Tag Archives: Dictatorship

Julian Assange’s Imprisonment Is The Intellectual Imprisonment of Us All

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Julian Assange has been imprisoned since 2012 because he had provided, to whistleblowers who were in government and who saw and could supply to his WikiLeaks organization, items of evidence which indicated that their government was breaking its own laws, protection of their personal identity, which confidentiality they could then rely upon for their personal safety, to protect those whistleblowers against retaliation by their government. No regular ‘news’-medium could or would reliably do that, but Assange and his WikiLeaks organization could, and they always did. This is why governmental whistleblowers did go to them for this purpose.

The power that a government has to ‘classify’ documents is the power that it has to hide evidence from its public and so to rule its population as being their subjects instead of (authentically) their citizens: it is the ability to BE a dictatorship. (It might arguably be acceptable when a democracy is being invaded by a foreign country, but never — other than that — can there be governmental secrecy to protect itself unless the government is a dictatorship — NOT a democracy — in which case the Government is, itself, being the enemy of its own population.) Without such secrecy against the public, the government would be a democracy, because then the population would be voting in an authentically free information-environment where there exists uncensored information to the public, so that each individual can make one’s OWN individual judgments regarding what is true, and what is false. But, otherwise, a government is a dictatorship.

This power (classifying governmental information) is also a government’s power of legal impunity so that it can violate its own laws and know that the voting public will not know that it did. That routine power of classifying information is the intellectual imprisonment of the nation’s entire population.

Julian Assange is not a subject (‘citizen’) of the U.S. Government, nor is he a subject of the UK Government, nor is he a subject of the other two Governments (Sweden and Ecuador) that have participated in assisting America and Britain to place and keep him in varying forms of (now super-max) imprisonment for over a decade, but they have done it, during all of this time, and never yet has he been tried and convicted of anything other than his having jumped bail in 2012 on a phony rape charge that even its alleged victim admitted had been false; so, in effect, if not in reality, his very imprisonment is an example of those governments’ dictatorships — it has already been long-term imprisonment without trial. ONLY a dictatorship does that. Only a dictatorship can do that.

Assange is instead a subject of the Australian dictatorship, which has done nothing at all to assist him or to protest his being raped by ‘law’ in those foreign lands. The fact that there are not revolutions overthrowing and replacing the Governments in each one of the countries that has participated in this ‘legal’ rape of Assange is testimony to the effectiveness of the intellectual imprisonment of each one of those nations’ populations.

Assange has been in various forms of imprisonment by UK for the last ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years — instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against that champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

On June 19th, Chris Hedges headlined “The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism” and documented that the alleged ‘assurances’ that the U.S. regime had provided to the UK regime on the basis of which the latter dictatorship would be transferring Assange to a super-max prison in the United States, had as many holes in it as a ton of Swiss cheese.

ONLY in barbaric dictatorships is any of this even possible, but here it is real.

Assange’s ‘trial’ will be the trial of ‘democracy’ in whatever nation it will be executed.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Powerful New Evidence that U.S. Is A Dictatorship

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Because the U.S. Government flaunts itself as being a democracy instead of a dictatorship and it coups and invades and overthrows and replaces (“regime changes”) Governments that it declares to be dictatorships instead of democracies (the “New Cold War” isn’t about “capitalism versus communism,” but about “democracy versus dictatorship”), a crucial question now in all international political discussions is: Is the U.S. Government ACTUALLY a democracy, or does it instead only pretend to be one? In other words: Is the U.S. Government’s position in “the New Cold War” fraudulent?

The June 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, contained an article that answers this question with empirical data which has definitively crushed all of the U.S. Government’s references to itself as being a “democracy.” It is therefore significant not only because it proves that the U.S. Government is a dictatorship, but also because it proves that the U.S. position in “the New Cold War is fraudulent. The article is therefore of significance not just to Americans, but globally.

The article, which was specifically about and addressed to America, closed by saying: “We think it is time that social scientists stop pushing the equivalent of the Ptolemaic solar system. They need to recognize what almost everyone else does: that we live in a money-driven political system. No one is going to make progress by adding epicycles to voting models.” In other words: political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’ who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote) are now archaic: they are equivalent to the physical philosophers who had preceded the first physical scientist or “physicist” Galileo’s empirical demonstrations and the resulting first scientific theory (and subsequently Darwin doing the same thing in the biological sciences), that the Bible is not a book of history but instead a book of mythology mixing lies with truths in order to perpetuate and expand a particular clergy. But, now, the issue isn’t about control of the State by the clergy, but instead it’s about control of the State by the aristocracy — the nation’s super-rich. That’s what’s at issue in today’s America. Science is finally now extending outward, from its existing base, first in physics, and then in biology, to demonstrate such powerful empirical political realities as this in society — encroaching now upon the U.S. regime’s fraudulent dogma that the U.S. Government is a “democracy” instead of a “dictatorship” (a dictatorship such as it invades abroad and tries to overthrow and replace, by a ‘democracy’, some foreign nation’s Government — to add a new vassal-nation to the American empire’s ‘allies’ or actual colonies). This Emperor has no clothes, is what this academic article displays. But this particular “Emperor” represents not the clergy (such as in the time of Galileo and of Darwin), but instead the aristocracy — the super-rich (the imperialists, in the “New Cold War”). 

The article’s title is: “How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomes”. Its “Abstract” or summary says that “the relations between money and votes cast for major parties in elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from 1980 to 2018 are well approximated by straight lines.” In other words: Billionaires and other super-rich individuals can and do purchase electoral outcomes with their enormous political donations in America. It’s a “straight-line” relationship between money and winning: the candidate who is backed by the most money has the biggest (a huge) likelihood of winning; the candidate who is backed by the least money has the least (a minuscule) likelihood, and most of that money to the winning candidates comes from the few super-rich. The way to be politically successful in today’s America is, now clearly, to be more corrupt than your competitor — to be offering the Government for sale to the highest bidders (and to deliver on the promises that the politician makes to these individuals, so as to be able to remain in public office and continue to serve those masters). (And, then, after public office, come the biggest private benefits, to those former office-holders.) America is an aristocracy, not a democracy; it is one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. That’s what the article demonstrates.

Even more crushing is the same three authors’ (Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgenson, and Jie Chen) further analysis from these same data, their article “Big Money — Not Political Tribalism — Drives US Elections”, which exposes the fraudulence of the two American political Parties’ supposed ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ appeals, as being instead actually the aristocracy’s distractive political theater pumping those divides, as being, in reality, instead — at the structurally deeper level — between Republican versus Democratic Party billionaires, with Republican billionaires financing White-power appeals, and Democratic billionaires financing Black and other minority (and feminist) power appeals, all so that the nation’s population-at-large won’t be fighting instead against the aristocracy itself, which is the sole real beneficiary of this system of exploitation of the masses (exploitation of workers and consumers). Thus, the aristocracy’s victims — the public, the consumers and workers, the people who are NOT in the aristocracy — look elsewhere than at the aristocracy, to see their enemy. This latter paper isn’t behind a paywall, and it shows the same straight-line graphs relating money to power that the first-mentioned one here (which IS paywalled) did. So, one can readily see visually, here, how profoundly corrupt America’s Government actually is. (Those graphs are stunning, because the data are.)

I have previously posted articles summarizing, and linking to, a vast range of other empirical evidences, of many different types, all likewise pointing very strongly toward America’s being an aristocracy instead of a democracy, and these are some of them:

“How America’s dictatorship works”

“America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.”

“Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy”

“Politicians Don’t Actually Care What Voters Want”

“Is the U.S. actually a ‘police state’?”

“How the U.S. Government is controlled by its armaments firms”

“How the Billionaires Control American Elections”

“The Evilness of America’s Ruling Class”

All of those data should be compared to the opposite view, the U.S.-regime-imposed view, which is expressed by America’s political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’, who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote, instead of one-dollar-one-vote — which is America’s reality). Not only politicians, but also scholars, are beneficiaries of billionaires’ donations — the donations funding professorial chairs, college endowments, and ‘non’-profit foundations and ‘charities’. Such private interests thus control the public interests, to produce a deeply corrupt (privatized) body-politic. 

On which side of this debate, about the aristocracy and the public, do you stand, and why? And what do you think should be done about it? Do you favor the aristocrats, or the public? This is not a political question, but a meta-political one. It transcends existing political Parties, and all existing political prejudices. It requires authentically scientific thinking about public policies. Above all, such questions concern the existing one-dollar-one-vote (aristocracy), versus the possibility of one-person-one-vote (democracy) emerging (or re-emerging). But can dictatorship ever transform into democracy? If so, how? Of course, history provides answers, and it shows that, at least for a while, the American Revolution did transform an aristocracy here into a democracy (albeit, a limited one): it conquered Britain’s aristocracy on its land. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if one prefers aristocracy to democracy), an American aristocracy has recently risen here. America now has its own aristocracy. In science, only history provides answers. There have also, in some other countries, been revolutions overthrowing the local nation’s own aristocracy. All evidences in science are historical facts — nothing else than that. And the articles which are linked-to here are scientific: they are analyses which are based only on the relevant historical facts, displaying what history (not myth) shows. One thing that all of human history shows is that every aristocracy is based on myths. America’s aristocracy is no different. Social science is now puncturing that myth — exposing that fraud. This is significant globally, not merely locally.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

The Illusion of Freedom: We’re Only as Free as the Government Allows

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.  

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

The Empire Does Not Forgive

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The Americans, like the British and the Soviets before them, dug their own graveyard in Afghanistan.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare which centuries later inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics. 

It did not matter in 181 BC that there had been over 20 Roman emperors since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He had humiliated Rome. He had punctured its myth of omnipotence. And he would pay. With his life. Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 BC by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Nothing about empire, from then until now, has changed.

Imperial powers do not forgive those who expose their weaknesses or make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate violence, and state terror.

The current American empire, damaged and humiliated by the troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian Assange for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one voice. The killing of thirteen U.S. troops by a suicide bomber at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday evoked from Joe Biden the full-throated cry of all imperialists: “To those who carried out this attack … we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” This was swiftly followed by two drone strikes in Kabul against suspected members of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), which took credit for the suicide bombing that left some 170 dead, including 28 members of the Taliban.

The Taliban, which defeated U.S. and coalition forces in a 20-year war, is about to be confronted with the wrath of a wounded empire. The Cuban, Vietnamese, Iranian, Venezuelan and Haitian governments know what comes next. The ghosts of Toussaint Louverture, Emilio Aguinaldo, Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, Omar Torrijos, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Juan Velasco, Salvador Allende, Andreas Papandreou, Juan Bosh, Patrice Lumumba, and Hugo Chavez know what comes next. It isn’t pretty. It will be paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable Afghans. 

The faux pity for the Afghan people, which has defined the coverage of the desperate collaborators with the U.S. and coalition occupying forces and educated elites fleeing to the Kabul airport, begins and ends with the plight of the evacuees. There were few tears shed for the families routinely terrorized by coalition forces or the some 70,000 civilians who were obliterated by U.S. air strikes, drone attacks, missiles, and artillery, or gunned down by nervous occupying forces who saw every Afghan, with some justification, as the enemy during the war. And there will be few tears for the humanitarian catastrophe the empire is orchestrating on the 38 million Afghans, who live in one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world.

Since the 2001 invasion the United States deployed about 775,000 military personnel to subdue Afghanistan and poured $143 billion into the country, with 60 percent of the money going to prop up the corrupt Afghan military and the rest devoted to funding economic development projects, aid programs and anti-drug initiatives, with the bulk of those funds being siphoned off by foreign aid groups, private contractors, and outside consultants.

Grants from the United States and other countries accounted for 75 percent of the Afghan government budget. That assistance has evaporated. Afghanistan’s reserves and other financial accounts have been frozen, meaning the new government cannot access some $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank. Shipments of cash to Afghanistan have been stopped. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that Afghanistan will no longer be able to access the lender’s resources.

Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans, one in three, who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of Biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.

UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq.  Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeline Albright, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions was “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton who joked “We came, we saw, he died,” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia who after the attacks of 9/11 declared, “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.

Like Cato the Censor, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are, if history is any guide, at this moment planning to destabilize Afghanistan by funding, arming, and backing any militia, warlord or terrorist organization willing to strike at the Taliban. The CIA, which should exclusively gather intelligence, is a rogue paramilitary organization that oversees secret kidnappings, interrogation at black sites, torture, manhunts, and targeted assassinations across the globe. It carried out commando raids in Afghanistan that killed a large number of Afghan civilians, which repeatedly sent enraged family members and villagers into the arms of the Taliban. It is, I expect, reaching out to Amrullah Saleh, who was Ashraf Ghani’s vice president and who has declared himself “the legitimate caretaker president” of Afghanistan. Saleh is holed up in the Panjashir Valley.  He, along with warlords Afgand Massoud, Mohammad Atta Noor and Abdul Rashid Dostum, are clamoring to be armed and supported to perpetuate conflict in Afghanistan.

“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” Ahmad Massoud wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “The United States and its allies have left the battlefield, but America can still be a ‘great arsenal of democracy,’ as Franklin D. Roosevelt said when coming to the aid of the beleaguered British before the U.S. entry into World War II,” he went on, adding that he and his fighters need “more weapons, more ammunition and more supplies.”

These warlords have done the bidding of the Americans before. They will do the bidding of the Americans again. And since the hubris of empire is unaffected by reality, the empire will continue to sow dragon’s teeth in Afghanistan as it has since it spent $9 billion—some estimates double that figure—to back the mujahedeen that fought the Soviets, leading to a bloody civil war between rival warlords once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the ascendancy in 1996 of the Taliban.

The cynicism of arming and funding the mujahedeen against the Soviets exposes the lie of America’s humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan. One million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict with the Soviets, along with 90,000 mujahedeen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers.  But these deaths, along with the destruction of Afghanistan, were “worth it” to cripple the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahedeen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy, designed as he said to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam, taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:

We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet   Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to   make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahedeen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.

The clandestine campaign to destabilize the Soviet Union by making it “bleed for as much and as long as is possible” was carried out, like the arming of the contra forces in Nicaragua, largely off the books. It did not, as far as official Washington was concerned, exist, a way to avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of covert operations carried out by the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that made public the three decades of CIA-backed coups, assassinations, blackmail, intimidation, dark propaganda, and torture. The Saudi government agreed to match the U.S. funding for the Afghan insurgents. The Saudi involvement gave rise to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which fought with the mujahedeen. The rogue operation, led by Brzezinski, organized secret units of assassination teams and paramilitary squads that carried out lethal attacks on perceived enemies around the globe. It trained Afghan mujahedeen in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province. It shifted the heroin trade, used to fund the insurgency, from southeast Asia to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This pattern of behavior, which destabilized Afghanistan and the region, is reflexive in the military and the intelligence community. It will, without doubt, be repeated now in Afghanistan, with the same catastrophic results. The chaos these intelligence agencies create becomes the chaos that justifies their existence and the chaos that sees them demand more resources and ever greater levels of violence.

All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN or FOX, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – “Blowback,” “The Sorrows of Empire” and “Nemesis” – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.  

France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship?

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?

For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder, at times, about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman General de Gaulle, if alive today, would have likely been deeply enraged by the state of affairs in a country he loved and fought for with his heart and soul.

In the era of President Emmanuel Macron, who is merely a cynical actor, figurehead, and France’s public relation person in chief passing for a statesman, but who truly is a loyal servant of global corporatism, our revolution’s founders, as well as the subsequent republics’ principles, like the one of the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, have been insulted, slapped in the face, and assaulted by some sort of insidious and limp dictatorship, under the cover of a health crisis. A complex authoritarian strategy using the pretense of shielding French citizens, often against their will, in this new lucrative conceptual war.

This war on a virus is even more advantageous than the previous conceptual one: the war on terror. In General Macron’s war, syringes are the weapons delivery system of choice, needles like billions of little worker bees at the ready to jab you for an invitation to control freedom, and a moderate slice of happiness: the joy once you have obtained the French COVID pass Sanitaire to go to museums, movie theaters, inside restaurants, and avoid wearing masks outdoor.

French citizens should be aware that the very motto of our dear Republic, Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite is under the assault of king Ubu Macron and could, without a strong popular resistance, be decapitated by the cold blade of Macron’s virtual guillotine. In a form of dictatorial grab of power for the benefit of big biotech and big pharmaceutical companies. Macron’s pernicious pass sanitaire, just approved by France Assemblee Nationale, is a power grab by global corporate imperialism. Of course, all of it done with a wink, a tan and a smile! All of it done for the greater good of ungrateful “Gaullois refractaire” French citizens, in the continuity of the pesky Gilets Jaunes. Science lover poseur Macron, an enlightened modern day Julius Cesar, is bent on defeating obscurantism armed only with syringes to deliver his brand of salvation thru vaccines. Those who have been in the forefront of the street protest in France to resist this hybrid neoliberal dictatorship personified by Macron are the still active Gilets Jaunes.

From war on terror to war on virus: maximum profit for big tech & pharma

Forget about the good old so-called war-on-terror, fading slightly since its start in September 2001 but still a nice little threat in the background, big enough to keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash. A new conceptual global war was needed: the global war on COVID virus came at the right time. This one is even more promising, as it potentially concern the entire world population or 7.5 billion people. The COVID war has also been an easy sell for the general population, as it can be viewed as a war of necessity with humans “all in it together.” It can also provide an astronomical stream of revenue by making vaccination mandatory. In terms of profit from pandemics, vaccine companies have not been the only beneficiaries of this COVID gold rush.

Big tech companies have racked up billions of dollars at a furious pace since March 2020 and the various restrictive measures of lock-downs and curfews. The likes of Amazon, Zoom and streaming media have handsomely benefited from the imposed partial move to a virtual world. As matter of fact, worldwide stock markets have become junkies to this trend: addicted to the war on COVID benefits.

Needless to say, this vast stream of income is also potentially endless because of the virus mutation into different variants. One loses track of this Greek alphabet catalogue. It was Alpha first or the English variant, then Beta or the Brazilian one, more contagious than the rhythm of Samba, and now it is the Delta variant originally called Indian mutation. As the virus mutates, as they all do, it could potentially take us all the way to Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The side effect of the Delta variant’s rapid spread has been to allow Macron, and soon many others, head-of-states or figureheads, to tighten back the screw on fundamental liberties.

Rule by decree, states of emergency, arbitrary measures, absurd,or not, are a form of abuse of power that neoliberals like Macron are really enjoying. It is an insidious form of dictatorship under a benevolent disguise of the enlightened rulers forcing their citizenry’s behavior. In France a law is about to pass, in parliament, to make vaccine for healthcare workers across board mandatory. If they do not comply by September 15, 2021, they will be fired. In the case of France, this should be viewed as a prelude to mandatory vaccination for the entire population.

Killing personal freedom and liberties

In France, government controlled mainstream media, critiques rightly calling the Macron administration’s sweeping COVID policies a “dictature sanitaire” or healthcare dictatorship have been labeled conspiracy theorists. This is pure disinformation, as what defines a dictatorship, semantically speaking, is a government, elected or not, forcing policies on its citizens. It is done under the premise that it is an action for the benefit of the common good, but nonetheless it is the exercise of authoritarian power on a population.

Through the COVID-19 pandemics, governments have learned that, if fear and paranoia were prevalent enough, and they run a lot of polls in their respective population, any dictatorial measures could be implemented without risking much social turmoil. A great majority of people did, and would likely comply again to other lock-downs, wearing masks outdoors, curfews, but without much protest. Now the final frontier is mandatory vaccination from 12 years-old on, which will give you some sort of health passport. If approved. this pass would give people the right to live almost free. This new type of passport, given to you as a reward to your obedience, will give you access to a mythical promised land often called by Macron “the return of the happy days!”

COVID fear mongering: subterfuge to hide climate collapse threat

There is no doubt, for any rational minds, that contesting the reality of the COVID pandemic is pure conspiracy theory. More than that, it is full blown lunacy! There are two radical anti-vaxers thought processes here: firstly, deny the existence of the pandemic entirely; secondly, which might be even more disturbing, an unshakable belief that the virus was man made, and released on purpose by the like of Fauci, Bill Gates, and a hand full of mad scientists. And, of course, here’s the icing on the cake: they’re all acting on behalf of a cabal of globalist pedophiles. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that currently get you banned on social media.

As much as they are colorfully insane, this type of COVID-19 conspiracy theory denials are not, in essence, any worse than climate change crisis denial. The difference being that your average run of the mill climate change denier won’t get banned on social media. The nature of the capitalist global corporatism system, where neoliberals like Macron are leading figures, is not to create a crisis from scratch, which is either an impossible or very challenging task, but instead to take advantage of crisis either to further general policy goals, or in most cases benefit punctually from them like an opportunistic predator. This predatory aspect is after all the very nature of capitalism.

Besides the numerous advantages that Macron, his political colleagues and their patrons from the billionaire class have found in the COVID crisis, as explained above, not only huge financial gains for pharmaceutical companies, but also for tech companies involved in this sort of forced quantum leap to the virtual world. In brief, this has been a chance to brutally shock the global economy. Not to make it more equal or sustainable, but quite exactly the opposite: COVID has been an opportunity to concentrate wealth even more in fewer hands with a net result of more social inequality.

Because in today’s press one story is always used to hide another, the pandemic has been also a blessed opportunity to hide, not the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, but instead the 10,000-ton Godzilla wrecking the planet: Godzilla, in this case, being the growing certainty of an upcoming global climate collapse.

Of the “Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite” motto of the French revolution, all the great values have been trampled and gutted. With lock-downs, curfews, mandatory masks and vaccine, Liberte is now gone. In the era of Macron, a former investment banker, nobody can talk about Egalite in a country which is on its way to become almost as unequal as the United States; and last but not least, how could anyone see any Fraternite left? The community sense of brotherhood died quite sometime ago in France. There is no brotherhood left, no deep sense of connection within the nation, we are not “all in this together”.

In reality, there is only all of us, common men and women worldwide, against the billionaire class that controls the levers of the global corporate imperialist machines, with their political servant facilitators acting as heads of state. The specific names within the political class are of little significance, since they represent the identical interests. It’s a bit like the names given to the COVID variants. The Delta variant, portrayed as the top threat right now, started more modestly as India’s mutation. Who knows, perhaps in some billionaire class circles, Emmanuel Macron is just called factor X, LV or MANU.

How Billionaires Transfer Blame to Others

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on either side, Eric Zuesse writes.

Throughout history, aristocrats, and their flaks such as their ‘news’-media, cast blame downward, away from themselves who collectively control the government, and onto, instead, some minority or other mass group, who can’t even plan or function together so as to be able to control the government.

The U.S. has a two-Party aristocracy, as is clear from the “Open Secrets” list of the 100 biggest political donors in the 2020 U.S. Presidential and congressional campaigns, the “2020 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups”. Those are only these individuals’ publicly acknowledged expenditures, none of the dark political money, which, of course, is donated secretly. At the top there, of the donors’ lists, is Sheldon Adelson (who just died, on January 11th in California, and was buried in Israel), who spent far more than anyone in all of U.S. history had ever spent in any campaign cycle, $215 million, which amount far exceeded even the $82 million that he had spent in 2016, which in 2016 was second only to Thomas Steyer’s $92 million (the previous all-time highest amount donated in any campaign year). Adelson gave exclusively to Republicans, whereas Steyer gave exclusively to Democrats. Steyer in 2020 gave $67 million, which — though he was running for President in 2020, and hadn’t been running in 2016 — was only 73% of his 2016 donations, in that year, when he had been the nation’s top political donor. He was only the 5th-biggest donor in 2020, instead of #1.

The second-biggest donor in 2020 was the liberal Republican Michael Bloomberg, who ran in the Democratic Presidential primaries in order to defeat the only progressive in that contest, who was Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg spent $151 million of his own funds for that purpose. In 2016, he had spent $24 million in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and then try to beat Donald Trump.

The third-biggest in 2020 was Timothy Mellon, the son of Paul Mellon and grandson of Andrew Mellon. Timothy Mellon gave $70 million, all to Republicans.

In 2020, the top ten donors, collectively, spent $776 million to own their chunk of the U.S. Government. The second group of ten (#s 11-20) donated only $187 million; and, so, the top twenty together donated $963 million, just shy of $1 trillion. All 80 of the other top-100 donors, together, gave around $370 million, so that the total from all 100 was around one-and-a-third trillion dollars. 47 gave to Republicans; 53 gave to Democrats.

The smallest publicly acknowledged donor among the top 100, Foster Friess, gave $2.4 million, all to Republicans.

Most of these 100 donors are among America’s approximately 700 billionaires; and, even the ones who aren’t are serving and doing business with the billionaires, and therefore are to some extent dependent upon having good relations with them, not being enemies of any billionaire. All of these 100 are, obviously, also dependent upon the governmental decisions that the public officials whom they have purchased will be making, not only regarding regulations and laws, but also regarding foreign policies. For example, Friess merged his company into Affiliated Management Group, which “is a global asset management firm” that “has grown to approximately $730 billion.” Virtually all of the top 100 political donors are internationally invested, and their personal wealth is therefore affected by American foreign policies, in ways that the personal wealth of the rest of the population is not.

When the U.S. invades a foreign country, or issues sanctions against a foreign country, it benefits some American investors, not only in corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil, but even in some foreign-headquartered corporations. America’s spending around half of the entire world’s military expenses gives an enormous competitive boost to America’s billionaires, which is paid for by all U.S. taxpayers. It takes away money that would otherwise go toward the rest of the U.S. population — people who might even become crippled or killed by their military service for the benefit of America’s billionaires. Marketing this military service to the public, as “national defense” — even at a time when no nation has invaded or even threatened to invade America after 1945 — is good PR for America’s wealthiest families, regardless of whether it’s of any benefit whatsoever to other Americans. Because of the success of this PR for the military, Americans consider the U.S. military to be America’s best institution — far higher than any other part of the U.S. Government or any non-governmental institution, such as churches, the press, or the medical system. The U.S. Department of Defense is, also, by far, the most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. federal Government. This fact is carefully hidden from the U.S. public, so as to keep the public admiring the military.

Billionaires use their media, and their scholars, to point the finger of blame, for the problems that the public does know about, anywhere else than against themselves; and, though the billionaires have political differences amongst themselves, they are unified against the public, so as to continue the gravy train that they all are on.

In order for the aristocracy not to be blamed for the many problems that they cause upon the public, their first trick is to blame some minority or some other vulnerable mass within the public. Or else to blame some ‘enemy’ country. But if and when such a strategy fails, then, they and their media blame the middle class or “bourgeoisie,” in order to fool the leftists, and also they blame the “communists” and the poor, in order to fool the rightists. That’s a two-pronged PR strategy — one to the left, and the other to the right. Since the aristocracy is always, itself, fundamentally conservative, they would naturally rather blame the leftists as being “communists,” than to blame the middle class and poor, because to do the latter would place the public’s ideological focus on economic class, which then would threaten to expose the billionaires themselves as being the actual economic “elite” who are the public’s real enemy (and as being the elite against which the propaganda should instead be focused). Blaming the middle class and poor might work amongst their fellow-aristocrats, but if tried amongst the public, it would present the danger of backfiring. Consequently, there is a return to the days of Joseph R. McCarthy, but this time without communism. Thus, here is how the White House correspondent for a Democratic Party ‘news’-site, CNN, closed his ‘news’-analysis, on January 14th, under the headline “Washington’s agony is a win for autocrats and strongmen”:

Mission accomplished

Nice work, Mr. Putin.

According to a US intelligence community report, Russia’s chief goal in interfering in the 2016 election in support of Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton was to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” Four years on, there have been two impeachments and an insurrection against the US legislature. Millions believe Trump’s lies that he was illegally ejected from power, and doubt Biden’s legitimacy.

Conspiracy theorists have seats in Congress. There are serious questions about whether one of the country’s great political parties is now anti-democratic. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in a federal system that grants vast power to the states. And America’s self-appointed role as an exceptional nation and beacon of democracy is in the gutter.

Most of the disorienting events of the last few years can be blamed directly on Trump and his particular skill at tearing at the social, racial and political divides that are just below the nation’s surface. So the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin hardly deserves all the credit. But Russia, China and other autocratic nations are gaining much from Washington’s agony. They’re already using it to promote their own closed and totalitarian societies as models of comparative order and efficiency — and to beat back brave local voices calling for democracy and human rights.

In an effective declaration of victory for Russia’s espionage offensive against the US more than four years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, slid home the knife. “Following the events that unfolded after the presidential elections, it is meaningless to refer to America as the example of democracy,” he said.

“We are on the verge of reevaluating the standards that are being promoted by the United States of America, that is exporting its vision of democracy and political systems around the world. Those in our country who love to cite their example as leading will also have to reconsider their views.”

That’s propaganda from “leftist” (i.e., Democratic Party) billionaires. A good example of an independent American journalist who has been fooled by Republican Party billionaires to blame some amorphous mass of “leftists” is Sara A. Carter’s 12 January 2021 youtube “Rudy Giuliani talks big tech censorship”, blaming America’s problems on “the government,” or “the bureacracy,” and, of course, especially on Democrats. At 10:15 there, she said “My mother fled from Cuba.” Carter, as a conservative, is so obsessed with her visceral hatred of “communism,” that she interpreted America’s dictatorship as being communists, instead of as being billionaires — of both Parties: actually, fascists. In a two-Party fascist dictatorship, she fears the leftists. This is typical of propagandists on the conservative side. But propagandists on the liberal side (such as the CNN correspondent exemplified) are no better, just different.

Both propaganda-operations cast blame away from the real culprits.

In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on either side. What the public sees and hears, instead, is political theater, merely tailored to different audiences.

Living in Dark Times: I Revolt, Therefore I Am!

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By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

Source: Global Research

“Really, I live in dark times! The guileless word is foolish. (…) The laughing man has only not yet received the terrible news.” This is how Bertolt Brecht‘s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later) begins; published in June 1939.

It is one of the most important texts in German exile literature. Three generations later, we are again living in dark times.

Most citizens instinctively feel that “Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark” and “Time is Out of Joint” (Shakespeare). However, a sense of authority and a mental obedience reflex prevent them from distrusting the brazen lies of politicians, scientists and the mass media and from saying no. With this behaviour they stabilise the totalitarian system. 

Science has the task of leading people to knowledge. Depth psychology, for example, has found out what prevents people from using their common sense instead of handing over power to politicians. The clear-sighted free citizen will no longer obey: he will rebel against the unconstitutional Corona measures of governments as an outgrowth of the New World Order and will embrace the spirit of revolt. His highest goal is the realisation of freedom for all people. In this act of outrage, he finds himself: I revolt, therefore I am!

Science has to lead man to knowledge

The human community rightly expects science to alleviate the plight of people and to serve the protection of life. But there are hardly any independent scientists left, only academics (with university or college education) who kowtow. More and more scientists are hawking their knowledge and skills, and often their souls, to the military-industrial-media complex and Big Money. They even move so far away from their humanity that they help perfect the means for the general destruction of humanity. 

This is also true of psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists who could greatly enrich people’s lives. The fact that the science of psychology is still very much underestimated in our latitudes is largely due to the fact that many German psychologists of Jewish faith had to go into exile in the USA during the period of fascism. However, psychology is also eyed with suspicion because many of its representatives, while striving to help individuals, are in favour of preserving the system. They want the person seeking advice to find his way in society, to be a good and well-behaved citizen. 

In war, the state hires psychologists so that the soldier stays in line and does not run away. And if the soldier’s mind falls ill on the battlefield, he is picked up by the psychologist on home leave and prepared again so that he continues to defend the fatherland at the risk of his life. Nowadays, psychologists give dubious advice to young and old alike on how to get through their anxieties, depressions and fits of despair due to the politically imposed Corona measures in reasonably good health. The betrayal of one’s own professional ethics is pushing humanity into misery. (1)

What joy, on the other hand, when one learns that a judge in Germany has already filed a 190-page constitutional complaint with the supreme court in December 2020 because of the drastic Corona measures imposed by the federal and state governments, because it is high time to “stabilise our liberal-democratic legal order again”. (2) Or that a professor from Tübingen is leaving the German Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, a sister organisation of the National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”, which advises the German government. His reason for leaving reads: 

“I want to serve a science that is committed to fact-based honesty, balanced transparency and comprehensive humanity.” (3)

First comes the feeling, then the action!

It is very difficult to get a person to move directly for a humane, peaceful and free society. Unconscious fears and inner psychological blocks prevent him from thinking rationally. When he becomes aware of this with the help of an experienced and compassionate psychologist or psychotherapist, he can begin to “have the mind free and cast off all timidity” (Rabelais). 

This person can listen to the other person when he is given new information and one draws his attention. He can then also think his own thoughts and begin to change, to take action. For this to happen, however, his deep soul feeling, his emotional life, must be addressed. The insight of scientific depth psychology is: First comes the feeling, then the action!

For this reason, it is counterproductive and hurtful to discriminate against fearful and obedient fellow citizens as “complete idiots” or “ducking mice”. Such an assessment shows that one does not know their deeper motives. Therefore, all conceivable motivations for obedience and fearful silence must be explored – especially authoritarian and religious upbringing in the parental home and school as well as the influence of society. (4)

Often it is the very personal accounts of those affected that speak to people deep down, stir them up and make them think. A positive example is the heartbreaking story of colleague Peter König, which was published on 27 December 2020 in the Canadian online platform “Global Research” (www.globalresearch.ca): “Death by Ventilator – A Personal Story – for the World to Know.” (5)

I revolt, therefore I am!

The clear-sighted human being who has become conscious of himself, who knows himself to be the master of his destiny, can really do nothing else but rebel against the conditions of the present social order, to commit himself to the spirit of revolt. The form of life that corresponds to this is that of permanent indignation.

In 1952, the French writer, philosopher, critic of religion and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Albert Camus (1913-1960) published the book “L’homme révolté” (Man in Revolt). Camus’ thinking culminates in the call to revolt in the sense of an incessant struggle for a higher degree of freedom. To take note of the absurdity of the world is to revolt against it. In this act of revolt, man would find himself – in a variation of Descartes‘ formula: “I revolt, therefore I am! 

This person wants neither earthly promises nor reassurances about the hereafter. The announcement of a future kingdom of God on earth or in heaven is indifferent to him. In both cases one had to wait, and during this time the innocent did not stop dying. The working masses, tired of suffering and dying, would be people without God. Man’s place in the revolt would be at their side. 

For free man and his revolt in the name of human right and human dignity, there would be no higher goal than the realisation of freedom for all – and that immediately and not via the “diversions” of a dictatorship, as the revolutionary demanded. 

Notes:

(1) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27182&css; https://www.globalresearch.ca/cook-sweetens-meal-arsenic-charched-attempt-murder/5732124

(2) https://de.rt.com/inland/111310-richter-erhebt-verfassungsbeschwerde-gegen-corona/

(3) https://de.rt.com/inland/111305-aus-protest-gegen-lockdown-politik-tuebinger-professor-verlaesst-akademie-der-wissenschaften/

(4) https://www.globalresearch.ca/dispel-the-magic-belief-in-author…-power-and-violence-strengthen-community-feelings/5729560; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27120&css

(5) https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-death-by-ventlator-a-personal-storyfor-the-world-to-know/5733068

 

Censorship Is the Way that Any Dictatorship — and NO Democracy — Functions

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

No democracy can survive censorship. If there is censorship, then each individual cannot make his/her own decisions (voting decisions or otherwise) on the basis of truth but only on the basis of whatever passes through the censor’s filter, which is always whatever supports the censoring regime and implants it evermore deeply into the public’s mind — regardless of its actual truthfulness.

The public does have a mind, as a collective constituting the majority of the residents in the given land, which majority rules any democratic government. If the government doesn’t really represent the majority, it’s no democracy, at all, but instead represents other individuals, the real rulers, who might be hidden. Consequently, if a democracy exists but a censor somehow becomes allowed, and emerges into existence in a given land, then democracy will inevitably be snuffed-out there, and dictatorship will inevitably be the result — merely because censorship has been applied there, which blocks some essential truths (truths that the rulers don’t want the public to know) from reaching the public.

Nothing is as toxic to democracy as is censorship. Censorship prevents democracy.

If a dictatorship already exists in a given land, then it does so by means of censorship, because only by that means will the public be willing to pay taxes to the regime and to go to war for it and to kill and die for it. Without censorship, none of that could happen, except in an authentic democracy. An authentic democracy has no censorship.

This is why democracy is so rare. Almost every dictatorship calls itself a ‘democracy’. But a government which calls itself “democratic” isn’t necessarily democratic, but more likely it has simply fooled its public to think that it is one (such as the United States has by now been scientifically proven to be — an actual dictatorship).

Anyone who endorses censorship is a totalitarian, a supporter of totalitarianism, even without recognizing the fact. If the person fails to recognize the fact that censorship is applied only in a totalitarian regime, then that person has bought into the most basic belief of totalitarianism: the idea that censorship can be justified in some circumstances. Dictatorships always pump that lie, so as to be able to continue to exist as a dictatorship. There is no circumstance which ever can justify censorship, unless one believes that dictatorship is, or can be, good instead of bad.

If you think that some censorship is good, then you have bought into the fundamental belief that is promulgated in any dictatorship. It’s a lie, but it fools the majority of people, in a dictatorship.

No writing, nor any other statement, should ever be censored, no matter how vile it is. Indeed, if it is vile, then it needs to be exposed, not hidden; because, if it is hidden, then it will fester until it grows in the dark and finally becomes sprung upon a public who have never been inoculated against it by truth, and therefore the false belief becomes actually seriously dangerous and likely to spread like wildfire, because it had been censored before it became public. The most deadly infections are those that grow in the dark and then become released upon a population who have no pre-existing protection against it.

Every religion, and every evil regime, seeks to censor-out whatever contradicts its propaganda, and is therefore intrinsically hostile toward democracy, but the danger is always being presented not by the writers and speakers of the propaganda, but by its publishers (regardless of media: print, broadcast, or online) — they are the source of all censorship. They are the censors. The people who select what to publish, and what not to publish, are the censors. The regime’s media are what perpetrate censorship, routinely, because those media are actually essential arms of the dictatorship, even if they are not directly owned by the government but instead by the clique who actually possess control over the government because they possess control over the mainstream (and much of the non-mainstream) media and thus the public’s mind in a ‘democracy’ in order to make it the dictatorship that it actually is.

Much has been written about how this censorship has been perpetrated in the post-WW-II (post-26-July-1945) USA., such as here, and here, and here, and here. (All of that has been censored-out from the major media — they don’t report that they represent the regime instead of the public.) As a consequence of that censorship against truth, history is being revised to be ‘history’ so as to portray a false ‘reality’ to people today. And there are numerous other examples of this, by the U.S. regime, each instance, of which lying, is affirmed as being truth by the regime’s agents, but is actually nothing more than vicious lies that are spread by the regime and its agents. What goes on behind the scenes is hidden from the American public, not really in order to protect them, but purely in order to deceive them. The deception of the American people, and of the residents in all of the U.S. Government’s foreign vassal-states (or ‘allies’) in Europe and elsewhere, is extreme, in all fields of international relations. Whereas Julian Assange was the world’s strongest enemy against censorship, he has been almost ten years now under some form or another of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and torture, all without ever having been convicted of anything, and all because he is an enemy against censorship instead of a flak for censorship. And Twitter and other ‘social media’ are hiding from the public — censoring — the sheer outrageousness of it all.

The solution to the problem of lies is not censorship, it is banning censorship. On 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after Russia’s RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all. As one can see from the accompanying video interview there of him, Greenwald was like a force of nature, in that video, or (to use a different metaphor) a huge dose of mental draino for clogged minds.

This also means that issues of libel and slander are only to be addressed in the civil courts, and not, at all, in the government’s prosecutions, the criminal courts.

All censorship needs to be banned. The question therefore becomes: How can this be done? That’s a question I have never seen discussed, perhaps because it is being censored. It’s a very serious question. Any ‘political science’ which exists that has no extensive literature about this question is fake. Perhaps draino for clogged minds is needed especially for scholars.

Things are worse than we know, because censorship exists. Maybe censorship is pervasive.

So: I shall venture a solution to this problem: By law, all media which discuss national and/or international affairs will fire all editors and producers of “news,” but not the employees who have only managerial, presentational, and/or stylistic assignments, and replace these people (all personnel who select what to present and what not to present) by a randomized algorithm being applied to each topic, so that, if, for example, something is entered into a search-box, then the order or presentation of the findings will be listed either (at the user’s selection) from earliest-posted to latest-posted, or latest-posted to earliest-posted, but not by anything that is chosen or determined by the search-engine itself. (In other words: no search-engine will be allowed to censor.) On print or broadcast media, every news-piece will be controlled in real time by its audience so as to determine what the questions are and then to bring into the presentation randomly selected scientifically qualified experts regarding each such question. For example: on the question of climate-change, the experts would be individuals who have terminal graduate-level degrees in each of the related climatology sub-specialties, such as those listed at Wikipedia, but also in essential related fields such as economics (an important climatological sub-specialty that’s not listed there). If, indeed, over 90% of climatologists agree that man-made global warming is a reality, then the result of this method of selecting the “experts” who will be presented is that that viewpoint will be represented by over 90% of the experts — and this outcome would not be controlled by the given ‘news’-medium, nor affected by its advertisers. In other words: only the subject-matter and academic qualifications — no governmental positions or background — would qualify individuals as being “experts” on the given topic. If a terminal degree isn’t a qualification for expertise on a topic, then what is? Aren’t government officials supposed to be relying on them? And if, for example, the topic is Syria, then shouldn’t all individuals who have terminal degrees on Syria be the “experts” who are invited, on a randomized basis, to comment to the public about Syria-related issues? If that were the case, then perhaps many Americans would know that the U.S. and NATO “began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” “organizing defectors in Syria,” and “smuggle U.S. weapons into Syria, participate in U.S. psychological and information warfare inside Syria” to produce regime-change there, and that Syria had never posed any threat to U.S. national security. And Barack Obama was hoping for such opportunities to overthrow Syria’s Government even when he became President in 2009. If the American public didn’t know those things at the time, then perhaps America’s censorship was total — which would indicate how absolutely crucial a randomization of the public’s information-sources is, so as to replace the power that the existing mainstrean ‘news’-media have over the public’s mind, in America, and in its vassal-nations (which don’t yet include Syria). If the public do not have unprejudiced — which means entirely uncensored — information presented routinely to them, then democracy isn’t even possible.

Anyway: that is one proposed way of replacing censorship, and overcoming dictatorship. How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators? Is there no basis for hope, at all?