The Ukraine War: Understanding And Resisting The Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda

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By Robert J. Burrowes

In a televised address on 24 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to order Russian military forces to invade Ukraine in what he labeled a ‘special military operation’ to defend the recently declared self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and ‘to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine’. Watch President Putin’s speech here or read a transcript here.

Since the invasion started, there has been a huge amount of commentary on it from a vast range of authors with a remarkably diverse range of perspectives. Beyond this, the cascading impacts of the war along with the changes that have been precipitated at various levels, have already been far-reaching and will be increasingly devastating for humanity as a whole.

Here I will focus on some of the more obscure aspects of the deeper agenda that is driving this conflict to manifest in the way that it is occurring. This reflects my own long-standing interest in understanding how elite power manifests in the world.

As I have explained previously, since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, ‘ordinary’ people have been engaged in an ongoing struggle against elites, whether local, imperial, religious, economic, national or, now, global. See ‘Why Activists Fail’. But whatever the context, the elite intention is always the same: to kill undesired populations and/or control the lives of everyone else by depriving them of their fair share of political, economic, social and ecological resources.

Since about 1500CE, the intensity of this conflict has deepened considerably with elites intent on killing off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslaving those left alive. This has been done through imperial conquest precipitating genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples, wars, control of food supplies and other resources to generate mass starvation, medical technologies, the deployment of lethal technologies notably now including 5G and, most recently, an injectables program, ostensibly to protect against a ‘virus’. See ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite Is Using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future’.

In essence, elite intention has never really wavered. To reiterate: Whatever ideology supposedly guided any elite in a particular context, the elite has usually wanted a substantial proportion of any local human population killed off and the bulk of those left alive reduced to slavery, in one form or another, while endlessly commandeering planetary resources for elite use.

The only differences between earlier eras and the present is that the assault on humanity is now genuinely global and it is in its final stage.

Unfortunately, too, this assault is happening in plain sight with the bulk of the population completely unaware of what is taking place and those who are at least concerned and resisting in some way focused on the ‘smoke and mirrors’ distraction presented by the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative and the antics of politicians.

Which means that the Elite’s kill and control agenda, being implemented through the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’, proceeds with minimal resistance. And those not killed by the various measures being used to depopulate humanity will be enslaved in a technological prison from which there will be no escape. After all, the absolutely minimum requirements for effective resistance are life, a mind with free will and food to eat, none of which can be taken for granted any longer.

So Where Does the War in Ukraine Fit into All This?

Well, at immediate and great personal cost to those soldiers and civilians killed or otherwise adversely impacted by the fighting, the war is being used as a smokescreen to obscure a highly orchestrated sequence of events that accelerate the Global Elite’s kill and control agenda, in just the same way that the Covid-19 narrative has done.

Using two wealthy members of the World Economic Forum – President Vladimir Putin of Russia (see ‘All Putin’s Men: Secret Records Reveal Money Network Tied to Russian Leader’) and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine (see ‘What Pandora Papers revealed about Zelensky offshore accounts and funding from Ukranian kleptocracy’) – backed by a supporting cast of key elite agents and unwitting accomplices throughout institutions such as NATO, the European Union, the US and other governments, the corporate media and elsewhere, the military conflict rages on in clear public view, with much debate about various measures being implemented as part of this conflict – such as sanctions by many countries on Russia – while several vitally important outcomes are obscured from general view or accepted as ‘unfortunate’ consequences of the war rather than planned measures of the elite to kill or control us all.

‘What outcomes are these?’ you might ask.

Well, while this war rages on, generating enormous emotion among those siding with either Russia or Ukraine – and thus, in extremely simplified terms, outraged by either NATO’s precipitating encroachment and military buildup over recent decades or Putin’s ‘unjustified’ aggression – here is a short, partial list of rapidly accelerated key outcomes, all compliments of this war, that bring you closer to death or technological slavery in the near term, wherever in the world that you live.

  1. The war, by accident (given that other key elite agents are well aware of what is happening and probably won’t precipitate it deliberately), could ‘go nuclear’, and kill off a huge proportion of humanity and, depending on its severity, starve most or even all of those left alive. But, assuming this outcome is avoided, there are plenty of other unpalatable options to contemplate.
  2. Russia and Ukraine supply 30% of the world’s wheat and significant percentages of other grains, sunflower oil, fertilizers, oil and gas, and strategic minerals (such as palladium and platinum), among other products. The war, as well as the sanctions imposed on Russia by many countries, has exacerbated the already seriously interrupted supply chains of these products, which either cannot be alternatively sourced or not as cheaply. And the previously generated supply chain collapses in all sectors, causing food (and other) shortages, price hikes and energy crises around the world, cannot be restored in any timeframe that is short. Millions will starve to death because of these supply chain collapses.

According to one recent report: ‘We believe we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions.’ See ‘Farmers on the Brink’.

To repeat: ‘we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions.’

And the thoughtful account by Riley Waggaman includes this comment from Anatoly Nesmiyan: ‘That is why the “special [military] operation” is a minor episode of little importance against the background of impending cataclysms…. The fact that Ukraine and Russia have been used as a tool speaks not so much about the mind of the West, but about the impenetrable stupidity of the direct participants in the current competition.’ See ‘Up next: Global food crisis?’

If you want to keep close track of the destruction of your food supply, now being dramatically accelerated by the war in Ukraine, check out the daily updates shared by the Ice Age Farmer (Christian Westbrook) on various channels.

  1. Intended deaths from the injectable continue to climb rapidly, despite concerted efforts by elite agents such as the World Health Organization, politicians, official medical systems, the pharmaceutical industry and the corporate and government media to conceal these deaths from public view. For just two recent attempts to compile a list of reports, see ‘UPDATED: How Many People Are the Vaccines Killing?’ and ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Massacre: 68,000% Increase in Strokes, 44,000% Increase in Heart Disease, 6,800% Increase in Deaths Over Non-COVID Vaccines’.

Of course, many eminent experts, heavily suppressed by the corporate media, have long ago warned that these ‘death shots’ will ‘decimate humanity’. For a small sample, see ‘The Truth about the Covid-19 Vaccine’, ‘A Final Warning to Humanity’, ‘J’Accuse! The Gene-based “Vaccines” Are Killing People. Governments Worldwide Are Lying to You the People, to the Populations They Purportedly Serve’, ‘COVID Shots to “Decimate World Population,” Warns Dr. Bhakdi’ and ‘BREAKING – Over 150,000 people including 600 children have died due to the Covid-19 Vaccines in the USA’.

But a quick check reveals that the Russian and Ukrainian governments have both enthusiastically participated in the entire Covid-19 ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ scam imposing the familiar range of measures – mandatory vaccinations, QR codes… – implemented elsewhere to fulfil the elite’s kill and control agenda.

This includes elite Russian participation in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) which, as noted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his recent book The Real Anthony Fauci is ‘the real-life authoritative collective for imposing rules during the… pandemic. This so-called “independent” monitoring and accountability body’s purpose was to validate the imposition of police state controls by global and local political leaders and technocrats…: subduing resistance, ruthlessly censoring dissent, isolating the healthy, collapsing economies, and compelling vaccination during a projected worldwide health crisis.’ See ‘I Believe We Are Facing an Evil That Has No Equal in Human History’ and ‘Sputnik V is a scam: “A socioeconomic experiment on the Russian population”’.

The government of Ukraine is no different, using coercive measures to force vaccination on its citizens despite an unusually high level awareness of the dangers of vaccines – leading to substantial resistance – among the general population. See ‘As COVID Surges, Protesters Hit Streets of Ukraine to Decry Vaccine Mandates’.

Are you keeping track of the ever-lengthening list of those who are injured or killed by the injection, which is taking place in the background of this war?

  1. The rollout of 5G, essential to elite creation of their surveillance and control grid, gathers pace under cover of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative and now the Russia/Ukraine war. Of course, the electromagnetic radiation will also kill vast numbers of people, both outright and via decimation of the insect population (thus further reducing global food supplies), and the surveillance and control grid it will make possible will trap you in your home and immediate neighborhood, with any semblance of human freedom and human rights consigned to memory. See ‘Sleepwalking into Hell: The Global Elite’s Technological Coup d’état Against Humanity’ and ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate The Extinction Of All Life On Earth?’
  2. And, unless you have been ignoring the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’, you are well aware that the Global Elite plans to transform 200 areas of human life using technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing). These technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and human privacy reducing those left alive to transhuman slavery in which you will have a digitized personal identity. This digitized identity will be connected to your banking, health, legal and other records to establish your personal ‘social credit score’, like that used in China, to determine what you can, and cannot, do while living in your ‘smart city’ eating food-like substances synthesized from trash and insects. See ‘The Great Reset’.

In Ukraine, the government is simply using the war to rapidly expand what was already ‘one of the most expansive government-run digital ID systems in the world’, making the country the ‘world leader’ in some aspects of digitization via their Diia app, with all that this portends for the human future. See ‘How Ukraine Government Is Converting Digital ID System Into Wartime Tool’. Of course, there will be no backtracking from this at war’s end.

Russia is equally committed to its digitization program, although it is also playing a key role in developing the elite-controlled banking system, complete with digitized currencies, that will supersede the current model. It is hosting the annual Cyber Polygon simulations. See ‘Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup’.

If all of this sounds preposterous, here are two other geopolitical analysts who offer a similar conclusion based on their own analyses: ‘The Ukraine Crisis: What You Need to Know’ and ‘Ukraine-Russia: A Proxy-War, Advancing the Agenda of the Great Reset?’

What about the War in Ukraine?

Like many people, I am concerned about the war too. In drawing attention to the deeper elite program that is rapidly trapping humanity in a nightmarish future, I am not suggesting that the war does not matter.

But I also know from long experience that the anti-war movement remains devoid of the capacity to act to prevent or halt wars because it lacks the analysis, strategic orientation, tenacity and courage to do so. I wish it was otherwise.

Still, if you want to participate in a strategy to end this war, particularly given the possibility of it morphing into a longer term insurgency – see ‘Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda’ – you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

And if you want to participate in a strategy to end all war, you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Having noted this, let me highlight that key aspects of these strategies are the need to recognize that violence is built deeply into human society by a parenting model that, in essence, is based on demanding obedience from a child, rather than nurturing the child’s Self-will. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And this generates a society in which many people are so adversely impacted that they are rendered effectively insane. Unfortunately, some of these people end up in situations where they exercise extraordinarily levels of control. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Hence, if you want to reduce violence and war in the future, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

So What Does All of this Mean?

Whatever your concerns about the war in Ukraine however, I encourage you to not let it distract you from acting powerfully to defeat the deeper elite agenda. If you get caught up in the war hysteria and fail to defend yourself and those you love, you will soon find that everything about the life you have known has been taken away, irrespective of the outcome of this war.

So What Can You Do?

Ideally, if you wish to strategically resist the elite agenda, your most powerful option is to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign.

The simplest version of this strategy is explained on the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine is a tragedy for those immediately impacted but for all of us as well. Particularly if we do not recognise the threat it conceals and act powerfully in response to this deeper threat.

For 5,000 years elites have been pitting us against each other – at work, on the battlefield, in life generally – by drawing attention to, and magnifying, superficial differences (based on gender, race, religion, class, nationality….), exacerbating conflicts and convincing us that they are acting in our own best interests when we do what they tell us via their agents in government, the corporate media and elsewhere, and that human solidarity is worth nothing.

Well, one day very soon now, we would do well to realize that in the end only three things matter: Human solidarity is essential if we are to survive this existential crisis, our true enemy is not each other but the insane Global Elite, and we must act powerfully and nonviolently if we are to defeat it.

A human future worth living will be short otherwise.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

The Future Is Here: Dystopian Movies Fit for a Dystopian World

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”—Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.

Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”

Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report which was released 20 years ago—we are now trapped into a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2022.

Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.

Both worlds—our present-day reality and Spielberg’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. And bodily privacy and integrity has been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from an oblivious American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television and internet zombies, but we have been warned about such an ominous future in novels and movies for years.

The following 15 films may be the best representation of what we now face as a society.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, this film depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned, and firemen ironically are called on to burn contraband books—451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question his book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now pre-censors speech. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The plot of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated ship is orchestrated by a computer system—known as HAL 9000—which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point in human evolution, technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous and human beings will become mere appendages of technology. In fact, at present, we are seeing this development with massive databases generated and controlled by the government that are administered by such secretive agencies as the National Security Agency and sweep all websites and other information devices collecting information on average citizens. We are being watched from cradle to grave.

Planet of the Apes (1968). Based on Pierre Boulle’s novel, astronauts crash on a planet where apes are the masters and humans are treated as brutes and slaves. While fleeing from gorillas on horseback, astronaut Taylor is shot in the throat, captured and housed in a cage. From there, Taylor begins a journey wherein the truth revealed is that the planet was once controlled by technologically advanced humans who destroyed civilization. Taylor’s trek to the ominous Forbidden Zone reveals the startling fact that he was on planet earth all along. Descending into a fit of rage at what he sees in the final scene, Taylor screams: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you.” The lesson is obvious, but will we listen? The script, although rewritten, was initially drafted by Rod Serling and retains Serling’s Twilight Zone-ish ending.

THX 1138 (1970). George Lucas’ directorial debut, this is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with “pain prods”—electro-shock batons. Sound like tasers?

A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that cracks down on its citizens sporadically. Alex is a violent punk who finds himself in the grinding, crushing wheels of injustice. This film may accurately portray the future of western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force.

Soylent Green (1973). Set in a futuristic overpopulated New York City, the people depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit. Sound familiar?

Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade “replicants” (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is now dominated by mega-corporations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). Based upon a Philip K. Dick novel, this exquisite Ridley Scott film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell’s dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state. The government controls the masses by controlling their thoughts, altering history and changing the meaning of words. Winston Smith is a doubter who turns to self-expression through his diary and then begins questioning the ways and methods of Big Brother before being re-educated in a most brutal fashion.

Brazil (1985). Sharing a similar vision of the near future as 1984 and Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, this is arguably director Terry Gilliam’s best work, one replete with a merging of the fantastic and stark reality. Here, a mother-dominated, hapless clerk takes refuge in flights of fantasy to escape the ordinary drabness of life. Caught within the chaotic tentacles of a police state, the longing for more innocent, free times lies behind the vicious surface of this film.

They Live (1988). John Carpenter’s bizarre sci-fi social satire action film assumes the future has already arrived. John Nada is a homeless person who stumbles across a resistance movement and finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see the real world around him. What he discovers is a world controlled by ominous beings who bombard the citizens with subliminal messages such as “obey” and “conform.” Carpenter manages to make an effective political point about the underclass—that is, everyone except those in power. The point: we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other up to start an effective resistance movement.

The Matrix (1999). The story centers on a computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias “Neo,” who begins a relentless quest to learn the meaning of “The Matrix”—cryptic references that appear on his computer. Neo’s search leads him to Morpheus who reveals the truth that the present reality is not what it seems and that Anderson is actually living in the future—2199. Humanity is at war against technology which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and Neo is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control. Neo soon joins Morpheus and his cohorts in a rebellion against the machines that use SWAT team tactics to keep things under control.

Minority Report (2002). Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg, the film offers a special effect-laden, techno-vision of a futuristic world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring you under control. The setting is 2054 where PreCrime, a specialized police unit, apprehends criminals before they can commit the crime. Captain Anderton is the chief of the Washington, DC, PreCrime force which uses future visions generated by “pre-cogs” (mutated humans with precognitive abilities) to stop murders. Soon Anderton becomes the focus of an investigation when the precogs predict he will commit a murder. But the system can be manipulated. This film raises the issue of the danger of technology operating autonomously—which will happen eventually if it has not already occurred. To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. In the same way, to a police state computer, we all look like suspects. In fact, before long, we all may be mere extensions or appendages of the police state—all suspects in a world commandeered by machines.

V for Vendetta (2006). This film depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. A vigilante named V dons a mask and leads a rebellion against the state. The subtext here is that authoritarian regimes through repression create their own enemies—that is, terrorists—forcing government agents and terrorists into a recurring cycle of violence. And who is caught in the middle? The citizens, of course. This film has a cult following among various underground political groups such as Anonymous, whose members wear the same Guy Fawkes mask as that worn by V.

Children of Men (2006). This film portrays a futuristic world without hope since humankind has lost its ability to procreate. Civilization has descended into chaos and is held together by a military state and a government that attempts to keep its totalitarian stronghold on the population. Most governments have collapsed, leaving Great Britain as one of the few remaining intact societies. As a result, millions of refugees seek asylum only to be rounded up and detained by the police. Suicide is a viable option as a suicide kit called Quietus is promoted on billboards and on television and newspapers. But hope for a new day comes when a woman becomes inexplicably pregnant.

Land of the Blind (2006). In this dark political satire, tyrannical rulers are overthrown by new leaders who prove to be just as evil as their predecessors. Maximilian II is a demented fascist ruler of a troubled land named Everycountry who has two main interests: tormenting his underlings and running his country’s movie industry. Citizens who are perceived as questioning the state are sent to “re-education camps” where the state’s concept of reality is drummed into their heads. Joe, a prison guard, is emotionally moved by the prisoner and renowned author Thorne and eventually joins a coup to remove the sadistic Maximilian, replacing him with Thorne. But soon Joe finds himself the target of the new government.

All of these films—and the writers who inspired them—understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan, flag-waving, zombified states, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the sleepwalking masses (who remain convinced that all of the bad things happening in the police state—the police shootings, the police beatings, the raids, the roadside strip searches—are happening to other people) will have to wake up.

Sooner or later, the things happening to other people will start happening to us.

When that painful reality sinks in, it will hit with the force of a SWAT team crashing through your door, a taser being aimed at your stomach, and a gun pointed at your head. And there will be no channel to change, no reality to alter, and no manufactured farce to hide behind.

As George Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”

Mariupol Theatre bombing – victims of a Nazi-orchestrated false flag?

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Wall Will Fall

On Wednesday, March 16th, Russia’s Tass news agency headlined “Azov battalion militants blow up Mariupol theater building — Defense Ministry”, and reported:

Militants of the Azov nationalist battalion blew up the Mariupol theater building, which they rigged with explosives earlier, Russian Defense Ministry announced Wednesday.

The Defense Ministry debunked Kiev’s accusations of an airstrike on the theater building, where civilians could have been held hostage.

“During daylight on March 16, Russian aviation carried out no missions involving strikes on ground targets within Mariupol limits. According to the verified information, militants of the Azov nationalist battalion carried out another bloody provocation by blowing up the rigged theater building,” the Ministry of Defense said.

The next day, CNN bannered “Survivors emerge from rubble of Mariupol theater bombed by Russia” and reported:

People sheltering in a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol are emerging from the building after it was bombed, the former head of the Donetsk region said Thursday.

Hundreds of people were thought to have taken shelter in the theater amid the ongoing Russian siege of Mariupol.

CNN had not asked Russia’s Ministry of Defense to show them the evidence they had backing up the claim that “During daylight on March 16, Russian aviation carried out no missions involving strikes on ground targets within Mariupol limits.” Apparently, CNN was interested ONLY in information that was being supplied by Ukraine’s government. Of course, ‘reporting’ in that way is only propaganda — not journalism.

See the detailed and fully documented account of this matter, here, which persuades me that Tass got it right, and that CNN got it wrong. I have checked out all of its linked-to sources and found them to be not only extremely credible but some of them are thoroughly mainstream, such as Deutsche Welle (the German public broadcaster), Newsweek, The Nation, Stanford University, and Amnesty International.

Striking satellite imagery taken on Monday of the Mariupol Drama Theatre—hit by an air strike today. 1,200 civilians were sheltering in it. The image shows that the word “children” is written in Russian in large white letters in front of & behind the theatre. (Source: @Maxar)

One source in it that is not mainstream is a posting by the breakaway republics in Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbass region, and it’s an announcement, dated March 12th, that:

The second provocation Zelensky is preparing for pictures in Western media, after unsuccessful provocation with Maternity hospital, [is that]Ukrainian forces … got Mariupol women, children and old people into the Drama Theater building in order to show the whole world that [after it will be blown up] the place was bombed by the Russian Federation.. … Don’t be silent! We need to make more people know about this[preparation]!

How could the pro-Russian side have known about this in advance? If Russia had had any reason for bombing that theater, then the Ukrainian government’s account of the matter would be worth considering. But none of that is the case here. The breakaway republics had gotten advance warning from resident(s) in nearby Mariupol — maybe from relative(s)s of hostages being held in that theater.

That rounding-up of those Mariupol civilians did occur, and Mariupol is (and has always been) ruled by the government in Kiev — the government that The West has been and is arming; so, this slaughter of those civilians definitely was either carried out by the government there (Ukraine) OR ELSE by the invading Russian forces. The question is: whom to believe? However, if Russia’s forces did it, then WHY would the pro-Russian breakaway republics have warned on March 12th that this would be happening there? And WHY would Russia have selected that specific building to blow up? It had no military value, and only civilians were inside it. They had been inside it ever since March 12th.

Indeed: WHY would only civilians have been there? Why would no Ukrainian government forces (which control the city) have been there? What military purpose would have been served by doing this except to fool yet more people in The West to send to the Ukrainian government yet MORE weapons so they can kill the invading Russian troops?

That city is controlled by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion.

Mariupol happens to be a city just outside the Donbass breakaway region from Ukraine in Ukraine’s southeast, and its citizenry were publicly protesting against the February 2014 forced overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Mariupol’s residents had overwhelmingly voted in the latest Ukrainian Presidential election, which was in 2010.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had hired Ukraine’s highly organized racist-fascist anti-Russian “Right Sector” and other far-right forces to prepare and lead the 2013 “Maidan” demonstrations against Yanukovych and subsequently to be appointed themselves to the top national-security positions in the new, U.S.-installed, post-coup Ukrainian government. Here is a video, on 9 May 2014, showing Mariupol residents protesting peacefully against the overthrow of their President, and being shot by the newly installed government’s police:

“Age restricted” video link here.

The pro-coup-regime (i.e., pro-U.S.) national Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post headlined “Avakov says 21 dead in Mariupol after clashes between police and separatists” and reported violent actions by the opponents of this new government:

Kremlin-backed “terrorists” kidnapped Mariupol police chief Valeriy Androshchuk during today’s firefight over the local police headquarters, said lawmaker Oleh Liashko on his Facebook page who is in the Donetsk Oblast city at the moment.

He “fought until the end” but “terrorists” took him from the “burning police station in a car that was cut off by a sports utility vehicle,” wrote Liashko. “The fighters stabbed the jeep driver with a knife and placed Androshchuk inside the car trunk and drove off in an unknown direction.”

Liashko was one of Ukraine’s leading far-right politicians and a strong backer of the U.S.-installed government; so, Liashko called the protesters “terrorists”; and, soon thereafter, the Ukrainian government officially introduced what they called an “Anti Terrorist Operation” in order to kill as many resisting people as possible anywhere in the country.

(To resist the coup-installed government was to be a ‘terrorist’.) This was virtually the beginning of Ukraine’s civil war. But, even earlier, on 2 May 2014, the new government’s murderous character was displayed in Odessa (in south-central Ukraine), where Right Sector forces trapped an unknown number of protesters in the Trade Unions Building — and burned them alive in it. The most heart-rending compendium of videos of that was shown here. This horrific event immediately sparked the protests throughout Ukraine’s southeast, which started on May 9th of 2014, which began the civil war.

So, it’s not surprising that, in the current battles, between the invading Russian soldiers and the soldiers of today’s Ukraine (the defenders of the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime), human shields are being used for protecting (‘shielding’) the latter (America’s proxy-forces in Ukraine).

The news-reports on March 17th, about the bombing of 1,200 civilians inside the Mariupol theater, was making a different use of the local civilians — not as human shields, but instead as victims of a false-flag attack by the Azov Battalion, in order to blame Russia so as to be able to receive yet more weapons from The West.

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

In the Age of Materialism, it is said that people have their orientation outwards and towards the boundary that separates humanity from the lower orders – the animals and plants – rather than the inner orientation towards Source. And it is within the great depth of materialism that represents the final stage of a grand cycle where the world reaches its ‘extremity of separation’ in a period of remoteness from the sacred impulse.

Unknowing and blind to this, the materialist believes they experience no loss because progress has given humanity much more than it ever had, and that material progress shall be their salvation. At such a time, it symbolizes that humankind has reached a limit of distance (an extremity) from its essential nature – from its centre – and thus from its sacred home. And the modern person – especially the product of westernized modernism – has gone so far from their essential nature that they have ceased to think of it or question its existence, and even fabricate and invent a pseudo-truth for its material reality.

Many now see these times of deep materialism as representing the ‘eleventh hour’ for humanity; as a decisive moment before a dramatic turn of events in its trajectory. Others, like myself, have referred to these times as representing humanity’s ‘dark night of the soul.’ I wrote the following passage over a decade ago:

We have now entered the crisis window, the transition phase – that heroic journey into the underworld – where we will be forced to experience a shamanic initiatory experience, perhaps a near-death experience, before we can emerge as an adolescent species with a new, more mature mind. Until we reach that stage, however, we will have to struggle with the death throes of the old mind, as old systems cling to power and global infrastructures attempt to remain in control of a world in transition…the ‘dark passage’ that we are now venturing into. This is part of our collective rites of passage: it will shake us, reshuffle and reorientate a great deal of life on the planet; and it will also, hopefully, catalyze and prepare us for a psychophysical transformation. The reorientation required – both psychological and physical – may be far from linear…as we wrestle with the cloak of the old world system that clings onto a modus operandi, refusing to let go without a fight. Despite our glorious, gleaming, polished achievements that the world displays with pride, our current systems (social, cultural, political and economic) are remarkably anachronistic, cunningly deceptive, opaque, and in dire need of renovation. Yet in order to sweep out the brushwood we may be forced to endure a metaphorical, and literal, dark night of the soul. The next 20 years cannot be the same as the last 20 years. Change is upon us rapidly, even if we are not aware of its pace.[1]

We were not aware of the pace as I wrote those words; and many are no more aware now even though that pace has dramatically quickened. At each cyclical renewal we are faced with prophecies of the ‘End Time’ that also throw up images and imaginations of the world apocalypse. Yet such an apocalypse is not a fatality but a revelation – a revealing. It marks the disintegration of one narrated cycle and the emergence of new mythological voices as heralding a departure from the dying throes of an aeon of time. At such a moment, the aftermath of an apocalypse/revealing lies a great expanse where reality itself requires a re-stitching together and reimagining. A new operation of worlding comes into being. There is a change of guard of the architypes: the social-status figures of leaders, politicians, and bankers are replaced by the metaphysician, the mystic, and the prophet.[2]

It is said that the nearness of an end of an era brings with it a sense of otherworldliness. It is at such threshold moments where the veil thins to allow a penetration, a mergence, of energies from various sources, physical and metaphysical. Dimensions start to crossover and intervene; boundaries begin to dissolve.  It is then that the illusion of ordinary, consensus reality is fast breaking down; this very same illusion that shielded many people from infra-psychic incursions. According to philosopher Rene Guenon, the extremity of materialistic beliefs and practices leads to a ‘solidification of the world,’ and it is this solidification that causes ‘fissures’ to open up through which ‘infra-psychic’ forces enter. In other words, humanity is invaded by the specters of its own psyche.

The reality of unknown psychic powers, and their influences, from beyond our world has always been part of human knowledge – only that now it comes out from its occult shell and more into visibility. The dissolution of the physical world, its fragmentation, chaos, and disarray, catalyzes the psychic manifestations that represent the phase of the dissolution of the present cycle. The dissolution of the present cycle of materialism only begets a necessary re-creation of the world. The hardening and extremity of corruption of our physical world must also lead to a degree of psychological fracturing if a new psycho-physical environment is to unfold. That is, unless there are cracks within the highly conditioned collective psychosphere of humanity, how can the light get it?

Every human soul is infused with a sense, a knowing, of the Transcendent – a filament or spark of Source – of the Alpha and Omega of all existence. Ignorance of it only exists on this physical, earthly plane, and obscured by the degraded forces of deep materialism. The inner faculty which recognizes this is often referred to as the Heart, and is the human being’s highest faculty – although it lies dormant or slumbering within most people. This is an incorruptible, inviolable element within the human – a ‘supramental organ of knowledge’ – that is beyond mind or intellect.

The sense of the transcendent implies an inner urge, longing, or pull to transcend the limitations of this plane of reality. These urges are the signs of the times – the moment of the eleventh hour. The contact with Source energy is available (gives) to those who are aware of it: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ (Matthew 25:29). It is at the eleventh hour, from a dissolution to a new beginning, that we understand also the phrase: ‘and the last shall be first.’

Saturday Matinee: The Thousand Faces Of Dunjia

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“The Thousand Faces of Dunjia” (2017) is a Chinese fantasy film directed by Yuen Woo-ping; scripted and produced by Tsui Hark, and starring Chengpeng Dong, Aarif Lee, Ni Ni, and Zhou Dongyu as the central core of a ragtag group whose mission is to defend humankind from ancient aliens. It’s a remake of Yuen’s 1982 film The Miracle Fighters.

Watch The Thousand Faces Of Dunjia on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/12064080

Waltzing to Armageddon

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The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.

By Chris Hedges

Source: Information Clearing House

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying. 

Peace has been sacrificed for U.S. global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen. 

So, what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse? So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted? So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth? In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the U.S. will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays Americans, if not immolation in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood.

Pandora’s Box of Evils

The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler.

The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked.

Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third, behind China and the United States.

NATO battlegroups are being doubled in size in the Baltic states to more than 6,000 troops. Battlegroups will be sent to Romania and Slovakia. Washington will double the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland to 9,000. Sweden and Finland are considering dropping their neutral status to integrate with NATO.

This is a recipe for global war. History, as well as all the conflicts I covered as a war correspondent, have demonstrated that when military posturing begins, it often takes little to set the funeral pyre alight. One mistake. One overreach. One military gamble too many. One too many provocations. One act of desperation.

Russia’s threat to attack weapons convoys to Ukraine from the West; its air strike on a military base in western Ukraine, 12 miles from the Polish border, which is a staging area for foreign mercenaries; the statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda that the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons, by Russia against Ukraine, would be a “game-changer” that could force NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from direct military intervention — all are ominous developments pushing the alliance closer to open warfare with Russia.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

Staggering Hypocrisy

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body:

“We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”

Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the U.S. military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliott Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the U.S.-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.
“There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow:

“It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP will need to be spent on defense. We will need more conventional strength in ships and planes. We will need to match the Chinese in advanced military technology, but at the other end of the spectrum, we may need many more tanks if we have to station thousands in Europe, as we did during the Cold War. (The total number of American tanks permanently stationed in Europe today is zero.) Persistent efforts to diminish even further the size of our nuclear arsenal or prevent its modernization were always bad ideas, but now, as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weaponry and appear to have no interest in negotiating new limits, such restraints should be completely abandoned. Our nuclear arsenal will need to be modernized and expanded so that we will never face the kinds of threats Putin is now making from a position of real nuclear inferiority.”

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate.

China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.

The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.