhindered.
Trump was left to explain himself. How could the US President justify this attack?
Remember that one year ago, things were boiling over in Iraq/Iran. Various Iran-backed militias rioted in Baghdad and broke the windows at US consulates. An American contractor was killed and US officials feared another Benghazi, or a new Tehran-style Embassy hostage crisis like in 1979. The US Military and Trump responded by killing 25 Shi’a militia members. Pentagon top brass then offered killing Soleimani as an additional option but assumed Trump wouldn’t be so brash. That was like giving a pyromaniac teenager a set of matches and five gallons of gasoline.
Killing a foreign government official is illegal, according to US policy and international law. Trump, at first, asserted Soleimani had plans to target four U.S. embassies, a claim that his own Defense Secretary Esper was not able to substantiate. It “seems to be totally made up,” said Congressman Justin Amash from Michigan.
On Twitter, Trump tried to give the last word by claiming that the US acted in self-defense because Soleimani posed an “imminent threat.” But Trump seemed unconvinced himself, as he tweeted that it “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”
Ah, but it does matter.
Killing people is a crime, you see, and a lot of people think so. The US has written laws that restrain this kind of thing from coming out of the White House, as it does so much damage to the U.S.’s moral standing in the world. (If capitalism and imperialism haven’t mangled that reputation forever.)
Former DA Vincent Bugliosi, in his book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, showed that presidents could well go to prison for the extrajudicial killings and illegal wars they engage in. The Hague Convention of 1907 and the UN ban the killing of a foreign government official, outside of wartime. Even Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, denounced “assassination, poison, perjury” as brutal statecraft, “held in just horror.”
In the wake of the killings of JFK and MLK and the targeted domestic killings of COINTEL-PRO, the US Congress convened the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the mid and late ’70s. President Gerald Ford responded by issuing an executive order that has since become standard US policy. No US government employee “shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
President Reagan affirmed and expanded this policy against assassination. But back at the Trump White House, the pressure to kill Soleimani came from evangelical Christian Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. CNN reported that White House insiders said Pompeo “was the one who made the case to take out Soleimani, it was him absolutely.” Pompeo also made a claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat,” but later backed off that claim, and instead explained that Soleimani had the “blood of American [soldiers]” on his hands from working with the Iraqi resistance.
At a loss for legal justification, Vice President Mike Pence stepped up with a “Hail Mary” kind of throw. He asserted that there may be a connection between Soleimani and “the 12 9/11 attackers.” (But Mike, there were 19 hijackers on 9/11.) Students of history will note that the NeoCon Right still invokes 9/11 when it’s desperate to justify a crime. 9/11 still has that power 20 years later. It’s like a myth that is eternal. If we allow it.
Millions of Iranians poured out into the streets for a three-day funeral in all top Iranian cities and towns. Hamed Ghashgavi in Tehran, told me, “General Soleimani, we know he was popular but none of us thought millions will mourn his death!”
Qassem Soleimani “had a command presence,” CIA Veteran John Maguire said. “He walked into the room and you could feel him.” Maguire had negotiated with Soleimani in Baghdad in 2004.
A native of the more tribal Southern Iranian province of Kerman, Soleimani was born in 1957. He fought at the front lines of the Iran/Iraq war, that nine-year slog fought with chemical weapon assaults, compliments of Iraq. The grinding agony, often in trenches, was compared to World War I. Inside Iran, the conflict is known as the “War of Holy Defense.” But the Reagan White House viewed the Iran/Iraq War as a chance to get aggressive and retaliate for the late 70’s hostage crisis. The US supported Iran‘s biggest rival, Saddam Hussein, as he invaded Iran. The USA gave Hussein several billions in economic aid and military training to help attack the nascent Islamic Republic.
The experience of Iraq invading Iran was deeply formative on young Soleimani, who lost many friends in the war. But Soleimani there became a legend known as “The Goat Burglar” for his talents at slipping behind enemy lines and coming back with live goats to feed his platoon. He regularly volunteered to fight at the front lines. He had a deep camaraderie with his fellows. Before battle, he would kiss each of them on the forehead and pray with them to be martyred.
From the end of the War, to 1997, Soleimani laid low, he didn’t get on well with President Rafsanjanhi. But sooner after that period, he rose to lead the elite “Quds” aka “Jerusalem” Force division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. His power grew, as did his closeness with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Gen. Petreaus once recalled that Soleimani told him, “You should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.”
In the corporate US media, Soleimani’s death was brushed off. He was expendable. A “terrorist.”
But a deeper look past the demonization shows an interesting pattern. Soleimani had a history of working with the Americans. Every time he worked with the USA, it went well for the Americans. In the end, the USA just stabbed him in the back.
When 9/11 happened, the Bush/Cheney regime decided to target Afghanistan and its Taliban regime. Qassem Soleimani saw an opportunity to reduce terrorism in the land immediately to the east of Iran. Soleimani worked with the US attacking forces. He and Iranian diplomats shared intelligence with the US on Taliban positions. The Americans informed the Iranians about an al-Qa`ida agent hiding out in Mashhad in eastern Iran. Soleimani was, “pleased with [the] cooperation,” and spoke at this time that “maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.”
It was not to be.
Bush and Cheney bowed to pressure from their Zionist wing and slapped the Iranians in the face with the “Axis of Evil” speech. It has been a long-standing policy of Israel to block any rapprochement between the US and Iran. Bush named Iran as a leading proponent of terrorism, despite its recent work against terrorism, with the Americans in Afghanistan. Soleimani felt betrayed.
Cut to 2014, and the US is back asking for Iran’s help, when US coalition forces are losing in Iraq. The jihadists were on the offensive, taking territory in Iraq, including the major city of Mosul. Iraq’s leading Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani, issued a call-to-arms to fight the Sunni extremists. Young Shia men volunteered by the thousands. Soleimani and his elite Quds Force helped organize them.
For the next three years, until 2017, Iran helped turn the tide there against ISIS and Al Nusra. On a number of occasions, Americans were hitting Islamic State targets from the air while General Soleimani directed ground forces against the militants.
At the same time, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were working against Soleimani and Iran in Syria. The US had decided to work against the Ba’ath Arab Socialist, Bashar Assad, who sometimes enjoyed the support of Russia and Iran.
When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) flew to Syria in 2017, it was to better understand the Syrian civil war. She met Assad and top Syrian officials. In the street, Syrian citizens begged her to stop the US funding of ISIS. She returned to Congress and proposed HR 608, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act. Because at this point, the US was fighting ISIS in Iraq, but working with ISIS in Syria. On the ground in Tehran, in 2017 at the New Horizon conference, when I asked Saudis, Arabs, and other locals from the region, who is funding ISIS? People uniformly named either Saudi Arabia or the USA.
Pop Quiz. Name the only country that has consistently opposed the Islamic State and al-Qaeda?
The Answer? No, it’s not the USA. It’s Iran.
Iran is a regional superpower in a kind of local “cold war” against Saudi Arabia and Israel. There are a set of facts that no one should do without when trying to figure out the real history of the Iran/US relationship. A deeper understanding of this history could begin to lay the groundwork to re-establish diplomatic ties, which have been suspended since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
In 2000, even Madeline Albright recognized that the CIA’s brutal 1953 coup overthrew the democratically-elected progressive Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the fickle Iranian king, Reza Shah. With their SAVAK secret police, the Shahs repressed dissidents and communists, and so Islam became the legal method of resistance. When President Jimmy Carter allowed the ailing Shah to travel to the USA to receive healthcare, Ayatollah Khomeini called for a general strike in Iran and flew back to Iran from his exile in France. 98% of the population voted to replace the monarchy with the Islamic Republic, in a referendum vote.
Because of the US’s support of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution resulted in an unplanned take-over of the US embassy. 53 US hostages were kept for 444 days until they were released on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.
During the Iran/Iraq War, it’s worth noting that young Qassem Soleimani met the young Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when both were fighting the Iraqi invasion. They would have a long, complicated relationship, as Adhmadinejad would go on to become elected President of Iran, from 2005 to 2013. His politics were “hardliner” compared to his successor, the more moderate Rouhani. Ahmadinejad may be most famous for his 2010 speech in front of the United Nations, in which he questioned the official story about 9/11.
Regarding 9/11/01, Iran was not involved, but US Allies were. The USA’s CIA Counterintelligence Database reports that two Mossad agents were among five Israelis arrested by NJ Police, on 9/11/01, for celebrating the attacks publicly, as they watched the World Trade Center burn. Held in custody for two months by FBI, Bush officials intervened and all five were released to go back to Israel. On Israeli television, they were celebrated as heroes.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, including two with ties to Saudi intelligence (Al Mihdhar and Al Hamzi). When Congress’s suppressed “28 Pages” of its own 9/11 Report were released in 2016, they documented Saudi funding of the 19 hijackers, from none other than US Ambassador from Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar bin Sultan (aka “Bandar Bush”). But even Bandar’s many appearances in the suppressed “28 Pages” have yet to prompt a grand jury investigation in US courts.
Later that month, in September 2001, General Wesley Clark, reported that a senior general inside the Pentagon told him, “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.’ And he named them…ending with Iran.”
The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and phase one didn’t end until 2011. Similar to the 9/11 official story, the premise for the Iraq War was a loose set of assumptions and insinuations, not hard facts or evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Hussein’s overthrow and execution was another targeted killing on a grander scale, similar to that of Soleimani. The Bush/Cheney “War on Terror” was a colossal waste of money, even by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. “A recent study…puts the cost of the War on Terror at roughly $5 trillion — a truly astonishing number. Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means.”
In 2007, German news magazine Die Spiegel leaked that Vice President Dick Cheney had a secret plan to invade Iran next.
Barack Obama was elected as a symbol of hope and change, but his pick of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was tragic for Iran. Hillary Clinton removed the Iranian terrorist group MEK from the State Department’s “Terrorism Watch List” in 2012. The media crowed that the lobbyists had done it again, as MEK represents big money ex-patriate Iranians who would like to see violent regime change in Iran. MEK was once a bizarre culty Islamic splinter group, banished to Albania, and hated in Iran for backing Iraq in the Iran/Iraq War. But money changes everything, and now with lavish funding, these days the MEK throws huge gala events in DC and NYC and pays Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton to come speak.
After President Barack Obama jettisoned Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, he did some ground-breaking work by working with moderate President Rouhani and signing the “Iran Nuclear Deal,” the JCPOA in 2015.
In 2017, with Trump in Office, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and others routinely ignored the Trump White House’s multiple calls to pressure Iran militarily. Their belief was that Syria’s Assad had effectively won the Syrian civil war, thanks to Iran and Russia, and now the war on ISIS took priority. Mattis quit at the end of 2018 when Trump demanded US withdrawal from Syria.
In 2018, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson quit as Secretary of State, and Mike Pompeo succeeded him. Pompeo lost no time in focussing a target on his longtime nemesis, Qassem Soleimani. It started in April of 2019, with the shocking designation of Iran’s entire Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization.” According to The Iran Agenda book by Reuters reporter Reese Erlich, the IRGC is a huge economic entity in Iran, and it controls about 10% of the entire Iranian economy. So declaring IRGC a terrorist organization would be like declaring Amazon a terrorist organization in the US.
But there were more than words in the declaration. The knives were coming out. “Bolton and Pompeo knew that that designation opened up the targeting aperture,” one former senior Trump administration official said.
In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. It requires the President to report to Congress whenever armed forces are introduced “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated,” and to terminate any hostilities after 60 days unless authorized by Congress.
But since 1973, Congress has done little to reclaim its constitutional responsibility to control the war machine. Professor Jack Goldsmith points out, “Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war.”
If there’s any one issue that may someday inspire a US Constitutional Convention, it may be the long history the USA has had with a “unitary executive” who abuses their powers to wage undeclared wars on smaller, weaker nations. Our system is running contrary to the spirit and the letter of the US Constitution. What happened in the Soleimani case is more than just the murder of one man. It shows that our current class of leadership, from Clinton to Trump, is so in love with violence, it crosses a line into contempt for the Constitution. The love of war is all.
What could possess their souls?
The flaws of the American brand of evangelical Christianity led directly to Soleimani’s fiery death with nine others. The dominant religion in America birthed a bloody global trauma that caused the whole planet to smell the stench of World War III. However, any student of the New Testament will notice that Jesus actually stood against the nationalism and the exclusionary practices of the Jewish leadership. He called the Pharisees and Scribes, “vipers” and even worse, “lawyers.”
Jesus’s pivotal lesson about the Good Samaritan exposes the hypocrisy of the “purity” of the High Priests. They were so obsessed with purity, they wouldn’t help a man beaten up in the street. Their religion blinded them to the basic humanity in all of us. At a time of crisis, when we need something to unite us, religion could reveal an inner light within us all. The Good Samaritan story holds up the forgotten and hated people of our day. The one who is hated most by society turns out to have the most heart. The outsider, the Samaritan ignores all the codes of the day and stops to care for the crushed and bloodied man. That’s the path. Actions of compassion and healing are the true way, not a religion of showiness, prestige, and power.
Mike Pompeo and the neoConservative Christians are super Pro-Israel, because their Christianity is based in the Old Testament, where God is oftentimes a violent, nationalistic force who favors his “Chosen People” in their many wars. Pompeo has compared Trump to King Cyrus, and likes to dwell on the Book of Esther, in which the Jewish people commit genocide on the Iranians/Persians, killing over 5,000 in one fell swoop. (An event celebrated every year with the Jewish feast of Purim.)
The Old Testament also has eternal wisdom, great laws, and lessons in it, like “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from the Ten Commandments. The Wisdom literature, such as Psalms and Proverbs, show the universal conception of God, evolving into a more compassionate, loving vision over time. But to rely on the Old Testament as a true book of history is shaky ground. To base US Foreign Policy on it is ahistorical. Most of the Old Testament is war stories, in which genocide and exclusion are held up as ideals. A little-known fact is that some early Christians didn’t at first want to include the Old Testament in their Bible. They felt that the teachings of Christ were complete: be humble, be of service, make your life about truth, integrity, and nonviolence. These were so much more substantial than the old books, which had led directly to the superficial posturing of the Pharisees, and the “Simple Way” resistance of Jesus of Nazareth.
It seems that with the killing of Soleimani, something has hijacked the spirituality of a man like Mike Pompeo. He became a “born-again Christian” inside the super-powered pressure-cooker of West Point US Military Academy. It’s like someone only gave him half the story. The American right-wing wants the righteousness of religion without doing the real work of Jesus’s core command, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
The story of the New Testament is really this: a young, passionate, former carpenter from the sticks, Jesus of Nazareth, picks up the oral traditions of a “street rabbi.” Able to quote the prophets, see people’s problems, and inspire people to change, he becomes a traveling street preacher, able to talk about the love of God in a radical new way. He challenges the aristocracy of the high priests and denounces their rigidity and formalism. He gathers a wide range of people “from below.” He teaches and heals among the peasant and working classes (without excluding Roman soldiers). Drawing on the Wisdom literature, he expands and radicalizes his message, in a time in which occupied Palestine was seeking ways to resist the violence of the Roman Empire. Influenced by the Zealots, and tempted by the lure of political power, Jesus ultimately rejected that path. He did consider it but rejected driving Rome out of Palestine with a sword. He even welcomed Pharisees at his gatherings and teaching sessions. His challenge to “love our enemies” was really a challenge to see that there is a light within all of us, including Americans, Israelis, and Iranians, and that it’s a common love of the truth. The historical Jesus never endorses killing people. He says we should “turn the other cheek” rather than retaliate with violence.
Essentially we have here an avatar, one of history’s most dynamic and radical figures, revered today in both Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, because he opened up a new space of what is possible for humanity: living in a place of dialogue, a love for the Word, sharing, truth, eating together, healing each other, reveling in our common humanity, and working out problems without violence. That is the space of God.
The violent Christianity of Mike Pompeo feels about as authentic as his boss, Donald Trump, wielding a Bible like a weapon, as a vague warning to protestors and radicals fed up with racism and police brutality.
They need to look deeper, because 2000 years ago, Jesus would have been among those protestors. According to the book Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton, when Jesus cleared the Temple in Jerusalem, he went in with an affinity group of 50-100 followers. It was an “Occupy the Temple” action, in which Jesus stood up to capitalism: the money-changers, animal-sellers, and merchants who had turned religion into a business. Jesus and crew literally pushed over the tables and set the doves free. It clarified Jesus’s work and became one of his last public acts of direct action.
In their zeal to make Christianity about violence and Old Testament rivalries against Iran, Pompeo and Trump totally miss the revolutionary spirituality of compassion for all beings and the essentially anti-capitalist message of Jesus. I am reminded of the young, rich kid who comes up to Jesus in the New Testament and says, “Hey, I have followed all the rules, but nothing is working for me!” So Jesus says, You must give up all your wealth, your power, your status, all you cling to, and get on the road with us, follow this path, be inside our movement, follow me. But the kid couldn’t do it because he was too attached: to luxury, to his self-concept, to his fragile and tender illusions, to a status quo of empire, class, and power.
It’s like that kid today is Mike Pompeo, and all the American Christians who do what he does. They want to follow Jesus, but can’t escape their formalism, their illusions, they can’t give up the habits of easy nationalism, their remote-control high tech violence, their sloganeering and stereotyping. Jesus says something truly radical – it’s not too late to turn around – give up all you have and follow me.
Instead the modern day Pharisees have been sending the FBI out to harass American activists.
I have been researching this article for six weeks, but I began to write the first draft on August 6, 2020. That date is actually the one year anniversary of the FBI visiting my home to stifle my international travel plans to advocate for peace with Iran. It seems that calling for peace has become something of a crime, in the time of Trump and Pompeo.
The FBI also visited such US dissidents as former Pentagon official Michael Malouf, and former US-Saudi diplomatic attaché Michael Springmann, and about fifteen others. What we all had in common was that we had previously attended the Iranian’s New Horizon conference, where dissidents from the USA and other countries were able to gather, share views, network, and brainstorm solutions to the problems of aggression, imperialism, and world peace.
When the FBI was at my house, they handed over a copy of a recent indictment of an American who had defected to Iran. But this situation had nothing to do with the New Horizon conference. The US Treasury, however, had sent the FBI to enforce their recent harsh economic sanctions against New Horizon. Four Iranians from New Horizon were sanctioned for hosting this international think tank, a kind of “Davos of the Global South.”
The FBI home visit was a gross violation of my core rights to free speech, religion, and the right to peaceably assemble and tackle grievances. The Bill of Rights took a backseat to an obsession with killing. We had been planning to attend the next New Horizon in Beirut that Fall.
This was certainly a nadir for US activists, but shortly thereafter, there was a bit of a thaw, when in September 2019, President Trump fired his White House war-monger, John Bolton. And then, the next month after that, the “mastermind” of the Trump White Houses’s sanctions on Iran, Sigal Pearl-Mandelker, resigned after being harassed by peace activists at a public event.
President Woodrow Wilson, once said, “Peace cannot…rest upon an armed balance of power.” Lasting peace, he maintained, required “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”
So instead of old religions, old rivalries, and old prejudices being given all of the power, what if the world could coalesce around a new vision, in which political assassination was banned, and just not required, because the balance of power was no longer based on violence.
The next step would be to map out a path to a place where we as one people on Earth can declare that war itself is simply out of date. How can we get to a place where we have outgrown it? The answer is to grow. We are close to being capable of global nonviolence. Gandhi said that the roots of nonviolence were already in the heart of all the world’s great religions.
The words of President Wilson ring true, “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is…the power of the united moral forces of the world.”
“The power of the united moral forces of the world” is a power that peoples of all religions, and no religions, could get behind, support, and live.
It’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Conference around the murder of Qassem Soleimani. It will be a way to start to talk about the truth behind the “balance of power” and begin the healing among the peoples of the world.
So that’s why, this article is not just some investigative journalism about a criminal act, I have created a way for you to get involved, in an international dialogue, with Iranian and American activists, on Zoon, this Friday, on October 2, the International Day of NonViolence. From 4 PM to 9 PM, we will have political and spiritual speakers from Iran, and the USA, and other countries.
We will hold a global Truth and Reconciliation Conference, to talk about a global cultural shift, to change the entire system. We have a great bunch of speakers: everyone from Lt. Col. (Ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, to radical priest Fr. John Dear, to Iranian film-maker Nader Talebzedeh.
Qassem Soleimani did not die in vain. He wanted to be a martyr. Now, let us work to have his death help to transform the world.
https://www.newyorkmegaphone.com/oct-2-gandhi-nonviolence-day
The author of the article above wishes to acknowledge Porsché Mysticque Steele for her editorial work, and thanks also to C. Maupin for advice.
By Charles Hugh Smith
Source: Of Two Minds
The banquet of consequences for the Fed, the elites and their armies of parasitic flunkies and factotums is being laid out, and there won’t be much choice in the seating.
Words can be debased just like currencies. Take the word sacrifice. The value of the original has been debased by trite, weepy overuse to the point of cliche. Like other manifestations of derealization and denormalization, this debasement is invisible, profound and ultimately devastating.
Consider the overworked slogan of implied shared sacrifice: we’re all in this together. Pardon my cynicism, but doesn’t this sound like what the first class passengers in the lifeboats shouted to the doomed steerage passengers on the sinking Titanic?
Here is the ice-cold reality of America in 2020: Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me. This isn’t a new trend, of course. Any measurable sacrifices shared by all the socio-economic classes ended with World War II in 1945, and since then it’s been one long slide to Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me.
We’ve seen this slide to decay and collapse many times in history. The elites who once gained social status and political power by making real sacrifices on behalf of the nation / empire become entirely self-serving, accumulating ever greater wealth and power by transferring all the sacrifices and risks onto the lower classes.
Peter Turchin, author of War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, describes how civic virtue is gradually replaced by personal greed and self-interest.
This excerpt perfectly captures the current zeitgeist:
“Virtus included the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to act in ways that promoted good, and especially the common good. Unlike Greeks, Romans did not stress individual prowess, as exhibited by Homeric heroes or Olympic champions. The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril.
Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen….
The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll….
The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen.”
Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity when
“An average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no ‘middle class’ comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor.”
Compare this to the America of World War II and the America of today. Wealthy, politically influential families such as the Kennedys could only retain their influence if their sons served in positions of combat leadership, and Joe Kennedy was killed in the European theater after volunteering for a highly risky air mission. John F. Kennedy very nearly lost his life in the South Pacific.
And how do our era’s crop of presidents and presidential contenders fare by comparison? The idea that flesh and blood should ever be at risk in defense of the nation /empire–perish the thought.
As Turchin sagely observed, it’s not just the limitless greed and avoidance of sacrifice of the elite that generates destabilizing inequality–it’s the eradication of the middle class as all the risks and sacrifices were shifted from the self-serving top to the middle and lower classes.
As I’ve often noted, risk cannot be made to disappear, it can only be transferred to others. In the grand scheme of things, the inherent risks of globalization and financialization have all been transferred to the middle and working classes (however you define them). The elite class enjoys the near-infinite support of the Federal Reserve and it’s ability to print near-infinite sums of currency to bail out the greediest, most self-serving scum of parasites and speculators.
Meanwhile, all the sacrifices required to support this unfair, corrupt, predatory system have been transferred to the middle and working classes via sleight of hand. The sacrifices weren’t transparent and up front; they were cloaked in the decline of job security, in ever-higher costs, in the decline of social mobility and the erosion of the purchasing power of wages.
The elites’ economist flunkies and factotums claimed that bailing out the freeloaders, parasites and speculators would benefit “the little people” because the grand trade-off delivered by the Federal Reserve (as correspondent R.J. pointed out to me) was: no more financial panics, which caused much misery in the working class due to business failures causing layoffs and unemployment.
But globalization, financialization and the rise of cartel-state monopolies have eviscerated the middle and working classes far more effectively and permanently than any brief financial panic, while greatly enriching the elite class–a rise in wealth that is backstopped by the Federal Reserve: profits are the elites to keep while their losses are socialized, i.e. transferred to the lower classes.
Job security, the purchasing power of wages and social mobility–nothing vital to the middle or working classes is backstopped by the Fed; the Fed’s one and only job is backstopping the wealth of our parasitic, predatory elite.
Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me. The banquet of consequences for the Fed, the elites and their armies of parasitic flunkies and factotums is being laid out, and there won’t be much choice in the seating.
By Edward Curtin
Source: Behind the Curtin
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” – Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998
For decades, Andre Vltchek, an old-school journalist and artist (but a young man) who traveled the world in search of truth and who always stood up straight, tried to revolve the world and encourage people to revolt against injustice. In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness and indefatigable courage. He told it straight. This irritated certain people and some pseudo-left publications, who sensed in him a no bullshit fierceness and nose for hypocrisy that frightened them, so they stopped publishing his writing. He went where so many others feared to tread, and he talked to people in places that were often the victims of Western imperialistic violence. He defended the defenseless and encouraged their defense.
Now he is dead. He died in the back seat of a chauffeur driven rental car on an overnight drive to Istanbul, Turkey. He was sleeping, and when his wife attempted to wake him upon arrival at their hotel, she couldn’t. He was 57-years-old.
Let him sleep in peace, but let his words ring out, his passionate cries for justice and peace in a world of violent predators.
Those who knew him and his work feel a great, great loss. His friend and colleague Peter Koenig wrote this touching goodbye.
As Koenig says, Vltchek was always defending those around the world who are considered disposable non-people, the Others, the non- whites, victims of Western wars, both military and economic, in places such as West Papua, Iraq, Syria, Africa, etc. He had a chip on his shoulder, a well justified chip, against the one-sided Western media and its elites that were always lecturing the rest of the world about their realities.
He was recently in the United States, and here is what he wrote:
But notice one thing: it is them, telling us, again, telling the world what it is and what it is not! You would never hear such statements in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. There, people know perfectly well what it really is all about, whether it is about race or not!
I have just spent two weeks in the United States, analyzing the profound crises of U.S. society. I visited Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. I spoke to many people in all those places. What I witnessed was confusion and total ignorance about the rest of the world. The United States, a country which has been brutalizing our Planet for decades, is absolutely unable to see itself in the context of the entire world. People, including those from the media, are outrageously ignorant and provincial.
And they are selfish.
I asked many times: “Do black lives matter all over the world? Do they matter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and do they matter in West Papua?” I swear, I received no coherent answer.
Somebody has to tell them… Somebody has to force them to open their eyes.
A few years ago, I was invited to Southern California to show my documentary work from Africa (my feature documentary film Rwanda Gambit, about West-triggered genocides in both Rwanda and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo), where millions of black people are dying, in order for the vast majority of the U.S. whites to live in piggish opulence.
But before I was allowed to present, I was warned: ‘Remember, people here are sensitive. Do not show too much of brutal reality, as it could disturb them.’
Hearing that, I almost left the event. Only my respect for the organizer made me stay.
Now I am convinced: it is time to force them to watch; to see rivers of blood, which their laziness, selfishness, and greed have triggered. It is time to force them to hear shouts of the agony of the others.
But as everyone knows, it is nearly impossible to force people to open their eyes and ears when they are dead set against doing so. Andre tried so hard to do that, and his frustration grew apace with those efforts that seemed to fall on deaf ears.
He was a relentless fighter, but he was a lover, too. His love for the people and cultures of the world was profound. Like Albert Camus, he tried to serve both beauty and suffering, the noblest of vocations. A lover of literature and culture, the best art and beauty ever produced, he was appalled at the way so many in the West had fallen into the pit of ignorance, illiteracy, and the grip of propaganda so tight that “what is missing is life. Euphoria, warmth, poetry and yes – love – are all in extremely short supply there.”
He sensed, and said it, that nihilism rules in the United States beneath the compulsive consumerism and the denial of the violence that the U.S. inflicts on people across the world. It was selfishness run amok. Me me me. It was, he felt, soul death, the opposite of all the ostensible religiousness that is a cover story for despair. He wrote:
It has to be stopped. I say it because I do love this life, the life, which still exists outside the Western realm; I’m intoxicated with it, obsessed with it. I live it to the fullest, with great delight, enjoying every moment of it.
Poetry, music, great literature, these he loved as he fought on the barricades for peace.
I urge you to read his article, Love, Western Nihilism and Revolutionary Optimism.
He was a rare and courageous man. Let us ring bells in his honor.
Here’s a Kenneth Rexroth poem for Andre, the fighter with the poet’s heart:
No Word
The trees hang silent
In the heat….
Undo your heart
Tell me your thoughts
What you were
And what you are….
Like the bells no one
Has ever rung
By Caitlin Johnstone
Source: Axis of Logic
For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.
This has made it very difficult to figure out what’s going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are some tips for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether that be the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:
1 — Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and that whoever controls the stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what’s going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.
2 — Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your cognitive wiring is susceptible to the same hacks as everyone else, and manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit those vulnerabilities. It’s not shameful to be deceived, it’s shameful to deceive people. Don’t let shame and cognitive dissonance keep you compartmentalized away from considering the possibility that you’ve been duped in some way.
3 — Watch people’s behavior and ignore the stories they tell about their behavior. This applies to people in your life, to politicians, and to governments. Narratives can be easily manipulated and distorted in many different ways, while behavior itself, when examined with as much objectivity as possible, cannot be. Pay attention to behavior in this way and eventually you’ll start noticing a large gap between what some people’s actions say and what their words say. Those people are the manipulators. Distrust them.
4 — Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and how they are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about them. Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about you.
5 — Learn to see how trust and sympathy are used by manipulators to trick people into subscribing to their narratives about what’s going on. Every manipulator uses trust and/or sympathy as a primer for their manipulations, because if you don’t have trust or sympathy for them, you’re not going to mentally subscribe to their stories. This is true of mass media outlets, it’s true of State Department press releases which implore you to have sympathy for the people of Nation X, and it’s true of family members and coworkers. Once you’ve spotted a manipulator, your task is to kill off all of your sympathy for them and your trust in them, no matter how hard they start playing the victim to suck you back in.
6 — Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim confused and unable to figure out what’s going on. If they can’t get a clear handle on what the manipulative abuser is saying, they can’t form their own solid position in relation to it, and the abuser knows this. Insist on lucid communication, and if it’s refused to you, remove trust and sympathy. Apply this to people in your life, to government officials, and to 8chan propaganda constructs.
7 — Familiarize yourself with cognitive biases, the glitches in human cognition which cause us to perceive things in a way that is not rational. Pay special attention to confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and the illusory truth effect. Humans have an annoying tendency to seek out cognitive ease in their information-gathering and avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than seeking out what’s true regardless of whether it brings us cognitive ease or dissonance. This means we tend to choose what we believe based on whether believing it is psychologically comfortable, rather than whether it’s solidly backed by facts and evidence. This is a weakness in our cognitive wiring, and manipulators can and do exploit it constantly. And, again, be humble enough to know that this means you.
8 — Trust your own understanding above anyone else’s. It might not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink, or by literally anyone else in a narrative landscape that is saturated with propaganda and manipulation. You won’t get everything right, but betting on your own understanding is the very safest bet on the table. It can be intimidating to stand alone and sort out the true from the false by yourself on an instance-by-instance basis, but the alternative is giving someone else authority over your understanding of the world. Abdicating your responsibility to come to a clear understanding of what’s going on in your world is a shameful, cowardly thing to do. Be brave enough to insist that you are right until such time as you yourself come to your own understanding that you were wrong.
9 — Understand that propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. Everyone’s constantly talking about what’s wrong with the world, but hardly any of those discussions are centered around the fact that the public been manipulated into supporting the creation and continuation of those problems by mass media propaganda. The fact that powerful people are constantly manipulating the way we think, act and vote should be at the forefront of everyone’s awareness, not relegated to occasional discussions in fringe circles.
10 — Respect the fact that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be. They are far, far ahead of us in terms of research and understanding of the methods of manipulating the human psyche toward ends which benefit the powerful. If you ever doubt that the narrative managers could be advanced and cunning enough to pull off a given manipulation, you can lay that particular doubt to rest. Don’t underestimate them.
11 — Understand that western mass media propaganda rarely consists of full, outright lies. At most, such outlets will credulously publish the things that are told to them by government agencies which lie all the time. More often, the deception comes in the form of distortions, half-truths, and omissions. Pay more attention to discrepancies in things that are covered versus things that aren’t, and to what they’re not saying.
12 — Put effort into developing a good news-sense, a sense for what’s newsworthy and what’s not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative. When you’ve got that nailed down, you’ll notice “Why are they acting like this is a news story?” and “Why is nobody reporting this??” stories all the time.
13 — Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set, you’ll suck at it for a while. If you learn you’ve been wrong about something, just take in the new information, adjust appropriately, and keep plugging away. Don’t expect to have mastered this thing before you’ve had time to master it. Like anything else, if you put in the hours you’ll get good at it.
14 — Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for navigating the narrative matrix, and keep track of them to orient yourself and stay on top of what’s going on. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no outlet is 100 percent solid, but some reporters are pretty close on some specific subjects. Click this hyperlink for an article on one way to do build a customized and reliable news stream. Click this hyperlink for a list of all my favorite news reporters on Twitter right now.
15 — Don’t let paranoia be your primary or only tool for navigating the narrative matrix. Some people’s only means of understanding the world is to become intensely suspicious of everything and everyone, which is about as useful as a compass which tells you that every direction is north. Spend time in conspiracy and media criticism circles and you’ll run into many such people. Rejecting everything as false leaves you with nothing as true. Find positive tools for learning what’s true.
16 — Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at any time in the light of new information, but not so loosely that it can be slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident, authoritative tone. As Carl Sagan once said, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
17 — Speaking of confident, authoritative tones, be suspicious of confident, authoritative tones. It’s amazing how much traction people can get with a narrative just by posturing as though they know that what they’re saying is true, whether they’re an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. So many people are just plain faking it, because it works. You run into this all the time in debates on online political forums; people come at you with a supremely confident posture, but if you push them to present their knowledge on the subject and the strength of their arguments, there’s not actually anything there. They’re just accustomed to people assuming they know what they’re talking about and leaving their claims unchallenged, and it completely throws them off when someone doesn’t buy their feigned confidence shtick.
18 — Be aware that sociopaths exist. There are people who, to varying degrees, do not care what happens to others, and these are the types of people who will use manipulation to get their way whenever it serves them. If you don’t care about truth or other people beyond the extent to which you can use them, then there’s no disincentive to manipulating.
19 — Be aware of projection, and be aware of the fact that it cuts both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don’t let your goodness trick you into thinking there aren’t monsters who will deceive and manipulate you, and don’t let sociopaths project their own sinister motives onto you by telling you how rotten you are. This mixes a lot of good people up, especially in their personal lives. Not everyone is good, and not everyone is truthful. See this clearly.
20 — Be suspicious of those who excessively advocate civility, rules and politeness. Manipulators thrive on rules and civility, because they know how to manipulate them. Someone who’s willing to color outside the lines and get angry at someone noxious even when they’re acting within the rules makes a manipulator very uncomfortable. Often times those telling you to calm down and behave yourself when you are rightfully upset are manipulators who have a vested interest in getting you to adhere to the rules set they’ve learned to operate within.
21 — Meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry and other practices are powerful tools which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others. Just be sure that you are using them for this purpose, not for escapism as most “spiritual” types do. You’re trying to become fully aware of what makes you tick mentally, emotionally and energetically; you’re not trying to become some vapid spiritual bliss bunny. The goal isn’t to feel better, the goal is to get better at feeling. Better at consciously experiencing your own inner world.
22 — Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can’t navigate your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren’t clear on your own role in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.
23 — Understand that truth doesn’t generally move in a way that is pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to. Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate kicked into lava and the hero gets the girl is manufactured. Russiagate and QAnon are both perfect examples of an egoically pleasing narrative with the promise of a Hollywood ending, either by Trump and his cohorts being dragged off in chains or by the “white hats” overcoming the Deep State and throwing all the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in prison for pedophilia. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.
24 — Try to view the world with fresh eyes rather than with your tired old grown-up eyes which have taught you to see all this as normal. Hold an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would look like; the sharp contrast between this image and the world we have now allows you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things like war, poverty, ecocide, and impotent electoral systems which keep seeing the same government behavior regardless of who people vote for. None of this is normal.
25 — Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do the social engineers. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them. Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view. Ignore the imaginary lines between the parties. You may be certain that your rulers do.
26 — Remain always aware of this simple dynamic: the people who become billionaires are generally the ones who are sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total narrative control via media ownership/influence, corporate lobbying, think tank funding, and campaign finance, and are thus able to manipulate the public into consenting to agendas which benefit nobody but plutocrats and their lackeys. This explains pretty much every major problem that we are facing right now.
27 — Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs; they only exist to the extent that people agree to pretend that they do. The narrative managers know this, and they exploit the fact that most of us don’t. Take Julian Assange, perfect example: he was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happened to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.
28 — Understand that war is the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire would cease to exist. This is why war propaganda is constant and sometimes so forced that glaring plot holes become exposed; it’s so important that they need to force it through, even if they can’t get the narrative matrix around it constructed just right. If they ceased manufacturing consent for the empire’s relentless warmongering, people would lose all trust in government and media institutions, and those institutions would lose the ability to propagandize the public effectively. Without the ability to propagandize the public effectively, our rulers cannot rule.
29 — Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons are always wrong. They’ve been so remarkably consistent in this for so long that whenever there’s a question about any narrative involving hostilities between the US-centralized power alliance and any other nation, you can just look at what Bill Kristol, Max Boot and John Bolton are saying about it and believe the exact opposite. They’re actually a very helpful navigation tool in this way.
30 — Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment. Arguing over whether it’s better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over whether it’s better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI, arguing over how internet censorship should happen and whom should be censored rather than if censorship should happen in the first place. The longer they can keep us arguing over the best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about whether we want to lick it at all.
31 — Watch out for appeals to emotion. It’s much easier to manipulate someone by appealing to their feely bits rather than their capacity for rational analysis, which is why any time they want to manufacture support for military interventionism you see pictures of dead children on news screens everywhere rather than a logical argument for the advantages of using military violence based on a thorough presentation of facts and evidence. You see the same strategy used in the guilt trips they lay on third-party voters; it’s all emotional hyperbole that crumbles under any fact-based analysis, but they use it because it works. They go after your heart strings to
circumvent your head.
32 — Pay attention to how much propaganda goes into maintaining the propaganda machine itself. This is done this because propaganda is just that central to the maintenance of dominant power structures. Much effort is spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing distrust in sources of dissent. You’ll see entire propaganda campaigns built around accomplishing solely this.
33 — Make a practice of asking “Who benefits from this narrative I’m being sold?” and “Who benefits from this belief I have?” Who benefits from your hating China or the Latest Official Bad Guy? Who benefits from the belief that the status quo is acceptable? Keep asking this about the narratives coming to you, and about the beliefs you already hold in your head.
34 — Learn the art of perceiving life without the perceptual filter of narrative. Mentally “mute” the narrative soundtrack and watch where all the resources are going, where the weapons are moving to and coming from, who’s being killed and imprisoned etc, to get a clear picture of what’s going on in the world.
35 — Whenever the mass media begin declaring that some dastardly deed has been committed which requires immediate military action, your default assumption should be that they’re lying, because they’ve got an extensively documented history of doing so. After lying so consistently about such things so many times, the burden of proof is always on the western power structures who are making the claim, and that burden requires mountains of independently verifiable evidence to be met.
36 — Dismiss all Latest Official Bad Guy narratives. The only ones who benefit from you hating a foreign government are the powerful people who are targeting that government and seeking to manufacture support for future actions against it. Don’t be a pro bono CIA propagandist.
37 — Be acutely aware that the only reason the status quo is accepted as “normal”, and its defenders regarded as “moderate”, is because vast fortunes are poured into making it seem that way. If we could see the status quo of this world with fresh eyes, we’d scream in horror.
INDIAN COUNTRY NEWS
"It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error"..Thomas Paine
Human in Algorithms
From the Roof Top
I See This
blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
अध्ययन-अनुसन्धानको सार
After the Crash 