Fake Intellectuals Working For Think Tanks Funded By the Arms Industry Are Driving Support For War After War After War

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By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Source: Covert Action

A few days after the October 7 attacks in northern Israel, The Atlantic Council ran an inflammatory article on its website by Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer, entitled “It doesn’t matter whether Iran planned the Hamas attack—Tehran is still to blame.”[1]

The article referenced a Wall Street Journal article that claimed unfoundedly that Iran was responsible for planning the attacks, and expressed belief that even if Iran didn’t directly plan it, Iran was still responsible because it had supported Hamas in the past.

The article went on to support an aggressive military response by the U.S. and Israel that could potentially entail bombing Iran. The latter was a long-held dream of neoconservatives who have wanted to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs since it took over from the Shah, a U.S. and Israeli client, in a 1979 revolution.

Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (Clarity Press, 2023) looks at the influence of think tanks like The Atlantic Council in driving gargantuan U.S. military budgets and endless wars that have no end in sight.

The Atlantic Council has been particularly hawkish with regards to Russia, helping to fuel a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine that has decimated a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and left us on the threshold of World War III.

Diesen is an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

His book emphasizes the undue influence that think tank pseudo-intellectuals play because of their ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media as well as academia and because of their authorship of policy reports that often guide government policy.

Rather than being even-handed or in any way objective in their analysis, the think tank fellows follow a preordained narrative.

According to Diesen, their job is to manufacture consent for the goals of their paymasters—weapons manufacturers and oil companies who profit off of war along with foreign governments courting more U.S. military aid.

Diesen writes that “think-tanks have become a symptom of hyper-capitalism in which all aspects of society have become an appendage to the market. Even political influence is regulated by the free-market, in which think tanks are an important component.”

Diesen notes that a brilliant achievement of propaganda has been to convince the population that propaganda is only an instrument of authoritarian states—that the U.S. is supposedly combating—and not liberal democracies.

The think tanks help condition the public to fear foreign threats and support wars of aggression under the veneer of providing independent expert analysis.

Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, has called The Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex,” while Diesen calls it “NATO’s Propaganda Wing.”

The Atlantic Council’s financial report from 2019/2020 reveals that it received over $1 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Diesen. It also received major contributions from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. State Department, a Saudi oil billionaire (Bahaa Hariri), Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, Crescent Petroleum, and Burisma, an energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarchs which appointed Hunter Biden to its board along with former CIA counter-terrorism director Cofer Black.

The Atlantic Council’s close ties to the CIA were further evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the NED, a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.

Former CIA Director James R. Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.

Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation being spread allegedly by Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who called for more aggressive intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics. 

One of The Atlantic Council’s fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable, attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.

In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other lethal weapons.

Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, The Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.

Last February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of ’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[2] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precipitous drop in global temperatures, affecting food production across the globe.

Triggering New Cold and Hot Wars

The Atlantic Council’s support for war with Russia is characteristic of think tanks which played a crucial role in pushing the decision to expand NATO after the Cold War.

George F. Kennan and other foreign policy experts had warned against this because NATO was perceived as a hostile military alliance by Russia and it would undermine new European security initiatives involving Russia. Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara at the time also called for a new “peace dividend” by which the U.S. would reduce its military budget and address social needs with taxpayer dollars.

The overriding imperative of the weapons industry, however, was to revitalize cold war thinking to ensure continuously high military budgets and the expansion of NATO and the think-tanks were enlisted to fulfill that end.

Diesen points out that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest American think tanks, played an instrumental role in the Russia Gate hoax, which greatly contributed to the spread of Russophobia underlying the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

A primary researcher and contributor to the Steele dossier, the seminal document in Russia Gate which spread false information about Donald Trump being blackmailed because of an alleged encounter with Russian prostitutes, was an employee of the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko, who was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI.

Working under Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and renowned anti-Russian hawk, Danchenko claimed to have accrued incriminating information against Trump from a meeting with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergey Millian, who said that this meeting never actually took place.[3]

The Atlantic Council was another false purveyor of Russia Gate whose revenues increased tenfold from 2006-2016 when it began demonizing Vladimir Putin and smearing politicians like Tulsi Gabbard who advocated for cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.

Leaving out the fact that Putin revitalized Russia’s economy after the failed privatization and shock therapy initiatives of the 1990s, The Atlantic Council made people believe that Putin invaded Ukraine on a whim and would destabilize all of Europe if he was not stopped.

This kind of analysis obscures the true origins of the conflict in Ukraine and the Western role in supporting NATO expansion and a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s legally elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the outbreak of civil war.

The Atlantic Council continues today along with other think-tanks to whitewash Ukrainian war crimes, corruption and close ties with the far-right and neo-Nazis.

Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute even celebrates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition politicians and media, while hypocritically framing the struggle against Russia as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.

McFaul and others have made clear that a primary U.S. foreign policy goal is to try and delink Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russia while expanding U.S. natural gas sales in Europe.

In 2019, the RAND Corporation, the think tank of the intelligence agencies, issued a report calling for threatening NATO expansion and the arming of Ukraine in order to draw Russia into a conflict that would facilitate its overextension militarily and economically and cause the Russian government to lose domestic and international support.

The same report advocated for intensifying the ideological and information war against Russia to weaken the legitimacy and stability of its government, and voiced support for the anti-corruption crusade of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Diesen identifies as a British intelligence asset supportive of policies designed to weaken the Russian Federation.

RAND earlier had advocated for provoking civil war within Syria through covert action and informational warfare and by capitalizing on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict in order to undermine the nationalist Assad regime and draw Russia into the conflict there.

RAND also advocated for the destabilization of the Caucuses in order to cause a fissure between Russia and its traditional ally, Armenia, hence weakening Russia.

This latter goal was achieved when Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed no-confidence in Russia’s ability to protect it after Azerbaijan—heavily armed by the U.S. and Israel—invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

RAND had also issued policy recommendations for reducing Russian influence in Moldova and undercutting Russian trade with Central Asia and promoted regime change in Belarus to destabilize a Russian ally and alter the country’s orientation westward.

Following this prescription, the NED and other U.S. agencies provoked an uprising in 2020 against Belarus’ socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was demonized in western media though he helped curb inequality and poverty considerably while resisting the rapid privatization initiatives carried out by other post-Soviet leaders.

CNAS and Team Biden

One of the most influential think tanks today is the Center For a New American Security (CNAS), which received huge sums from oil companies like Chevron and BP, financial giants like Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amazon and Google from Big Tech.

CNAS’s former CEO, Victoria Nuland, was a former adviser to Dick Cheney and a key architect behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine.[4]

CNAS’ founder, Michèle Flournoy, was a board member of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy helped develop counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and contributed to convincing Barack Obama to invade Libya. More recently, she has advocated for an aggressive military buildup in the South China Sea to counter a rising China.

When Joe Biden became president, at least 16 CNAS alumni were selected for foreign policy positions. CNAS had pushed heavily for making Kamala Harris Vice President as her foreign policy team consisted of an army of CNAS think-tankers—including Flournoy.

The appointment of CNAS alumni to prestigious positions and their lobbying influence epitomizes the so-called revolving door in which high level White House and Pentagon officials who serve corporate-military interests while in power are rewarded with lucrative paying jobs in which they continue to serve the same underlying interests.

Diesen emphasizes at the end of his book that think tanks in the modern U.S. have helped to subvert democracy and obstruct U.S. foreign policy in the interests of wealthy corporations that profit from endless wars. He sees as a solution more public disclosures about the sources of think tank funding and public pressures that could help reduce their influence.

Another more radical solution is a socialist revolution that would result in the nationalization of the weapons industry, taking profit out of war, and reorganizing research, development and production toward fulfilling human needs.

  1. Panikoff is the Atlantic Council’s Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. ↑
  2. In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑
  3. The New Knowledge think-tank fabricated a story of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama state election with the intent of causing the defeat of Republican candidate Roy Moore. ↑
  4. Nuland was also a fellow at the Brookings Institute. ↑

Daydreaming While Reading Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”   – Shakespeare, Macbeth

People often laugh when I tell them that I go to sleep at 8:15 P.M.  They laugh harder when I say it’s been a lifetime habit, with unavoidable exceptions of course.  And that I wake up long before dawn.  Not because I am a dairy farmer or a baker, but because I love to sleep and all the best things I have written have been written in my dreams and refined during reveries while walking or in the early morning when all is silent still and I am alone with my musings.  I have always felt that sleeping and being awake were a seamless whole, contrary to the go-getters’ attitude that sleep and dreams are a waste of time, and I have been blessed with the ability to fall asleep as soon as I crawl into my crib and usually to remember my dreams in detail when I wake.

Jonathan Crary, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University, agrees that sleep is profoundly important and under assault today.  To enter his book, 24/7, Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, (which was first published in 2014) is for me to discover a kindred spirit, but also to enter a mind so capacious and profound that I wish to share his insights while I dream in words.

If what William Wordsworth (what a name!) wrote in 1802 was true then,

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

what possibly could one say about today?  That shopping or thinking about shopping – things or propaganda or the latest useless buzz – is all we know?  That we have become completely insane, bamboozled by a capitalist techno-electronic madness that has not only seized our hearts but convinced our minds that it is good to spend our lives – our sleep and dreams and time and praxis – in tending to machines that destroy our souls night and day without interruption.

When fifty plus years ago the monk Thomas Merton wrote that “someday they will sell us the rain,” he could today add that the hard rain that Dylan sung of then has already fallen and they now need not sell us anything because we have eaten the bitter fruit of our own corruption.  People say they want peace while they fill their nights and days with digital dreams, eliminating what Crary calls “fugitive anonymity” for the bait of 24/7 capitalist drug addiction and being “with it.”  All the clichés have it that peace begins with “you,” yet you has become them or it, the tech-life 24/7.  I hear Sinatra singing Cole Porter’s lyrics today as

Night and day, you are the one
Only you ‘neath the moon or under the sun
Whether near to me or far
It’s no matter, cell phone, where you are
I think of you day and night

And such love is reciprocated, of course, as the electronic machines help so many distracted and restless souls make it through the night.  Sort of.  Not the kind of help Kris Kristofferson sang about, but a fleshless flashing gizmo colder than a frozen heart.

It is well known that sleep disorders are widespread today with technologically produced sleep drugs (and now marijuana) used by vast numbers of people. Such drug-induced sleep, the flip side of the frenetic passivity that precedes and follows it, occurs within a larger 24/7 sleepless framework that Crary accurately notes happens “ . . . within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, [for] sleeping is for losers.”   Yet what’s to be won is never enunciated because the winners’ faces are always well-hidden as they execute the prodigious capitalist machine of control that creates docility and separation in people who find the machine life irresistible – even as it drains them of easy-going vitality and the joy of dawdling, even for an idle while.  Doing nothing has become a crime.

Last night I stepped outside an hour after sunset and was startled by a massive full moon eyeing me as it rose over the eastern hills.  Here where I dwell there are no city or factory lights to block the moon and stars as they illuminate our nights.  But most people are not so lucky, for what our ancestors once took for granted – that we are part of nature, part of the Tao – has been lost for so many as artificial lights, urbanization, and a 24/7 linguistic mind-control ideology block the thrill of being transfixed by the moon’s loving gaze, an invitation to taste the sweetness of the north wind’s cookie.  Maybe the sight of her face might rattle the televised images lodged in people’s “memories” of mechanical misbegotten men in ghost suits trampling her peaceful countenance.

The 24/7 digital life, essential to neo-liberal financialized capitalism with its day and night markets and infrastructure that allow for continuous consumption and work – total availability – is the culmination of a long process that began with the invention of artificial lighting that allowed the English cotton mills to run 24/7.  Crary brilliantly illustrates this point through the 1782 painting, Arkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, by the British artist James Derby.  This painting shows the windows of the massive mills lit like pin-points in the rural night, watched over by a full moon that illuminates the sky.  Incongruous time indeed!  He writes, “The artificial lighting of the factories announces the rationalized deployment of an abstract relation between time and work, severed from the cyclical temporalities of lunar and solar movements.”  This radical break from the traditional relation between time and work and the earth was later noted by Karl Marx as essential to the advance of capitalism since it disconnected the laboring individual from all interdependent connections to family, community, etc. while reorienting people’s feelings for time.  The English art critic John Berger, who knew that time with its corollary to place was a key to understanding so much history, put it this way: “Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those it exploits.  This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.”

Dreaming of imprisonment, I just remembered that although it seems like a delusion from so far away and long ago, I once worked in a factory by day with its huge blast furnaces, in a NYC Police precinct jail on the 4-12 P.M. shift, and all-night as a nightwatchman.   All good lessons in how American society works, although I hated them all and labored simply for the pay.  But each in its own way taught me about imprisonment, especially the watchman’s job, since it involved a jolting sense of time and staying awake all night and sleeping by day.  I was always exhausted and felt I was violating my deepest nature.

Sleep deprivation is a central component of the torturers’ methods, as so many victims of the U.S. war machine have learned.  And the Pentagon (DARPA) has spent vast sums trying to create a sleepless soldier who can go at least seven days without sleep.  As Crary notes: “ . . . scientists in various labs are conducting experimental trials of sleeplessness techniques, including neurochemicals, gene therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation.”   The war against sleep is being waged on many fronts by well-armed maniacs intent on controlling human beings for nefarious ends.  To control sleep is to control time is to confound minds, which is the goal.

Ovid, the most sensual of Roman poets, would be shocked, I imagine, to learn that Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams from his Metamorphoses, would be attacked so relentlessly by today’s madmen who never heard of his poetry.  My mind drifts to my college days translating Ovid under a weeping willow.  “My cause is better: no-one can claim that I ever took up arms against you,” he wrote and I read.  These words come back to me as I muse on the arms taken today against sleep, but I’m not sure if it’s Ovid or Bob Dylan’s lyrics in his song Workingman’s Blues #2 (from the album Modern Times) that fly to mind, for Dylan also sings “No-one can ever claim/ That I took up arms against you.”

Poor Morpheus, so many people in these modern times yearn for your arms but instead of that balm, they toss and turn in a time out of mind and out of sleep.

Crary tells us that the amount of sleep the average North American adult gets has gone from ten hours in the early twentieth century to eight hours a generation ago to six-and-a-half today.  And although people will always have to sleep, I think we can expect further reductions.  To say it is a form of torture is probably an exaggeration, but not by much.  He writes:

Behind the vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic and periodic textures of human life. . . . A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. . . . 24/7 is a time of indifference, against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within which sleep has no necessity or inevitability.  In relation to labor, it renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.  It is aligned with what is inanimate, inert, or unageing.  As an advertising exhortation it decrees the absoluteness of availability, and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement, but also their perpetual non-fulfillment.

In other words, 24/7 is a form of linguistic mind control tied to cell phones, computers, and the digital life of the Internet whose purpose is to convince people that sleep and the human body is somehow unnatural and the future lies with people accepting their marriage to machines in a disenchanted and transhuman world.  It is a lie, of course, for if that is a future people accept, there will be no future, just a desert.  “Deleuze and Guattari went to the point of comparing the order-word [24/7] to a ‘death sentence,’” writes Crary. Such an order-word or imperative is similar in this respect to the term “9/11” which was coined to send an instant message that emergencies will now be endless so we will have to monitor you forevermore.  Keep your cell phone ready.  Be on your toes, stay alert, the terrorists come at all hours – keep awake!

Crary makes a profoundly important point at a time when there is much justifiable focus on propaganda and the lies of governments and the media.  This is the power of habit involved in the acceptance of the naturalness of various devices – today, electronic screens that are omnipresent – that we semi-automatically accept as normal.  He says, “In this sense, they are part of larger strategies of power in which the aim is not mass-deception, but rather states of neutralization and inactivation, in which one is dispossessed of time.  But even within habitual repetitions there remains a thread of hope – a knowingly false hope – that one more click or touch might open onto something to redeem the overwhelming monotony in which one is immersed.  One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time.”

This is part of a modern process of psychological reductionism and a changed understanding of the nature of wishes that have excluded dreaming and daydreaming from any connection to a traditional magico-theological framework.  Science and especially the neuro-sciences have reduced all life to what is empirically provable, attenuating life and the creation of art in the service of human life.  Crary uses Jean Paul Satre’s inelegant but insightful neologism, “practico-inert,” to explain people’s inability to see the nature of the social worlds they are part of with any clarity.  “The practico-inert was thus Sartre’s way [in Critique of Dialectical Reason] of designating the sedimented, institutional everyday world constituted out of human energy but manifested as the immense accumulation of routine passive activity.”

To repeat, this frenetic passivity serves to obscure the negative historical reality of life in a 24/7 electronic spectacle that is advertised as amazingly empowering but is the reverse.

For direct experience has fallen on hard times as life today has come to be mediated through electronic gadgets.  Surprises must be googled in advance or photographed to prove their reality.  Living is never easy, not in the summertime or any other season. Tension, inattention, exhaustion, and constant busyness are the order of the day.  This should be self-evident but isn’t.  People feel it but can’t see it.

Commenting on the dying art of storytelling, Walter Benjamin, in an essay called “The Storyteller,” said the following about people’s ability to listen and remember stories that they can integrate into their own experience so they can pass them on:

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation, which is becoming rarer and rarer [written in 1936].  If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.  Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.  A rustling in the leaves drives him away.  His nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.  With this the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.  [my emphasis]

We have gone beyond rustling in the bushes to a cacophonous electronic world that makes one deaf to all else.  That it will come crashing down around our ears is hard to imagine, but it will.  It already has in the damage that it’s done.

Once upon a time . . . well, I will spare you.  It might just seem like the dream of a ridiculous man, or something Dostoevsky would write, not your normal story or even daydream.

So read Jonathan Crary’s brilliant, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep and its sequel, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World.  They will get you to think about your sleep habits and whether or not you are ever turned off and tuned out but just sometimes only in “sleep mode.”

Saturday Matinee: Greener Grass

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By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

There’s a scene in “Greener Grass,” written and directed by Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe (who also co-star), where four families in golf carts sit at a four-way intersection. Everyone gestures at everybody else: “You go,” “Oh, no, you go, I insist…” And so they sit at the intersection forever, smiles frozen on their faces, in a standoff of psychotic politeness. If you’re at a four-way intersection, someone has to go first, someone has to allow themselves to be waved on through. In “Greener Grass,” nobody dares.

DeBoer and Luebbe have created a psychotic suburban world where surface conformity is all, where everyone strives to look and be the same. The smiling faces perch on top of roiling emotions, not even necessarily anti-social emotions, just regular ones, like need, loss, pain. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is pushed to its most surreal extreme. Everyone in the town has braces. Everyone dresses the same, in pinks and light blues and light purples. Everyone drives golf carts. It’s like they live in a mini village placed on a country club golf course somewhere. 

The golf cart scene is an excellent example of what “Greener Grass” is attacking, and it’s a sharp and subversive critique: it would be great to live in a more civil world, but too much civility leads to golf carts stalled at a four-way intersection. In another scene, when two meals end up on the ground after a collision between two waiters, the patrons hasten to eat the food off the floor. To say, “Please bring me another meal” would just not be done. Every single interaction in “Greener Grass” is “competitive,” but it’s competition tamped down by friendly beaming smiles. These people live in an agony of one-upmanship.

“Greener Grass” starts out strong and strange in the first scene. Lisa (Luebbe) and Jill (DeBoer) sit in a group of parents on a blazing sunny day, watching their kids play soccer. Both women are immaculately dressed and made up, braces on their teeth. Jill holds a newborn baby and Lisa compliments the baby on being “cute.” Jill immediately hands the baby over to Lisa. Nobody seems to find this strange, not even Jill’s husband (Beck Bennett). Lisa wanted the baby, and so it’s polite to hand it over, it would be selfish to hang onto it. Later on, a neighbor (Mary Holland) expresses resentment that Jill didn’t give the baby to her. Jill clearly has mixed feelings about what she has done, and yet “mixed feelings” are not allowed in the world of “Greener Grass.” Jill’s remaining son (Julian Hilliard) is a handful, a bedwetter and a perceptive observer. His surprising transformation is matched by Jill’s total personality-disintegration.

Both DeBoer and Luebbe have performed with the improv comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade for over a decade. They bring that experience to their creation of this alternate universe, an unholy mix of “Blue Velvet,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “The Stepford Wives.” The characters in “Greener Grass” watch a lot of television and DeBoer and Luebbe have a lot of fun creating these alternate-history shows, fake commercials, fake reality shows and soap operas. “Greener Grass” displays its sketch comedy origins, and sometimes the “bits” stand out as not fitting altogether properly, maybe not as fleshed out as they should be. This is a very unsettling film, with a color palette that manages to be blazing-vivid and dreary-muted at the same time, as though it’s all a regurgitated idea of an already-regurgitated idea. (That idea of regurgitation is made explicit in one of the fake television commercials.)

There are very funny details throughout. Pay close attention to the production design. The houses all look like toy houses, with interchangeable decor. People are just “playing house,” they don’t actually live there. In the grocery store, a sign is placed in a prominent position: “Not responsible for stolen lives.” In one surreal moment, Jill and Lisa make out with each others’ husbands, not even realizing their mistake. “Greener Grass” feels a little bit like a comedy sketch drawn out past its capabilities, but the film’s target is always clear.

Like all good satires, “Greener Grass” trucks in exaggeration. Anyone “getting ahead” of anyone else is looked on with suspicion. Personal relationships have a generic quality because if you say you’re “best friends” with someone, someone else might feel left out. Being “unselfish” can be a competition, especially when done performatively. In the leveling world of “Greener Grass,” “standing out” is terrifying. It’s Tall Poppy Syndrome on amphetamines. Even as Jill deteriorates, there’s no sense here of a possible escape to another place where things are different. In “Greener Grass,” Sylvia Plath’s suffocating “bell jar” covers the whole world.

In Gaza genocide, US defends Israel’s ‘aura of power’

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As South Africa accuses Israel of genocide, the Biden administration endorses Israel’s bid to sow “fear” in Gaza’s defenseless civilians.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.

Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in US weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.

A senior administration official insists to Politico that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”

How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. According to Politico: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.

Instead, the US is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.

Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”

At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.

But just as the US is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the US is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7 attack, the officials say.”

To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.

This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.

As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”

In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.

When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”

In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”

Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.

The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”

Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former US ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of U.S. arms to Israel and the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”

Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet US public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of US political support for its extermination campaign there.

In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”

But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”

Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”

Israel Is Terrified the World Court Will Decide It’s Committing Genocide

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:International Court of Justice HQ 2006 via Wikimedia Commons

By Marjorie Cohn

Source: ScheerPost

For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on December 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

South Africa’s well-documented application alleges that “acts and omissions by Israel … are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On January 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.

In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:

(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;

(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;

(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;

(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;

(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;

(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza’s medical system; 

(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;

(8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.

South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:

“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”

Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, declared, “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.

“Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.

Israel’s Strategy to Defeat South Africa’s Case at the ICJ

Israel and its chief patron, the United States, understand the magnitude of South Africa’s ICJ application, and they are livid. Israel usually thumbs its nose at international institutions, but it is taking South Africa’s case seriously. In 2021, when the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Israel firmly rejected the legitimacy of the probe.

“Israel generally doesn’t participate in such proceedings,” Prof. Eliav Lieblich, an international law expert at Tel Aviv University, told Haaretz. “But this isn’t a UN inquiry commission or the International Criminal Court in the Hague, whose authority Israel rejects. It’s the International Court of Justice, which derives its powers from a treaty Israel joined, so it can’t reject it on the usual grounds of lack of authority. It’s also a body with international prestige.”

A January 4 cable from the Israeli Foreign Ministry says that Israel’s “strategic goal” is that the ICJ reject South Africa’s request for an injunction to suspend Israel’s military action in Gaza, refuse to find that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and rule that Israel is complying with international law.

“A ruling by the court could have significant potential implications that are not only in the legal world but have practical bilateral, multilateral, economic, security ramifications,” the cable states. “We ask for an immediate and unequivocal public statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that YOUR COUNTRY rejects the outragest [sic], absurd and baseless allegations made against Israel.” 

The cable instructs Israeli embassies to urge diplomats and politicians at the highest levels “to publicly acknowledge that Israel is working [together with international actors] to increase the humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as to minimize damage to civilians, while acting in self defense after the horrible October 7th attack by a genocidal terrorist organization.”

“The State of Israel will appear before the ICJ at The Hague to dispel South Africa’s absurd blood libel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spokesperson Eylon Levy declared. South Africa’s application is “without legal merit and constitutes a base exploitation and contempt of court,” he said.

Israel is pulling out all the stops, including disingenuous accusations of “blood libel,” an anti-Semitic trope that erroneously accuses Jews of the ritual sacrifice of Christian children.

“How tragic that the rainbow nation that prides itself on fighting racism will be fighting pro-bono for anti-Jewish racists,” Levy added ironically. He made the astonishing claim that Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza is designed to prevent the genocide of the Jews.

As the old adage goes, when you’re being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and act like you’re leading the parade.

The Biden regime rose to defend its staunch ally Israel. U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby lambasted South Africa’s ICJ application as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Kirby claimed, “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat,” echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion.

Kirby’s contention that Israel is trying to prevent genocide is particularly absurd, given the fact that since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Israeli forces have killed at least 22,100 Gazans, about 9,100 of whom are children. At least 57,000 persons have been wounded and at least 7,000 are reported missing. Untold numbers of people are trapped beneath the rubble.

Provisional Measures Against Israel Can Have Immediate Impact

South Africa is requesting that the ICJ order provisional measures (interim injunction) in order to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention.” South Africa is also asking the court “to ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide.”

The provisional measures South Africa seeks include ordering Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza” and to cease and desist from killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, inflicting on them conditions of life intended to destroy them in whole or in part, and imposing measures to prevent Palestinian births. South Africa wants the ICJ to order that Israel stop expelling and forcibly displacing Palestinians and depriving them of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies and assistance.

The judicial arm of the United Nations, the ICJ is composed of 15 judges elected for a nine-year term by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. It is not a criminal tribunal like the International Criminal Court; rather it resolves disputes between countries.

If a party to the Genocide Convention believes that another party has failed to comply with its obligations, it can take that country to the ICJ to determine its responsibility. This was done in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia, in which the Court found that Serbia violated its duties to prevent and punish genocide under the Convention.

The obligations in the Genocide Convention are erga omnes partes, that is, obligations owed by a state towards all the states parties to the Convention. The ICJ has stated, “In such a convention the contracting States do not have any interests of their own; they merely have, one and all, a common interest, namely, the accomplishment of those high purposes which are the raison d’être of the Convention.”

Article 94 of the UN Charter says that all parties to a dispute must comply with the decisions of the ICJ and if a party fails to do so, the other party may go to the UN Security Council for the enforcement of the decision.

An average ICJ case from start to finish can last several years (it was nearly 15 years from the time that Bosnia first filed its case against Serbia in 1993 to the issuance of the final judgment on the merits in 2007). However, a case can have an immediate impact. The filing of a case in the ICJ sends a strong message to Israel that the international community will not tolerate its actions and seeks to hold it accountable.

Provisional measures can be issued quickly. For example, the ICJ ordered measures 19 days after the Bosnian case was initiated. Provisional measures are binding on the party against whom they are ordered, and compliance with them can be monitored by both the ICJ and the Security Council.

Judgments on the merits rendered by the ICJ in disputes between parties are binding on the parties involved. Article 94 of the United Nations Charter provides that “each Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of [the Court] in any case to which it is a party.” The judgments of the court are final; there is no appeal.

Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures will take place on January 11 and 12 at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.

Other States Parties to the Genocide Convention Can Join South Africa’s Case

Other states parties to the Genocide Convention can either request permission to intervene in the case filed by South Africa or file their own applications against Israel in the ICJ. South Africa’s application identifies several countries that have referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They include Algeria, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Türkiye, Venezuela, Bangladesh, Egypt, Honduras, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Pakistan and Syria.

On January 5, Quds News Network tweeted, “Jordan’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi, announces that his country backs South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ. He added that the Jordanian government is working on a legal file to follow up on the case. Turkey, Malaysia, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) had announced that they back the case too.”

The newly formed International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine, endorsed by more than 600 groups throughout the world, has convened to urge states parties to invoke the Genocide Convention.

The coalition contends, “Declarations of Intervention in support of South Africa’s invocation of the Genocide Convention against Israel will increase the likelihood that a positive finding of the crime of genocide will be enforced by the United Nations such that actions will be taken to end all acts of genocide and those who are responsible for the acts will be held accountable.”

During the first week of January, delegations of “grassroots diplomats,” spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War and RootsAction, mounted a campaign across the United States urging nations to submit Declarations of Intervention in South Africa’s case against Israel in the ICJ. Activists traveled to 12 cities, visiting UN missions, embassies and consulates from Colombia, Pakistan, Bolivia, Bangladesh, the African Union, Ghana, Chile, Ethiopia, Turkey, Belize, Brazil, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Haiti, Belgium, Kuwait, Malaysia and Slovakia.

“This is the rare case where collective social pressure urging governments to support the South African case can be a sharp turning point for Palestine,” said Lamis Deek, a Palestinian attorney based in New York, whose firm convened the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation’s Commission on War Crimes Justice, Reparations, and Return. “We need more states to file supporting interventions — and we need the court to feel the watchful eye of the masses so as to withstand what will be extreme U.S. political pressure on the Court.”

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, noted, “The increasing global isolation of Israel and the U.S. and their European allies is an indicator that this is a key moment for popular movements to move their governments in the direction of taking these steps and being on the right side of history.” Indeed, since October 7, millions of people throughout the world have marched, protested and demonstrated in support of Palestinian liberation.

RootsAction and World Beyond War have created a template that organizations and individuals can use to urge other states parties to the Genocide Convention to file a Declaration of Intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Apocalypse Now: The Government’s Use of Controlled Chaos to Maintain Power

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

Figure One: Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers…throw them into darkness for a few hours and then you just sit back and watch the pattern. 

Figure Two: And this pattern is always the same? 

Figure One: With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find…and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back…and watch…and let them destroy themselves. — “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Twilight Zone

Will 2024 be the year the Deep State’s exercise in controlled chaos finally gives way to an apocalyptic dismantling of our constitutional republic, or what’s left of it?

All the signs seem to point in this direction.

For years now, the government has been pushing us to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—has manifested itself in the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today.

Why is the Deep State engineering this societal madness? What’s in it for the government?

What is playing out before us is a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps the populace fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of standing united in defense of our freedoms.

It’s not conspiratorial.

It’s a power play.

Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, understood the dynamics behind this power play.

In the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Serling imagined a world in which the powers-that-be carry out a social experiment to see how long it would take before the members of a small American neighborhood, frightened by a sudden loss of electric power and caught up in fears of the unknown, will transform into an irrational mob and turn on each other.

It doesn’t take long at all.

Likewise, in Netflix’s apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s studio), unexplained crises lead to a technological blackout that leaves the populace disconnected, disoriented, isolated, suspicious, and under attack from mysterious ailments and each other.

As one of Leave the World’s characters speculates, the culprit behind the escalating catastrophes, which range from WiFi outages and mysterious health ailments to cities under siege from rogue forces, may be the result of a military campaign intended to destabilize a nation by forcing people to turn against each other.

It’s really not so far-flung a scenario when you consider some of the many ways the government already has the ability to manufacture crises in order to sow fear, fuel hysteria, destabilize the nation and institute martial law.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture health crises. Long before COVID-19 locked down the nation, the U.S. government was creating lethal viruses and unleashing them on an unsuspecting public.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture civil unrest and political upheaval. Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been using agent provocateurs to infiltrate activist groups in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” them.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture economic instability. As the national debt continues to rise upwards of $34 trillion, with little attempt by federal agencies to curtail spending, it stands as the single-most pressing threat to the economy.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture environmental disasters. Deployed in 1947, Project Cirrus, an early precursor to HAARP, the government’s weather-altering agency, attempted to disable a hurricane as it was moving out to sea. Instead of weakening the storm, however, the government steered it straight into Georgia, resulting in millions of dollars in damaged properties.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture communications blackouts. Internet and cell phone kill switches enable the government to shut down communications at a moment’s notice. It’s a practice that has been used before in the U.S. In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels (reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone). In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked (again, same rationale). And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down (this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man).

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture terrorist attacks. Indeed, the FBI has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

The government has the tools and the know-how to manufacture propaganda aimed at mind control and psychological warfare. Not long ago, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation came in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military had been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users. Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda. In fact, the CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

We must never forget that the government no longer exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, “we the people” are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, trap and control us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms.

It’s telling that in Leave the World Behind, before disaster strikes, the main characters—on their way to a family vacation—are utterly oblivious, connected to their electronic devices and insulated from each other and the world around them. Adding to the disconnect, the family’s teen daughter, Rose, is fixated on binge-watching episodes of Friends, even as the world falls apart around them. As TV critic Jen Chaney explains, the sitcom’s presence in the story “underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of ‘leaving the world behind.’”

We’re in a similar escapist bubble, suffering from a “crisis of the now,” which keeps us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

Yet in addition to being distracted by our electronic devices and diverted by bread-and-circus entertainment spectacles, we are also being polarized by political theater, which aims to keep us divided and at war with each other.

This is the underlying cautionary tale of Leave the World Behind and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”: we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control.

A popular meme circulating a while back described it this way:

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government has never stopped shaking the jar.

Sickening Profits — The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.

It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from illnesses and diseases resulting from the food system by having stakes in the pharmaceuticals sector as well. For them, it’s a win-win situation.

Lobbying by agrifood corporations and their well-placed, well-funded front groups ensures this situation prevails. They continue to capture policy-making and regulatory space at international and national levels and promote the (false) narrative that without their products the world would starve.

They are now also pushing a fake-green, ecomodernist agenda and rolling out their new proprietary technologies in order to further entrench their grip on a global food system that produces poor food, illness, environmental degradation, dependency and dispossession.

The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt to benefit powerful interests, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels export-oriented commodity monocropping and regional food insecurity.

This model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness and the eradication of biodiversity. And it relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets and agrifood corporations’ needs ahead of rural communities, local markets, on-farm resources and food sovereignty.

In addition, there are also the broader geopolitical aspects of food and agriculture in a post-COVID world characterised by food inflation, hardship and multi-trillion-dollar global debt.

There are huge environmental, political, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed. A paradigm shift is required.

All of this is set out in Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth (December 2023), published as an open-access (free) e-book by Global Research (it can be read directly on the Global Research website or downloaded as a pdf) and is a follow up to the author’s book Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order (2022).

That book contains substantial sections on the agrarian crisis in India and issues affecting the agriculture sector. Aruna Rodrigues — prominent campaigner and lead petitioner in the GMO Mustard Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India — stated the following about the book:

This is graphic, a detailed horror tale in the making for India, an exposé on what is planned, to hand over Indian sovereignty and food security to big business.”

‘Sickening Profits’ continues in a similar vein. By describing situations in Ukraine, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it is another graphic horror tale in the making that is being intensified across the globe. The question is: Can it be stopped?