The idea that Ukraine and Zelensky are going to “win the war” is an absolute fantasy. It’s delusional in the extreme. And yet, so many in the West have been conditioned to really believe it.
If you are getting your narrative and information from mainstream media in a NATO nation, then my heart goes out to you. Understand that your externalized reality on this war is nothing more than a testament to the power of western propaganda. We have a state-of-the-art consensus reality machine which would make Goebbels’ head spin, and makes Stalin’s Pravda look like Nickelodeon.
Much closer to the truth is this: Ukraine is not just losing, but they are setting themselves up for a historical downthrow. If Russian Ministry of Defense dailies are even partly true (most of these are backed up by visual evidence as well), then at the current clip of 200-300 per day of Ukraine Armed Forces lost in combat may, very soon, approach the level of US soldier losses in Vietnam. In just 6 months. Mind you, it took the US ten years to lose an estimated 56,000 troops in that fruitless war of attrition.
It is becoming clearer every day that the Ukraine Armed Forces seem to have a policy of either not counting their dead, or counting them as AWOL, so as to avoid a collapse in military morale (and more actual deserters), and the inevitable international and domestic fallout from having to announce that they have 20,000 or 30,000 dead soldiers, many of whom were untrained, under equipped frontline fodder – forced into conscription by a desperate Zelensky regime eager to please his new funding sources in Washington and Brussels. If their true numbers were announced publicly each week, what do you think would happen to US, UK and EU support for Zelensky and his Nazi brigades? And how long would Ukrainians support NATO’s arm’s length proxy meat grinder war? Not long at all. It would be over yesterday.
Like the actor Zelensky, our governments are also selling a packaged fantasy to their public. Support for a losing war would end in a heartbeat should the true state of affairs become the consensus reality in the West.
When the fighting eventually stops, perhaps the smartest men in the room will then be the estimated 5,ooo Ukrainian soldiers who have already surrendered to Russian and DPR forces. Fortunate will be those who walked away from their western puppet’s deteriorating, ego-driven suicidal debacle.
The likely numbers we are looking at here across the board are simply unprecedented in recent modern conflict, and each and every data point confounds each and every fanciful, postmodernist projection coming out of our corrupt, self-reverential western mainstream media and parroting politicians who are quite clearly feeding off their own propaganda entrails now. It’s beyond disgusting. Sorry to be blunt here, but this is fast becoming the biggest propaganda bubble in the history of western military adventurism.
And that’s saying something.
And don’t expect a mea culpa from the gaggle of charlatans we have running foreign and “defense” policy in the US, UK, mutton Europe, and the rest of the supine NATO backwater nations. They will simply double-down and continue attacking any dissenters to their fanatical party line, believing that crushing free speech and debate will somehow help keep their propaganda bubble from deflating faster than it already is.
Sure, it’s an exercise in futility, but it’s one we’ve sadly come to expect from the legion of incompetent globalist bureaucrats and technocrats with a track record of repeated failures whose only real accomplishment has been to blow trillions in public money on systematically wrecking other countries, and always under some contrived moral imperative. By the way, besides being the most corrupt society and government in the western orbit, as it stands now, Ukraine is much, much further from being an independent, sovereign and free “democracy” than Russia is.
The longer the geniuses at NATO and our media continue fueling their proxy war of attrition, the more territory Kiev is going to lose. And whatever they lose, they will never get back. That’s for the simple reason that the people in those regions do not want to live in a wildly corrupt and western controlled, Nazi-ridden sectarian basket case of a failed state.
So the next time to hear someone trumpeting, “I Stand with Ukraine!”, just stop and ask them:
“Where would you draw that line on how many dead Ukrainian soldiers until we call it quits? How much territory will Kiev have to lose before we say that’s enough?”
And don’t let them go until they give you a coherent answer.
“The ferocity of the confrontation in Ukraine shows that we’re talking about much more than the fate of the regime in Kiev. The architecture of the entire world order is at stake.” Sergei Naryshkin, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence.
***
Here’s your ‘reserve currency’ thought for the day: Every US dollar is a check written on an account that is overdrawn by 30 trillion dollars.
It’s true. The “full faith and credit” of the US Treasury is largely a myth held together by an institutional framework that rests on a foundation of pure sand. In fact, the USD is not worth the paper it is printed on; it is an IOU flailing in an ocean of red ink.
The only thing keeping the USD from vanishing into the ether, is the trust of credulous people who continue to accept it as legal tender.
But why do people remain confident in the dollar when its flaws are known to all? After all, America’s $30 trillion National Debt is hardly a secret, nor is the additional $9 trillion that’s piled up on the Fed’s balance sheet. That is a stealth debt of which the American people are completely unaware, but they are responsible for all the same.
In order to answer that question, we need to look at how the system actually works and how the dollar is propped up by the numerous institutions that were created following WW2. These institutions provide an environment for conducting history’s longest and most flagrant swindle, the exchange of high-ticket manufactured goods, raw materials and hard-labor for slips of green paper with dead presidents on them.
One can only marvel at the genius of the elites who concocted this scam and then imposed it wholesale on the masses without a peep of protest. Of course, the system is accompanied by various enforcement mechanisms that swiftly remove anyone who tries to either break free from the dollar or, God help us, create an alternate system altogether. (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi come to mind.) But the fact is– aside from the institutional framework and the ruthless extermination of dollar opponents– there’s no reason why humanity should remain yoked to a currency that is buried beneath a mountain of debt and whose real value is virtually unknowable.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the dollar was the strongest currency in the world and deserved its spot at the top of the heap. Following WW1, the US was “the owner of the majority of the world’s gold” which was why an international delegation “decided that the world’s currencies would no longer be linked to gold but could be pegged to the U.S. dollar, “because the greenback was, itself, linked to gold.” Here’s more from an article at Investopedia:
“The arrangement came to be known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. It established the authority of central banks, which would maintain fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. In turn, the United States would redeem U.S. dollars for gold on demand….
The U.S dollar was officially crowned the world’s reserve currency and was backed by the world’s largest gold reserves thanks to the Bretton Woods Agreement. Instead of gold reserves, other countries accumulated reserves of U.S. dollars. Needing a place to store their dollars, countries began buying U.S. Treasury securities, which they considered to be a safe store of money.
The demand for Treasury securities, coupled with the deficit spending needed to finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society domestic programs, caused the United States to flood the market with paper money….
The demand for gold was such that President Richard Nixon was forced to intervene and de-link the dollar from gold, which led to the floating exchange rates that exist today. Although there have been periods of stagflation, which is defined as high inflation and high unemployment, the U.S. dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency.” (“How the U.S. Dollar Became the World’s Reserve Currency”, Investopedia)
But now the gold is gone and what’s left is a steaming pile of debt. So, how on earth has the dollar managed to preserve its status as the world’s preeminent currency?
Proponents of the dollar system, will tell you it has something to do with “the size and strength of the U.S. economy and the dominance of the U.S. financial markets.” But that’s nonsense.
The truth is, reserve currency status has nothing to do with “the size and strength” of America’s post-industrial, service-oriented, bubble-driven, third-world-sh**hole economy. Nor does it have anything to do with the alleged safety of US Treasuries” which– next to the dollar– is the biggest Ponzi flim-flam of all time.
The real reason the dollar has remained the world’s premier currency is because of the cartelization of Central Banking.
The Western Central Banks are a de facto monopoly run by a small cabal of inter-breeding bottom-feeders who coordinate and collude on monetary policy in order to preserve their maniacal death-grip on the financial markets and the global economy. It’s a Monetary Mafia and– as George Carlin famously said: “You and I are not in it. You and I are not in the big club.” Bottom line: It is the relentless manipulation of interest rates, forward guidance and Quantitative Easing (QE) that has kept the dollar in its lofty but undeserved spot.
But all that is about to change due entirely to Biden’s reckless foreign policy which is forcing critical players in the global economy to create their own rival system. This is a real tragedy for the West that has enjoyed a century of nonstop wealth extraction from the developing world.
Now– due to the economic sanctions on Russia– an entirely new order is emerging in which the dollar will be substituted for national currencies (processed through an independent financial settlement system) in bilateral trade deals until– later this year– Russia launches an exchange-traded commodities-backed currency that will be used by trading partners in Asia and Africa.
Washington’s theft of Russia’s foreign reserves in April turbo-charged the current process which was further accelerated by banning of Russia from foreign markets. In short, US economic sanctions and boycotts have expanded the non-dollar zone by many orders of magnitude and forced the creation of a new monetary order.
How dumb is that? For decades the US has been running a scam in which it exchanges its fishwrap currency for things of genuine value. (oil, manufactured goods and labor) But now the Biden troupe has scrapped that system altogether and divided the world into warring camps.
But, why?
To punish Russia, is that it?
Yes, that’s it.
But, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t we try to figure out whether the sanctions actually work or not before we recklessly change the system?
Too late for that. The war on Russia has begun and the early results are already pouring in. Just look at the way we’ve destroyed Russia’s currency, the ruble. It’s shocking! Here’s the scoop from an article at CBS:
“The Russian ruble is the best-performing currency in the world this year….
Two months after the ruble’s value fell to less than a U.S. penny amid the swiftest, toughest economic sanctions in modern history, Russia’s currency has mounted a stunning turnaround. The ruble has jumped 40% against the dollar since January.
Normally, a country facing international sanctions and a major military conflict would see investors fleeing and a steady outflow of capital, causing its currency to drop….
Huh? You mean the attack on the ruble didn’t work after all?
Sure looks that way. But that doesn’t mean the sanctions are a failure. Oh, no. Just at look at the effect they’ve had on Russian commodities. Export receipts are way-down, right? Here’s more from CBS:
“Commodity prices are currently sky-high, and even though there is a drop in the volume of Russian exports due to embargoes and sanctioning, the increase in commodity prices more than compensates for these drops,” said Tatiana Orlova, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics.
Russia is pulling in nearly $20 billion a month from energy exports. Since the end of March, many foreign buyers have complied with a demand to pay for energy in rubles, pushing up the currency’s value.” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News)
You’re kidding me? You mean the ruble is surging and Putin is raking in more dough on commodities than ever before?
Yep, and it’s the same deal with Russia’s trade surplus. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in The Economist:
“Russia’s exports… have held up surprisingly well, including those directed to the West. Sanctions permit the sale of oil and gas to most of the world to continue uninterrupted. And a spike in energy prices has boosted revenues further.
As a result, analysts expect Russia’s trade surplus to hit record highs in the coming months. The IIF reckons that in 2022 the current-account surplus, which includes trade and some financial flows, could come in at $250bn (15% of last year’s GDP), more than double the $120bn recorded in 2021. That sanctions have boosted Russia’s trade surplus, and thus helped finance the war, is disappointing, says Mr Vistesen. Ms Ribakova reckons that the efficacy of financial sanctions may have reached its limits. A decision to tighten trade sanctions must come next.
But such measures could take time to take effect. Even if the EU enacts its proposal to ban Russian oil, the embargo would be phased in so slowly that the bloc’s oil imports from Russia would fall by just 19% this year, says Liam Peach of Capital Economics, a consultancy. The full impact of these sanctions would be felt only at the start of 2023—by which point Mr Putin will have amassed billions to fund his war.” ( “Russia is on track for a record trade surplus”, The Economist)
Let me get this straight: The sanctions are actually hurting the US and helping Russia, so the experts think we should impose more sanctions? Is that it?
Precisely. Now that we have shot ourselves in the foot, the experts think it would be wise to shoot the other one too.
Am I the only one who is struck by the insanity of this policy? Check out this clip from an article at RT:
“Russia could earn a record $100 billion from gas sales to European countries in 2022 due to the sharp rise in energy prices, French newspaper Les Echos reported this week, citing Citibank analysts.
According to the paper, the projected income from gas sales will be almost twice as much as last year. The analysis does not take into account profits from the sale of other Russian commodities, such as oil, coal, and other minerals.
Les Echos reports that, despite sanctions and warnings of a sweeping embargo on Russian energy, the 27 EU countries continue to send roughly $200 million per day to Gazprom.”(“Russian gas revenues projected to hit new highs”, RT)
So the revenues from gas and oil sales are literally flooding Moscow’s coffers like never before. Meanwhile, energy prices in the EU and America have skyrocketed to 40-year highs.
Can you see how counterproductive this policy is?
The EU is sinking into recession, supply lines have been severely disrupted, food shortages are steadily emerging, and gas and oil prices are through-the-roof. By every objective standard, the sanctions have not only failed, but backfired spectacularly. Can’t the Biden people see the damage they’re doing? Are they completely divorced from reality?
Imagine if the Ukrainians use Biden’s new artillery battery (HIMARS) to shell cities in Russia? Then what?
Then Putin takes off the gloves and shuts off the flow of hydrocarbons to Europe immediately. That’s what’s going to happen if Washington continues to escalate. You can bet on it. If Russia’s “Special Military Operation” suddenly becomes a war, the lights across Europe will go dark, homes will begin to freeze, factories will go silent, and the continent will slide headlong into a protracted and painful depression.
Does anyone in Washington think about these things or are they all so drunk on their own press clippings they’ve completely lost touch with reality?
Here’s more from an article at RT:
“Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own.…
“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote…
In a May 30 essay, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins also said that the embargo had failed…
Did you catch that part about “Russia winning the economic war”? What do you think that means in practical terms?
Does it mean that Washington’s failed attempt to maintain its global hegemony by “weakening” Russia is actually putting enormous strains on the Transatlantic Alliance and NATO that will trigger a re-calibration of relations leading to a defiant rejection of the “rules-based system.”
Is that what it means? Is Europe going to split with Washington and leave America to sink beneath its $30 trillion ocean of red ink?
Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
Uncle Sam’s 30 Year Bender
Proponents of Washington’s proxy-war have no idea of the magnitude of their mistake or how much damage they are inflicting on their own country. The Ukraine debacle is the culmination of 30 years of bloody interventions that have brought us to a tipping point where the nation’s fortunes are about to take a dramatic turn-for-the-worse. As the dollar-zone shrinks, standards of living will plunge, unemployment will soar, and the economy will go into a downward-death spiral.
Washington has greatly underestimated its vulnerability to catastrophic geopolitical blowback that is about to bring the New American Century to a swift and excruciating end.
A wise leader would do everything in his power to pull us back from the brink.
Do you remember the iconic Union Carbide image from the 1950s or early 1960s? The one with the giant hand coming from the sky, pouring pesticides onto Indian soil.
The blurb below the image includes the following:
Science helps build a new India – India has developed bold new plans to build its economy and bring the promise of a bright future to its more than 400 million people. But India needs the technical knowledge of the western world. For example working with Indian engineers and technicians, Union Carbide recently made available its fast scientific resource to help build a chemicals and plastics plant near Bombay. Throughout the free world, Union Carbide has been actively engaged in building plants for the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, carbons, gases and metals.”
In the bottom corner is the Union Carbide logo and the statement ‘A HAND IN THINGS TO COME’.
This ‘hand of god’ image has become infamous. Union Carbide’s ‘hand in things to come’ includes the gas leak at its pesticides plant in Bhopal in 1984. It resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead.
As for the chemical-intensive agriculture it promoted, we can now see the impacts: degraded soils, polluted water, illness, farmer debt and suicides (by drinking pesticides!), nutrient-dense crops/varieties being side-lined, a narrower range of crops, no increase in food production per capita (in India at least), the corporate commodification of knowledge and seeds, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the undermining of traditional knowledge systems and farmers’ dependency on corporations.
Whether it involves the type of ecological devastation activist-farmer Bhaskar Save outlined for policy makers in his 2006 open letter or the social upheaval documented by Vandana Shiva in the book The Violence of the Green Revolution, the consequences have been far-reaching.
And yet – whether it involves new genetic engineering techniques or more pesticides – there is a relentless drive by the agritech conglomerates to further entrench their model of agriculture by destroying traditional farming practices with the aim of placing more farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.
These corporations have been pushing for the European Commission to remove any labelling and safety checks for new genomic techniques. The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.
Since 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost €37 million lobbying the European Union. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.
In recent weeks, Syngenta (a subsidiary of ChemChina) CEO Erik Fyrwald has come to the fore to cynically lobby for these techniques.
But before discussing Fyrwald, let us turn to another key agribusiness figure who has been in the news. Former Monsanto chairman and CEO Hugh Grant recently appeared in court to be questioned by lawyers on behalf of a cancer patient in the case of Allan Shelton v Monsanto.
Shelton has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and is one of the 100,000-plus people in the US claiming in lawsuits that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller and its other brands containing the chemical glyphosate caused their cancer.
His lawyers argued that Grant was an active participant and decision-maker in the company’s Roundup business and should be made to testify at the trial.
Why not? After all, he did make a financial killing from peddling poison.
Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 and Grant received an estimated $77 million post-sale payoff. Bloomberg reported in 2017 that Monsanto had increased Grant’s salary to $19.5 million.
By 2009, Roundup-related products, which include genetically modified seeds developed to withstand glyphosate-based applications, represented about half of Monsanto’s gross margin.
Roundup was integral to Monsanto’s business model and Grant’s enormous income and final payoff.
Consider the following quote from a piece that appeared on the Bloomberg website in 2014:
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16%, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24%.”
In the same piece, Chris Shaw, a New York-based analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co, is reported as saying “Glyphosate really crushed it” – meaning the sales of glyphosate were a major boost.
All fine for Grant and Monsanto. But this has had devastating effects on human health. ‘The Human Cost of Agrotoxins. How Glyphosate is killing Argentina’, which appeared on the Lifegate website in November 2015, serves as a damning indictment of the drive for “earnings growth” by Monsanto. Moreover, in the same year, some 30,000 doctors in that country demanded a ban on glyphosate.
The bottom line for Grant was sales and profit maximisation and the unflinching defence of glyphosate, no matter how carcinogenic to humans it is and, more to the point, how much Monsanto knew it was.
Noam Chomsky underlines the commercial imperative:
… the CEO of a corporation has actually a legal obligation to maximize profit and market share. Beyond that legal obligation, if the CEO doesn’t do it, and, let’s say, decides to do something that will, say, benefit the population and not increase profit, he or she is not going to be CEO much longer – they’ll be replaced by somebody who does do it.”
Syngenta’s CEO is cut from the same cloth as Grant. While Monsanto’s crimes are well documented, Syngenta’s transgressions are less well publicised.
In 2006, writer and campaigner Dr Brian John claimed:
GM Free Cymru has discovered that Syngenta, in its promotion of GM crops and foods, has been involved in a web of lies, deceptions and obstructive corporate behaviour that would have done credit to its competitor Monsanto.”
Some weeks ago, Fyrwald called for organic farming to be abandoned. In view of the food crisis, brought on by the war in Ukraine, he claimed rich countries had to increase their crop production – but organic farming led to lower yields. Fyrwald also called for gene editing to be at the heart of the food agenda in order to increase food production.
He stated:
“The indirect consequence is that people are starving in Africa because we are eating more and more organic products.”
In response, Kilian Baumann, a Bernese organic farmer and president of the Swiss Small Farmers’ Association, called Fyrwald’s arguments “grotesque”. He claimed Fyrwald was “fighting for sales”.
Writing on the GMWatch website, Jonathan Matthews says the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have emboldened Fyrwald’s scaremongering.
Matthews states:
Fyrwald’s comments reflect the industry’s determination to undermine the European Union’s Farm to Fork strategy, which aims by 2030 not just to slash pesticide use by 50% and fertilizer use by 20% but to more than triple the percentage of EU farmland under organic management (from 8.1% to 25%), as part of the transition towards a ‘more sustainable food system’ within the EU’s Green Deal.”
He adds:
Syngenta view[s] these goals as an almost existential threat. This has led to a carefully orchestrated attack on the EU strategy.”
Mathews quotes research that shows GM crops have no yield benefit. He also refers to a newly published report that draws together research clearly showing GM crops have driven substantial increases – not decreases – in pesticide use. The newer and much-hyped gene-edited crops look set to do the same.
Syngenta is among the corporations criticised by a report from the UN for “systematic denial of harms” and “unethical marketing tactics”. Matthews notes that selling highly hazardous pesticides is actually at the core of Syngenta’s business model.
According to Matthews, even with the logistical disruptions to maize and wheat crops caused by the war in Ukraine, there is still enough grain available to the world market to meet existing needs. He says the current price crisis (not food crisis) is a product of fear and speculation.
Matthews concludes:
If Erik Fyrwald is really so concerned about hunger, why isn’t he attacking the boondoggle that is biofuels, rather than going after organic farming? The obvious answer is that the farmers being subsidised to grow biofuels are big consumers of agrichemicals and, in the US case, GMO seeds – unlike organic farmers, who buy neither.”
Fyrwald has a financial imperative to lobby for particular strategies and technologies. He is far from an objective observer. And he is far from honest in his appraisal – using fear of a food crisis to push his agenda.
Meanwhile, the sustained attacks on organic agriculture have become an industry mainstay, despite numerous high-level reports and projects indicating it could feed the world, mitigate climate change, improve farmers’ situations, lead to better soil, create employment and provide healthier and more diverse diets.
Transnational agribusiness has lobbied for, directed and profited from policies that have caused much of the above. And what we now see is these corporations and their lobbyists espousing (fake) concern (a cynical lobbying tactic) for the plight of the poor and hungry while attempting to purchase EU democracy to the tune of €37 million. Cheap at the price considering the financial bonanza that its new patented genetic engineering technologies and seeds could reap.
Various scientific publications show these new techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.
By attempting to dodge regulation as well as avoid economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear were the industry’s priorities lie.
Unfortunately, Fyrwald, Bill Gates, Hugh Grant and their ilk are unwilling and too often incapable of viewing the world beyond their reductionist mindsets that merely regard seed/chemical sales, output-yield and corporate profit as the measuring stick of success.
What is required is an approach that sustains indigenous knowledge, local food security, better nutrition per acre, clean and stable water tables and good soil structure. An approach that places food sovereignty, local ownership, rural communities and rural economies at the centre of policy and which nurtures biodiversity, boosts human health and works with nature rather than destroying these.
Fyrwald’s scaremongering is par for the course – the world will starve without corporate chemicals and (GM) seeds, especially if organics takes hold. This type of stuff has been standard fare from the industry and its lobbyists and bought career scientists for many years.
It flies in the face of reality, not least how certain agribusiness concerns have been part of a US geopolitical strategy that undermines food security in regions across the world. These concerns have thrived on the creation of dependency and profited from conflict. Moreover, there is the success of agroecological approaches to farming that have no need for what Fyrwald is hawking.
Instead, the industry continues to promote itself as the saviour of humanity – a hand of god powered by a brave new techno-utopian world of corporate science, pouring poison and planting seeds of corporate dependency with the missionary zeal of Western saviourism.
African Union Chairman and Senegal president Macky Sall meeting President Vladimir Putin, June 3, 2022 (Photo:Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS)
The U.S. drive to dominate creates self-inflicted wounds and self-imposed crises. It also creates suffering around the world with only the most servile vassal states willing to do what Washington wants.
The United States continues to shoot itself in the foot in its futile effort to damage the Russian economy. It is also asking other nations to do likewise and live with inflation, food scarcity, and rising energy prices. European countries have gone along with the sanctions which cut off their natural gas supplies from Russia when there is no logical alternative source for them. However, the rest of the world has refused to join in U.S. and EU condemnations or accept that they must live with privations caused by the reckless actions of other nations.
Of course, the ongoing state of delusion just continues the fantasy foreign policy decision making in Washington. The Countering Malign Russian Influences in Africa Act, HR 7311 , is just one example. But while the U.S. makes up nonsense as it goes along, the real problems that African nations have with the U.S. and their desire to have good relations with Russia go unaddressed.
Russian president Vladimir Putin recently welcomed Macky Sall, president of Senegal and Chairman of the African Union (AU) to a summit meeting. African countries are particularly hard hit by sanctions against Russia. They depend on Russia and Ukraine for supplies of wheat and other grains. When the sanctions regime removed Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, it impeded Africans ability to pay for commodities, including food and fertilizer. In a virtual meeting with the EU, Sall said, “When the SWIFT system is disrupted, it means that even if the products exist, payment becomes complicated, if not impossible.” In other words, Africa has to go hungry because of the U.S. obsession with an impossible mission of breaking up Russia or turning back the clock to the 1990s when compromised Russian leadership allowed their country to be open to international thievery.
African nations are not the only ones who face serious crises because of anti-Russian sanctions. The U.S. expects India and China to give up supplies of Russian oil and cause hardships in those countries. Biden will soon visit Saudi Arabia and ask for an increase in oil production, which of course means that OPEC nations will make less money. Of course, Sall’s visit to Russia could have been a wakeup call to Washington that policy changes were needed, instead they fell back on old strategies, warning African countries not to buy grain from Russia, calling it “stolen ” from Ukraine. At a moment of opportunity, the Biden administration just added insult to injury.
The United States is still the country with the world reserve currency and 800 military bases around the world. This power is never used for the benefit of humanity. The drive to dominate never ends, and people throughout the planet are expected to go along and suffer due to American whims.
That is what the U.S. told the people of Venezuela, who had the gall to elect and re-elect left wing governments. The Trump administration demanded “maximum pressure” against Venezuela, enacting harsh sanctions that killed 50,000 people, cutting off access to foreign markets and even choosing to recognize a phony president.
But a funny thing happened on the way to destroying Russia. The Europeans who go along like good little vassals still need oil, and according to reports the U.S. has decided to allow Venezuela to sell some of its resources to their puppets in their time of need. The U.S. whiplashes from trying to punish one country, to lifting their punishments on another, while telling others they have to starve and just be quiet about it.
While the Congressional Black Caucuses (CBC) takes part in fairy tales about “malign Russian influence,” Africans are taking matters into their own hands and talking directly with Putin. They know they must ignore U.S. dictates if they are to survive. Of course Russia will ultimately create its own payment system with African countries, just as it did with China.
Meanwhile Russian victories in Ukraine continue. The Ukrainian counter attacks that have become a staple of corporate media are mostly imaginary, more grist for the war propaganda mill. Joe Biden undermines himself by blurting out that Ukraine may have to negotiate a settlement, while also announcing that the U.S. will keep sending money and military equipment.
The U.S. is once again undermining itself. An empire in crisis will inevitably behave irrationally. It demands control but creates the circumstances which undo the very systems, such as SWIFT, that it depends upon. But there will be more meetings with Putin, and more countries saying that they will not undermine themselves because Washington asks them to.
“The power of the Void is the power of wombness in us all, the power of true creativity.” ~Peggy Andreas
The status quo is a juggernaut. It’s excessive. It’s overreaching. It’s ominous. It is so massive that it’s closed off from the underlying essence. It is so extensive that it’s lacking. It is so supreme that it’s extreme. It is so ubiquitous that it’s stifling. It is so vast that it must be checked by something greater than it is lest it spiral out into corruption.
What is greater than the vast somethingness of the status quo? The vast nothingness of the void. What is more powerful than the unimaginative zeitgeist? The creative power of the void. What is always bigger than the existing condition? The potential reconditioning force of the void.
The void is between worlds even as it creates worlds. It is the primal source, the vital core, the perennial roots, the primordial seed. It is all at once a lodestone, a whetstone, a steppingstone, and a Philosopher’s Stone.
It’s the floating nothing, the blindman’s target, the flow state between the bowman’s mind, the arrow, and the bull’s eye. It is the pivot point where all points point. It is the darkness that shines all light.
Indeed. The seed of somethingness can only grow from the heart of nothingness—the almighty void, the birthplace of all things, the great womb from which we are all born. Even the status quo is merely one of its infinite creations.
The void is not only a place of death and disorder, but also the birthplace of order. It’s the state in which the caterpillar is annihilated in the cocoon. It’s the place where the Phoenix is reborn. It’s a sacred space where bludgeoned aspects of the profane status quo can unwind and flourish. It’s a vital humus for human creativity.
Even regarding imagination, the void is the state of mind where No-mind and mindfulness intersect to become curiosity and wonder.
Those of us mindful enough can tap into the curiosity and wonder of the void and avoid the stifled certainty of the status quo. From the seat of No-mind (healthy detachment), we see how everything is connected to everything else. We see how the mind of Everything holds the heart of Nothingness, and the void of Nothingness holds the core of Everything.
Sometimes in order to open our mind we must lose it. Sometimes in order to cultivate mindfulness we must embrace No-mind in the void. Sometimes the only way to discover that the “door to our jailcell is open” is to lose the mindset that conditioned us into thinking that we were trapped in the first place.
Thus, the power of the void is the power of creativity in the face of contentment. It’s the power of audacious questioning in the face of accepted answers. It’s the power of imagination in the face of rigidity. It’s the power of humor in the face of self-seriousness. It’s the power of death and rebirth in the face of excess and stillbirth.
Have no illusions, the status quo is the pinnacle of contentment, accepted answers, rigidity, self-seriousness, excess, and stillbirth. It is our responsibility alone to flip the script, to turn the tables, to push the envelope, and to stay ahead of the curve. Nobody else can do it for us.
If we can gain mastery over the void, we can gain mastery over the status quo. Just as the master must integrate the darkness within him to become whole, we must integrate the void within us to become creative. Otherwise, the status quo consumes us. Otherwise, we drown in cultural conditioning. Otherwise, the Matrix has us by the balls, and the blue-pill-poppers will have outflanked our red-pill-popping courage.
But if we can gain the courage to create through the integration of the void, we can avoid the stifling trap of the status quo. We can rise above stagnation, complacency, comfort, and certainty. We can transcend the unhealthy scene and transform ourselves into a thundercloud fat with healing rain.
We can seize the lightning that splits the cosmos and fall in love with the split. Realizing that we are the split. We always have been. And that’s okay. We attain healthy detachment by understanding that we are a creature that must constantly negotiate its own delusionary attachment to being a thing separated from cosmos.
The power of the void is the power of holistic detachment in the face of illusory attachment. From the void we can see how our tiny self is outflanked by the mighty cosmos. We can see how petty our stress, anxiety, and existential angst really is. The grand scheme of things becomes a mighty hammer that shatters the glasshouse paradigm of our small-mindedness.
The void teaches the power of rebirth and creation from the ashes of death and destruction. It digs up the skull of God and props it up like a scarecrow. It drags the bones of the Phoenix across the desert and into the Garden of Rebirth. It blackens the sun and dances in the shadows, kicking up dust, and dousing the fires in Plato’s Cave. It awakens those who have pretended to be asleep.
From the self-inflicted wreckage of the void, we emerge more robust and antifragile than before, fixed by having been broken, whole by having been split in half, healed by honoring our wounds and brandishing them like trophies atop the summit of our having fallen apart and come back together again.
From our mastery of the void comes the unity of summit and abyss inside us. The wisdom gained at the summit guides us through the lows of the abyss. The courage gained in the abyss helps us navigate the highest heights. The unity of both gives us the power to create and to destroy in the face of that which seeks to fixate, stagnate, and perversely preserve conditions at the expense of healthy change. It gives us the power to overcome the status quo and to become a force of healthy change to be reckoned with.
In early 2020, the Global Elite launched its long-planned coup to capture control of the human population by killing off a substantial proportion and technologically imprisoning those left alive as transhuman slaves. A primary intended outcome of this agenda is to enable the Elite to own and completely control use of the Earth’s remaining resources.
Using the World Economic Forum (WEF) as its primary agent, and with the complicity of key international organizations and all national governments (after some hiccoughs requiring the assassination of five national presidents), the Global Elite has gone about progressively implementing the many components of its plan for a full takeover of Planet Earth. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.
Despite the facts that the horrendous details of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ – which, without consulting any of us, identifies changes to some 200 areas of human life – can be read by anyone on the WEF website and many spokespeople, including the delusional chairperson Klaus Schwab – The fourth industrial revolution ‘is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds… and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.’ – and his equally delusional adviser Yuval Noah Harari – ‘History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.’ – have outlined some key details of what they are doing to us, the bulk of the human population has submissively accepted their fate by burying their heads deeply into the sand and, gullibly believing the Elite’s ‘virus-threat’ narrative, meekly tolerated a long series of encroachments on their rights and freedom, including mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, QR codes, multiple gene-altering (and, in many cases, injury or death-inflicting) injections, as well as the political, economic and social costs of these elite measures. See ‘Great Reset’, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution, by Klaus Schwab’ and Yuval Noah Harari.
And these encroachments and costs are just the beginning of their very detailed agenda!
Given the value of understanding the psychology underpinning the main categories of actors in this conflict if we are to fully comprehend what has taken place and why, as well as the psychological qualities necessary to resist the Elite agenda effectively, I want to revisit this subject (partly so that the inadequacies of other psychological explanations – including elite critiques of activists – are exposed).
Before proceeding, I wish to acknowledge Erich Fromm’s 1942 classic, The Fear of Freedom, while simply noting that the explanation offered here diverges profoundly in its explanation of the shared thesis: humans fear freedom.
So, let me briefly answer six questions: Why is the bulk of the human population willing to give away the little freedom they have left so readily? Why is the Global Elite so committed to taking over planet Earth and all life on it? Why do all those elite agents collaborate with their masters’ plans? Why are most of those unhappy about the loss of their freedom happy to protest ineffectively rather than resist strategically? Why are psychological critiques of activists by elite agents misconceived? And what psychological qualities are needed to resist effectively?
Before answering these questions in any detail, I will start by briefly explaining why fear or, more accurately, unconscious terror, is the fundamental answer to the first five of the above six questions and then go on to elaborate why this terror manifests differently in the five circumstances. I will then answer the sixth question.
Terrorizing Children into Submission
As I have explained at some length elsewhere, the process of what human beings like to benignly call ‘socialization’ is a process of terrorizing children and adolescents into submissive obedience. Delivered daily by parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in the child’s life as an endless stream of violence – whether ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and/or ‘utterly invisible’ – the child is progressively reduced to a socially constructed delusional identity who is storing a vast amount of suppressed fear, pain, anger, sadness and other feelings that they were not allowed to feel and express throughout childhood (and then adolescence). This individual goes on to lead the life they have been terrorized into leading (with only utterly superficial choices at the margin still allowed). See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
And because disobedience on the part of a child is almost invariably met with ‘punishment’ – the sanitized word that adults like to use to obscure from themselves and others the fact that they are being violent – it is a rare child who survives into adulthood with much of the unique Selfhood that evolution bequeathed them at birth. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.
Hence, as a result of this violence inflicted throughout childhood and adolescence, the typical human being grows into an adult who, perhaps despite complaining at times, is submissively obedient to ‘authority figures’ in a wide variety of contexts: employers, religious figures, doctors, government officials, police and military personnel, legal and prison personnel, and bureaucrats generally. People do not ‘believe’ in authority; they are fearful of being disobedient.
In other words: Virtually all human beings fear the freedom to think for themselves, decide what to believe and choose how to behave. Hence, they think, believe and behave in accord with norms that are determined by Elites and promulgated through Elite-controlled channels including education systems, entertainment outlets and news media.
Devoid of a mind that can critique the structures and processes of the society in which they live (and the role of the actors within them), this compliant individual is also unable to critique Elite propaganda, whether presented as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ or ‘news’. See ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda andFalse Flag Attacks?’
Hence the typical human being spends their life as a victim of those structures, processes, individuals and information they learned to fear as a child. And, for example, the idea that they could be responsible for their own health by consulting relevant evidence, information and personnel before making their own informed decision is simply preposterous. After all, as the propaganda they believed taught them, we have ‘experts’ who will tell us what is best for us. And while they accept that this expertise might involve a financial cost, the true cost of this belief in experts is immeasurable: A mind that has been robbed of its capacity for unique and powerful investigation, analysis and action.
So let us return to the six questions above, answering each briefly in turn.
Why is the bulk of the human population willing to give away the little freedom they have left so readily?
Obviously, the answer to this first question is simple: As explained above, terrorized in childhood, the typical person simply adopts obedience as their way of life. Of course, they might powerlessly complain and they might resist a little at the margins (by being ‘a bit late’ or not doing exactly as expected, for example) but, apart from this, they will invariably comply as directed. The idea of genuinely disputing any ‘authority’ is out of the question. Paradoxical though it might seem, plenty of these people will end up in relative positions of authority and expect those in their charge to obey them. Of course, there is no real paradox. They have ‘learned’ throughout childhood that people in higher positions of authority are obeyed, and that includes them in very limited contexts. But there is always a wide range of higher authorities to keep them in line too, and they submit readily.
And told they need to take four or more injections to combat the ‘virus’, they submit. Obedience is all. Although, of course, they will usually characterize their belief and behaviour more favourably – such as ‘I am doing the right thing by the community’ – to (unconsciously) avoid any risk of exposing the terror driving both their belief and behaviour.
Another important way in which their fear works is to suppress awareness of bigger, more profound threats – which might trigger enormous and paralysing (conscious) terror – in favour of focusing on something much smaller (even if untrue) that feels ‘manageable’; that is, the person feels able to exercise sufficient control to navigate or neutralize the threat. So in this current context, most of the population is focusing on more narrow and imminent threats – whether or not these are true and particularly those ‘threats’ (‘SARS-CoV-2’, its ‘variants’ and now ‘Monkeypox’) heavily promoted by governments, the corporate media and other elite agents – because this enables people to participate in the delusion that their cooperation is helping to contain the smaller (delusional) threat.
But the idea of considering the real threat – in this case, a coup by the Global Elite to kill off or control the vast bulk of the human population while capturing full control of Earth’s resources – is simply too terrifying so it is easier to suppress awareness of it and ignore, dismiss or dispute this deeper agenda as unfounded, a ‘conspiracy theory’ or simply non-existent. Delusion, denial and other psychological aversion techniques are extremely common human behaviours among those who are (unconsciously) terrified. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’ and ‘The Limited Mind: Why Fear Is Driving Humanity to Extinction’.
Why is the Global Elite so committed to taking over planet Earth and all life on it?
Well, at the superficial level, there are various explanations offered, notably including the fact that the Earth’s resources are depleted and so conserving the bulk of what is left for elite use, shared only minimally with the remaining population of transhuman slaves, is their plan. But there is a deeper and more truthful explanation. Members of the Global Elite have been so utterly terrorized that they are insane. For a careful explanation of this point, see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
Why do all those elite ‘agents’ (international organizations, governments, corporate media, medical and legal systems, industries, professional groups) collaborate with their masters’ plans?
Well, again, in simple terms, they are too terrified not to collaborate but because their terror is unconscious to them they will characterize their obedience as ‘the right thing to do’, ‘just doing my job’, ‘I’ve got a family to support’ or an equivalent. However they characterize their behaviour, it is simply to mask from themselves the fear that drives their submissive behaviour.
For collaborators, the importance of obedience also far outweighs any sense of personal moral choice. Obviously, it is their fear that generates this attitude and behaviour. If you are scared to resist ‘authority’, then you must make a virtue out of submission and obedience. In essence: the collaborator will dogmatically defend their behaviour as ‘right’ in the circumstances as the means of suppressing their own awareness of the terrifying and painful tangle of feelings (suppressed fear, pain and anger…) in their own unconscious.
You can read a great deal more detail in the section headed ‘People Who Pretend to be Your Friend: The Emotional Profile of Collaborators and Traitors’ in ‘Why Violence?’
Why are most of those unhappy about the loss of their freedom happy to protest ineffectively rather than resist strategically?
Once again, as already mentioned, because they are unconsciously terrified. While able to penetrate the superficial layer of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, they are unlikely to perceive the far-reaching and horrific agenda – and those responsible – beyond this.
Moreover, by ‘pretending’ to resist – by attending a rally, for example, in which freedom is powerlessly ‘demanded’ from an elite agent (a government) – they can delude themselves and those around them that they are powerful in defence of their freedom when, of course, they have fearfully passed off responsibility for fighting for it, as Anita McKone noted, by powerlessly asking others to change their behaviour and demanding that others give them freedom.
But freedom given is freedom that can be taken away.
Consequently, such events have zero strategic value – and would only have it if used to promote strategically-focused actions designed to defeat the Elite coup – and so those attending such events can obscure their fear of doing something effective. By engaging in these powerless acts of rebellion, they can minimize (and often eliminate) the risk of incurring the cost of disobedience (that will often accompany powerful acts of resistance), by hiding in a crowd whose actions are well known to have no impact. After all, protest rallies are notoriously ineffective as the extensive record demonstrates.
And while government authorities might outlaw such events and even precipitate police engagement to prevent or disrupt them (as has been happening in the past two years), this only obscures the reality that such actions, in themselves, are ineffective anyway and simply distract the bulk of those resisting from taking (different) action powerfully. See ‘Why Activists Fail’.
In essence, the fear of the typical activist makes them incapable of analysing and critiquing the true depth of the crisis and then identifying and taking strategic action in response.
Consequently, this fear then makes them unwilling to offer deeper analyses and more powerful action to those they perceive as only just ‘awakening’. They project their own fear onto others.
Why are psychological critiques of activists by elite agents misconceived?
As noted earlier in this article, several authors in the past two years have purported to show that those opposing the elite agenda are suffering from one or another psychological disorder.
However, these articles are either written by elite agents working in psychiatry or other authors who are too terrified to critique their own submissiveness in the context and, often enough, well paid to discredit, one way or another, those individuals courageous enough to have a mind of their own.
In relation to the first category, while there is no scientific basis to psychiatry, the tragic reality is that there is an extensive and well-documented history that psychiatry has long been used to inflict violence on targeted populations, particularly those resisting an elite-driven narrative. In other words, psychiatric violence is just another elite tool for silencing and discrediting those who resist elite imperatives. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’.
So when certain authors label those resisting the elite-driven narrative as suffering from a psychological dysfunctionality, they are merely continuing what has been a long-term effort to marginalize those who offer serious critiques of, and resistance to, elite behaviour. Another recent effort has been the labeling of those people who resist as suffering from ‘oppositional defiance disorder’. See ‘Psychiatrists now say non-conformity is a mental illness: only the sheeple are “sane”’.
And while many other authors are paid to promote an elite-driven narrative designed to discredit opponents for this or other reasons, it is also the case that all of these authors have been so terrorized by their own ‘socialization’ experience that any concept that each individual has a unique Self is not only incomprehensible but also both terrifying and ‘wrong’. Hence, the person who is truly an individual is dangerous because they have not ‘learned’ to obey – parents, teachers, employers… and elites – as directed.
In essence, for these individuals especially, disobedience of authorities is simply ‘wrong’: not in a moral sense, however, but simply in the sense that they have been terrorized into believing that disobedience reflects improper ‘learning’ and, hence, inadequate punishment to ‘induce’ social conformity. So activists should be pejoratively labeled and punished for not conforming to elite-driven norms.
What psychological qualities are needed to resist effectively?
Mainly, just one: Courage. The courage to investigate what is happening until the truth is uncovered, the courage to analyze what is driving it, and the courage to act powerfully in response.
Easy to type; not so easy to find.
Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda
If you have the courage to strategically resist the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 16 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
Finally, while the timeframe for this to make any difference is now in doubt, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.
Conclusion
Human freedom is on the verge of being lost. Forever.
If the Global Elite is successful in implementing its ‘Great Reset’ agenda, everything that humans value will be taken from us including, in many cases, our life.
The evidence on this issue is now overwhelming and it is virtually impossible to keep track of all of it once you start to investigate it.
And given the rapidly advancing technological elements of the Elite coup, as well as the ongoing destruction of food and energy supply chains, time is now very short.
Do you have the courage to act on this by resisting strategically?
The Grayzone has published leaked email communications between faux-left British commentator and aspiring parliamentarian Paul Mason and a shady intelligence contractor named Amil Khan which plainly shows the two plotting to use state power to subvert anti-imperialist media outlets like Consortium News and Grayzone, as well as “far left rogue academics” and the broader left more generally.
Mason has obliquely authenticated the contents of the emails with a weird, rambling Medium post claiming to have been victimized by a “Russian hack-and-leak operation.” The post does not deny the veracity of the emails. Instead, Mason bizarrely claims that they “may be altered or faked,” as though they are not his own personal communications whose accuracy he could instantly deny if they were altered or faked in any way.
This is the same as verifying the emails and then yelling “But look over there! It’s Putin!”
It would take a very silly person indeed to look at a bunch of authenticated emails showing a major British media figure conspiring with an intelligence contractor to subvert the antiwar left, and then conclude that the correct response to this would be to get angry at the Russians.
Wow.
This new report from @KitKlarenberg based on leaked emails details how Paul Mason is purportedly secretly working with the national security state to censor, smear, deplatform and destroy virtually the entire antiwar left.
There will probably be a lot written about these leaks in the coming days, but for now I’d like to focus on the fact that, in these private communications between a media insider and an intelligence insider, the “independent investigative journalism” outlet known as Bellingcat is described as a “proxy” for western intelligence agencies and is said to receive “a steady stream of intel” from them.
“Just as Bellingcat get a steady stream of intel from Western agencies, I suspect the attacks on you and others are fed by Russian and Chinese intel,” Mason is seen telling Khan, who has been the subject of a previous Grayzone exposé.
On the team of spinmeisters Mason and Khan were plotting to assemble to undermine anti-imperialist media, Mason said that “what it really also needs is intel service input by proxy – eg Bellingcat.” Which certainly reads like an explicit call to work with western intelligence agencies to take down his perceived enemies on the left.
“Khan – a long-time advocate and associate of [Bellingcat] – did not once challenge Mason’s repeated characterization of the supposed citizen journalist collective as a clearing house for friendly spy agencies,” write Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal.
When we say publicly what @paulmasonnews says privately — that Bellingcat receives "a steady stream of intel from Western agencies" and acts for them "by proxy" — we get accused of spreading Russian propaganda. Does that make @paulmasonnews a Russian propagandist? 🤷♂️ https://t.co/gX8vyJpN0B
As of this writing there has been little in the way of denial from Bellingcat of those claims the closet CIA fan Paul Mason made when he believed he was communicating in privacy. The Twitter page of its executive director and founder Eliot Higgins tweeted, “I see the Gray Zone has acquired even more hacked emails, I wonder who keeps providing them with those, hmmmm.”
When asked by a commenter if intelligence agencies leak information to Bellingcat, Higgins replied, “No and never,” which he then immediately retreated from when pressed, saying instead, “Well if we use sources that aren’t open sources we’ll use multiple independent sources to acquire the same or related data and triangulate the data to confirm its authenticity.”
Which is a mighty long pace from “No and never,” if you look at it. It’s saying well if we do get information from someone who might work for an intelligence agency, we’ll use “related data” from other sources (who themselves may or may not also have intelligence ties) to “confirm” it.
People would be well advised to take anything Higgins says about his operation with a large grain of salt. In 2016 he dismissed the suggestion that his operation is funded by the CIA cutout known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) with a “Stop reading conspiracy websites.” Less than a year later he admitted when pressed that Bellingcat does indeed receive funding from NED.
Who is Bellingcat really? A superb investigation by @AlanRMacLeod
How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points into the Press https://t.co/DqNnM4sR9n
This is not the first time it has been claimed that Bellingcat operates as a proxy for western intelligence information laundering, nor the second, nor the third. As Alan MacLeod documented last year for Mintpress News, there was already a mountain of evidence that the “independent” narrative management firm celebrated and beloved by the western political/media class operates as a proxy of the western intelligence cartel. Mason and Khan’s communications are just one more piece on the pile.
Western intelligence agencies have numerous pathways through which they can get information, misinformation and disinformation into the mainstream press without people noticing that the news media are publishing government propaganda. Mason’s emails are yet more evidence that Bellingcat is one such pipeline for intelligence cartel psyops.
If there’s something the cartel wants published, they launder it through proxies like Bellingcat and then the news media run it saying it’s been verified by an “independent” “OSINT” service. And presto, you’ve got yourself some good old fashioned Langley-cooked spook propaganda.
This doesn’t mean that everything Bellingcat publishes is entirely false (the best propaganda is generally a mixture of truth with half-truth, distortion, lies by omission, and the removal of context and perspective), it just means it’s generally untrustworthy. Because it operates at the direction, knowingly or unknowingly, of sociopathic government agencies whose only interest is in domination and control.
If the term “information laundering” sounds familiar to you, it might be because you heard it used in the news, like during the George W Bush administration when Dick Cheney’s inner circle was leaking false claims about Iraq to The New York Times, “verifying” that information when contacted to confirm it, and then citing those false news reports when continuing to make the case for invasion.
The term might also sound familiar to you because information laundering was the subject of the much-ridiculed Mary Poppins jingle sung by notorious imperial narrative manager Nina Jankowicz, who also featured in the Grayzone report. Apparently Mason contacted Khan in outrage over a Consortium News piece disputing the official imperial Ukraine narrative, and Khan reached out to Jankowicz for advise on what to do.
Jankowitz told Khan that Consortium was a case of “useful idiots rather than funding,” meaning it’s not paid by the Kremlin it just publishes things that empire managers don’t like. Khan then told Mason that there was a highly suspicious gap in Consortium News publications between 2005 and 2011, which Consortium editor Joe Lauria explained in The Grayzone piece was apparently the result of Khan not doing basic fact checking and not understanding how the internet works.
Lovely.
Sing it with me now:
“It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie! It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie!”
Amid this resounding silence, Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, has stepped in to fill the void. In a New Republic article titled “Why Ukraine Matters for the Left,” Duss attempts to convince fellow progressives that the “provision of military aid” to Ukraine “can advance a more just and humanitarian global order.” Duss has only praise for a Biden administration that, in his view, “should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis.” By contrast, Duss opts to launch an attack on dissident journalists, myself included, who don’t share his enthusiasm.
To make his case, Duss omits an abundance of inconvenient facts, betraying either considerable ignorance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict or a deliberate effort to distort it.
While apologia for US hegemonic projects is normal in DC foreign policy circles, Duss’ contribution is particularly noteworthy given his painstaking attempt to cast himself as an outsider. “Our political class,” Duss states, “advocates military violence with a regularity and ease that is psychopathic.” Duss’ comment is both accurate and wildly ironic, given his choice to advocate our political class’s military violence in Ukraine — with the remarkable ease that he identifies in others as psychopathic.
When it comes to how the Biden administration has handled the Ukraine crisis, Duss cannot identify a single fault. “The Biden team clearly did not seek this war,” Duss claims, and “in fact… made a strenuous, and very public, diplomatic effort to avert it.”
Duss does not explain what the administration’s “strenuous” diplomacy entailed, perhaps because even its top officials now openly admit that none existed.
In an interview with War on the Rocks, State Department counsellor Derek Chollet was asked if NATO expansion into Ukraine was “on the table” in pre-invasion contacts with Russia. “It wasn’t,” Chollet replied. The White House, Chollet explained, “made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way,” including “arms control.” (emphasis added) But when it comes to “the future of Ukraine” and its potential NATO membership, Chollet said, this was deemed a “non-issue.”
To Duss, the Biden administration’s (openly admitted) refusal to even discuss Russia’s core demands – and to only entertain issues that it deemed to be “legitimate” on Russia’s behalf – is apparently a “strenuous diplomatic effort.” If “diplomacy” amounts to enforcing US hegemony, as many in DC seem to believe, then Duss would have a case. But in the rest of the world, where diplomacy entails constructive dialogue with a semblance of parity, he does not.
Duss also takes aim at the argument, advanced by prominent leftists including former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, that a US-European pledge that Ukraine won’t join NATO “would have solved the problem” with Russia.
To refute Lula, Duss stresses that “in the weeks leading up to the war, U.S. allies, specifically German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, signaled clearly” that Ukraine’s NATO ascension “was not going to happen.” According to Duss, it is Putin who sabotaged their efforts by invading, and who “has now made that discussion moot.”
Duss omits what also happened in the weeks leading up to the war. While Germany and France did indeed float a proposal to keep Ukraine out of NATO, it was Ukraine – with US backing – that rejected it. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Scholtz proposed to Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 19 – five days before Russia’s invasion — that Ukraine “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” signed by both Putin and Biden. But Zelensky rejected Schultz’s plan, a response that “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.” In dismissing the Germans’ NATO proposal, Zelensky joined the Biden White House, as State’s Derek Chollet acknowledged and other Biden officials made clear in public.
Ignoring US-Ukrainian rejectionism, Duss then declares that “it seems absurd to suggest that even an ironclad public pledge from President Biden that Ukraine would never be accepted into NATO would have convinced Putin to draw back the 180,000 troops he had placed on Ukraine’s borders.” Perhaps, but that very public pledge happened to be the centerpiece of Germany’s last-minute diplomatic effort – one that Duss himself invoked, and that Zelensky (along with Biden) chose to reject.
Duss’ whitewashing of the Biden administration’s rejection of diplomacy before the Russian invasion carries over to the period since.
Since Russia’s invasion, Duss says, the White House has “acted with restraint and care not to get drawn into a wider war with Russia.” While it is true that Biden has opted not to start World War III – in other words, has opted not to trigger a global suicide pact — he has done anything but act with “restraint.” One day before Duss’ article was published, Biden authorized the delivery of medium-range advanced rocket systems to Ukraine. These rockets have the capacity to strike inside of Russia; the US is acting on Ukraine’s assurance that it won’t.
Duss may support undermining diplomacy in Ukraine and shipping off billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry instead, but this can only be described as “restraint” if the sole measure is an immediate — rather than merely prospective — nuclear holocaust.
Duss is so impressed with Biden’s handling of the war that he cannot even detect a tangible path that could end it. “As of this writing,” Duss declares, “I have seen no evidence of a settlement in the offing—as in, a deal that Putin would actually entertain, let alone accept—that we’re refusing to ‘push for.'”
If Duss cannot see evidence of a realistic settlement that Russia could accept, then he is being willfully blind. Russia’s explicit proposals, issued before the war and after, including two weeks into the invasion, called on Ukraine to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”
It is worth noting that the latter is Russia’s only new condition: for the eight years before the February invasion, Russia formally accepted the Minsk accords, which, to end the Donbas war, would have kept the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside Ukraine’s borders, with limited autonomy.
Duss is free to argue that Russia’s terms for ending the war are unacceptable. But to pretend that Russia has not even laid out those terms, is to essentially advocate that the war never end.
By omitting Russia’s stated terms for a settlement, Duss also allows himself to erase one of the invasion’s key causes: the 2014 Maidan coup, and the ensuing eight-year Donbas war that had left more than 14,000 people dead by the time Russian forces crossed the border on February 24th.
After ignoring Russia’s stated grounds for a peace settlement, Duss goes on to disingenuously claim that the Ukrainian government has been pushing for one.
“Ukraine presented Russia with a far-reaching set of proposals over a month ago, including a commitment to ‘permanent neutrality,’” Duss claims. “Volodomyr Zelenskiy continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war.”
It is true that Ukraine presented Russia with a 10-point plan in late March. But Duss omits what happened immediately after: while Russia “signaled its preliminary support,” (RAND analyst Samuel Charap) Ukraine’s Western backers sabotaged it, and Zelensky acquiesced. In early April, Ukrainian and Russian officials were finalizing details for a Zelensky-Putin summit. But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and ordered him to halt diplomacy. Citing sources close to Zelensky, Ukrayinska Pravda reports that Johnson informed his Ukrainian counterpart that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Johnson also relayed that even if Russia and Ukraine chose to sign security guarantees, the UK and its allies would not take part – rendering any such agreement worthless.
Zelensky clearly received the message, as Duss’s own source makes clear. When Duss claims that Zelensky “continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war,” he links to a Reuters article that reveals such an “offer” to be hollow. Zelensky, Reuters reports, said he would only negotiate with Putin if Russia first withdrew entirely from Ukraine – an obvious non-starter. “Get out of this territory that you have occupied since February 24,” Zelensky said. “This is the first clear step to talking about anything.” Zelensky also “ruled out suggestions… that Ukraine should make concessions for the sake of securing a peace agreement that would allow Putin to save face.”
Thus, returning to Duss’ rendering, Zelensky’s “far-reaching proposals” were immediately rescinded under Western orders, and Zelensky’s “offer to negotiate” was premised on a condition that would have made negotiations impossible.
None of this is to suggest that Russia was justified in launching an invasion of Ukraine. To defend the use of force, which has been so catastrophic, Russia has to meet a high burden of evidence that, in my view, it has not. But one does not need to defend Russia’s invasion to see through Duss’ attempt to whitewash the US role in provoking and prolonging it.
Tellingly, Duss is openly hostile to journalists who have reported on the context that he has omitted. Out of nowhere, Duss introduces an attack on The Grayzone, the Max Blumenthal-founded news outlet that I work for. While Duss has nothing but praise for Biden, he has nothing but ad hominems for us (“pernicious authoritarian agitprop,” “atrocity-denying grifters” “click-baiting provocateurs”). After sharing this vitriol, he then immediately declares that engaging with us is “wasting time.”
I feel the same way about his juvenile name-calling, but interested readers can judge for themselves whether his insults are supported by facts. (He links to two “sources,” one a Medium blog post that, true to the neo-McCarthyite norm, peddles innuendo that The Grayzone is funded by Russia, among other smears).
If Duss is genuinely concerned about wasting time, he also might reflect on why he devotes ample space to paying lip service to progressive principles, only to ultimately endorse policies that flagrantly violate them. “Centering opposition to U.S. imperialism and militarism is an entirely appropriate starting point,” Duss states. Yet Duss’ desired end point would see leftists center U.S. imperialism and militarism, with disastrous results: among them, prolonging a proxy war against a nuclear armed power, threatening a worsening global food crisis, and sentencing more Ukrainians to death.
Even putting aside US complicity in the Ukraine proxy war and its dangers for the planet, progressives like Duss might wish to consider the likely political consequences. One obvious guide is the election of 2016, when Donald Trump won over a significant portion of voters by claiming to oppose the military interventionism that Duss is now urging progressives to embrace. Having seemingly learned nothing from 2016, Democrats in 2022 are again ceding anti-war sentiment to Republicans, 68 of whom voted against the $40 billion Ukraine bill in the House and Senate (versus zero Democrats).
As at least some Republicans vote against the proxy war, Biden has defended the domestic pain caused by his Ukraine proxy war by blaming “Putin’s Price Hike” and trying to argue that “defending freedom is going to cost.” Biden’s defense of “freedom” in Ukraine is now costing him a transatlantic flight to grovel at the feet of the Saudi autocracy, in the hopes of staving off a humiliating cost in the November midterms.
Continuing his mealy mouthed approach, Duss both claims to support diplomacy while simultaneously declaring it to be unattainable. The US, he says, “should certainly be actively engaged in finding a diplomatic path to end the war, and avoid committing to maximalist aims that could foreclose one.” But yet, according to Duss, “for the moment that path is unclear.”
If the path toward peace for Ukraine is unclear to Duss, then that can only be because he has chosen to erase the factual background and the diplomatic solutions on offer, thereby reinforcing the “maximalist aims” that he claims to oppose. Duss’s proxy war apologia will certainly win him a warm reception in establishment DC circles. For the US progressive movement, Ukraine, and the rest of the planet, it only spells disaster.
After the Crash 
