Category Archives: Social Engineering

IN THY BODY DO I DWELL (THE PHYSICAL CONSTRUCT AS HOST)

Posted on by
Reply

By Kingsley Dennis

Source: Waking Times

The body is coming back into sight as a site for experimentation and as a target for a type of quasi-transcendence. Within the inverted world of the lesser reality, the physical body has always been recognized as the vehicle through which life is experienced. In other words, it is our avatar whilst in this realm. As such, it has always been a site of contestation.

In some religious circles, the body is seen as a material distraction from the Divine and its influence was seen as needing to be repressed and subjugated (which may include certain physical deprivations, including self-harm). Various religio-spiritual perspectives have regarded the physical body as an obstacle, a barrier, to a sense of the sacred. The other extreme is that the body is regarded as the ideal vehicle for experiencing the sensual and sensuous – it is a vessel for indulgence and decadent experience. Still, there has been no consensus reached over how to regard the vehicle of the human physical body.

In my earlier book – Hijacking Reality – I noted how recent narratives are trying to place the human body as a site of weakness. That is, the body is open and vulnerable to disease and infection; it succumbs to aging and exhaustion; it disallows the human being from the full range of experiences. In this light, narratives of transhumanism are attempting to gain ground as a way of offering an alternative to the ‘weak body.’ These, as I had discussed, are attempts to drive the human experience deeper into materialism and a technocratic agenda for a digital-hybridization program within our societies.

The Inversion is steering ever forward into deeper and deeper realms of materialism. It is utilizing a narrative of quasi-transcendence through embedding deeper into the myth of technological salvation. The lines are not so much being drawn but being blurred. American writer Philip K. Dick, famous for his science fiction books that question the nature and validity of reality, spoke about the blurring of boundaries between body and environment in his 1972 speech “The Android and the Human” –

“Our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves.1″

This quasi-aliveness of the environment that Dick speaks about is the animating stage where relations between the human body and the material world begin to blur (and merge). Much of Western spiritual-mystical practice is interpreted as a somatically-felt experience. The body is the instrument that receives and grounds the experience, whether it be in terms of the ‘great flash,’ ‘illuminating light,’ or the ‘bodily rush.’ The body is the human instrument for receiving, transforming, and sometimes transferring, energies. There are many ‘bodies’ in spiritual-mystic traditions, including the etheric, the astral, the ecstatic, the subtle, the higher, and others; the physical, material body is recognized as the densest of them all. Also, it is the ‘easy target’ since it resides fully within the material world and is open to social engineering and influence.

The body in history has always been a site of focus. It has helped define the experience of self/other and the outer/inner and has been regarded as the material vessel for the spiritual impulse. Perhaps for this reason, many societies around the world have, at one time or another, attempted to suppress the power and expression of the human body. It could be that the controlling agencies within the inverted world regard the balanced, correctly functioning human body as a portal for appropriately navigating the perceptive wavelengths of reality. Many of the mystical traditions placed a strong emphasis on the purification of the human body; on it being free from toxins and corruptive influences. In this way, the physical vessel was said to receive the ‘illuminations,’ or the ‘mercy’ of the sacred, divine impulse.

The body acts as an antenna for the nourishing inspirations/energies for the soul. What better way to block these illuminations than to corrupt the body’s purity through a polluting environment – socially, psychologically, and biologically. As such, the body has always been a site for the convergence of power and control. This body-power relationship has been a major theme in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has deconstructed, in his critical history of modernity, how the body has been fought over as a site of power. The physical body is also regarded as a location of resistance against the establishment powers. It is a fixed place where an individual can be located, found, and held accountable. And now that our physical movements are continually tracked through the digital infosphere, there is even less chance to escape the eye of authoritative surveillance. If we cannot escape from our bodies then, it would appear, we are forever within the system.

The human body has always been accepted as a unit within the social matrix. This has also been expanded to define bodies in terms of social institutions: we have the body politic, the social body, the scientific body, the medical body, the body of an organization, etc. The once sacred site of the body, which was the vessel for somatic spiritual experiences, has been adopted, or co-opted, into a social construction of bodies that belong under control and subjugation of external authorities. In Gnostic terms, the body’s site of power has been referred to as those of the ‘sleepers’ and the ‘wakers.’ Sleepers are those whose inner self has yet to break through the layers of the body’s social conditioning.

The somatic spiritual experience has been seen as a threat to hierarchical societies because it exists beyond their bounds of power. This is one reason why ecstatic experiences, whether through spiritual or other means, have been suppressed, outlawed, and discredited by orthodox religions and mainstream institutions alike. Ecstatic experiences that can break down the thinking patterns and conditioning structures of the Inversion are alarming for institutions of socio-political power. How can you control, regulate, and discipline a body, energy, or experience that has no physical location? Such intangible forces, such as the power of baraka, are positively infectious and beyond bounds.[i] As cultural historian Morris Berman notes:

“The goal of the Church (any church) is to obtain a monopoly on this vibratory experience, to channel it into its own symbol system, when the truth is that the somatic response is not the exclusive property of any given religious leader or particular set of symbols. 2″

In recent times, there has been an increasing focus on what is termed the innate consciousness of the body, and which has been revealed through such techniques as muscle testing. It is innate because it is inborn (born in and of the body), and it is instinctual. Somatic consciousness then is another word for our intuitive intelligence. It is an intelligence that can be communicated through the body, and it is this which threatens those that seek to control the dreaming mind of humanity. However, the matrix of reality is not a clean-cut realm.

We exist in an anthropological environment where nature and culture cannot be neatly divided. The physical realm is a fusion of the real/imagined, and where subject/object is blurred. Yet now, this hybridity is being further enforced and coalesced through genetic engineering, implants, augmented reality, and the sciences of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information technology (including artificial intelligence). The Inversion is attempting to gain our willing compliance through offering a form of transcendence that goes beyond the body and the bodily senses.

The Galactic Gaze

The dreaming mind has always been tempted and awed by the stars beyond. There is perhaps no living person who has not gazed up into the night firmament and wondered about the cosmos out there. And perhaps, there have been those persons who upon gazing up wondered whether they were not living within some kind of bubble. The dreamer’s world has often been depicted as a bubble reality, most notably by the Renaissance alchemists, as in this well-known engraving:

The Philosopher’s Stone lies outside of the realm of the Inversion; it can only be grasped by one who has exited from the dreamer’s reality bubble (or perceptual prison). For most people, the spiralling star tapestry of the cosmos is the first step of the beyond. Reason enough, then, for this to have become the new destination for the modern pioneers within the lesser reality.

The break from the body begins at an early age through social conditioning. To some extent, all individuals have to relinquish some of the contact they have with the innate intelligence of the body (including the body of the natural world) by being incorporated into the ‘social body.’ And as the social body becomes increasingly enmeshed within the digitized landscape, this alienation from the body will only likewise increase. Modern culture’s love affair with decadence, and the rise of sexualization and drug indulgence, all contribute to a desensitization of the body – even when the body is the medium of experience, such as in sexual experiences. As noted, this is a targeting of the ‘pure body’ so as to corrupt its potential for deciphering deeper layers within the Inversion. The body-medium for the life experience is also viewed by transhumanists as a hindrance upon the evolutionary journey toward an ‘immortal society’ that is destined for the stars.

This view is more keenly taken by mostly western and ‘elite’ types who have begun to feed themselves upon a modern cosmic-religious mythic consciousness. This is what Jasun Horsley refers to as a ‘Galactic religion,’ which seeks transcendence/ascension by leaving the planet and colonizing others. It is a ‘rich geek’ religion based on accelerating technologies and pushed by the major tech-titan companies. As Horsley notes, rather than ascension, it is the reverse: ‘It has to do with dissociation, the attempt of the traumatized psyche to split off from the body and float off into fantasy land, beyond the reach of reality and all the pain it entails. Bodies frozen on ice, souls lost in space, free, free from the terrible travails of the body.’3 In such contexts as these, and more, there is a trauma being experienced through the physical body. Trauma can be related to dysfunctional energy being trapped within the body, causing discomfort and disease. In an attempt to escape the body of the planet we are being forced to ‘techno-transcend’ the limitations of the biological human body.

To travel into the stars, we are told, requires us to upload our consciousness into machinic devices and/or ethereal cloudscapes. In a bid to escape the confines of a depleting ‘prison planet’ we are being asked to put our faith – and our consciousness – into a new techno-prison. Yet who shall be the new guards? This could entail the trauma of a new birth – re-enacting the prongs of the biological birth passage yet through entry into yet another realm of the Inversion. There seems to be no genuine exit of the dreaming mind through consciousness upload – only a leap into another programmable maze, yet this time perhaps with less benevolent programmers.

In the western psyche there appears to be an ongoing splintering between ‘inner space’ exploration and ‘outer space’ exploration. The techno-dream of space colonization is the new favoured trend whilst the inner space research of the psyche is promoted as a dangerous and trickster landscape. Outer space is the new undiscovered realm that offers hope against the twilight of the body (including the body of the earth). And yet such ‘Galactic pioneers’ seem driven less by a unified perception and more by forces arising within their splintered psyches that they have failed to integrate. These are the subconscious forces that grasp at survival, at any cost, and would willingly walk over the bodies of others to secure their own survival. Leaving the planetary body is only for the ‘lucky’ few, whilst the rest must remain grounded – or with their minds in cloudscape orbit. The trick of the Inversion is that there are endless doors to keep walking through, yet no exit to awaken out of. By walking out of one dreamworld into another we may think we are free, yet we remain imprisoned within the dream still. Or worse, we unknowingly become our very own prison guards.

No rockets will ever create enough thrust to take us where we truly need to go, for awakening from the gravity of the Inversion is an inner-space journey. It is the colonizing of the quiet kind – of ourselves. By striving to attain the orbital Overview Effect we are missing the real point, which is the ‘Inner view’ from within ourselves.

The Body as the Holy Host

The Inversion – our inverted world reality construct – is unsure what to make of the human physical body. Is it our saviour – our holy host? –  or a danger to our own progress and a threat to the agenda of others? As I have written previously,[ii] the narratives of a new biopower have brought to the fore a medical-political establishment within many of our societies worldwide. The biology of control is now a major player within the current realm of lived experience. There is now a noticeable rush to gain a political-corporate control over the access, use, and sovereignty of the human body. In a very real sense, it is the individual’s last line of physical defence. Each individual is a conscious entity (a spiritual essence) that is operating within this material realm through the vehicle of the physical body. As such, we are uniting with a biological partner. We are a merged being: as it is said, a union of flesh and spirit. Whilst the spirit – the essential being – is immortal, it has to abide in its physical incarnation by the biological limitations of the bodily host. Because of this crucial fact, external control agendas are determined to not only gain power over the outer aspects of the body (it’s freedoms, utility, mobility, etc.,) but also, via interventions, to have control over its internal functioning (DNA code, intra-communication, and more).

The human body functions upon many varied levels and acts as many things – including as a receiver, filter, and transmitter of energies and information. It is only the false, manipulated narrative that posits the human body as a ‘biohazard.’ By using this designation, external agencies of authority can seek to further contain and control the movement of the body as well as gaining internal access through chemical and pharmaceutical interventions. These possibilities were foreseen by many, not least by the social philosopher and author Aldous Huxley. Even as far back as the 1950s, Huxley envisaged the encroachment of scientism to gain increasing intervention into the human body:

Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be discovered. Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom.4

And yet, this is still a viewpoint based on the material and physical sciences. It does not represent a deeper, spiritual perspective. This was to be provided by the Austrian philosopher and proponent of spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner. In talks given during September-October 1917, Steiner had the presence of vision to discuss the later potential interventions and influence over the human body. He said that: ‘Taking a “sound point of view,” people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit.’5

Clearly, this shows that the human physical body is a site of target in an attempt to curb or block reception of spiritual forces. Through what may appear to be a ‘sound point of view,’ a range of socio-cultural narratives will be created and propagated, according to Steiner, that will push an agenda of increased medical intervention. And these medically backed ideas have the aim ‘to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination towards spirituality out of people’s souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body.’6 Humanity has arrived at that time now, if we observe current events and their related consequences. We are now at a time within the 21st century where we are witnessing the transmutation of living beings – and bodies. The human being has arrived at a threshold previously unknown to it, and there are forces compelling the human to step over and through it. It is a threshold that will recode environments and bodies. The threshold is the point where a genetic deterritorialization process can begin, and from which we may witness the emergence of a new organism different from the current one. It is a threshold of recombination and recodification; a new assemblage that represents yet another phase within the Inversion. From here on, we are biologically vulnerable to an encroaching machinic impulse that, by its very nature, will morph bodily combinations into machinic connections.

Our bodies are reaching an exhaustion point. The crises we now face across the body of the earth is from a collapse of the individual, social, and psychological body. Already, the social mind is in trauma, and the body is showing this illness or dis-ease. The Inversion has made sure that the biological and psychological dimension has coalesced. The ripple of a bodily trauma is being felt across the planetary membrane as people are forced to unnaturally detach from the physical world around them. New physical arrangements of dislocation (lockdowns) and social avoidance are becoming established practices within our societies. These unnatural ordinances are creating cognitive and bodily dissonance. Bio-traumas have arisen that are affecting our sensibilities. New bodily phobias have been set in motion. This is the newly inverted threshold – a threshold of deterritorialization that has enforced a changing perception of the body. We are sensing alterations in human bodily awareness and receptivity. There is a deprivation too. The body is being pulled back from its natural organic terrain. It is being made to retreat from physical presence and away from the reassuring touch. It is as if the body is being reconfigured to devolve away from the sensual and into a new digitally articulated sensate. This bodily aliveness is being substituted by decomposition and the fear of decay and deterioration.

In the modern age, death has replaced sex as the modern taboo. The sanitized environment of the hospital has replaced the home as the place for passing away. The experience of death and dying has become detached from community life with the effect that emotion and closeness has been replaced by medical management. The dying body has become inverted into a thing of disgust and embarrassment. Death has now become something shameful – a forbidden process. Death is a modern scandal. Modern life has internalized the rejection of death, and we are coded to cringe at the thought of bodily deterioration. Death is a loser. To die is to lose, to fail. There is no room for failure within the deepening layers of machinic materialism and computational competition. Death can be replaced by tech-assisted immortality in the new ‘posthuman future.’ Alternatively, the body can be transcended through transhumanism so that death no longer haunts the halls of the physical flesh. These are the new imaginings in the realm of machinic desire. Humanity is on the threshold of venturing into an Inversion of codified imagination and upturned desires. Desire has overtaken pleasure, and it is the social sphere within the Inversion that creates and sustains this desirous torment and torture of the unattainable. And within the unattainable, greater forms of external control must be endorsed to compensate. For this reasoning, current forces have begun to establish new pathways of control over life processes. And this, by intent and not coincidence, aligns with the rise of the machinic impulse. The question that now needs to be asked is whether the machine impulse is evolutionary or devolutionary in terms of human life upon this planet.

References

1 Dick, Philip K. (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (ed. Lawrence Sutin). New York: Vintage Books, p183

2 Berman, Morris (1990) Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York: HarperCollins, 146.

3 Horsley, J. (2018). Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation. London, Aeon Books, p189

4 Huxley, A. (1959). Brave New World Revisited. London, Chatto & Windus, p107-8

5 Steiner, Rudolf (2008) The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, p85

6 Steiner, Rudolf (2008) The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, p199-200

[i] Baraka, a prominent concept in Islamic mysticism, refers to a flow of grace and spiritual power that can be transmitted.

[ii] Hijacking Reality: The Reprogramming & Reorganization of Human Life

The World’s Gyre

Posted on by
1

Bu Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The U.S. is edging closer to war with Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, a state security agency composed of armed groups, some of which are close to Iran, but which for the main are Iraqi nationalists. The U.S. carried out a drone strike in Baghdad, Wednesday that killed three members of the Kataeb Hizbullah forces, including a senior commander. One of the assassinated, al-Saadi, is the most senior figure to have been assassinated in Iraq since the 2020 drone strike that killed senior Iraqi Commander al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani.

The target is puzzling as Kataeb more than a week ago suspended its military operations against the U.S. (at the request of the Iraqi government). The stand down was widely published. So why was this senior figure assassinated?

Tectonic twitches often are sparked by a single egregious action: the one final grain of sand which – on top of the others – triggers the slide, capsizing the sandpile. Iraqis are angry. They feel that the U.S. wantonly violates their sovereignty – showing contempt and disdain for Iraq, a once great civilisation, now brought low in the wake of U.S. wars. Swift and collective retaliation has been promised.

One act, and a gyre can begin. The Iraqi government may not be able to hold the line.

The U.S. tries to separate and compartmentalise issues: AnsarAllah’s Red Sea blockade is ‘one thing’; attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, an unrelated ‘another’. But all know that such separateness is artificial – the ‘red’ thread woven through all these ‘issues’ is Gaza. The White House (and Israel) however, insists the connecting thread instead to be Iran.

Did the White House think this through properly, or was its latest assassination viewed as a ‘sacrifice’ to appease the ‘gods of war’ in the Beltway, clamouring to bomb Iran?

Whatever the motive, the Gyre turns. Other dynamics are running that will be fuelled by the attack.

The Cradle highlights one significant shift:

“by successfully obstructing Israeli vessels from traversing the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Ansarallah-led Sanaa government has emerged as a powerful symbol of resistance in defence of the Palestinian people – a cause deeply popular across Yemen’s many demographics. Sanaa’s position stands in stark contrast to that of the Saudi and Emirati-backed government in Aden, which, to the horror of Yemenis, welcomed attacks by U.S. and British forces on 12 January”.

“The U.S.–UK airstrikes have prompting some heavyweight internal defections … a number of Yemeni militias previously aligned with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, consequently switched allegiance to Ansarallah … Disillusionment with the coalition will have profound political and military implications for Yemen, reshaping alliances, and casting the UAE and Saudi Arabia as national adversaries. Palestine continues to serve as a revealing litmus test throughout West Asia – and now in Yemen too – exposing those who only-rhetorically claim the mantle of justice and Arab solidarity”.

Yemen military defections – How does this matter?

Well, the Houthis and AnsarAllah have become heroes across the Islamic World. Look at social media. The Houthis are now the ‘stuff of myth’: Standing up for Palestinians whilst others don’t. A following is taking hold. AnsarAllah’s ‘heroic’ stance may lead to the ousting of western proxies, and so to dominate that ‘rest of Yemen’ they presently do not control. It seizes too, the Islamic world imagination (to the concern of the Arab Establishment).

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of al-Saadi, Iraqis took to the streets of Baghdad chanting: “God is Great, America is the Great Satan”.

Do not imagine this ‘turn’ is lost on others – on the Iraqi Hashd al-Sha’abi, for example; or on the (Palestinians) of Jordan; or on the mass foot-soldiers of the Egyptian army; or indeed in the Gulf. There are 5 billion smartphones extant today. The ruling class do watch the Arabic channels, and view (nervously) social media. They worry that anger against the western flouting of international law may boil over, and they will be unable to contain it: What price the ‘Rules Order’ now since the International Court of Justice upended the notion of a moral content to western culture?

The wrongheadedness of U.S. policy is astonishing – and now has claimed the most central tenet in the ‘Biden strategy’ for resolving the crisis in Gaza. The ‘dangle’ of Saudi normalisation with Israel was viewed in the West as the pivot – around which Netanyahu would either be forced to give up on his maximalist security control from the River to the Sea mantra, or see himself pushed aside by a rival for whom the ‘normalisation bait’ held the allure of likely victory in the next Israeli elections.

Biden’s spokesperson was flagrant in this respect:

“[We] … are having discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia … about trying to move forward with a normalization arrangement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So those discussions are ongoing as well. We certainly received positive feedback from both sides that they’re willing to continue to have those discussions”.

The Saudi Government – possibly angry at the U.S. recourse to such deceptive language – duly kicked the plank out from beneath the Biden platform: It issued a written statement confirming unequivocally that: “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops – and all Israeli occupation forces are withdraw from the Gaza Strip”. The Kingdom stands by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in other words.

Of course, no Israeli could campaign on that platform in Israeli elections!

Recall how Tom Friedman set out how the ‘Biden Doctrine’ was supposed to fit together as a interlinked whole: First, through taking a “strong and resolute stand on Iran” the U.S. would signal to “our Arab and Muslim allies, that it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner … that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region; Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price”.

The second strand was the Saudi dangle that would inevitably pave the path into the (third) element which was the “building of a credible legitimate Palestinian Authority as … a good neighbour to Israel …”. This “bold U.S. commitment to a Palestinian state would give us [Team Biden] legitimacy to act against Iran”, Friedman foresaw.

Let us be plain: this trifecta of policies, rather than gel into a single doctrine, are falling like dominoes. Their collapse owes to one thing: The original decision to back Israel’s use of overwhelming violence across Gaza’s civil society – ostensibly to defeat Hamas. It has turned the region and much of the World against the U.S. and Europe.

How did this happen? Because nothing changed by way of U.S. policies. It was the same old western bromides from decades ago: financial threats, bombing and violence. And the insistence on one mandatory ‘stand with Israel’ narrative (with no discussion).

The rest of the world has grown tired of it; even defiant towards it.

So to put it bluntly: Israel has now come face-to-face with the (self-destructive) inconsistency within Zionism: How to maintain special rights for Jews on territory in which there is an approximately equal number of non-Jews? The old answer has been discredited.

The Israeli Right argues that Israel then must go for broke: All or nothing. Take the risk of wider war (in which Israel, may or may not, be ‘victorious’); tell Arabs to move elsewhere; or abandon Zionism and themselves move on.

The Biden Administration, rather than help Israel look truth in the eye, has discarded the task of obliging Israel to face up to the contradictions in Zionism, in favour of restoring the broken status quo ante. Some 75 years after the founding of the Israeli state, as former Israeli negotiator, Daniel Levy, has. noted:

‘[We are back to] “the “banal debate” between the U.S. and Israel over “whether the bantustan shall be repackaged and marketed as a ‘state’”.

Could it have been different? Probably not. The reaction comes from deep in Biden’s nature.

The trifecta of U.S. failed responses paradoxically has nonetheless facilitated Israel’s slide to the Right (as evidenced by all recent polling). And has – absent a hostage deal; absent a Saudi credible ‘dangle’; or any credible path to a Palestinian State – precisely opened the path for the Netanyahu government to pursue his maximalist exit from collapsed deterrence through securing a ‘grand victory’ over the Palestinian resistance, Hizbullah, and even – he hopes – Iran.

None of these objectives can be achieved without U.S. help. Yet, where is Biden’s limit: Support for Israel in a Hizbullah war? And were it to widen, support for Israel in an Iran war too? Where is the limit?

The incongruity, coming as it does, at a moment when the West’s Ukraine Project is imploding, suggests that Biden may see himself needing some ‘grand victory’, as much as does Netanyahu.

The “Phantom Legion” Problem

Posted on by
Reply

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Everything is presented as rock-solid until it falls apart.

Of the many signs of systemic decay in the late Roman Empire, one of particular relevance to our era is the Phantom Legion, military units that on paper were at full strength–and paid accordingly–but which were in reality no longer there: the paymaster collected the silver wages and recorded the unit’s roll of officers and soldiers, but it was all make-believe.

When the Empire’s wealth seems limitless, graft, embezzlement and fraud all seem harmless to those skimming the wealth. Look, the Empire is forever, what harm is there in my little self-interested skim?

This rot starts at the top, of course, and then seeps into every nook and cranny of the system. When those at the top are getting fabulously wealthy on modest salaries while claiming to serve the public, the signal is clear: go ahead and maximize your own private gain at the expense of the public and the state. Civic virtue–the backbone of the Empire–decayed into self-interest, incompetence and indulgence.

The “Phantom Legion” Problem has another wrinkle: the legion is reported at full strength, but the actual number of soldiers is far lower than the reported number, and the competence of the officers is so low that the legion is incapable of performing its duties. In other words, the numbers don’t reflect the actual utility-value of the legion as a combat unit: the soldiers may be ill-trained, ill-equipped and poorly fed, and the officers inexperienced, corrupt or just waiting for their term of duty to end.

In the present day, this is how The Phantom Legion Problem manifests: the agency / institution is reported at full strength and fully capable of performing all its duties, but beneath the surface it’s lacking experienced staff and competent leadership, and much of the staffing is in unproductive, dead-wood administrative positions.

Taking healthcare as an example, we find experienced frontline caregivers are retiring and not being replaced with equivalent numbers of staff with the equivalent experience. We find caregivers are burning out due to crushing workloads, or quitting the profession in order to have a family and get their life back.

Meanwhile, the number of administrators increases, soaking up the system’s funding with endlessly expanding compliance data entry, reports, etc., all of which adds additional burdens on those actually providing care.

There’s always enough money to increase administrators’ salaries, but not enough to maintain essential systems or hire more caregivers.

The Phantom Legion Problem plays out in many ways in modern bureaucracies. The number of sworn officers in a police department may appear adequate but if many are assigned to desks, the PD is not actually at full strength.

If administrators are advanced due to their PR and financial skills rather than on their competence in actually leading the organization, the Phantom Legion problem is already terminal. the rot starts at the top, and those actually carrying the weight fulfilling the organization’s mission burn out, get disgusted and give up.

The problem with The Phantom Legion Problem is there is every incentive to hide the decay of systemic competence and capability behind glowing annual reports and ginned-up numbers. Only those within the organization know the truth and they are under pressure to keep quiet, lest they find themselves on the slow train to Siberia.

Here is how systems decay and collapse: everything is reported at full strength, but the numbers don’t reflect reality. Everything is presented as rock-solid until it falls apart. Everyone outside the system is in disbelief while insiders wondered how it held together as long as it did.

Global Economic War Is Coming And The Threat To The US Dollar Is Real

Posted on by
Reply

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In a recent statement posted to social media, Tucker Carlson explained succinctly his many reasons for traveling to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. His decision, mired in an avalanche of outrage from leftist media talking heads and a multitude of western politicians, was inspired by Carlson’s concern that Americans have been misdirected by corporate propaganda leaving the public completely uneducated on the war in Ukraine and what tensions with the East might lead to.

I agree. In fact, I don’t think the majority of Americans have a clue what the real consequences of a global war with Russia and its allies would look like. Even if the conflict never resulted in shots fired and stayed confined to the realm of economic warfare, the US and most of Europe would be devastated by the effects.

Carlson specifically mentioned dangers to the status of the US dollar, and I suspect this comment probably mystified a great number of people. Most of the population cannot fathom the idea of a US dollar implosion set in motion by a foreign dump of the greenback as the world reserve currency. They really do believe the dollar is invincible.

The most delusional people are, unfortunately, those within mainstream economic circles. They just can’t seem to grasp that the west is in the midst of financial collapse already, and war would accelerate the effects to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

I have been warning about this outcome for many years. I think I have made my position clear in the past; I suspect the conflict between east and west has been carefully engineered over the course of a decade or more, and Russia is not innocent in this affair.

Russia has consistently collaborated with globalist institutions including the International Monetary Fund in the effort to create a new “global reserve currency system.” In other words, the interests of Russia and the globalists do indeed intersect in a number of ways and the war in Ukraine has not necessarily changed that.  Time Magazine even complained last year about the IMF issuing positive reports about Russia’s economy – They thought the organization was going to repeat the false NATO narrative that Russia was in the midst of fiscal implosion.  Instead, the IMF essentially praised Russia’s resiliency in the face of sanctions.

As I noted in 2014 in my article ‘False East/West Paradigm Hides Rise Of Global Currency’ in reference to the burgeoning war with Ukraine.

“I would remind pro-Putin cheerleaders that Putin and the Kremlin first pushed for the IMF to take control of the Ukrainian economy, and the IMF is now demanding that Ukraine fight Russia in exchange for financial support. This might seem like irony to more foolhardy observers; but to those who are aware of the false East/West paradigm, it is all the part of a greater plan for consolidation of power.”

I also argued that:

“I have warned for quite some time that the development of East/West tensions would be used as a cover for a collapse of the dollar system. I have warned that among the American media this collapse would be blamed on an Eastern dump of foreign exchange reserves and treasuries, resulting in a global domino-effect ending U.S. world reserve status.”

From the moment Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed (many argue that this was done with the help of western intel agencies) the agenda for WWIII was set in motion. Both sides seemed to create the circumstances by which a conflagration was unavoidable.

Russia, strangely, supported the intervention of the IMF to secure Ukraine’s economy. The IMF then asserted that Ukraine would have to fight Russia to keep control of the Donbas or risk losing the financial aid that was keeping the country alive. Is this irony, or is there something else going on here?

NATO started arming Ukraine, and Ukraine used those arms to slaughter civilians in the Donbas. The eastern population wanted to join with Russia, and Ukraine had no intention of allowing this (IMF funding was on the line). In the meantime, the government began openly discussing the official inclusion of Ukraine into NATO. Russia then invaded, taking the Donbas. Now the entire region is a powder keg and both sides are ready to light the fuse.

But let’s look at this situation as if there was no globalist involvement in facilitating the crisis, just for a moment as an exercise in critical thinking…

If I had to pick a side that is “more right” in their position, it would have to be Russia, but not for the reasons many leftists might imagine when conservatives defend Russia.  The bottom line is that the left blindly follows establishment dictates while the rest of us are at least willing to look at the situation from both sides (which is the same thing Tucker Carlson is doing, and he’s being accused of treason for it).

Imagine if China was working to create a military alliance with Mexico with the potential for the Chinese military to stage long range weapons and soldiers on the American southern border? Imagine the chaos that this would cause in the US (maybe they would finally secure the border)? That’s what Russia was facing with Ukraine. Hell, America almost initiated global nuclear war when the Soviets staged missiles in Cuba in 1962. Military operations so close to the borders of major national powers are not a joke.

This was exact rationale for the war on Ukraine cited by Putin in his discussion with Tucker Carlson, and it makes sense.  Again, if we look at the events without the prospect of globalist interference.  But what if we start to consider who benefits the most from this war?

I certainly don’t trust Putin, but that doesn’t negate the Orwellian behavior of European and American political leaders. There is something going on here beyond the typical mechanisms of geopolitical brinkmanship. The conflict has wide ranging consequences and only serves the goals of a select group of elites.  I suspect elements of both Russia and NATO governments are either knowingly or unwittingly serving these interests.

It is undeniable. It is a verifiable reality – Many of our political leaders and elitist institutions are corrupt beyond comprehension. They are seeking an authoritarian reformation, a “great economic reset” and they are triggering multiple conflicts around the world. We saw the mask come off during covid. These people are not merely misguided; they are monsters, and they are hungry. It’s not beyond them to conjure a worldwide calamity and sacrifice the west like a goat on the altar to get the total centralization they desire.

The East/West paradigm plays into this plan perfectly. The BRICS nations are poised to drop the dollar as world reserve; some have already done so in bilateral trade. Make no mistake, if the conflict in Ukraine (and other parts of the world like Syria or Iran) continues to escalate nations like China will move to dump their dollar holdings just as Russia did. As the largest importer/exporter in the world, many countries would follow China’s lead and shift into a basket of currencies instead of the dollar for international trade.

What does this mean?

The dollar, which has been hyperinflated through more than a decade of Federal Reserve QE money printing, has continued to remain stable only because it is the world reserve and the petro-currency. Foreign banks hold trillions in US currency in overseas coffers for this very reason. With the loss of reserve status, an endless river of dollars will then flood back into the US as foreign investors diversify away from the Fed note. Result? Massive inflationary collapse.

This is what’s at stake. This is what Tucker Carlson was referring to, and far too many in America just don’t get it. Globalists benefit because this is what they have been working towards for decades – The deconstruction of US society and the economy so that the “old world order” can be replaced with their “new world order” of Central Bank Digital Currencies.  An IMF one-world currency basket and a host of other highly unpleasant socialist changes would swiftly follow.

The BRICS might be working with the IMF because they see the dethroning of the dollar as an opportunity to gain greater influence over international trade.  Or, maybe they are controlled opposition and they are scrambling for a seat at the NWO table.  In the end, the fall of the dollar would be a watershed moment for the formation of a global currency system.

And the best part for globalists is, they will be seen as the “heroes” when it’s all over. They spent the better part of the last century setting up America for economic failure through their devaluation of the dollar and the creation of a national debt trap. The system was going to break anyway, but now they can divert all blame to war and the “arrogance of nation states” and then come to the rescue with their dystopian digital money.

An east/west conflict opens the door to the Great Reset.  It is, in a lot of ways, the core of the Reset.  Everything in the new world order agenda relies on it.  Right now, the only thing holding back the tide is the public’s general refusal to fight. No one is interested in going overseas to die in a meaningless battle for Ukraine (Zelensky is truly delusional if he thinks Americans will shed blood in his trenches – Even a draft would be an utter failure). No one is interested in starting WWIII, whether it be nuclear or just economic.

I think the establishment’s outrage over Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin is based on their fear that western audiences are already skeptical of the motives behind the conflict and an unfiltered discussion on the war might galvanize this feeling.  The notion of war is becoming harder and harder for the establishment to sell.

This, however, does not negate the ability of NATO or Russia in expanding the crisis beyond Ukraine into other regions or into financial subterfuge (again, keep your eyes on Syria and Iran). Ultimately, they want us to choose sides, but only from the list of sides they approve. Liberty minded groups in the west need to choose our OWN side and fight for our own interests. It can’t be about NATO vs Russia, it has to be about free people vs the globalists. This is the only way these disaster events will ever end.

How the US-led Liberal World Order is Falling Apart

Posted on by
1

By Taut Bataut

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The basis of the US-led liberal world order was laid at the end of the World War 2. However, the United States and the Soviet Union kept on fighting over the spread and influence of their respective ideologies till the 1990s. The United States’ victory in the Cold War established its hegemony over the globe. Many Western philosophers, at that time, believed that the US-led liberal world order was here to stay. Famous American political philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, in his book “The End of History and the Last Man,” also endorsed this notion. However, the turn of the 21st century exposed many flaws in the liberal world order. For the past two decades, the world has witnessed numerous wars, chaos, and turmoil in almost every region. And at the core of most of these wars and conflicts, there is one common factor: The United States. The latter has waged wars, sparked chaos, and thrown governments in many countries under the pretense of democracy.

Most of the world’s financial institutions, including the World Bank, IMF, etc., are under US control. These institutions were created to financially assist the underdeveloped and developing nations. However, the United States has long been using these institutions to put the global south under duress to implement pro-US policies. This augmented a feeling of being under the dominance of the United States, especially among the poor countries of the world. Allegedly, the United States also holds the reins of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Although the rationale behind the creation of this institution was to curb terror financing and money laundering. However, this institution, too, has been reduced merely to a tool for the United States to pressure the countries that do not conform to the latter’s policies. China, Pakistan, and many other countries have raised concerns about the politicization of this institution by the United States and its allies. Even some of the US allies admitted to using this forum for political leverage over their enemies in the past.

The United Nations is considered the fundamental organ of the US-led world order. Initially, this institution was created to provide representation to all the member countries of the world and to resolve their disputes peacefully. However, the basic structure of the institution was faulty since its creation, as it provided extensive powers to 5 major countries. This inculcated a feeling of deprivation among other member countries. The United States has used this power for its own benefit a host of times throughout history. Recently, the United States has also vetoed a UN resolution calling for a peaceful ceasefire in Gaza. This has further sparked hostile sentiment among third-world countries against the US-led liberal world order. Moreover, the lack of power to enforce the UN resolution has also led to the failure of this system. On multiple occasions, the United States has even ignored and rejected the United Nations and has become the source of chaos and turmoil in different countries around the world. The United States’ unilateral decision to attack Iraq is one of the major substantiations of the failure of this world order.

The recent Israel-Hamas war has exposed the inadequacies of this world order. The United Nations failed to protect the lives of innocent civilians, including children and women, against Israel’s genocide. The United States and its Western allies provided protection to Israel in its ethnic cleansing operations in Gaza. South Africa registered a case against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29th December 2023, calling for an immediate ceasefire. However, the ICJ ended up making a weak decision after hearing both sides. It declared Israel’s actions genocidal. However, it did not call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. This proved detrimental to the already ruptured image of the liberal institutions. Pro-Palestinian people around the globe took this decision as an attempt by the ICJ to appease both sides.

To fill all this void created by the US-dominated liberal world order, Russia and China have emerged as a new hope for the global south. China and Russia are leading an inclusive world order through BRICS. The expansion of BRICS has provided underdeveloped and developing countries with an opportunity to have their say in global affairs. Chinese President Xi Jinping stated at the BRICS Summit 2023 that all countries should have an equal opportunity to excel in global modernization. More than 40 countries have shown interest in joining BRICS recently. This demonstrates the declining faith of the world in the US-led liberal world order. To stay relevant and to preserve its integrity, the institutions of international liberal order will have to give more space to the global south. Otherwise, it is bound to be replaced by a new and more inclusive world order led by emerging economies.

The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer

Posted on by
1

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The madmen are in power.”— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

What is going on?

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

Arab regimes collude with Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Posted on by
Reply

By By Jean Shaoul

Source: Defend Democracy Press

As Israel’s fascist government prepares to launch a massive ground invasion to take over Rafah city, discussions are now under way about setting up 15 campsites—each with around 25,000 tents—across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, to house the million-plus Palestinians that have taken refuge in the city.

These tent cities are to be funded by the United States and Arab despots and operated by the butcher of Cairo, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Egypt and other Arab regimes are in effect providing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the ability to claim he has assured the “safe passage” he said he would provide so that the planned ground invasion could take place. As Netanyahu again declared as Israel mounted a massive aerial bombardment of the city, his real goal is “total victory”—which means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest into the desert.

That such proposals could even be discussed with the Arab regimes confirms that their collusion with Israel’s genocidal offensive against Gaza, from day one, has now become direct participation in its ethnic cleansing through a second Nakba.

Israel has already killed at least 29,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, buried thousands more under the rubble, and displaced approximately 86 percent of Gaza’s population—1.7 million out of 2.3 million people. The majority are now sheltering in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt where they face famine, lack access to clean water and medical care and the imminent prospect of extermination.

Egypt: Israel’s border guard

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 104 million people and the key frontline state, has for decades played a criminal role as a direct accomplice in Israel’s suppression of the Palestinians and its de facto border guard.

Since signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Cairo has extended its ties with Tel Aviv, importing natural gas from Israel for refining and re-export, coordinating security over their shared border and the Gaza Strip, maintaining Israel’s blockade on Gaza, and strictly limiting the movement of people and goods across its borders after Hamas took control in 2007. Egypt stood by when Israel launched murderous assaults on the besieged enclave in 2008-9, 2012, 2014, the 2018-29 Great March of Return and 2021.

When the Gaza offensive started in October, Israel’s “wartime proposal” to push Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert was met with a furious response from Cairo. However, this was not out of any concern for the Palestinians but because of what El-Sisi called “Gaza’s existential threat to Egypt’s national security.” If a million Gazans crossed the border, he warned, this would lead to a resurgence of Islamist “militancy” in Sinai.

When El-Sisi refers to a resurgence of Islamist militancy, he means a renewal of the mass popular opposition known as the 25 January Revolution, which in 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring”, ended Mubarak’s personal rule. On July 3, 2013, the junta was able to resume power in a military coup thanks to the political bankruptcy of the bourgeois liberal opposition and their pseudo-left appendages in the Revolutionary Socialists, who provided leading personnel for the anti-Islamist Tamarod movement through which the military and its billionaire backers prepared the political ground for the coup. El-Sisi has brutally crushed all dissent ever since and the last thing he wants is millions of displaced and angry Palestinians to act as the focus for broader political opposition to his regime, to US imperialism and all its allies in the region.

The army has already fortified the concrete border wall with Gaza, installing barbed wire to prevent the Palestinians from crossing into the Sinai and deploying troops and 40 tanks along the border.

El-Sisi, speaking at a press conference on October 18 with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Cairo, argued that Israel could move Gaza’s Palestinians to Israel’s Negev desert instead of Sinai “until Israel is capable of defeating Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Afterwards, Palestinians could return to their homeland.”

Reports are circulating, citing the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, that Egypt is constructing an eight-square-mile walled enclosure in northern Sinai to host Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza, though this is described as a “contingency plan” in the event Palestinians succeed in breaching the reinforced border.

But wherever the de facto concentration camps being discussed are eventually established, Egypt and the other Arab regimes involved are giving a greenlight for mass murder in Rafah. On Sunday, with breathtaking cynicism Egyptian officials, responding to these latest proposals for tent cities, told Israel that they would not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Army Radio also said that Egypt had emphatically denied reports it might pullout of its 1979 Camp David treaty if Israel attacked Rafah.

All the oil-rich despots are working openly with Israel to enable it to pursue its genocidal war, even deepening their ties to ensure Israel can continue the war without hindrance. They cover their treachery with crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and appeals for an urgent meeting of the toothless UN Security Council that is subject to Washington’s veto “to prevent Israel from causing an imminent humanitarian disaster for which everyone who supports the aggression is responsible.”

Jordan: Repressing Palestinian protests

Jordan has played the most open role in repressing popular opposition to Israel. It shares a long border with Israel and is home to over 2.2 million registered Palestinian refugees driven there by wars between 1947 and 1967, and their descendants. Around half of its 11 million population are of Palestinian descent, of whom around two thirds have been granted citizenship, but they face discrimination while nearly 400,000 still live in 10 refugee camps. Jordan has maintained a “cold peace” with Israel following a US Clinton administration-brokered normalization treaty in 1994.

The Jordanian government has banned protests along its border with the West Bank and clamped down on protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), it has “arrested or harassed” over 1,000 pro-Palestine protesters who have called for the Jordanian government to take action against Israel. Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said “Jordanian authorities are trampling the right to free expression and assembly to tamp down Gaza-related activism.”

Last week, the authorities arrested activist, Khaled al-Natour, after he shared posts calling for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of the government’s heightened crackdown on pro-Palestine activists, under a controversial new cybercrime law. According to Amnesty International, the vaguely worded law, passed in August, gives the government huge latitude to crack down on free speech and has been used to arrest and charge at least six political activists for their “social media posts expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments or criticizing the authorities’ policies towards Israel and advocating for public strikes and protests.”

Arab regimes keeping Israel’s economy running

Jordan, along with several other Arab states, is also playing a central role in keeping Israel’s economy functioning during the war.

According to Israel’s television Channel 13, the United Arab Emirates-based PureTrans FZCO and Israel-based Trucknet, which provides logistics technology for the Arab shipping companies, are transporting vital goods, including food, plastics, chemicals and electronic devices and components, between Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port and Haifa port, via roads passing through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The route was established prior to the Gaza offensive. In June, Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Road Safety, announced plans to develop the route, stating on X/Twitter that “the overland transportation of the goods will shorten the time by 12 days and greatly reduce the existing waiting time due to the wire problem. We will do it and we will succeed.” In September, Trucknet signed a shipping agreement with the UAE and Bahrain.

The plans also include a railway line, yet to be agreed, linking the UAE and Israel with a high-speed train service between Israel’s northern city of Beit She’an and southern port of Eilat on the Red Sea.

The route has assumed greater strategic significance since October and especially because of Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, helping Israel circumvent the shipping blockade and cutting the 14-day sea route around the Cape to four days.

Acutely conscious of the mass opposition within its already restive population to Israel’s genocidal war, Jordan denied that goods were being transported to Israel via its territory. But television reports showing trucks from the UAE crossing Jordanian territory to reach Israel exposed this lie, sparking anger and demonstrations against Jordan’s ‘shameful land bridge’ to Israel.

The Dubai-Haifa “land corridor” was in fact first mooted in 2017 by Israel’s transport minister Yisrael Katz and highlighted at the signing in 2020 of the Abraham Accords with the UAE and Bahrain–and later with Sudan and Morrocco–that ended the participants’ long-standing economic boycott of Israel. It made apparent Israel’s economic ties with the Gulf states that had long been kept under wraps.

The Accords not only signified the ditching of their long defunct adherence to securing a “two-state solution,” even as Netanyahu threatened to annex one third of the West Bank, illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab Israeli war. It crucially paved the way for trade and investment deals with Tel Aviv, particularly in arms, technology and cyberware, and Israel’s broader economic integration into the region begun clandestinely after the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Saudi Arabia and the planned war against Iran

Bahrain could only sign up to the Accords with the tacit consent of its paymaster in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is now directly involved in the Dubai-Haifa corridor as part of its efforts to extract as many concessions as possible from Washington, including a defence agreement, commitment of “security” support, arms and fighter jets and help with a civilian nuclear program, even as it expanded its economic and political links with China to strengthen its bargaining position.

The land corridor is a key concern for the US and European imperialist powers. It is aimed at positioning the Israeli port of Haifa as a major gateway to Europe, altering the political and economic map of the region by bypassing the Red Sea and furthering Israel’s integration into the Gulf states’ economies.

Haifa would be the linchpin of the India-Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a major transport infrastructure project aimed at integrating India, the Gulf and Europe while avoiding Iran, which would bring India closer to US imperialism and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Oman’s Salalah Port, which has extensive ties with India, could also become part of the new network.

The project, which excludes Turkey, the largest non-oil economy in the Middle East, has aroused Ankara’s wrath, with government officials saying that the most suitable route for east-west trade passes through Turkey not Greece. It also undermines Egypt’s Suez Canal that is already suffering financial losses from the diversion of shipping round the Cape, intensifying its economic and social crisis.

The Arab regimes now account for one quarter of Israel’s $12.5 billion defence exports. Leaders from the UAE have also reiterated their commitment to the Abraham Accords, with UAE presidential foreign affairs adviser Anwar Gargash telling a conference in Dubai last month, “The UAE has taken a strategic decision, and strategic decisions are long-term.”

The bilateral flow of goods has exploded, expanding from $11.2 million in 2019 to $2 billion, excluding software, from January to August 2023, according to Israel’s UAE ambassador. The UAE-Israel partnership deal that came into force last year lowered tariffs with the aim of increasing bilateral trade to $10bn within five years. While far less than Israel’s trade with the European Union and Turkey, this is nevertheless far more than Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan.

As Israeli CEOs told the Financial Times, amid the Gaza genocide it has been “business as usual,” with new investment plans going ahead and the UAE’s airline continuing its flights to Tel Aviv even as others cancel theirs.

While Saudi Arabia was never a “frontline state” in the Arab Israeli conflict, in October 1973 it led the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ban on the export of oil to those countries that had supported Israel during the October 1973 Arab Israeli War. The war began after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the territories lost in the 1967 war. Only Iraq and Libya did not take part in the oil embargo that was lifted in March 1974, by which time the price of oil had risen nearly threefold, massively increasing the oil states’ wealth and reactionary political influence in the region.

50 years later, there has been no mention of a similar embargo in defence of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, indicating the monarchies’ backing for Israel’s war, paid for and planned by the Biden administration, to assert US hegemony over the resource-rich region and suppress all opposition to Washington and its regional allies and to their own regime.

Israel’s war on Gaza has done nothing to derail Washington’s long-running efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A potential Saudi-Israel deal is a crucial part of its bid to settle the Gaza conflict with Riyadh indicating its willingness to proceed with discussions. For their part, the US and UK have consolidated the reversal of their previous opposition to Riyadh’s war to unseat the Houthis in Yemen, launching hundreds of aerial strikes on the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping linked to Israel aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its war and blockade of Gaza.

The Arab regimes, whose populations hold them in contempt, have made a pact with the devil: support for Israel—and by implication US imperialism—in return for Washington’s commitment to back their “security” in the event of a new “Arab Spring” or mass movement to unseat them, and to wage war against Iran, which has backed opposition forces to their rule, as part of its preparations for war on China.

Julian Assange’s Day in Court

Posted on by
1

Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.

And Our Flags Are Still There – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

By the afternoon the video link, which would have allowed Julian Assange to follow his final U.K. appeal to prevent his extradition, had been turned off. Julian, his attorneys said, was too ill to attend, too ill even to follow the court proceedings on a link, although it was possible he was no longer interested in sitting through another judicial lynching. The rectangular screen, tucked under the black wrought iron bars that enclosed the upper left hand corner balcony of the courtroom where Julian would have been caged as a defendant, was perhaps a metaphor for the emptiness of this long and convoluted judicial pantomime. 

The arcane procedural rules — the lawyers in their curled blonde wigs and robes, the spectral figure of the two judges looking down on the court from their raised dais in their gray wigs and forked white collars, the burnished walnut paneled walls, the rows of lancet windows, the shelves on either side filled with law books in brown, green, red, crimson, blue and beige leather bindings, the defense lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, addressing the two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, as “your lady” and “my lord” — were all dusty Victorian props employed in a modern Anglo-American show trial. It was a harbinger of a decrepit justice system that, subservient to state and corporate power, is designed to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.

The physical and psychological disintegration of Julian, seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly five years held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh, was always the point, what Nils Melzer the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture calls his “slow-motion execution.”  Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh. 

Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimes, lies, corruption, torture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.

The two-day hearing is Julian’s last chance to appeal the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel. On Wednesday the prosecution will make its arguments. If he is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But the British court may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. At the same time, she accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well. The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measure. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

The defense must convince the two judges that the District Judge made serious legal errors to see an appeal granted.  

They argued that espionage is, as a matter of law, a political offense and that the extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political offenses. They focused on the extensive UK law, common law and international law that defines espionage as a “pure political offense” because it is directed against a state apparatus. For this reason, those charged with espionage should be protected from extradition. The lawyers spent a long time adjudicating the case of Chelsea Manning to justify her leak of documents that exposed war crimes as in the public interest, then arguing that if she was justified in leaking the documents Julian was justified in publishing them.

As the day wore on it became evident that the two judges were not well versed in the case, constantly asking for citations and expressing surprise that senior officials in the U.S., such as Mike Pompeo when he was head of the CIA, said Julian would not be protected by the First Amendment in an American court because he was not a citizen. Julian’s lawyers brought up past espionage cases, such as that of MI5 agent David Shayler, prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for passing secret documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 — which included the names of agents. He also disclosed that MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence service) kept files on prominent politicians, including Labour ministers, and that MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) was involved in a plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Momar Gaddafi. The British extradition request was rejected by the French Cour d’Appel because it was a “political offense.”  

All 18 counts filed against Julian allege that his purpose was “that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States and the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The hearing was, after those in 2020 that focused on Julian’s mental and psychological health, refreshing in that it discussed the crimes committed by the U.S. and the importance of making them public. The two judges rarely interrupted, unlike other court proceedings for Julian I have attended where the judge often condescendingly cut short the defense. This may be a reflection of the broad public support, including by major media organizations, which have belatedly rallied behind Julian. Hundreds of people thronged the entrance to The Royal Courts of Justice, an expansive Victorian Gothic stone building adorned with statues of Jesus, Moses, Solomon and Alfred the Great, the celebrated pillars of the English legal tradition, to call for Julian’s freedom.

The afternoon session was different. On about a half dozen occasions the judges halted the defense to ask about how the leaks, because they were not thoroughly redacted, had endangered lives, although the U.S. has never been able to provide evidence of anyone whose life was lost as a result of the leaks. This canard has long been the cross on which U.S. officials have sought to crucify Julian. The two judges — one wonders if they had been given instructions during the lunch break — hurled these accusations at the defense lawyers until we adjourned.

“These indiscriminate disclosures were condemned by The Guardian and The New York Times,” Judge Sharp admonished the defense team. “They could have been done differently.”

This reference was especially egregious since the unredacted documents were first made public not by WikiLeaks or Julian but by the website Cryptome after reporters from The Guardian printed the password to the unredacted documents in their book.

The U.S. is officially seeking Julian’s extradition, where he potentially faces up to 175 years in prison, for the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables. But the U.S. did not request his extradition until the release in March 2017 of the files known as Vault 7 which detailed how the CIA could hack Apple and Android smartphones and turn internet-connected televisions — even when they were off — into listening devices. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, was found guilty last year of four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents after handing over classified materials to WikiLeaks. He was given a forty-year sentence in February.

After the release of Vault 7 then CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” The Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, said that Julian’s arrest was a priority. By August the U.S. Senate had passed a 78-page intelligence finance bill which included a sentence declaring that “it is the sense of Congress that Wikileaks and the senior leadership of Wikileaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.” In May 2019 the Trump administration accused Julian of violating the Espionage Act and asked the UK to extradite him to stand trial in the U.S. Trump has called the allegations against Julian treason and called for “the death penalty or something.” Other politicians, including former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, have also called for Julian to be executed.

If Julian is extradited and additionally charged for the release of the Vault 7 documents, Fitzgerald told the court, “it could result in additional charges that merit the death penalty for aiding and abetting the enemy.” The U.S., he said, especially if Trump is elected again to the presidency, could easily “reformulate these charges into a capital offense.”

Summers brought up President Donald Trump’s request for “detailed options” of how to assassinate Julian when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. “Sketches were even drawn up,” he said, adding that the plot fell apart when the UK authorities backed down, especially over a potential shootout, in the streets of London”.

“The evidence showed that the US was prepared to go to any lengths, including misusing its own criminal justice system, to sustain impunity for US officials in respect of the torture/war crimes committed in its infamous ‘war on terror’, and to suppress those actors and courts willing and prepared to try to bring those crimes to account,” he said.

 The lawyers were right. The CIA is the driving force behind the extradition. The leak was highly embarrassing and to the CIA highly damaging. The CIA intends to make Julian pay. Schulte, who leaked Vault 7, was given a forty year sentence. Julian, if extradited, will be next.