Category Archives: military-industrial complex

The Magnitude of Western defeat in Ukraine is higher than expected

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By Salman Rafi Sheikh

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Europe is in a state of desperation; the continent is losing in Ukraine despite the ‘mighty’ strength of NATO; and European leaders are now vowing for a ‘stronger’ response, including via sending their own forces to combat Russian military forces in Ukraine. Will this decision, if it is ultimately taken, bring any meaningful change to Ukraine’s slow fall is, however, a moot question. What makes it a moot question is the scale of Ukraine’s fall and the depletion of Western stockpiles of weapons and ammunition that it is already finding hard to refill. Russia, on the other hand, is already outpacing its rivals in the West as far as the production of more – and better – weapon systems is concerned. A report in The Guardian noted that “Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners” primarily because they cannot match this level of military preparedness and the sheer ability to sustain the fighting for two to three years.

The EU’s leader, Josep Borrell, recently noted after two years of high-intensity supply of weapons from EU allies, mainly from existing stocks, European states’ existing stocks are now depleted and “the conflict has evolved from a war of stocks to a war of production”, which, as the said report shows, Russia is clearly winning.

This information is now public, reinforcing, alongside some recently leaked Pentagon documents, the reality of Russian dominance in Ukraine. Propaganda notwithstanding, these leaked documents show that the Pentagon believes that Russian losses in Ukraine have been far less than losses publicly stated by US officials. For example, as opposed to various publicly stated estimates, Russia is said to have lost around 200,000 troops. But the Pentagon documents from February and March 2024 put the figure at around 17,000 only. Such is the scale of propaganda and the magnitude of the fear surrounding the collapse of the NATO expansion agenda that the West is now taking steps to hand over seized Russian assets to Ukraine to fund their war on Russia. They’re probably running out of enough money too!

The situation, according to a French newspaper’s investigation – which also claims to have consulted many official reports – is “critical”, with many French military officials ridiculing the idea of sending French troops to Ukraine, where the French army of “cheerleaders” can hardly fight a battle handed Russian military. But France is not an exception here. Most European military forces share this state of affairs, with very little active hardware or few troops to offer. Surely, Europe cannot send in everything, since it will leave the continent itself unprotected.

But it is highly unlikely that Russia will attack Europe, although a European provocation might change this scenario. However considering the fact that Russian military operation in Ukraine were/are driven by the Western imperative of expanding NATO, Russian success in preventing this expansion serves the purpose. For the West, however, a Russian victory in Ukraine is fretful for different purposes. They publicly talk of a Russian victory leading to a wider war in Europe, but the reality is that a Russian victory will stamp the end of western hegemony in global politics since the end of the Second World War. The West will no longer be an all-powerful ‘centre’ of the world.

Geopolitically, the West will be unable to dictate global politics, as it has been able to in the past several decades. Economically, the US dollar might lose its financial hegemony, primarily because a Russian victory in Ukraine will also indicate Russia’s ability to bypass the Western-dominated financial system. If the West can no longer control the global financial system, it automatically creates the space for alternative systems to flourish and acquire central significance. Such a scenario bodes very well for the imperatives of a new, alternative international order.

For the West – especially, the US, the self-declared leader of the ‘free world’ – this is a deeply troubling situation. Washington’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment shows this anxiety reaching critical levels. It says: “Moscow will continue to employ all applicable sources of national power to advance its interests and try to undermine the United States and its allies … [challenging] the US primacy within” the global system. Making other admissions of failure, the report also says that the Russian economy continues to grow and that, despite western sanctions, Moscow’s oil trade is far from diminished. The report accepts that “Moscow has successfully diverted most of its seaborne oil exports and probably is selling significant volumes above the G-7–led crude oil and refined product price caps, which came into effect in December 2022 and February 2023, respectively—in part because Russia is increasing its use of non-Western options to facilitate diversion of most of its seaborne oil exports and because global oil prices increased last year”.

Because Russia is able to maintain its “energy leverage”, according to 2024 Assessment, it means it is not facing any problems vis-à-vis financing its military operations in Ukraine. In fact, the report also accepts Russia’s ability to increase public spending despite the ongoing conflict.

This is the Western assessment after financing the war on Russia for two consecutive years. Logically, such assessments infuse a sense of fear and desperation, which has led some leaders in Europe to push for sending NATO troops to Ukraine. While it may only be a threat, it does show an extremely heightened sense of defeat and a clear sense of the beginning of the end of the “Western century”.

Our Real National Security Budget

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$2 Trillion, Here We Come.

Signe’s second toon du jour SIGN17e Military

By Andrew Cockburn

Source: Spoils of War

The Biden Administration has just published its proposed budget, generating copious commentary, much of it displaying a commensurate degree of misunderstanding, especially regarding our gargantuan national security spending. To get at the truth of the matter, I consulted my friend Winslow Wheeler, who has been observing the insalubrious intricacies of the budget process over the past fifty years as a senior aide to Senators from both parties as well as a senior analyst for the General Accounting Office and directing the Center for Defense Information.

The defense budget has just been posted by the administration is being described as approaching a trillion dollars. Is that accurate?  :

No. It’s actually a lot more than that. In fact it’s beginning to inch up on $2 trillion. 

How so?

The problem is that when most people look at the defense budget, they don’t count everything that we spend even for the Pentagon. But in addition to that, there are hundreds of billions of dollars outside of the Pentagon’s budget that we spend for national security. Things like the nuclear weapons activities in the Department of Energy; that’s $37 billion; $26 billion for retired military pensions and healthcare and $12 billion for the Selective Service, the National Defense Stockpile, and a strange and suspicious looking category for the international activities of the FBI in something called “Defense Related Activities.”

Do we have any idea what that last one is for?

It has always been classified. In the 50 years I’ve been watching the defense budget, it’s never been explained other than some occasional hints. One year they admitted to a lot of money being spent by the FBI in, wait for it, Taiwan, and so it’s very unclear exactly what this is, but it’s always counted as part of so-called defense related activities.  

The expenses that I have just been describing come to $970 billion, but that leaves out a lot.. Add in about $800 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the State Department and its associated agencies, the Department of Homeland Security. And we know now from our Republican friends that border protection is a dire national security issue. Add all that together. Then you can calculate the share for the interest on the debt that we pay each year. All those activities I’ve just described come to 21% of all federal spending. Calculating in that percentage as a the amount it contributes to the debt burden gives you $254 billion.. And so you add all of that up together and you get $1.767 trillion.

Jesus Christ.  What about CIA and other intelligence spending?

All the intelligence agencies are in the Pentagon budget except for the intelligence agencies for the State Department, Coast Guard and  the Department of Homeland Security. Those are the few other things that are not in the Pentagon budget that are distributed in the other agencies that I’ve described.  When they last published the total amount for the intel budget it was over $120 billion, but it’s all embedded in these various agencies.

Since the budget was published, there’s been some wailing and lamentation that because of irksome spending restraints, this budget  actually represents a cut or at least restraint on defense spending. What’s your view on that?

Well, last yea the budget deal that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated with the Democrats for the Pentagon allowed only a 1% increase in defense spending. But because of the screwy way that we actually calculate things, if you put together everything we spent just for the Pentagon without all those other items I mentioned, last year, it looks like we will have spent $968 billion, while for 2025, Biden’s requesting $921 billion. So yes, that’s a cut. But that doesn’t include the supplementals that Biden will request later this year for the Pentagon, for Ukraine, Israel, God knows what, that will get us back into competition with 2024. The reason why 2024 is higher than the Biden request is because it had 60 billion worth of emergency supplementals that Congress is about to approve and that money is counted in my total. But because of the broken accounting rules that we use for the budget, that money’s not counted when you calculate the deal that McCarthy made with the Democrats, and that’s emergency money that doesn’t count on budget cap.

For years we had the Overseas Contingency Operations defense spending, the so called war budget, which was the extra money the military got for actually fighting wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Are we getting back to that?

Yes.  The politically-derived budget caps don’t apply to that money.  And it’s a lot more than just for the wars; lots of billions for goodies for everybody added each year there. It’s all part of the hocus pocus ways that Congress allows itself to appropriate money so it can pretend that it’s using restraint, but actually is exploiting all kinds of loopholes to increase whatever cap or restraint they pretend that they’ve added to the defense budget.

What’s the next budgetary legislative stage that we’re going to endure?

:We haven’t finished with 2024 yet, because Congress  has gotten into this habit of never passing budgets on time. And it also helps the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate discipline members so they don’t get out of the line on things. We do these things called continuing resolutions that keep the money flowing but only at the level approved in the previous year. And we’re in that situation for the Defense Department for 2024. Next week or the week after, they’re going to resolve that and pick a final total for 2024, which will include most, but probably not all of the emergency supplemental that Biden requested for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and defense industrial base spending. So that number will become final in two or three weeks. We have barely begun on the 2025 consideration in Congress that will take the next three, four months and we’ll have another continuing resolution because they won’t pass things in time for the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1st, and we’ll go through this charade once again. And because this is an election year, it’ll be all that more sloppy, painful, and unappealing to observe.

Then when they do it, Chuck Schumer and whoever is the Speaker of the House will pat themselves on the back and say, ‘well, we’ve done a great job. Who says we can’t do anything. We just got the budget finally passed.’ But that will be months late yet again.

Are there items tacked onto the defense bills that have nothing to do with defense? 

Yes. There’s two bills. One is the National Defense Authorization Act, which is the bill that goes to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. That’s a policy bill. It doesn’t make money actually available to be spent, but it pretends it does. It has lots of numbers in it; it’s a tar baby for all kinds of crazy stuff or politically driven stuff because the legislative process is so broken.  Members don’t have an opportunity to do stuff on the floor of the House and Senate and especially in the Senate because the Majority Leader exploits the rules to make amendments impossible. The National Defense Authorization Act is one of those bills where they actually get a chance to do amendments and they do all kinds of crazy stuff, lots of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense.  Last year they had 600 amendments for that bill.

Whew.

But they don’t really get debated. This is yet another way that the Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, controls things. If you’re a Senator, you have to supplicate Schumer to get him to accept your amendment. That will then will get into a package that he’s blessed and it’ll be adopted wholesale by the Senate with perfunctory debate and members giving staff-written speeches about ‘this is a wonderful bill. It includes my important amendment to increase ice block cutting in Minnesota’ and all kinds of other crazy stuff. Every one of these will have been approved by Schumer or his agents as politically acceptable. If you are a dissenter and have a problem with how things are done in the Pentagon or anywhere else, you will not get Schumer’s blessing and your amendment will not be added to his package to be dumped into the National Defense Authorization Act, and you’ll be out in the cold. We go through essentially the same process with the appropriations bill, which is the one that actually makes the money available to all these agencies. Yet again, Schumer controls the process where if he likes the smell of your amendments and it’s okay with the prevailing political dogma that week or that month or for the last decade, it’ll get included. And if you have something that that Chuck Schumer doesn’t like, your amendment will be out in the cold.

Was it always like this?

When the Senate described itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body back in the 1970s and eighties, it would have a process where a bill would come up on the floor in the Senate, and the Senate took great pride in the fact that it had unlimited amendments, and you could offer an amendment on anything you wanted to all of these bills, whether it’s the National Defense Authorization Act or the FAA Authorization Act, and there would be a proper debate, and then the Senate would vote and the majority of those senators present in voting would prevail.

Today it’s a fundamentally broken process because of the automatic filibuster, which allows the party leaders to totally control things. Unless a Senator can somehow put together sixty votes to override a filibuster, Schumer and McConnell can simply prevent your amendment from even coming to the floor, let alone get debated. It’s also a corrupt process because if you legislate in ways that Chuck Schumer, or whoever is the leader, doesn’t like or your idea is a pain in the ass for the Democratic, or Republican, caucus, you will be on the outs.  Furthermore, Schumer, and McConnell control a large portion of the money that you need for your reelection campaign. And if you don’t behave yourself, you’ll be on the outs, not just on getting your amendment adopted, but you’ll be on the outs so far as getting any of his money is concerned. And for the money that he doesn’t directly control, he’ll be sending the message to the big political donors, ‘don’t give anything to Senator So and So. He’s not one of us; he’s not a good boy.’  That’s the way we do business these days.

Getting back to the defense bill, I saw an item this morning that the Navy is saying they all have to cut back Virginia class submarine production from two to one next year because of their terrible financially straitened circumstances. How do we read that?

There’s two things going on there. One is that the Navy has requested a gigantic ship-building budget, something like $45 billion. The problem is that navy ships are so expensive these days that you can’t fit much dirt into that bag. Those submarines are about $3 billion apiece. Aircraft carriers, and we’re paying for two more, are about $13 billion apiece. They have a brand new ‘low cost’ frigate that’s getting into production this year. Those come in at $1 billion apiece. When you have ships that cost these amounts, even with a gigantic budget, like $45 billion, you can’t buy many of them. The second thing that’s going on is the Navy is tickling the system. They’re saying, ‘Oh dear, we can only afford one sub this year because we’re so stretched running. And isn’t that just terrible?’ So they’re tickling Congress where it feels good, and they’re saying, ‘okay, when you add money, add money for another submarine.’

So does that mean the budget will grow beyond what the President has asked for?

The Biden request is a floor, not a ceiling.

And the other game that goes on is they are actually limited in a relative sense in the billions of dollars that they can add on each year. So the staff on the appropriations committee and the two armed services committees, they go looking for things to cut in the accounts in the Pentagon budget where nobody’s paying much attention. So they can then plow that money back into the stuff that the Navy wants for these submarines, or that Senator X, Y, or Z wants for a research and development program that just happens to be performed in his, or her, state and just happens to be from that company that gave him a healthy political contribution last year.  One of the things the staffs love to cut is training money for the Air Force and others,  because they’ll declare the request to have been excessive. They’ll add that few hundred million dollars to the pot for goodies that members of Congress want. An added problem, of course, is that the Air Force is already way, way behind on trending hours for pilots, and that account needs more money, not less money. There are all kinds of other games that the staff at these committees play to pretend they’re taking out unuseful money, and paying for the oh, so wonderful ideas that members of Congress want for their special requests.

Thank you. At least we’ve been warned.

Washington’s Wars Eroding its Global Clout

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By Salman Rafi Sheikh

Source: New Eastern Outlook

If war is politics by other means, Washington’s ongoing wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are meant to buttress its global influence on the one hand and undermine its competitors on the other. But the question is: how is this politics by other means working out for Washington? Not so good. Russia’s recent military victories in Ukraine and China’s expansive inroads into the Middle East alongside the growing anti-Americanism in the region (due to Washington’s support for Israel and its inability to prevent a genocide of the Palestinians) indicate an overall American inability to shape global geopolitics in unilateral ways to the exclusive advantage of Washington and its allies in Europe and elsewhere.

Russia’s recent military gains in Ukraine, for example, have very clearly established its military credentials as a power that has been able to withstand the combined military strength of the US and its European allies assembled in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). What does this mean for Washington’s policies in Central Asia? Most certainly, Washington cannot simply present Russia as a ‘weak’ military power that can be simply ‘isolated’. But more than that, Russia is utilising its victories over NATO in various ways.

For instance, when the NATO-backed Russia-Ukraine military conflict began, most reports in the mainstream US media began to spread false messaging about Central Asia potentially moving itself out of the so-called ‘Russian clout’. The US saw in it an opportunity to push itself into the region. But this has turned out to be a fiasco. When the US imposed sanctions on Russia, many Russian companies began to relocate their businesses to Central Asia, directly contributing to Central Asia’s impressive 4.8 percent growth rate in 2023. According to the findings of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the region is forecast to register an even more impressive level of growth at almost 5.7 percent in 2024-25.

In other words, thanks to Washington’s sanctions, the Russian political economy is now more deeply connected with Central Asia than it was before February 2021, which is also strengthening the Eurasian Economic Union. Now that this integration is working for the advantage of Central Asia means that the latter have little to no incentive to pay too much attention to Washington and/or the imperatives of moving decisively to Washington. It means that not only has the Biden administration’s policy of NATO expansion via Ukraine failed so far in Ukraine itself, but the ‘new’ Central Asia policy it inaugurated in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has also failed to make any impact on the ground. Russia defeated US design also by approaching relations with the Central Asian States in ways that gave them enough space to stay neutral in the conflict. While the West saw this neutrality as a sign of Russian weakness in the region and the Central Asian States’ growing assertiveness, it failed to read how this was part of Russia’s strategy to cultivate its ties in a more balanced way. This balance is also pretty evident in the ways Russia has not objected to, or even resisted, China’s growing footprint in the region, although reports in the Western media often see China’s role in Central Asia at the expense of Russia. But the West seems to have been misreading this region.

As far as Washington’s war in the Middle East is concerned, its military support for Israel plus its inability to stop genocide has eroded its credibility. Suppose Washington has been supporting Israel to maintain its dominance in the Middle East. In that case, Washington’s excessive support is now derailing its objectives, since the Middle East is now exercising a lot more strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Washington than was the case until a few years ago.

In the past few months, a flurry of Chinese activity indicates it much more clearly than anything else. China has convened leadership summits, met with Arab delegates, supported their stance vis-à-vis Israel, and held joint military exercises with one of the US’ most important allies in the region (Saudi Arabia). The UAE, otherwise a close US ally and one of the first states to sign the Abraham Accords to recognise Israel and establish diplomatic ties with it, actually withdrew from the US-led naval task force in May 2023, indicating policy and interest-based differences.

The UAE is also a country in the Middle East that has over 100,000 Chinese living there and involved in many businesses. But when it comes to the Middle East itself, and the fact that many countries in the region are involved in China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), we see the region’s trade with China registering an overall growth of almost 45 percent in 2021 and 27 percent in 2022.

Given the economic integration, the Middle East is turning out to be a region where Washington’s clout is receding fast, without any signs of recovery in the immediate future at least. Although US strikes in the Red Sea on the Houthis are meant to indicate Washington’s willingness to offer a security umbrella to the Gulf states (against Iran-backed groups), the region appears to be past the point where it must have the US on its side to ensure security. Gulf states’ perceptions of Iran as an enemy are changing, thanks to Beijing’s mediation.

As far as Washington’s support for Israel is concerned and as far as the threat of a wider war in the region it is posing, Gulf states are on the edge of a conflict that might directly undermine their modernization programmes – development projects that mainly involve China in various capacities.

Therefore, if Washington’s involvement in the Israel war was meant to bring back the era of US dominance, the exact opposite is happening, both in the Middle East and Central Asia, which happen to be two of the world’s most energy-rich regions.

It’s War: The Real Meat Grinder Starts Now

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred. 

Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.

The money quote:

“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”

Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.

Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.

Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.

That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.

Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.

And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.

Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.

Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.

The sponsors remain the same

Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.

The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.

Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.

That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.

It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.

The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…

… Donald Trump.

Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.

ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”

But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.

It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian

The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s

military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”

Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.

And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”

In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.

The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.

Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.

Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.

It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.

Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.

So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.

Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.

So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.

In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity,  now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.

There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.

Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.

As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.

The Shameful Way that the American Empire Is Ending

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The American empire — which is now the largest empire in history — is ending not only with defeats on every front, but with the historically profound stigma of being one of the two perpetrators (the other and more-publicized one being Israel) of the largest ethnic-cleansing operation (to remove all of the 2.3 million Gazans from Gaza) ever since Hitler’s ethnic-cleansing campaign ended.

That one ended after the Soviet Union defeated the Third Reich (or 3rd German empire) at the battle of Kursk on 23 August 1943 and so made inevitable the defeat of Hitler, and the end of his Third Reich, and the end of their organized extermination program against Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘non-Aryans’ — as well as made inevitable, from that date forward, the ultimate defeat of the Japanese empire, which (from that date forward) was only a matter of when, and no longer of whether, Japan would surrender.

The atomic bombings in August 1945 didn’t determine that victory over Japan; Hitler’s defeat at Kursk in August 1943 did. But, of course, the U.S. regime and its colonies allege that the U.S. and UK defeated Germany, though only Soviet troops entered Berlin and drove Hitler to commit suicide on 30 April 1945, thus conquering Germany. Because FDR had died just 18 days prior to that, and his successor Truman was an unknown and Stalin wanted his relations with Truman to be like his relations with FDR had been — mutually beneficial — Stalin generously allowed U.S., UK, and French, forces in as-if they all had done it, defeated Germany, so as to continue the anti-nazi alliance into the post-WW2 era. That turned out to have been a catastrophic error on Stalin’s part, simply a gamble that turned out to have been wrong.

The U.S. regime now does mainly proxy wars, because its only military victory (with its own troops) in the 130+ military invasions it has carried out ever since WW2, was the small one, 46 years later, and 33 years ago, in America’s 1991 battle for Kuwait; and America’s biggest-ever proxy war is the one that’s been going on ever since 2014 to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine using mainly Ukrainian troops who are being supplied by the U.S. and its colonies, with weapons, intelligence, and training. And this proxy war, like all of America’s other ones, is now almost certainly going down to defeat, after the expenditures of over 600,000 dead already, and perhaps over a trillion dollars of taxpayer expenses ultimately, all in order for the U.S. Government to keep Ukraine, which it grabbed control over in a bloody and barbaric February 2014 coup that it and its allies called a ‘democratic revolution’ though it actually terminated Ukraine’s democracy and turned that nation into the U.S. regime’s springboard into the U.S. empire’s planned ultimate conquest of Russia.

The war in Ukraine culminates the U.S. regime’s plan ever since Russia ended the Cold War on its side in 1991 while America secretly continued its side of that war by expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and especially into Ukraine itself because Ukraine is closer to The Kremlin than any other country is, barely 300 miles away, ideal for a blitz five-minute U.S. missile decapitation of Russia’s central command.

The U.S. regime started privately telling its stooges, first West Germany’s Helmut Kohl on 24 February 1990, but then later Francois Mitterrand and others, that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact mirror to America’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance — and the entire Russian side of the Cold War — all would soon end, the Cold War would secretly continue on the U.S.-and-allied side, until Russia itself will be conquered. Consequently, starting on 24 February 1990, America’s stooge regimes began to understand that though the prior excuse for the Cold War on America’s side was ‘anti-communism’, the reality was and is that on the American side, that war’s objective is — by whatever means (subversion, coup, proxy war, sanctions, or otherwise) — to win control over the entire world, and that Russia is America’s main target to grab control over, so as to culminate its empire.

Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Presidency until his death on 12 April 1945 just before WW2 ended, there was no Cold War, despite some U.S. officials, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted it. President Roosevelt had no qualms about accepting the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as an ally so long as both countries would be committed to defeating Hitler: for FDR, no country has any right to interfere in any other country’s domestic affairs; and, so, the Soviet Union’s domestic affairs were irrelevant to U.S.-Soviet relations. U.S. Senator Harry Truman disagreed with FDR about that; and In 1944, the Democratic Party’s megadonors required President Roosevelt to accept Truman as his running-mate for Vice President. That decision by the Democratic Party’s megadonors produced the Cold War when President Truman, upon the advice from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, decided on 25 July 1945 that America must conquer — no longer cooperate with — the Soviet Union. Within just two years, FDR’s entire Cabinet was replaced. Truman was the ultimate anti-FDR.

Today’s America is the one that Truman and his hero Eisenhower created, not the one that FDR had carefully started to plan in August 1941 until he died on 12 April 1945. Truman reversed FDR’s foreign policies. In order to understand how this happened, the reality of WW2 has to be truthfully understood.   

The most masterful summary of how WW2 ended is the 12 May 2015 article by Ronnie Kasrils, his “Op-Ed: Lest we forget the truth about World War Two”, which is 100% truthful and covers all of the historically important points, so that the reader can understand how much the U.S. regime and its post-WW2 colonies (or ‘allies’) lie about that history in order to ‘justify’ their decision (which was made on 25 July 1945) by U.S. President Truman to now go forward by creating and expanding ultimately throughout the world an American empire, the first target of which would be to conquer Russia — the very same country that had actually won WW2 for the Allies. Agents for the U.S. regime lie profusely about history in order to deceive the public that the U.S. and/or Britain was/were mainly responsible for the defeat of Hitler and the Allied victory in WW 2. We’re inundated with that propaganda.

So: the American empire, which began with a plethora of lies, is now ending with a campaign against the Gazans that might ultimately become remembered as being the second-worst genocide in history — #1 being, of course, the Holocaust by Hitler and his German Third Empire (which was carried out not by bombings and a siege like the Israel-U.S. one now is, but instead by search-and-destroy operations against its ‘racial’ targets, plus industrialized mass-murdering “concentration camps”). Though the means of carrying out the genocide aren’t identical, both of those campaigns rightfully earn the world’s contempt and disgust.

Yet the U.S. Government is a full partner with Israel’s Government in carrying out this ethnic cleansing or possibly even full genocide of the Gazans. Biden fully supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing or even genocide against the Gazans, though he speaks against it in order to fool enough voters so as to win a second term. Furthermore, the Washington Post reported on 18 March 2024 that ever since 27 October 2023, Biden has known that Israel’s saying they intending to kill only Hamas is a lie and that they’re bombing and sieging Gaza so as to exterminate or otherwise get rid of all of its residents. So, if Netanyahu gets convicted and hung for this genocide, then Biden ought to get hung too, because he is the person who authorizes all of the weapons, ammunition and guidance, in order for Israel to do it.

And there also are other ways in which the U.S. regime is shamefully behaving while its previously ever-expanding empire is starting to fall apart.

The only country that regularly and always votes in the U.N. General Assembly against Resolutions that condemn racism and bigotry in all of its forms including nazism and Holocaust-denial, is the United States, largely because ever since 1945 the U.S. has brought into this country so many elite Nazis and gave them sanctuary and hid their atrocities from the public. But in recent years, one of the main excuses it gives is that Ukraine is voting against it and so America must do likewise in order to reaffirm its support for Ukraine. (In fact, America’s U.N. Representative that year said the reason for America’s refusing to vote against nazism was America’s opposition to Russia and support for Ukraine. India’s Representative said that the fact that Russia had introduced the Resolution was irrelevant to whether it should be adopted.) The only other country that has often been joining with America’s and Ukraine’s pro-nazi votes at the U.N. has been Canada, which (like America) had brought in and provided sanctuary for many Ukrainian Nazis after WW II. In fact, as I headlined on 24 September 2023, “Canada’s Parliament Gives Standing Ovation to 98-Year-Old Nazi SS Ukrainian”. But, actually, America’s anti-Russian military alliance NATO is simply riddled with nazis. Lies cover this up. And America’s lie-based invasions of Iraq in 2003 and of Libya in 2011 and of Syria ever since 2013, are all nazistic and lie-based, too; so, the evidence that the post-WW-II U.S. Government is nazi is clear and undeniable. All of this comes from Truman, under the advice from both Eisenhower and Churchill.

Anyone who would call this a democracy would have to be either blind or crazy. The only way that the U.S. regime can keep it going is on the basis of lies. And now the empire that is based upon those lies is starting to fall apart. The key event will be when the first NATO member Government will either block a NATO action or else quit the NATO alliance. Or else, if neither of those happens, then the key event will be what will happen because neither of them did happen: WW3. Either the empire will collapse, or else the entire world will self-destruct as a result of the U.S. Government’s actions.

The fundamental crisis of the West

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By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A growing number of media outlets in America and in Europe have recently reached the conclusion that “rules-based international order” long espoused by the West has failed.

In essence, this means that the position of the Western powers in the world has weakened: they have failed to destroy the Russian economy by imposing sanctions, and the war in Gaza has demonstrated that the US and the Western European countries are far from all-powerful.

The media frequently claim that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has changed the international situation, in that it has made clear the limited capabilities of the West and deepened the rift between the West and the Global South.

The Ukrainian conflict and the war in Gaza have demonstrated to the whole world, and above all to ordinary people in the West, that their ruling elites are unable to grasp this reality, lack strategic vision and are generally guided by their own personal interests.

The ruling elites in the West have demonized Russia in every possible way and have come to believe the myth that Russia can be strategically defeated. This is a huge miscalculation and this conclusion will become obvious to all in the very near future. The present author is reminded of the junker Grushnitsky, in Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time,” a fantasist who plays the role of an unworldly romantic for so long that he begins to believe it himself.

As Vladimir Putin has aptly put it, “Russophobia, like any other ideology based on racism, national superiority and exclusivity, blinds the person who subscribes to it and deprives them of reason.”

The state of the “rules-based international order” is becoming increasingly alarming for many Western powers. According to an article published in the weekly journal the Economist on February 15, so-called national conservatives, who “suspect free markets of being rigged by the elites,” are gaining in influence in the US and Europe. They are also hostile to migration, despise pluralism, especially multiculturalism, and are obsessed with dismantling institutions they see as tainted by globalism.

Despite their differences, these national conservatives are united by their hostility to shared enemies, including migrants, especially Muslims, globalists and all their perceived enablers. Donald Trump is leading in the polls in America. The far right is expected to make gains in the European Parliament elections in June. In Germany last December, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AFD) reached a record high of 23 percent, according to polls. Anticipating Rishi Sunak’s loss in the elections, the right wing of Britain’s Conservative Party are hoping to grab power in the party. In 2027, Marine Le Pen may well become president of France.

According to the Economist, the current authorities need to take people’s legitimate concerns seriously: the public in many Western countries see illegal migration as a source of unrest and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up poorer than they are. They are concerned about losing their jobs to new technologies. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been hijacked by hostile, illiberal, left-wing elites. They view the globalists who have flourished over the last few decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste.

These complaints have real merit and mocking them only confirms how detached from reality the elites have become.

The position of Washington and its hangers-on in Europe in relation to Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza has added significantly to the public’s distrust of the West’s ruling elites. By openly supporting the actions of the Netanyahu government, the governments of the Western powers are convincing everyone, including their own populations, of their own policy of double standards: only the lives of Israelis are valued and massacres of Arabs are allowed.

As the Saudi newspaper Arab News reports, Arab and Muslim Americans, and 60 percent of all other Americans, have for months wanted President Joe Biden to pressure Israel into agreeing to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The White House has, in effect, ignored these pleas.

In response to this stance, Muslim Americans in nine potentially wavering states met in Dearborn, Michigan, in December 2023 under the slogan “Abandon Biden, Truce Now.” They have vowed not to vote for Biden in the presidential election unless he changes the policies that are enabling Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip possible.

The US journal Foreign Affairs, in an article entitled “Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order” quotes one G7 diplomat: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we did with the Global South (around Ukraine) was lost. … Forget the rules, forget the world order. They will never listen to us again.”

The economic recession, which has become a permanent situation for many European states, also provides little room for optimism. In the US, the high inflation and huge government debt are expected to worsen this spring and summer, according to some analysts. The most closely watched indicator of opinions about the economy, a monthly poll conducted by the University of Michigan, has reported that public confidence is at an exceptionally low ebb, about the same level as during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.

With the presidential election just nine months away, this gloomy mood has become a serious problem for the Democrats. President Joe Biden is already facing a host of challenges to his bid for a second term, starting with concerns about his fitness for office as an 80-year-old man. Another major obstacle to his election bid is the opinion polls that give him low marks for his management of the economy.

The current economic problems are exacerbated by growing inequality, the worsening drug crisis and the proliferation of firearms. The promotion of non-traditional sexual orientation and the encouragement of same-sex couples have cause legitimate outrage to many conservative religious people.

In the European Union between June 6 and 9, more than 400 million voters in 27 countries will elect 720 MEPs to represent them for the next five years. Observers predict an increase in the influence of right-wing conservative parties. One major reason for the heightened interest in the upcoming election is the unprecedented corruption scandal that erupted in the European Parliament in December 2022, when the vice president and several other officials, including three MEPs, were accused of taking bribes. The investigation is ongoing, but it has already revealed instances of illegal activities and immoral behavior on the part of MEPs. Conservatives accuse the EU of being an opaque bureaucracy with vastly overpaid staff, which is disconnected from the reality experienced by ordinary residents of the EU member states, and which spends its vast budgets – totaling hundreds of trillions of euros – not for the common good but for the personal whims and fantasies of its leaders. Inflation and the cost of living are still rising in many European nations, while many blame EU bureaucrats in Brussels for policies such as the Green Deal that have made life more expensive for Europeans by raising the prices of fuel, food and most other essentials. In addition, anti-Russian sanctions, which have led to the rejection of cheap energy from Russia by a number of European countries, have had a negative impact on the well-being of ordinary citizens.

Over the past few weeks, thousands of farmers from across Europe, particularly from Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and Belgium, have taken to the streets to protest against additional spending on Ukraine and against new EU environmental policies that make farming unviable.

The short-sighted policy of the Western elites with regard to the crises in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip is leading to a loss of confidence in the ruling authorities on the part of ordinary citizens. It is easy to imagine their reaction in the event of any further military setbacks by Ukraine or any worsening of the situation within the country.

The position taken by many developing nations with regard to the current international processes is highly symptomatic. In an editorial for the Arabic international newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Editor-in-Chief Grhassan Charbel writes: “Zelensky’s position reminded me of remarks by the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, that ‘the one who is covered by the Americans is naked.’ The same phrase could be said by Putin to Zelensky.

Putin has the right to be sarcastic. The leaders of the West did not accept that he could not lose… That he went to Ukraine to punish the entire West and to launch a major coup against a world that was born from the collapse of the (Berlin) Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union.”

It is no coincidence that the ruling circles of Western Europe are currently not hiding their anxiety about what they refer to as the “threat posed by Trump and Russia.”

In fact, everything we see happening testifies to the inadequacy of the current ruling elites in the West, who are unable to reasonably and rationally assess the emerging situation, guided as they are solely by short-term personal interests.

It is very possible that they will be swept away by a wave of new unexpected events, and new leaders will come to power.

It is therefore highly likely that 2024 will be a turning point in many respects.

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

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

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

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.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition 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.

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

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, 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.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who 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 should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s 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.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Lies About Jews, Israel, and the War in Gaza

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

News-reports are so full of lies and misrepresentations about Jews, Israel, and the war in Gaza, as to be commonly propaganda that conveys falsehoods more than truths.

Two news-reports from Reuters on February 28th will be cited here as examples of such propaganda:

“After threats and abuse, British lawmakers question their safety over Gaza” opened:

It was 10 minutes of shouted accusations of being a “genocide enabler” and having “blood on your hands” that made a British lawmaker fear for his safety over his decision to voice support for Israel in its war with Hamas.

Almost touching noses with his accuser before walking away and warning he would call the police, the opposition Labour Party member said the incident in a town in his constituency was just the latest of several that made him change his behaviour.

He now makes sure he sits near the door on public transport and limits meetings with the public.

“It feels like it could just need one spark to flip from someone giving you tuppence (criticism) in the street to escalating to actual violence,” the lawmaker said.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza, more than 10 British politicians spoken to by Reuters said the abuse directed at them had become more intense. At least one cited this as a factor in deciding not to seek a new term in parliament in an election later this year.

Its underlying presumption (such as in “the Oct. 7 Hamas attack … sparked the war in Gaza,” which is intended to communicate the false impression that this war started on 7 October 2023 and so the aggressor in this war is the Gazans not the Israelis — and NOT at Israel’s founding in 1948 so that the aggressor is the Israelis, and the Palestinians are only reacting against that long-ongoing aggression) is that to be against Israel and to be for Palestinians, is to be anti-Semitic, but many Jews — including Albert Einstein and other prominent ones — have called Israel and its current leadership “racists” and “fascists” against the vast majority of the population in the area that in 1948 became “Israel”, which was originally called “Palestine” not “Israel” and was overwhelmingly Muslim not Jewish before Britain gave this land to the few Jews there and started Israel in 1948. Immediately, the racist-fascist Jews there, self-called “Zionists” as believers in the Jewish Scripture’s (Christian Old Testament’s) myth that ‘God’ gave it to them and ordered them to exterminate the then-current residents, carried out their biblically commanded ethnic cleansing war to clear the land for incoming Jews from European Christianity’s German-led Holocaust. For examples, Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 7:16 and 20:15 -18, have ‘God’ in that Scripture say that when the Israelites enter the promised land they are to exterminate the Canaanites, Hittites, Girgishites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, living there. So, Israel was founded by the far-right subsequently Likud Party leaders of Israel, such as Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, who led the extermination of entire Arab villages in the Nakba or “Catastrophe” as it’s called by Palestinians — the Palestinians’ equivalent to what for Jews the Holocaust had been. The Jews will never forget the Holocaust, just as the Palestinians will never forget the Nakba — but whereas the Nakba has continued with varying degrees of intensity ever since 1948 (culminating now in the Israel-America extermination of Gazans), the Holocaust ended in 1945.

It all goes back to 1948, the creation of Israel. Here’s from a lengthy article “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs” in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on 6 July 2019, about how Israel’s Government cleansed, eliminated, thousands of key documents, which remain unknown, but some scraps of which survived, such as, “And then Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won’t have anywhere to return to. That is, all the Arab villages.”

On 24 August 2014, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network headlined “Over 300 Survivors and Descendants of Survivors and Victims of the Nazi Genocide Condemn Israel’s Assault on Gaza” and presented their letter to the world, signed by (at that time) 327 of them:

As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.

We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians, and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.

Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

Consequently: many Jews are anti-Israel even though they profess themselves to be still Jews. Only bigots equate pro-Israel with being not anti-Semitic, and equate anti-Israel as being anti-Semitic (or anti-Jews). There is, in reality, no equation whatsoever between anti-Israel and anti-Jew. Only propaganda claims or implies any such false equation.

Albert Einstein and 26 other prominent Jewish progressives co-signed a letter to the editor of the New York Times published 4 December 1948, condemning Menachem Begin by name as a “fascist,” and saying, of his work (and of his unnamed colleague in that work, Itzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected Prime Ministers of Israel, and whose follower Netanyahu today leads Israel), that:

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 [1948], terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

‘News’-reports such as that one from Reuters, which imply that every Jew is a Zionist (supports Israel), and that only anti-Semites condemn Israel, are arrant lies. They deceive for political purposes. That is propaganda. It forced the progressive leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn out of power and out of politics in Britain. So: these are extremely potent lies. This Reuters ‘news’-report opens with a large photo of marchers in Britain holding up the star of David and the flags of Israel and Britain, and “Never Again Is Now” signs, suggesting that to oppose Israel’s genocide of Gazans is to be anti-Semitic — is to be bigoted against Jews. This is mass-mind-control by Reuters, to make Brits think that they ought to side with the Israelis against the Gazans, and to therefore support Israel’s genocide of Gazans (as, somehow, being a justifiable response to the 7 October 2023 Hamas-Gazan attack against Israelis).

A subtler lie in it is that the war in Gaza started on 7 October 2023, instead of in 1948. The reality is that the 7 October 2023 event was the victims’ crying out, to the entire world, to call public attention to their living in the world’s largest (and constantly under siege by their prison-guards) open-air prison, Gaza, that they’re born into and permanently sentenced to, by Israel. It’s not where they want to live, no more than any prison anywhere is. But, after 7 October 2023, Israel decided to eliminate the Gazans and labelled this Israel-America genocide of Gazans partnership a ‘war against Hamas’ — which is yet another lie that the media publish without question, without shame, and purely as propaganda from and about Israel.

Also on February 28th, Reuters headlined “Michigan’s strong ‘uncommitted’ vote shows Israel impact on Biden support” and opened “DEARBORN, Michigan/WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Joe Biden’s campaign and top Democratic officials vowed to double down on efforts to win over voters as the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East, after Michigan registered a stronger-than-anticipated protest vote over his support of Israel.” It included this line from Biden’s campaign — with no question (far less rebuttal) being presented about it: “Biden’s campaign will continue to ‘make our case in the state – to both uncommitted voters and the entire Michigan constituency,’ a senior campaign official said as the results were tallied. ‘The President will continue to work for peace in the Middle East.’” But actually, as Politico had headlined on February 13th, “US won’t punish Israel for Rafah op that doesn’t protect civilians” and it said that the Biden Administration has informed the Netanyahu Administration that if it decides that it has no practicable way to expel the Gazans to foreign lands (which Israel’s Government — assisted by America’s Government — has been trying to do ever since October 16th) then the U.S. Government will not punish Israel if it simply slaughters all of them. “No reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm [Politico’s euphemism for slaughter] civilians without facing American consequences [meaning punishment]. More than half of the enclave’s 2.3 million population has fled to Rafah.” So: that would entail slaughtering 1.15 million Gazans there. The Politico article made no mention of what would be done with the 1.15 million survivors, the Gazans who haven’t yet gotten to Raffah, but if Netanyahu would halt the extermination program at that point, a rationale for discontinuing the operation there would be hard if not impossible to imagine — at least inasmuch as half of Gazans would then already have been slaughtered by Israel.

And this slaughter of Gazans is being done with U.S.-made weapons and military intelligence, and so it is actually a joint U.S. and Israeli operation. As Israel’s Jewish News Service reported on November 27th:

Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

From 7 October 2023 up through 23 December 2023, the U.S. Government shipped to Israel 10,000 tons of U.S. weaponry and ammunition; and Biden has pressed harder on Congress to authorize an additional $14 billion of such assistance to be donated by U.S. taxpayers, to Israel, in order to complete what it’s doing to Gaza — whatever that may turn out to be — than he has ever pressed Congress to approve anything (except donating even more weapons and intelligence to Ukraine too). And, then, on January29th, YNET News, the most popular internet portal in Israel, headlined “Global ammunition shortage forces Israel to limit bombings”, and they reported that “Over 25,000 tons of weapons have been delivered to Israel via approximately 280 aircraft and 40 ships from the U.S. since the onset of the conflict.” So, obviously, Biden, rather than being  “The President [who] will continue to work for peace in the Middle East,” is instead actually an equal partner along with Netanyahu, in carrying out this Israel-U.S.-planned genocide. How many of Reuters’s readers know this fact? Furthermore, that Reuters article likewise stated (without pointing out the absurd lie) that “the U.S. president aims to solve conflicts in the Middle East.” How can that be? Perhaps he intends to ship yet more billions of dollars worth of U.S.-made taxpayer-donated weapons to Israel in order to enforce that ‘peace’ — the ‘peace’ of the graveyard. So sayeth Reuters, at any rate. And believeth its readers? But that is the mainstream ‘news’-‘reporting’, and this certainly is NOT. What is the reality? And why does the opposite side hide it? And who are paying them to hide it?

Which people actually control a ‘democracy’: the people who fund political propaganda, or the people whose votes are swayed by it? If a country is controlled by contending factions between the billionaires — such as Democratic ones versus Republican ones — is that a democracy? If it’s instead an aristocracy, is there any way to overthrow and replace it by a democracy, other than to have an authentic revolution?