Category Archives: war

War Without End

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What is wrong with the United States of America?

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz famously drew on his own experience in the Napoleonic Wars to examine war as a political phenomenon. In his 1832 book “On War” he provided a frequently quoted pithy summary of war versus peace, writing in terms of politico-military strategy that “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, war-making is a tool provided to statesmen to achieve a nation’s political objectives when all else fails.

One can reject the ultimate amorality of Clausewitz’s thinking about war while also recognizing that some nations have historically speaking exploited war-making as a tool for physical expansion and the appropriation of foreigners’ resources. As far back as the Roman Republic, the country’s elected leaders doubled as heads of its consular armies, which were expected to go out each spring to expand the imperium. More recently, Britain notably engaged in almost constant colonial wars over the course of centuries to establish what was to become history’s largest empire.

America’s dominant neocons characteristically believe they have inherited the mantle of empire and of the war powers that go hand-in-hand with that attribute, but they have avoided other aspects of the transition in turning the United States into a nation made and empowered by war. First of all, what comes out the other end after one has initiated hostilities with another country is unpredictable. Starting with Korea and continuing with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq as well as other minor operations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, American war-making has brought nothing but grief on those on the receiving end with little positive to show for the death, destruction and accumulated debt. Also forgotten in the rush to use force is the raison d’etre to have a federal national government at all, which is to bring tangible benefit to the American people. There has been none of that since 9/11 and even before, while Washington’s hard-line stance on what has become a proxy war against Russia over Ukraine promises more pain – perhaps disastrously so – and no real gain.

If one has any doubt that going to war has become the principal function of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, it is only necessary to consider several stories that have appeared in the past several weeks. The first comes from the Republican side, and it includes a possibly positive development. House Minority leader Republican Kevin McCarthy warned two weeks ago that the GOP will not necessarily continue to write a “blank check” for Ukraine if they obtain the House majority in next month’s election, reflecting his party’s growing skepticism about unlimited financial support for the corrupt regime in place in Kiev. McCarthy explained “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check.”

America’s uncritical support for Ukraine, which has been a contrivance by the White House and media since the fighting started, has led to a growing number of Republicans, particularly some of those aligned with Donald Trump’s “America First” approach, to challenge the need for massive federal spending abroad at a time of record-high inflation at home. Since Russia launched its invasion in February, Congress has approved tens of billions in emergency security and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, while the Biden administration has shipped billions more worth of weapons and equipment from military inventories, all done with only limited or even no oversight of where the money and weapons are winding up.

But, unfortunately, the GOP is far from unified on its approach to Ukraine-Russia. Congressman Liz Cheney demonstrated that her apple did not fall far from her father’s tree, taking some time off from trying to hang Donald Trump to denounce what she refers to as the “Putin wing of the Republican Party.” She put it this way: “You know, the Republican Party is the party of Reagan, the party that essentially won the Cold War. And you look now at what I think is really a growing Putin wing of the Republican Party.”

Cheney criticized Fox News for “running propaganda” on the issue and in particular called out Fox host Tucker Carlson as “the biggest propagandist for Putin on that network… You really have to ask yourself, whose side is Fox on in this battle? And how could it be that you have a wing of the Republican Party that thinks that America would be standing with Putin as he conducts that brutal invasion of Ukraine?”

Cheney notably did not address the issue of how the war developed in the first place because the US and UK preferred saber rattling to diplomacy with Moscow. Or why the United States feels compelled to tip-toe to the brink of a possible nuclear war over a foreign policy issue that is of no real national interest to the American people. And where did she make her comments? At the McCain Institute in Arizona. Yes, that’s a legacy of Senator John McCain another Republican who never saw a war he couldn’t enthusiastically support.

Both President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have confirmed that the US is in with Ukraine until “victory” is obtained, whatever that is supposed to mean, while other Administration officials have indicated that the actual purpose of the fighting is to weaken Russia and remove President Putin. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre glibly spouted the party line when asked about McCarthy’s comments. She thanked congressional leaders for bipartisan work to “support Ukraine to defend itself from Russia’s war crimes and atrocities,” adding that “We will continue to work with Congress and continue to monitor those conversations on these efforts and support Ukraine as long as it takes. We are going to keep that promise that we’re making to the brave Ukrainians who are fighting every day, to fight for their freedom and their democracy.”

Perhaps more bizarre than Cheney’s comments is the tale of a letter that was prepared by thirty Democratic Party progressives urging US support for negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine. The letter was prepared in June but not released until last week before being quickly retracted under pressure on the following day. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said it was retracted because it “was being conflated with [the] comments” made by McCarthy over his warning about budget cutting for Ukraine. Jayapal referred to the letter as a “distraction,” but what she really meant was that her group had no desire to make common cause with the Republicans over any issue, including war and peace in an escalating conflict that is manifestly pointless.

A clueless Jayapal also took pains to contradict the message put out by her own group, emphasizing that there has been no opposition to the administration’s Ukraine policy from Democrats in Congress. She said Democrats “have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people.” She doubled down on the White House message, affirming that the war in Ukraine will only end with diplomacy after “a Ukrainian victory.”

So basically, anyone talking sense about Ukraine in Washington is being shut down by forces within the political parties themselves working together with a compliant national media that is mis-representing everything that is taking place on the ground. It is a formula for tragedy as the Biden administration has shown no sign of seeking diplomacy with Russia to end the conflict despite the president’s recent surprising warning that the world is now facing the highest risk of nuclear “Armageddon,” which he, of course, blames on Putin. Given all of that, in my humble opinion a government that is unable or unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect its own citizens while also avoiding a possible nuclear catastrophe that could end up engulfing the entire world is fundamentally evil and has lost all legitimacy. It should recognize that fact before submitting its resignation.

Poland, NATO Agree Deadly Polish Border ‘Russian Attack’ Was Errant Ukrainian Missile

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By Tyler Durden

Source: Zero Hedge

A mere less than 24 hours ago, before the dust had settled from the explosion and before investigators could come to any definitive conclusions after the deadly incident on the Polish border village of Przewodów, the Western public was already being harangued and forewarned to stay away from ‘conspiracy theories’ as the early mainstream headlines – pushed especially based on an anonymous US official in an Associated Press report – were fast out the gate with “Russian missiles hit Poland, killing two”. 

“Article 5” – the NATO collective defense treaty which many had long worried would be the first invoked act leading to WWIII, began trending on Twitter, as Western officials issued confident statements of ‘solidarity’.  Almost immediately and without evidence, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded “action” from the West over the supposed brazen aggression against a NATO member. “Hitting NATO territory with missiles… This is a Russian missile attack on collective security! This is a really significant escalation. Action is needed,” Zelensky said his Tuesday night video address.

And then as missile crash site images widely circulated on the internet, leading even Western sources to express doubt that the projectile was launched by Russia, enter no less than the foreign minister of Ukraine, who attempted to preempt what he slammed as a developing Russia-promoted “conspiracy theory”. Like with many other aspects to this war, some of the most obvious common sense questions were quickly declared “off limits” before they could even be asked. 

Warsaw then stopped just short of any talk of Article 5, but then floated Article 4 as the basis of an emergency NATO security meeting for Wednesday, which calls for “consultations” in the event a NATO country is under threat. 

But what a difference a few hours, and a skeptical refusal to blindly jump on the war! bandwagon, makes. First, as we reported overnight, President Joe Biden explicitly said that based on preliminary information, it is “unlikely” that the rocket strike in Poland originated in Russia. Oops. This as based on the available emerging evidence it seemed clear the culprit was more likely an errant Ukrainian anti-air missile. “It’s unlikely in the minds of [sic] the trajectory that it was fired from Russia. But we’ll see,” Biden had said. But this admission conveniently came well after the US president seized the ‘fog of war’ moment to unveil another massive $37 billion emergency aid package for Ukraine almost simultaneous to the border incident.

Now on Wednesday, Poland and NATO officials have also done a reversal of the initial kneejerk ‘blame Russia’ reporting which momentarily sent the world into a frenzy of anxiety over the prospect of WWIII. Polish President Andrzej Duda has said the explosion that killed two people now appears to be an “unfortunate accident” and not an “intentional attack.”

What is left to say after all of this? Here are the facts…

Recall that the initial reaction out of Moscow was that either Ukraine or Poland was staging a “deliberate provocation” in so quickly hurling blame on Russia for an aggressive act. Warsaw officials had even in the hours after demanded that Russia make an apology if it was an accident.

But President Duda alongside NATO HQ is quickly reversing the entire narrative, according to more from Axios: 

  • Duda added that the projectile that caused the blast was “most likely” Russian-made, but officials have “no proof at the moment that it was a missile fired by the Russian side.”
  • Ukraine has previously denied it was to blame for the blast and accused Moscow of a “serious escalation.” Russia also denied responsibility.

Of course, it’s always been the case that Ukraine’s anti-air missile arsenal is entirely “Russian-made” – particularly its S-300s.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a similar assessment, saying it was most likely an errant Ukrainian missile:

“Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks,” the NATO Secretary General told reporters after an emergency meeting of the alliance’s Security Council. 

He stressed that the investigation into the explosion is still ongoing but that there is “no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack. And we have no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO.”

To be expected, he quickly followed by still laying blame on Russia for the overall war and series of events which led to the deadly border explosion. “But let me be clear. This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears ultimate responsibility, as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” the NATO chief said.

Without addressing Zelensky’s prior day shrill rush to get NATO to declare military action based on collective security, Stoltenberg stressed, “this is not Ukraine’s fault.” As NATO defense officials continue to meet to determine a way forward, and as the whole drama has clearly fizzled out (again, only after it emerged it was Ukraine’s rocket), likely the alliance will quietly move on in a “nothing to see here” manner.

But what about the next time a similar border tragedy or incident on NATO-land plays out? Will the same “Russia is attacking NATO!” narrative prevail before anyone is allowed to ask simple questions? Will the war drums beat before there’s so much as a forensic investigation? Will there be a mushroom cloud before pesky rational skepticism disrupts the “consensus”? As the past ten years of war in Syria and Western intervention there have demonstrated, this is the likely inevitable scenario of how NATO and Russia will stumble into direct conflict at this rate.

In the meantime, as for the below still lingering question, we won’t hold our breath…

Researchers Find Massive Anti-Russian ‘Bot Army’

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By Peter Cronau

Source: Consortium News

A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts.

An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war.

The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian.

The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.

The research team analysed a massively unprecedented 5,203,746 tweets, sent with key hashtags, in the first two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Feb. 24. The researchers looked at predominately English-language accounts. A calculated 1.8 million unique Twitter accounts in the dataset posted at least one English-language tweet.

The results were published in August in a research paper, titled “#IStandWithPutin versus #IStandWithUkraine: The interaction of bots and humans in discussion of the Russia/Ukraine war,” by the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Science.

The size of the sample under study, of over 5-million tweets, dwarfs other recent studies of covert propaganda in social media surrounding the Ukraine war. 

The little-reported Stanford University/Graphika research on Western disinformation, analysed by Declassified Australia in September, examined just under 300,000 tweets from 146 Twitter accounts.

The Meta/Facebook research on Russian disinformation reported widely by mainstream media, including by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) a fortnight later, looked at only 1,600 Facebook accounts.

Reports on the new research have appeared in only a few independent media sites, and on Russia’s RT.  The ground-breaking study exposing a massive anti-Russia social media disinformation campaign has been effectively ignored by Western establishment media, showing how stories that don’t fit the desired pro-Western narrative are routinely buried. 

Disinformation Blitz Krieg

The Adelaide University researchers unearthed a massive organised pro-Ukraine influence operation underway from the early stages of the conflict. Overall, the study found automated “bot” accounts to be the source of between 60 to 80 percent of all tweets in the dataset. 

The published data shows that in the first week of the Ukraine-Russia war there was a huge mass of pro-Ukrainian hashtag bot activity. Approximately 3.5 million tweets using the hashtag #IStandWithUkraine were sent by bots in that first week. 

In fact, it was like someone had flicked a switch at the start of the war as pro-Ukraine bot activity suddenly burst into life. In that first day of the war the #IStandWithUkraine hashtag was used in as many as 38,000 tweets each hour, rising to 50,000 tweets an hour by day three of the war. 

By comparison, the data shows that in the first week there was an almost total absence of pro-Russian bot activity using the key hashtags. During that first week of the invasion, pro-Russian bots were sending off tweets using the #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia hashtags at a rate of only several hundred per hour.

Given the apparent long-range planning for the invasion of Ukraine, cyber experts expressed surprise that Russian cyber and internet responses were so laggard. A researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in Switzerland, said: “The [pro-Russian] cyber operations we have seen do not show long preparation, and instead look rather haphazard.”

After being apparently left flatfooted, the #IStandWithPutin hashtag mainly from automated bots, eventually fired up a week after the start of the war. That hashtag started appearing in higher numbers on  March 2, day 7 of the war. It reached 10,000 tweets per hour just twice over the next two days, still way behind the pro-Ukraine tweeting activity. 

The #IStandWithRussia hashtag use was even smaller, reaching only 4,000 tweets per hour. After just two days of operation, the pro-Russian hashtag activity had dropped away almost completely. The study’s researchers noted the automated bot accounts “likely used by Russian authorities,” were “removed likely by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”

The reaction against these pro-Russian accounts had been swift. On March 5, after the #IStandWithPutin hashtag had trended on Twitter, the company announced it had banned over 100 accounts using the hashtag for violating its “platform manipulation and spam policy” and participating in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour.”

Later that month, the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) reportedly raided five “bot farms”’ operating inside the country. The Russia-linked bot operators were reportedly operating through 100,000 fake social media accounts spreading disinformation that was “intended to inspire panic among Ukrainian masses.”

Ukrainian security forces unearthed a pro-Russian automated “bot army” operating out of an apartment in March 2022. The raid found 100 sets of GSM-gateways, left, and 10,000 sim cards, right, operating 100,000 fake bot accounts. (SBU)

Unfiltered Research

The landmark Adelaide University research differs from these earlier revelations in another most unique and spectacular way. 

While the Stanford-Graphika and Meta research was produced by researchers who have long-term deep ties to the U.S. national security state, the Adelaide University researchers are remarkably independent. The academic team is from the university’s School of Mathematical Science.

Using mathematical calculations, they set out to predict and model people’s psychological traits based on their digital footprint.

Unlike the datasets selected and provided for the Stanford/Graphika and the Meta research, the data the Adelaide University team accessed did not come from accounts that had been detected for breaching guidelines and shut down by Meta or Twitter. 

Joshua Watt is one of the lead researchers on the university team, and is a Master of Philosophy candidate in applied mathematics.

He told Declassified Australia that the dataset of 5 million tweets was accessed directly by the team from Twitter accounts on the internet using an academic license giving access to the Twitter API.

The “Application Programming Interface” is a data communication software tool that allows researchers to directly retrieve and analyse Twitter data.

The fake tweets and automated bot accounts had not been detected and removed by Twitter before being analysed by the researchers, although some were possibly removed in Twitter’s March sweep.

Watt told Declassified Australia that in fact many of the bot accounts behind the 5 million tweets studied are likely to be still up and running.

Declassified Australia contacted Twitter to ask what action they may have taken to remove the fake bot accounts identified in the University of Adelaide research. They had not responded by the time of going to press.

Critical Tool in Info War

This new research paper confirms mounting fears that social media has covertly become what the researchers call “a critical tool in information warfare playing a large role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

The Adelaide University researchers tried their best to be noncommittal in describing the activities of the fake Twitter accounts, although they had found the vast majority – over 90 percent – were anti-Russian messages. They stated: “Both sides in the Ukrainian conflict use the online information environment to influence geopolitical dynamics and sway public opinion.”

They found the two main participating sides in the propaganda war have their own particular goals and style. “Russian social media pushes narratives around their motivation, and Ukrainian social media aims to foster and maintain external support from Western countries, as well as promote their military efforts while undermining the perception of the Russian military.”

While the research findings concentrated on automated Twitter bots, there were also findings on the use of hashtags by non-bot tweeters. They found significant information flows from non-bot pro-Russian accounts, but no significant flows from non-bot pro-Ukraine accounts.

As well as being far more active, the pro-Ukraine side was found to be far more advanced in its use of automated bots. The pro-Ukrainian side used more “astroturf bots” than the pro-Russians. Astroturf bots are hyper-active political bots that continuously follow many other accounts to increase followers of that account.

Social Media Role in Boosting Fear

Crucially, the University of Adelaide researchers also investigated the psychological influence the fake automated bot accounts had on the online conversation during those early weeks of the war. 

These conversations in a target audience may develop over time into support or opposition towards governments and policies – but they may also have more instant effects influencing the target audiences’ immediate decisions.

The study found that it was the tweets from the fake “bot” accounts that most drove an increase in conversations surrounding “angst” amongst people targeted by them. They found these automated bot accounts increased “the use of words in the angst category which contains words related to fear and worry, such as ‘shame,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘threat, ‘panic.’”

By combining the “angst” messaging with messages about “motion” and geographical locations, the researchers found “the bot accounts are influencing more discussion surrounding moving/fleeing/going or staying.” The researchers believe this effect may well have been to influence Ukrainians even away from the conflict zones to flee from their homes.

The research shows that fake automated social media “bot” accounts do manipulate public opinion by shaping the discourse, sometimes in very specific ways. The results provide a chilling indication of the very real malign effects that mass social media disinformation campaigns can have on an innocent civilian population. 

Origins of Twitter Bot Accounts

The researchers report that the overwhelming level of Twitter disinformation that was anti-Russian was from bots “likely [organised] by pro-Ukrainian authorities.”

The researchers asserted no further findings about the origin of the 5 million tweets, but did find that some bots “are pushing campaigns specific to certain countries [unnamed], and hence sharing content aligned with those timezones.” The data does show that the peak time for a selection of pro-Ukrainian bot activity occurred between 6pm and 9pm across U.S. time zones.

Some indication of the origin and the targeting of the messages could be deduced from the specific languages used in the 5 million tweets. Over 3.5 million tweets, or 67 percent, were in the English language, with fewer that 2 percent in Russian and Ukrainian. 

In May 2022, the National Security Agency (NSA) director and U.S. cyber command chief, General Paul Nakasone, revealed that the Cyber Command had been conducting offensive Information Operations in support of Ukraine.

“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations,” Nakasone said. 

Nakasone said the U.S. has been conducting operations aimed at dismantling Russian propaganda. He said the operations were lawful, conducted through policy determined by the U.S. Defense Department and with civilian oversight.

Nakasone said the U.S. seeks to tell the truth when conducting an information operation, unlike Russia.

U.S. Cyber Command had deployed to Ukraine a “hunt forward” cyber team in December to help shore up Ukraine’s cyber defences and networks against active threats in anticipation of the invasion.

A newly formed European Union cyber rapid response team consisting of 12 experts joined the Cyber Command team to look for active cyber threats inside Ukrainian networks and to strengthen the country’s cyber defences.

The U.S. has invested $40 million since 2017 in helping Ukraine buttress its information technology sector. According to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the investments have helped Ukrainians “keep their internet on and information flowing, even in the midst of a brutal Russian invasion.”

Wars & Lies in Our Pockets

With the rise of the internet, war and armed conflict will never be the same. Analysts have noted that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ushered in a “new digital era of military, political and economic conflict” being manipulated by “laptop generals and bot armies.”

“In all dimensions of this conflict, digital technology plays a key role – as a tool for cyberattacks and digital protest, and as an accelerator for flows of information and disinformation,” wrote analysts at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Brussels. “Propaganda has been a part of war since the beginning of history, but never before could it be so widely spread beyond an actual conflict area and targeted to so many different audiences.”

Joshua Watt, one of the lead researchers on the University of Adelaide team that conducted the landmark study, summed it up: “In the past, wars have been primarily fought physically, with armies, air force and navy operations being the primary forms of combat. However, social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale.”

“CNN brought once-distant wars into our living rooms,” another analyst stated, “but TikTok and YouTube and Twitter have put them in our pockets.”

We are all carrying around with us a powerful source of information and news media – and also, most certainly, disinformation that’s coming relentlessly at us from influence operations run by “bad actors” whose aim is to deceive.

Facebook Hired Ex-CIA, FBI Agents to Censor Content That Deviates From Official Narrative

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So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: The Defender

Story at a glance:

  • Many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
  • So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
  • In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.
  • The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying hundreds of journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook’s values are based on the American tradition of free expression. Yet, censorship on social media has gone mainstream as part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality.

In an official Facebook video, a Meta employee identified as “Aaron” states that he’s the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook,” deciding “what is acceptable and what is not.” These gatekeepers effectively dictate what the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see when they’re scrolling their feeds.

In all, 40,000 individuals are part of Facebook’s content moderation staff, yielding incredible power over public information. Writing for MintPress News, journalist Alan Macleod explains:

“It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day.

“Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.”

But according to Macleod’s MintPress investigation, many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and DOD, to the extent that, he says, “some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.”

‘Aaron is CIA’

Facebook employee Aaron, featured in their marketing video, formerly worked for the CIA, up until July 2019, though this isn’t disclosed by Facebook. According to Macleod:

“In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA.

“For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, ‘wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,’ especially on ‘the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,’ his LinkedIn profile reads.

“None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.”

Meta is teeming with ex-government agents

Berman is not the only ex-CIA agent working at Facebook — far from it. So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.

Macleod’s investigation, for instance, uncovered the following ex-CIA agents at Facebook:

  • Deborah Berman, a trust and safety project manager for Meta, was an intelligence analyst at the CIA for 10 years.
  • Bryan Weisbard, now a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta, worked as a CIA intelligence officer from 2006 to 2010 before becoming a diplomat.

While at the CIA, his job involved leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns.”

  • Cameron Harris, a trust and safety project manager at Meta, was a CIA analyst until 2019.

Former members of other government agencies are also common at Meta. Macleod revealed:

  • Emily Vacher, who Facebook/Meta recruited to be a director of trust and safety, worked at the FBI from 2001 to 2011, becoming a supervisory special agent.
  • Mike Bradow, employed as a misinformation policy manager at Meta since 2020, worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2010 to 2020.

“USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua,” Macleod noted.

  • Neil Potts, Facebook’s vice president of trust and safety, is a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps.
  • Sherif Kamal, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a program manager at the Pentagon until 2020.
  • Joey Chan, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a commanding officer for the U.S. Army until 2021, where he oversaw more than 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.

Ex-intelligence officers in control of what you see

Meta is appearing increasingly like another branch of government put in place to mold the views of society, as with a workforce composed of ex-intelligence agents, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remain impartial.

Macleod wrote:

“Hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power.

“Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.

“Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, ‘woke’ organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial.

“It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of ‘black sites’ where prisoners are repeatedly tortured.

“Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.”

CIA history of control and corruption

For instance, U.S. intelligence agencies kept watch on Ukrainian nationalist organizations as a source of counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Declassified CIA documents show close ties between U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.

After WWII, Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most radical section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in 1929 and had the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure, independent Ukraine, and other Ukrainian Nazi leaders fled to Europe, and the CIA helped protect them.

The CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets.

While the Nuremberg trials brought justice to the leaders of fascist Germany, “the Ukrainian Nazis were spared the same fate, and some were even granted indulgences by the CIA.”

According to the film “Ukraine on Fire,” “By 1951, the Agency [CIA] excused the illegal activities of OUN’s security branch in the name of Cold War necessity.”

In another disturbing example, one of the first scientists assigned to Fort Detrick’s secret biological warfare laboratory during WWII was bioweapons expert Frank Olson. In 1953, Olson died after plummeting to the ground from a high-rise hotel room window in Manhattan.

Days earlier, he had been secretly drugged by the CIA, which claimed Olson’s death was a suicide. Decades later, however, it was revealed that Olson didn’t jump from the window — he was deliberately murdered after the CIA became concerned that he might reveal disturbing top-secret operations.

This includes the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra project, which engaged in mind control experiments, human torture and other medical studies, including how much LSD it would take to “shatter the mind and blast away consciousness.”

Controlling the media is the ‘CIA’s dream’

The collusion of the media with government agencies is nothing new. In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.

Bernstein described full-time CIA agents who worked as journalists and more than 400 U.S. journalists who secretly carried out assignments for the CIA over a 25-year period.

The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news. Activist Post added:

“Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s … dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete.

“Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird.”

As further noted by Monthly Review, the situation has only gotten worse, as evidenced by the steady stream of ex-CIA agents now heading up policy and content moderation at Facebook. “The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media,” the news outlet noted, adding:

“Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world.

“Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.”

Social media infiltrated by government agencies

To be clear, it’s not only Facebook that’s relying on former CIA agents to decide what you can see. Other social media giants are similarly affected, employing individuals from a multitude of government agencies.

“In previous investigations,” Macleod wrote, “this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council.”

However, he says, “the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.”

What does this mean for the information you see on a daily basis, assuming you’re one of the billions who take a peek or two at Facebook during the day? Macleod explained:

“The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.

“In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.

“The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s.

“And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.”

The 500 Years Old WESTERN HEGEMONY is Coming to an END and the World is about to ENTER a VERY DANGEROUS PERIOD

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For 500 years the world has been run from Europe or the US: that’s about to change and nobody is sure what its replacement will look like

By Timofey Bordachev

Source: The 21st Century

The most dramatic and unique aspect of the current state of affairs in international politics is that we cannot count on the ability of a single state, or a group of sufficiently powerful countries, to play a leadership role in the future.

This means it is difficult for us to imagine who will be able to force states to comply with the rules of conduct in their foreign policy, and how such strictures can even be enforced.

Indeed, the question of why individuals, or in this case countries, should abide by regulations is the most fundamental one in political philosophy.

And despite all the imperfections of the power method, humanity has not yet invented any other way of achieving such goals, even in minimal amounts, other than by force.

Over the last 500 years, the rules of international communication have been created within the narrow community of Western countries, first in Europe, before in the 20th century the US joined in, providing the power needed to enforce the system.

At first, this was done through the balance of power of leading European states, joined by Russia in 1762.

After the international order that had emerged in the mid-17th century came under attack from revolutionary France, control of the rules became a matter for a small group of major empires.

They, led by Russia and Britain, defeated Napoleon and in 1815 created an order which had at its heart a general agreement that mutiny in international affairs was unacceptable.

By the end of the nineteenth century, politics had become global, but the European powers, including Russia, could still control the rest through brute force and their colossal military-industrial superiority.

The dramatic events of 1914-1945 brought the US to the forefront of global politics, as the leader of the Western community on a global scale.

International institutions, starting with the United Nations, were established with the primary objective of preserving the monopoly position of the West.

This, however, required the emergence of formal institutions of justice in the form of international law, or the participation in the highest UN body, the Security Council, of the Soviet Union and China, which were inherently hostile to US and Western European interests.

The institutional form of Western power dominance has become overbearing and the main question now is whether it can be preserved.

Therefore, the collapse of US and Western European power positions in international politics entails not just a change of leadership, but a revision of the existing institutions and rules at the global level.

In other words, the entire formal international order that has emerged after World War II (and in reality over the last few centuries) will cease to exist.

It was based on a special system of rights and privileges for a limited group of great powers, and later the illusion of fairness of which was created by international institutions led by the UN.

It was this system that played the role of the main legitimizing principle of the existing world order, although in practice it was often replaced by the West’s ability to exert a decisive influence on world affairs

Thus, the collapse of international political institutions will very probably prove to be a consequence of the disappearance of their power base, whose presence has been unchallenged for several centuries.

We are now witnessing the destruction of both the formal and the real basis of the international order. In all likelihood, this process can no longer be stopped.

The coming period will be a time of defining the new global power base, and it is difficult to say yet which players, and to what extent, will become part of it.

What is important is that the top states of the present time – the US, Russia, China and India – are not close to each other, especially in terms of values and understanding of the basic principles of international rules.

The greatest problem so far is the behaviour of the US and certain Western European countries, which, for internal reasons, are pursuing an aggressive policy towards the outside world.

These states have embarked on a very troubling path of qualitative changes in the basic things that make up the social, gender and, consequently, political structures of society. For most other civilizations, this path is a challenge and will be rejected.

We also do not know the extent to which the internal development of the West depends on the spread of its ideals, as it did in previous periods.

In the event that the trends emerging in the West will, like revolutionary France, the Bolshevik regime or Nazi Germany, demand not just recognition from others, but expansion globally, the future will become very worrying.

We can already see that the conflict between the values favored by the West and the foundations of domestic legitimacy in a number of countries, is becoming a ground for aggravated political relations.

It would, however, be a mistake to hope that the other great and middle powers confronting the West are completely united in their understanding of the foundations of justice at the domestic level.

Even if Russia, India, China or Brazil now demonstrate a common understanding of the basic principles of a “proper” world order, this does not mean that they have the same vision of a better domestic order.

This is all the more true of the states of the Islamic world and other major developing countries. Their conservative values are often in conflict with those of the West, but this does not mean that they can create unity between themselves.

In other words, the new international order will, for the first time, be without a reliable link with the domestic ambitions of the leading powers, and this is indeed a qualitative change compared to all the historical eras we discussed.

Such a phenomenon seems very important because we have no experience of understanding how relations between states will develop under such conditions.

Brute force could become the only relatively tangible basis to assert the order, but this may not be enough to make the conditions imposed by it sustainable, even in the short term.

Another unique feature of today’s revolutionary situation is that the revision of the international order is not being carried out by one or a few powers – it has now become the business of the world’s majority.

The countries that make up about 85% of the world’s population are in one way or another no longer prepared to live with conditions created without their direct involvement.

That said, their resistance is often expressed without direct intention and depends on the power capabilities of the particular power.

What from the point of view of Russia or Iran looks like lack of resolve in dealing with the US may seem like a great challenge for Kazakhstan or another young sovereign country – after all, their entire socio-economic system was created to exploit a liberal world order.

The fragile states of Africa, or the former Soviet space, are far less capable of behaving consistently than the prosperous monarchies of the Persian Gulf. China, though now the second most powerful economic power, is also aware of its weaknesses.

But all this does not change the most important thing – even if the destruction of the existing status quo takes the form of soft sabotage rather than decisive military action, it does not simply reflect a general discontent with Western authoritarianism, but creates a new order, and the basic features of this are as yet undetermined.

In the coming years, most countries in the world will seek to make the most of the weakening of the power base of international politics in their self-interest.

So far, these actions constitute a constructive conflict, since they objectively undermine a system based on fantastic injustice.

However, as time goes on the US-EU bloc will weaken and lock itself away, and Russia or China will never be strong enough to take their place.

And in the perspective of the next 10 to 15 years, the international community will face the problem of replacing the power monopoly of the West with new universal instruments of coercion, the nature and content of which are still unknown to us.

A war Russia set to win

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The Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans

Breached: With the attack on the Crimean Bridge, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had warned him against. Reuters

By MK Bhadrakumar

Source: The Tribune of India

Two massive terrorist strikes misfired spectacularly and a terrible beauty is born in the Ukraine war. These two carefully planned attacks in quick succession — on Nord Stream gas pipelines and Crimean Bridge — were intended as a knockout blow to Russia. According to President Vladimir Putin, people ‘who want to finally sever ties between Russia and the EU, weaken Europe’ are behind the Nord Stream blasts. He named the US, Ukraine and Poland as ‘beneficiaries’.

Last Wednesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service FSB identified Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, as the mastermind behind the Crimean attack. The New York Times and Washington Post also pointed fingers at Kiev, quoting ‘sources’. While Nord Stream-1 has been crippled, one of the strings of Nord Stream-2 remains intact. Putin said last week that the pipeline could be restored and Russia could deliver about 27 billion cubic metres of gas. ‘The ball is on the side of the European Union, if they want — let’s turn on the tap,’ he said.

But mum’s the word from Brussels. It is a profoundly embarrassing moment for the EU. The triumphalism has vanished as Europe is threatened by years of recession caused by the blowback from sanctions against Russia, where the US insisted on the cut off of energy ties with Moscow. The EU has now become a captive market for Big Oil and is left to buy LNG from the US at the asking price, which is six to seven times higher than the domestic price in the US. (Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.)

Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering.

The Crimean Bridge attack of October 8 is much more serious. Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had repeatedly warned him against. Putin has disclosed that there have also been three terrorist attacks against the Kursk NPP. Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime.

Russia’s retaliation against Ukraine’s ‘critical infrastructure’, something Moscow refrained from so far, has serious implications. Since October 9, Russia has begun systematically targeting Ukraine’s power system and railways. Noted Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Izvestia that if this tempo was kept up for a week or so, it ‘will disrupt the entire logistics of the Ukrainian military — system for transporting personnel, military equipment, ammunition, related cargo, as well as the functioning of military and repair plants.’

The Americans are cocooned in a surreal world of their self-serving narrative that Russia ‘lost’ the war. In the real world, though, Ivan Tertel, KGB chief in Belarus, who has an insider view of Moscow, said last Tuesday that with Russia boosting its troop strength in the war zone — 3 lakh troops who have been mobilised plus 70,000 volunteers — and the deployment of advanced weaponry, ‘the military operation will enter a key phase. According to our estimates, a turning point will come in the period from November of this year to February of next year.’

Policy-makers and strategists in Delhi should make a careful note of the timeline. The bottom line is, Russia is looking for an all-out victory and will not settle for anything less than a friendly government in Kiev. Western politicians, including Biden, understand that there is nothing stopping the Russians now. The US’ weapon kitty is running dry as Kiev keeps asking for more.

When asked whether he’d meet Biden at the G20 in Bali, Putin derisively remarked on Friday, ‘He (Biden) should be asked whether he is ready to hold such negotiations with me or not. To be honest, I don’t see any need, by and large. There is no platform for any negotiations for the time being.’

However, Washington has not yet thrown in the towel and the Biden administration remains obsessed with exhausting the Russian military — even at the cost of Ukraine’s destruction. And, for the Russians too, there is still much to be worked out on the battlefield: the oppressed Russian populations in Odessa (which suffered unspeakable atrocities from the neo-Nazis), Mykolaiv, Zaporizhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov are expecting ‘liberation’. It’s a highly emotive issue for Russia. Again, the overarching agenda of ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine must be taken to its logical conclusion.

When all that is over, Putin knows Biden will not even want to meet him. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said last week, ‘Anyone who seriously believes that the war can be ended through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations lives in another world. Reality looks different. In reality, such issues can only be discussed between Washington and Moscow. Today, Ukraine is able to fight only because it receives military assistance from the United States…

‘At the same time, I do not see President Biden as the person who would really be suitable for such serious negotiations. President Biden has gone too far. Suffice it to recall his statements to Russian President Putin.’

India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order. Sadly, Indian elites are yet to purge their ‘unipolar predicament’. Europe, including Britain, is devastated and there is palpable discontent over the US’s ‘transatlantic leadership’. Indo-Pacific strategy is hopelessly adrift. New power centres are emerging in India’s extended neighbourhood, as the OPEC’s rebuff to Washington shows. A profound adjustment is needed in the Indian strategic calculus.

The endless proxy war, by design

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While privately conceding that its ally Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war,” the Biden administration keeps fueling it.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented the White House with a geopolitical crisis that it played a critical role in creating. In February 2014, Victoria Nuland, a current senior State Department official and former Dick Cheney advisor, was caught on tape plotting the installation of a new Ukrainian government – a plan, she stressed, that would involve Biden and his then-top aide, and current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Weeks later, the democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and replaced by Washington-backed leaders – including a prime minister selected by Nuland.

The regime change in Kiev made Biden the most influential US political figure in Ukraine, as underscored by the lucrative Burisma board seat gifted to his son Hunter. While the Biden family and other well-connected players profited, Ukraine fell into civil war. In the eastern Donbas region, Kremlin-backed Ukrainian rebels took up arms against a fascist-infused coup government that cracked down on Russian culture and countenanced murderous assaults on dissidents. Rather than promote the 2015 Minsk II accords — the agreed-upon formula for ending the Donbas conflict – the US fueled the fight with a weapons and training program that turned Ukraine into a NATO proxy. Influential US politicians left no doubt about their intentions. As the Donbas war raged, lawmakers declared that they were using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and vowed to “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain). In February of this year, Russia invaded to bring the eight-year fight to an end, leaving Ukraine to pay the heaviest price of all.

The Biden administration shunned multiple opportunities to prevent the Russian assault. When Russia submitted draft peace treaties in December 2021, the White House refused to even discuss the Kremlin’s core demands: a pledge of neutrality for Ukraine, and the rollback of NATO military forces in post-1997 member states that neighbor Russia. At the final round of talks on implementing Minsk II in early February, the “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, which had threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he signed a peace deal, the US made no effort to encourage diplomacy. Emboldened to escalate its war on the Donbas, the Ukrainian government then massively increased shelling on rebel-held areas in the days immediately preceding Russa’s February 24th invasion.

Looking back at the pre-invasion period, Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Bush I, now concludes that “if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO,” then Russia’s war “probably would have been prevented.”

For Washington, preventing the war would have interfered with longstanding objectives. As US policymakers have openly recognized, Ukraine’s historical, geographical, and cultural links to Russia could be used as a tool to achieve regime change in Moscow, or, at minimum, leave it “weakened.”

As Ukraine enters another winter of war, this time facing an intensified Russian assault, the Biden administration is apparently in no mood to end a crisis that it helped start.

The US-Nazi Connection since World War II: From Inspiring the Third Reich to Supporting the Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

The mafia in Washington, London, Brussels and Tel Aviv would do anything to keep their “Unipolar World Order” project in place, in fact, there are getting desperate to hold on to whatever remaining powers they have left even if it means collaborating with its worst enemies. There is a well-known ancient proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” that rings true today especially since Washington, the CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, along with Mossad and NATO have supported well-known terrorists including the Islamic State (ISIS), Al Qaeda, and other groups to overthrow governments they don’t approve of especially in the Middle East. However, their support of terrorists who were their enemies at one time or another did not start with their regime change wars against Syria or Libya, the idea of supporting its enemies began during and after World War II when the US government recruited Ukrainian Nazis to counter their new enemy, the Soviet Union. What a strange turn of events knowing that the Soviets who fought the Nazis with their American and European allies during the war were seen as a new threat. Washington and the rest of their mafia cohorts used the Nazis back then as they are now using jihadi terrorists today in their war for world domination no matter what the costs are in the long-term.

So who were the Nazis and why was Washington interested in recruiting them in the first place? For starters, the Nazis had members involved in several scientific and technological disciplines that the US government was interested in and would later utilize them to produce all sorts of weapons of war and psychological operations for its future military operations, but we will get into further details shortly. However, the Nazis did follow a far-right fascist ideology that was authoritarian that coincided with ultranationalist principals that rejected anarchy, communism, democracy, republicanism, socialism and other forms of government that was seen as a threat to their rising power. And as insane as this sounds, the Nazis also used scientific racism, or what we can call eugenics to manipulate human gene pools by separating certain groups of people between those who are considered inferior to advancing those who were deemed superior.  Then there is the element of antisemitism that was prevalent within the Third Reich. Nazism has led to genocide, torture, forced sterilizations, imprisonment of its opposition, deportations and other atrocities among those who did not fit the profile of being an ultra-nationalist especially if you did not have the racial qualities that they demanded for their movement. 

If we look back into the history of fascism, its roots were based in Europe as historians have claimed that Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ‘aka’ Napoleon III who ruled France with an iron fist from 1848 to 1852 had the elements of a fascist/Nazi state. 

America’s Extermination of Red Savages was Adolf Hitler’s Inspiration 

Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new chancellor took the lead in imposing fascist policies in his country when he came to power. Hitler’s allies also known as the Axis Alliance, Benito Mussolini of Italy and Hirohito of Imperial Japan had similar policies.   

So, what inspired this sort of ideology?  Where did the Nazis get their inspiration from?  It’s a known fact that Adolf Hitler admired America’s ways of dealing with certain groups in their short history from the Jim Crow laws against African Americans to the indigenous populations who were sent to prison camps during the American Indian wars.  John Toland’s ‘Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography’ states that “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” and that “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”  So, when did the idea of a ‘concentration camp’ came into effect? It was under US President and Democrat, Andrew Jackson who introduced “emigration depots” as part of his Indian Removal Act of 1830 where tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples who were forced into what was called ‘prison camps’ and they included the Seminoles, Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and other tribal nations mainly in the Southern part of the United States and that included Alabama and Tennessee. 

One other element of how the US model of governance that influenced Nazi Germany was the Jim Crow Laws.  James Q. Whitman, a legal scholar and author of ‘Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law’ wrote an introduction on how the Nazis viewed American race laws:

In the opening minutes, Justice Minister Gurtner presented a memo on American race law, which had been carefully prepared by officials of the ministry for purposes of the gathering; and the participants returned repeatedly to the American models of racist legislation in the course of their discussions.  It is particularly startling to discover that the most radical Nazis present were the most ardent champions of the lessons that American approaches held for Germany.  Not, as we shall see, in this transcript the only record of Nazi engagement with American race law.  In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s many Nazis, not least Hitler himself, took a serious in the racist legislation of the United States.  Indeed in Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than “the one state” that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish. 

My purpose is to chronicle this neglected history of Nazi efforts to mine American race law for inspiration during the making of the Nuremberg Laws, and to ask what it tells us about Nazi Germany, about the modern history of racism, and especially about America     

The Nazis saw US race laws as a suitable policy that they can implement on various groups such as the Jews who were a wealthy and powerful class of people which many Germans despised at the time, became non-citizens.  Native Americans, Filipinos, African Americans, and others were also considered non-citizens even if they lived in the US or its colonized territories.  But there was one aspect of US race laws that interested the Nazis and that was the anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages in about 30 US states where those who broke the law in the US received a severe criminal punishment.  US-inspired race laws were imposed on German society with the establishment of the Nuremberg laws that was passed on September 15th, 1935.  

Operation Paperclip: Why the US Government Recruited Nazis After WWII

The rumor of a nuclear war is more prevalent today more than ever before since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has taken place.  Ukraine’s actor, oh, excuse me, I meant President, Volodymyr Zelensky has called for “preventive strikes” to deter Russia from using nuclear weapons although he backtracked the claims shortly after, but he did call for for the West to hit Russia with nuclear weapons for preventative measures which was extremely dangerous rhetoric coming out of his mouth.  Speaking of nuclear weapons, do you know who originally proposed the idea of placing nuclear bombs on ballistic missiles in the first place?  It was an idea that was derived from Nazi rocket scientists who was hired by the US government during World War II.  The original program was called Uranprojekt or the “Uranium Project” for the purpose of developing nuclear technology to build weapons and reactors.  

In the last years of World War II, US intelligence agencies and the Military-Industrial Complex secretly transferred more than 1,600 Nazi scientists and their families from Germany who were experts in various fields that included rocket science, aerodynamics, chemical weapons, and medicine in what was called Operation Paperclip.  There were Nazis working for the US military who also prepared intelligence briefs creating fear and panic that the Soviets were going to take over the world which was over-exaggerated.  But what the US government feared most was that the Soviet Union under Operation Osoaviakhim with more than 2,500 former Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ) and the Soviet sector of Berlin would be one step ahead of the US government in weapons development and other areas. 

One important historical fact about America’s Nazi Scientists was the recruitment of Wernher von Braun or known by his full name as Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun who was a member of the Nazi Party and the Allgemeine SS or the “General SS” which was a major branch of Nazi Germany’s paramilitary forces.  Wernher von Braun was also the head of developing rocket technology who is considered the pioneer of rocket and space technology in the US.  He was also the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that allegedly helped launch the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.  

Nazi scientists also helped the US government and the CIA develop chemical and biological weapons programs that included the use of sarin gas and other dangerous weapons of war including VX (nerve agent) and of course, the most used biological weapon during the Vietnam war, Agent Orange.  So, in other words, the US government hired Nazi scientists for their knowledge of creating weapons of mass destruction that has inflicted damage on various populations around the world since then.  During the Vietnam war, the US military unleashed Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population causing more than 3 million people to develop birth defects and other health related problems to this day.  The Nazi scientists were indeed evil geniuses when it came to developing advanced weapons of war and that was something that the US military and the intelligence community were solely interested in and that was and still is a scary thought.      

America’s Frankenstein: The Neo-Nazis of Ukraine

As we know from the valuable lessons of history that the US government and the CIA had supported and trained Ukrainian Nazis since 1946.  The CIA had organized “Stay Behind” operations with the OUN-B (neo-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Eastern Europe and other areas to assist Ukrainian nationalist who were sent to destabilize Soviet Ukraine with covert operations such as using commandos to assassinate Soviet officials, to sabotage infrastructure and to commit acts of terrorism. 

The history of the US government and its CIA operatives shows that it supported Ukrainian war criminal Stephan Bandera to advance the Ukrainian underground movement to destabilize Soviet Ukraine, so the CIA and their Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) planned covert operations with the OUN-B and provided support to the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) for psychological warfare within the Soviet sphere of influence.   The CIA declassified their historical account of their association with Ukrainian Nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis during the Cold War in ‘Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists’ by Kevin C Ruffner detailed how the “CIA reestablished and expanded its contacts with the Ukrainians and others for covert action against the Communists and as wartime assets to be used behind Red Army lines as guerrillas, saboteurs, and resistance leaders.”  The historical account went further and stated that “The sometimes brutal war record of many emigre groups became blurred as they became more critical to the CIA.”

Fast forward to November 2013 were there were large-scale protests which was known as the Euromaidan against the policies of President Victor Yanukovych who made the decision to have closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of proceeding with the idea of having a political and economic relationship with the European Union by rejecting their free-trade agreement.  Then in February 2014, what is known as the Maidan Revolution took place that ended up in violent clashes between the protesters and the government’s security forces in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv which led to a coup against the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.  Soon after, the Russo-Ukrainian war began and the birth of the Neo-Nazi inspired Azov Battalion was established as they became the resistance against basically, anything Russian.   

On January 22nd of this year, Yahoo News who is part of the mainstream media published an article titled ‘CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades’ basically admitted that the CIA was secretly training Ukrainian forces since 2015:

While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government

According to Yahoo News, an unnamed former senior intelligence official said that “If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” and that “we’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”  One must wonder how many were actually radicalized neo-Nazis. 

In 2018, Reuters published a commentary by Josh Cohen ‘Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem’ that explains Ukraine’s problem with the Nazis filling the ranks of its National Militia.  Cohen said that in “a January 28 demonstration, in Kiev, by 600 members of the so-called “National Militia,” a newly-formed ultranationalist group that vows “to use force to establish order,” illustrates this threat.”  Cohen added that the National Militia has recruited members from the Nazi-affiliated Azov Battalion:

Many of the National Militia’s members come from the Azov movement, one of the 30-odd privately-funded “volunteer battalions” that, in the early days of the war, helped the regular army to defend Ukrainian territory against Russia’s separatist proxies. Although Azov uses Nazi-era symbolism and recruits neo-Nazis into its ranks, a recent article in Foreign Affairs downplayed any risks the group might pose, pointing out that, like other volunteer militias, Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces. While it’s true that private militias no longer rule the battlefront, it’s the home front that Kiev needs to worry about now

Cohen obviously is following the mainstream media narrative when he said that Putin seized Crimea which in fact, it was the Russian-speaking Crimean people who voted in a referendum to reunite with the Russian federation.  But to his credit, Cohen does mention the fact that the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector are held in high-regards since they fought Russian-backed separatists.  Cohen also mentioned the Azov battalion’s children’s training camps:   

When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term. Since the Crimean crisis, the militias have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces, but some have resisted full integration: Azov, for example, runs its own children’s training camp, and the careers section instructs recruits who wish to transfer to Azov from a regular military unit

Although Cohen’s claims expose Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis, he also follows the Western establishment and the mainstream media’s narrative that “the Kremlin’s claims that Ukraine is a hornets’ nest of fascists are false: far-right parties performed poorly in Ukraine’s last parliamentary elections, and Ukrainians reacted with alarm to the National Militia’s demonstration in Kiev” which are all lies.  Cohen’s statement is false, in fact, it’s a contradiction when he wrote at the beginning of his article that the “National Militia’s members were recruited from the Azov movement” but not to worry because “Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces” at least according to Cohen who sourced his misinformation from Foreign Affairs magazine which is a publication owned by the Council of Foreign Relations, a favorite of of the US political establishment. 

So, does the US government, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the CIA support Ukrainian Neo-Nazis in their ongoing war efforts against Russia today?  Well, the answer to that question should be obvious by now.