Tag Archives: geopolitics

Climb Down From the Summit of Hostile Propaganda

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Public reactions to an open letter from academics, journalists and politicians asking for co-existence with Russia show many Americans don’t buy the media’s bellicose spin, as Norman Solomon explains.

By Norman Solomon

Source: Consortium News

Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.”

Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”

A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought — and that makes it all the more hazardous. After President George W. Bush declared “You’re either with us or against us,” many Americans gradually realized what was wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.

Since early 2017, the U.S. mass media have laid it on thick with the rough political equivalent of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro — “the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition,” in the words of Wikipedia. The Russiagate frenzy is largely about punching up contrasts between the United States (angelic and victimized) and Russia (sinister and victimizer).

Countless stories with selective facts are being told that way. But other selectively fact-based stories could also be told to portray the United States as a sinister victimizer and Russia as an angelic victim. Those governments and their conformist media outlets are relentless in telling it either way. As the great journalist I.F. Stone observed long ago, “All governments lie, and nothing they say should be believed.” In other words: don’t trust, verify.

Often the biggest lies involve what remains unsaid. For instance, U.S. media rarely mention such key matters as the promise-breaking huge expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the brazen U.S. intervention in Russia’s pivotal 1996 presidential election, or the U.S. government’s 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or the more than 800 U.S. military bases overseas — in contrast to Russia’s nine.

An Open Letter for Sanity

For human survival on this planet, an overarching truth appears in an open letter published last week by The Nation magazine: “No political advantage, real or imagined, could possibly compensate for the consequences if even a fraction of U.S. and Russian arsenals were to be utilized in a thermonuclear exchange. The tacit pretense that the worsening of U.S.-Russian relations does not worsen the odds of survival for the next generations is profoundly false.”

The initial 26 signers of the open letter — “Common Ground: For Secure Elections and True National Security” — included Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, writer and feminist organizer Gloria Steinem, former UN ambassador Gov. Bill Richardson, political analyst Noam Chomsky, former covert CIA operations officer Valerie Plame, activist leader Rev. Dr. William Barber II, filmmaker Michael Moore, former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, former U.S. ambassador to the USSR Jack F. Matlock Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Alice Walker and Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, former senator Adlai Stevenson III, and former longtime House Armed Services Committee member Patricia Schroeder. (I was also one of the initial signers.)

Since its release five days ago, the open letter has gained support from a petition already signed by 30,000 people. The petition campaign aims to amplify the call for protecting the digital infrastructure of the electoral process that is now “vulnerable to would-be hackers based anywhere” — and for taking “concrete steps… to ease tensions between the nuclear superpowers.”

We need a major shift in the U.S. approach toward Russia. Clearly the needed shift won’t be initiated by the Republican or Democratic leaders in Congress; it must come from Americans who make their voices heard. The lives — and even existence — of future generations are at stake in the relationship between Washington and Moscow.

Many of the petition’s grassroots signers have posted comments along with their names. Here are a few of my favorites:

*  From Nevada: “We all share the same planet! We better learn how to do it safely or face the consequences of blowing ourselves up!”

*  From New Mexico: “The earth will not survive a nuclear war. The weapons we have today are able to cause much more destruction than those of previous eras. We must find a way to common ground.”

*  From Massachusetts: “It is imperative that we take steps to protect the sanctity of our elections and to prevent nuclear war anywhere on the earth.”

*  From Kentucky: “Secure elections are a fundamental part of a democratic system. But this could become meaningless in the event of thermonuclear war.”

*  From California: “There is only madness and hubris in talk of belligerence toward others, especially when we have such dangerous weapons and human error has almost led to our annihilation already more than once in the past half-century.”

Yet a wide array of media outlets, notably the “Russiagate”-obsessed network MSNBC, keeps egging on progressives to climb toward peaks of anti-Russian jingoism. The line of march is often in virtual lockstep with GOP hyper-hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The incessant drumbeat is in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

Meanwhile, as Dr. King said, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent co-existence or violent co-annihilation.

 

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Life-giving Light and Those Who Would Snuff it Out

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By John Andrews

Source: Dissident Voice

The concluding sentence of Roy Medvedev’s superb account of Russia during the Stalin years reads:

When the cult of Stalin’s personality was exposed [in the XXth and XXIInd Congresses in 1956 and 1961 respectively] a great step was made to recovery.1

It’s a vital point, similar to that made by the incredible truth and reconciliation commission event that followed the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, and that point is this: before any society can really advance it must recognise and admit to itself the mistakes and crimes perpetrated by its own trusted leaders. Or, as Rosa Luxemburg once put it:

Self-criticism – ruthless, harsh self-criticism, which gets down to the root of things – that is the life-giving light and air of the proletarian movement.2

Yet self-criticism of our own governments is almost impossible. Infinitely more effective than state censorship – which can restrict criticism – is self-censorship, and that’s pretty much what we have: a society which is incapable of seriously challenging those in power, let alone calling them to account for any wrongdoing – not through any state-imposed censorship, but through creating a culture that’s utterly brainwashed into believing the perfection of their constitution and therefore refusing to even imagine its very considerable imperfections. Whilst we do not have the domestic death squads and concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia to enforce domestic obedience, we still have loyal populations that are almost as effectively programmed to believe the perfections of their state leaders and their institutions as many Germans and Russians were during the Hitler and Stalin years.

In Britain, for example, in 2015 when the leader of the Green Party Natalie Bennett was provocatively questioned about the Party’s well-known opposition to monarchy she remarked,

I can’t see that the Queen is ever going to be really poor, but I’m sure we can find a council house for her — we’re going to build lots more.

This obviously whimsical comment, although factually reasonable, provoked the following headline in The Independent: ‘We would evict Queen from Buckingham Palace and allocate her council house,’ say Greens

Similar sensationalist headlines led in almost every newspaper and TV news broadcast. Green Party membership, which had been surging until that moment, immediately fell off a cliff. I was a membership secretary for our local Green Party branch at the time and had been signing up new members at the rate of about two a week. New memberships not only stopped completely, but some who had just joined us immediately cancelled their memberships. And this from people who would see themselves as progressives. No need to guess how Tory voters, who comprise most voters, reacted to Bennett’s quip. Such is the level of brainwashing in a supposedly democratic country about the perfection of the British monarchy, and its unchallengeable position as unelected head of state.

But it’s not just Britain that has to endure a majority of brainwashed citizens. I remember seeing a TV documentary about the time of the illegal Iraq War in 2003. The programme was about heroic US marines bravely defending western freedom, by helping to kill defenseless Iraqi civilians. Some of the heroes were interviewed about the hard time they were having, and the one that will forever stick in my mind implied that no amount of personal suffering was too great for him. “I would slit my own throat for my president”, he said. So Iraqi civilians didn’t have much chance.

The marine’s remark reminded me of a quote in Medvedev’s book, showing the similarity between modern US citizens and the brainwashed Russians of Stalin’s day:

Just as [religious] believers attribute everything good to god and everything bad to the devil, so everything good was attributed to Stalin and everything bad to evil forces that Stalin himself was [supposedly] fighting. “Long live Stalin!” some officials shouted as they were taken to be shot.3

When, very occasionally, some of the major crimes of our great trusted leaders are brought to our attention, there is never any clamouring for justice, no national outrage that the public’s trust could be so cheaply squandered. Whilst some newspapers might print a subdued story or two, located somewhere towards the bottom of page thirty nine, and whilst national TV stations may record a few words tucked away deeply buried somewhere on their websites, in the sacred name of “balance”, the real gravity of the misdeeds of our trusted leaders are otherwise routinely ignored, and the revelations are quickly lost in the usual myriad of trivial distractions.

For example, when, after many years and thirteen million pounds of treasure, the Chilcot Report was eventually published, effectively providing sufficient evidence for Tony Blair and other establishment leaders to be indicted for war crimes, no such calls from our trusted leaders were heard – just a deafening silence, followed almost immediately by business as usual.   But those who dare to provide the evidence of our rulers’ misdeeds are quickly and viciously victimized – as any whistleblower could easily confirm; with the better-known of whom, such as Daniel Ellsberg, Mordechai Vanunu, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden standing as fine examples of the terrible consequences of speaking the truth about power. This is how Rosa Luxemburg’s ruthless self-criticism is rendered impossible in our “free” societies where official censorship doesn’t exist, but where official “news” isn’t worth censoring.

One of the holiest cows of the establishment, the institution which, almost above any other, will not tolerate any form of criticism, are our so-called “defence” forces. The word “hero” has been re-defined to mean absolutely anyone wearing a military uniform. TV commercials encouraging young people to join the armed forces appear almost every night. TV programmes depicting the military as brave heroes resisting overwhelming odds in the sacred name of freedom and democracy appear almost every night. Every year people adorn themselves in little plastic poppies and stand in silence for two minutes on the 11th November, not so much to recall those who were needlessly slaughtered for the supposed “war to end all war”, but to serve as a subliminal recruitment aid. Criticising the armed forces is always strictly off limits.

The Annihilation of Raqqa

Yet a recent report by Amnesty International (AI), who investigated the devastating attack by western coalition forces on the Syrian city of Raqqa, is so damning that anyone who does not criticise those responsible is guilty by association of war crimes.4 They are in a similar position to those who silently stood by as their neighbours were carted-off to Nazi concentration camps. Although AI has a somewhat dubious reputation, earned mainly by its very tepid response to the multitude of horrors perpetrated over many years by the Zionist regime in Occupied Palestine, its latest report on Raqqa has some merit.

No one will ever know how many civilians perished in last year’s battle for Raqqa. However, estimates for the numbers of people living in the city prior to the war are given at around 220,000, whilst the number estimated to be living there earlier this year is around 61,000.  Some civilians managed to flee the city, but many did not, as they were prevented from doing so by IS. Amnesty summarised the terrible situation for civilians as follows:

The four-month military operation to oust the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS) from Raqqa, the Syrian city which IS had declared its capital, killed hundreds of civilians, injured many more and destroyed much of the city. During the course of the operation, from June to October 2017, homes, private and public buildings and infrastructure were reduced to rubble or damaged beyond repair.

Residents were trapped, as fighting raged in Raqqa’s streets between IS militants and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters, and US-led Coalition’s air and artillery strikes rocked the city. With escape routes mined by IS and the group’s snipers shooting at those trying to flee, civilians fled from place to place within the city, desperately seeking refuge or escape. Some were killed in their homes; some in the very places where they had sought refuge, and others as they tried to flee.5

If Amnesty was referring to North Korea, say, or Iran, Russia, China, or the Syrian government, almost certainly its report would have been leading the western world’s news broadcasts. Outraged politicians and their tame propagandists in the mainstream media would have been demanding that “something should be done”. But those countries were not the subjects of the Amnesty report. It was referring instead to the biggest villains in the world — the US and British governments, joined on this occasion by France. Although other countries were implicated in this particular “coalition of the willing”, their roles were relatively minor. Consequently our politicians and their lackeys in the mainstream media seem hardly to have noticed AI’s report. Once again the truth is available, but has been conveniently self-censored by all the usual tricks of state.

Two investigators from AI spent two weeks in February 2018 visiting the ruins of Raqqa. They went to 42 different locations and interviewed 112 civilian residents. About half of the report focuses mainly on the personal stories of four families whose lives were devastated by the “liberation” of Raqqa from IS occupation by the combined efforts of western firepower, and ground-troops supplied by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – a mainly Kurdish militia.

Although the so-called global coalition:

boasts membership of 71 countries and four inter-governmental organisations; an eclectic alliance including nations as diverse as Panama and Poland, Australia and Afghanistan. Some Coalition members, Chad, for example, or Niger, are likely to have given support in name only. Others, particularly European states, were more deeply involved, although the exact extent of their actions is not always clear.6

Whilst most people are probably aware that US, British and French air forces bombed countless targets in Syria generally, and specifically here, in Raqqa, fewer people know about the involvement of western ground troops. But AI tells us:

[T]he US deployed some 2,000 of its own troops to north-eastern Syria, many of whom were engaged in direct combat operations, notably firing artillery into Raqqa from positions outside the city. In addition, a smaller number of special forces were operating close to front lines alongside SDF members. British and French special forces were also deployed to the area, but in much smaller numbers.

Among the US deployment were Army High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) with GPS-directed 227mm rockets, which could be fired from 300km away, as well as hundreds of Marines from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and the 24th MEU equipped with M777 howitzers, which they used to rain down 155mm artillery fire upon the city from a distance of up to 30km.6

AI concludes its summary of the involvement of “coalition” forces as follows:

The Coalition launched tens of thousands of strikes on Raqqa during the military campaign. Of these, more than 4,000 were air strikes, almost all of them carried out by US forces. British forces carried out some 215 air strikes, while the French military was responsible for some 50 air strikes with the overwhelming majority – more than 90% – carried out by US piloted aircraft and drones. No other members of the Coalition are known to have carried out air strikes in Raqqa. At the same time, US Marines launched tens of thousands artillery shells into and around Raqqa…

While Coalition forces operated mostly from positions several kilometres outside the city, a small number of special operation forces from Coalition member states – notably the US, UK and France – operated alongside the SDF close to front line position in/around the city, reportedly mostly in an advisory rather than combat role.

The SDF were partly responsible for locating targets for Coalition air and artillery strikes. It is not clear what percentage of the Coalition air and artillery strikes were carried out based on co-ordinates provided by the SDF – as opposed to strikes on targets identified by Coalition forces themselves through air surveillance or other means – and the extent to which Coalition forces verified targets identified by the SDF prior to launching strikes on those targets.7

Although Kurdish militia were reportedly too lightly-armed to be physically accountable for the destruction of Raqqa, their target identification function was clearly significant.

It has long been routine for the military’s propaganda machine to dismiss concerns about civilian casualties inside war zones, and the carnage wreaked on Raqqa was no exception. Furthermore, the military’s word is always accepted at face value.

[A]t the height of conflict in Raqqa, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend wrote that ‘… there has never been a more precise air campaign in the history of armed conflict’.8

But the alleged accuracy of the ordnance used by the military is not the point. The point is that no matter how smart the smart bombs are, they’re still killing civilians – and that’s a war crime. An estimated 4,000 bombs were dropped on the defenceless civilians of Raqqa by “coalition” warplanes. Given that many of those are only accurate, on a good day, to within ten metres of their target, it’s very clear to see that these alone must have accounted for considerable civilian casualties. But they may not have been the main problem.

Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell (senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), suggests that the Coalition operation was far from precise: ‘In five months they fired 35,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine artillery battalion, or any Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam War.’8

But legitimate ISIS targets must have been almost negligible, as IS had immersed themselves amongst the civilian population. Given also that most artillery shells are considerably less accurate than guided missiles, and can only be expected to strike within a hundred metres of their targets, and given that tens of thousands of these things rained down on the trapped and defenceless civilians of Raqqa, the claims by the military’s propagandists that they tried everything possible to minimise civilian casualties are obviously ludicrous.

There has never been a more precise air campaign in the history of armed conflict [than in Raqqa]
— Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend

Isis withdraws, undefeated, from Raqqa

Sometime in October some sort of deal was suddenly worked out which allowed Isis to simply pack up and leave Raqqa, in a convoy of trucks, together with most of their weaponry. According to a BBC report, the deal:

enabled many hundreds of IS fighters to escape from the city. At the time, neither the US and British-led coalition, nor the SDF, which it backs, wanted to admit their part.  Has the pact, which stood as Raqqa’s dirty secret, unleashed a threat to the outside world – one that has enabled militants to spread far and wide across Syria and beyond?

Great pains were taken to hide it from the world. But the BBC has spoken to dozens of people who were either on the convoy, or observed it, and to the men who negotiated the deal…

[T]he convoy was six to seven kilometres long. It included almost 50 trucks, 13 buses and more than 100 of the Islamic State group’s own vehicles. IS fighters, their faces covered, sat defiantly on top of some of the vehicles…

Freed from Raqqa, where they were surrounded, some of the [IS] group’s most-wanted members have now spread far and wide across Syria and beyond.

War crimes

The US-led “coalition” undoubtedly committed a vast number of war crimes in the “liberation” of Raqqa, and the considerably-referenced AI report summarises the particular breaches of law applicable:

(a) The Principle of Distinction

This requires parties to conflict to at all times, ‘distinguish between civilians and combatants’ and to ensure that ‘attacks may only be directed against combatants’ and ‘must not be directed against civilians’. Parties to conflict must also distinguish between ‘civilian objects’ and ‘military objectives’. Anyone who is not a member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict is a civilian, and the civilian population comprises all persons who are not combatants. Civilians are protected against attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. In cases of doubt, individuals should be presumed to be civilians and immune from direct attack. Making the civilian population, or individual civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities, the object of attack (direct attacks on civilians) is a war crime (My emphasis).9

It isn’t clear how hard the “coalition” tried to distinguish combatants from non-combatants, but in the four detailed case studies that Amnesty supplied – which were the tragic stories of just four families from a city of tens of thousands – it would appear they didn’t try very hard at all. One such piece of evidence was supplied by “Ammar”, who

told Amnesty International that on ‘the second or third day of Eid” [26-27 June 2017] an air strike killed 20-25 people, mainly civilians but some IS too, at a communal water point, around the corner from Abu Saif’s house.’10

So, clearly essential water supplies were either deliberately targeted by the “coalition”, or some “legitimate” target was so near that the likely presence of defenceless civilians was simply ignored.

(b)  Proportionality

The principle of proportionality, another fundamental tenet of IHL, also prohibits disproportionate attacks, which are those “which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”. Intentionally launching a disproportionate attack (that is, knowing that the attack will cause excessive incidental civilian loss, injury or damage) constitutes a war crime. The Commentary on the Additional Protocols makes clear that the fact that the proportionality calculus requires an anticipated “concrete and direct” military advantage indicates that such advantage must be “substantial and relatively close, and that advantages which are hardly perceptible and those which would only appear in the long term should be disregarded (my emphasis).11

Whilst it is undeniable that the head-chopping organ-eating occupiers of Raqqa were about as vile a group of psychopaths as it’s possible to get, and that their removal from Raqqa would no doubt be extremely difficult to accomplish, it’s deeply questionable that the total destruction of a civilian-occupied city could be considered proportional to the reign of terror it was supposed to terminate. The fact that IS were eventually cleared out of Raqqa, very much alive and well, shows that they were not committed kamikaze warriors and suggests that alternative methods for bringing to an end their repulsive occupation may have been possible.

(c) Precautions

In order for parties to an armed conflict to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality they must take precautions in attack. “Constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects”; “all feasible precautions” must be taken to avoid and minimise incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects. The parties must choose means and methods of warfare with a view to avoiding or at least minimising to the maximum extent possible incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects. As well as verifying the military nature of targets and assessing the proportionality of attacks, the parties must also take all feasible steps to call off attacks which appear wrongly directed or disproportionate. Parties must give effective advance warning of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit. When a choice is possible between several military objectives for obtaining a similar military advantage, the parties must select the target the attack on which would be expected to pose the least danger to civilians and to civilian objects.

The limited information available on the precautions in attack taken by the Coalition suggests that they were not adequate or effective. The cases examined in detail indicate that there were serious shortcomings in verification that targets selected for attack were in fact military, with disastrous results for civilian life. Further, several attacks examined by Amnesty International suggest that the Coalition did not, at least in those instances, select weapons that would minimise harm to civilians. Also, the warnings that were given to civilians were not effective. They did not take into account the reality that civilians were blocked from leaving Raqqa, and did not include specific information (such as warning civilians to stay away from tall buildings).11

Amnesty claim that up to the point of publication of their report repeated approaches to “the coalition” for specific details regarding their attacks on Raqqa were either inadequately answered or had not been answered at all. Therefore questions relating to whether sufficient precautions were taken remain unanswered, and could imply breaches of international law.

(d) Joint and individual responsibility of coalition members

One of the attractions to “coalition” actions is the difficulty in attributing specific responsibility for possible crimes after the event, and Amnesty states:

It is concerned that this lack of clarity may enable individual Coalition members to evade responsibility for their actions. The UK Government, for example, maintained until May 2018 that it had not killed a single civilian in Syria or Iraq, despite carrying out thousands of air strikes across the two countries. On 2 May 2018 it admitted for the first time that one of its drone strikes had caused one civilian casualty in Syria in March 2018.11

However, there is very limited wriggle-room in attempting to evade responsibility by trying to divert attention to others. International Humanitarian Law (IHL):

Requires all states to ‘respect and ensure respect’ for its provisions under Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions. This includes both positive and negative obligations on states providing assistance to another state which is then used to commit a violation of international humanitarian law. The negative obligation is not to encourage, aid or assist in violations of IHL by parties to a conflict. The positive obligation includes the prevention of violations where there is a foreseeable risk they will be committed and prevention of further violations where they have already occurred.

The USA, UK, France, and other states involved in military operations as part of Operation Inherent Resolve therefore may be legally responsible for unlawful acts carried out by Coalition members.12

(e) Duty to investigate, prosecute and provide reparation

States have an obligation to investigate allegations of war crimes by their forces or nationals, or committed on their territory and, if there is sufficient admissible evidence, prosecute the suspects. They must also investigate other war crimes over which they have jurisdiction, including through universal jurisdiction, and, if appropriate, prosecute the suspects.12

Life-giving light – and those who would snuff it out

The Amnesty International report provides compelling evidence that, at the very least, there are legitimate questions to be answered regarding the attacks on Raqqa by the USA, Britain and France. And it must never be forgotten that the whole IS phenomenon is mostly a creation of the west, that without the deeply cynical plotting of the US, British and possibly French deep states, IS would likely never have come into existence. The words of French foreign minister Roland Dumas should be recalled:

I’m going to tell you something,” Dumas said on French station LCP. “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business [in 2009]. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.

So Dumas may have said – but the French were involved in the destruction of Raqqa.

If similar probable war crimes had been carried out in some other country by Russia, say, or China, or Iran, or any other nation to which the west is routinely hostile, almost certainly outraged voices would be heard caterwauling in Westminster and Washington. Front pages of newspapers, together with TV and radio news programmes would be howling that “something must be done”. Yet in Westminster and Washington the silence is deafening. Not a single word of protest appears on the front pages of our newspapers, and our TV and radio stations appear to be looking the other way. Why? Because our “heroes” are personally involved, and personally responsible for the terror, and that is the terrible truth that cannot be admitted.

The cold hard fact is that far from being heroic, many people in the military are de facto war criminals. From at least as far back as the second world war, when defenceless civilians were bombed to death and incinerated in their homes in the pointless bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, for example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the slaughter of countless defenceless civilians in later wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to the more recent civilian killing fields of Iraq, Libya and now Syria, our so-called heroes have just as much innocents’ blood on their hands as any Nazi war criminal ever had.

With very few exceptions, the military seldom do anything heroic. The very last thing that senior officers want, the generals, admirals, air marshals and so on, is a peaceful world – for the very obvious reason that they would all be out of work, vastly overpaid work requiring very little real and useful effort, work that not only pays these people far more than they’re worth, but also, which is far worse, gives them far too much power in our societies. Consider, for example, the words of an unnamed general in a recent Observer interview that if Jeremy Corbyn – a lifelong pacifist – was to win a general election:

There would be a mutiny in the armed forces… unless he learnt to love NATO and the nuclear bomb.13

The cold hard fact is that these people, those who run our so-called “defence” forces are out of control. They are more interested in protecting their own careers than doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and which so many people mistakenly believe they are doing – protecting us. We are not made safer by the ruthless and illegal destruction of civilian cities such as Raqqa. The people that carry out these war crimes should be brought to account and charged like the common war criminals they really are, which is pretty much the same conclusion reached by Amnesty International:

Where there is admissible evidence that individual members of Coalition forces are responsible for war crimes, ensure they are prosecuted in a fair trial without recourse to the death penalty.14

We need complete, truthful information. And the truth should not depend on whom it is to serve.
— V.I. Ulyanov, (Let History Judge, Roy Medvedev, Preface.))

Self-criticism – ruthless, harsh self-criticism, which gets down to the root of things – that is the life-giving light and air of the proletarian movement.
— Rosa Luxemburg15

Sometimes I think we biologists may find ourselves coming into politics from our own angle. If things go on as they are going – We may have to treat the whole world as a mental hospital. The entire species is going mad; for what is madness but a complete want of mental adaptation to one’s circumstances? Sooner or later, young man, your generation will have to face up to that.…

I have an idea, Father, a half-formed idea,that before we can go on to a sane new order, there has to be a far more extensive clearing up of old institutions… The world needs some sort of scavenging, a burning up of the old infected clothes, before it can get on to a new phase. At present it is enormously encumbered… This is just a shadowy idea in my mind… Something like breaking down condemned, old houses. We can’t begin to get things in order until there has been this scavenging.

— HG Wells, The Holy Terror, Simon and Schuster, 1939.

  1. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Roy Medvedev, p. 566.
  2. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Roy Medvedev, Preface.
  3. Medvedev, p. 363.
  4. Amnesty International Report, p. 9.
  5. AI Report, p. 5.
  6. AI Report, p. 48.
  7. AI Report, p. 49.
  8. AI Report, p. 53.
  9. AI Report, p. 62.
  10. AI Report, p. 44.
  11. AI Report, p. 63.
  12. AI Report, p. 64.
  13. How the Establishment lost control, Chris Nineham, p. 93.
  14. AI Report, p. 67.
  15. Let History Judge, Roy Medvedev, Preface

Russia-gate and the Crisis of American Exceptionalism

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By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Indications of deep unrest that occurred under Obama, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Sanders phenomena, have all been blamed on Russia.”

The era of Trump has been just as frustrating as the era of Obama. Over the last six months, I have channeled some of this frustration into the co-writing of a book with Professor of Liberation Theology Roberto Sirvent titled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of US Empire. The book will consist of twenty-one chapters detailing just how important the ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence are to the promotion of US empire, racism, and capitalist exploitation. Russia-gate was a catalyst for the work and has its own chapter in the book. The psychotic narrative has dominated political discourse in the United States for over two years with no end in sight. There was no way to avoid it.

Russia-gate is a manifestation of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism posits that the American way of life is the most superior way of life. It is the white man’s burden personified in the nation-state. The ideology burdens Americans, defined as white and preferably capitalist, with the duty to civilize those outside of their class and racial affiliation. The twin evils of white rule and capitalist plunder reign supreme and are expanded and protected by a third evil: militarism. American exceptionalism says that war redeems the uncivilized from the perils of ungovernability, capitalist plunder leads the uncivilized to prosperity, and white rule bestows humanity itself upon the non-white world.

“American way of life is ‘white man’s burden’ personified in the nation-state.”

Russia-gate has profoundly challenged the logic of American exceptionalism in a period of American decline. Unlike the first Cold War, Russia has been labeled a threat not for its socialist political economy but because it has been accused of helping elect Donald Trump. The imaginary Russian threat to America is not terrorism or communism, but Russia as a state itself. Russia-gate is predicated upon the notion that the Russian Federation possesses both the will and the power to shape politics in America. This assumes that the American nation-state is neither invincible nor its political system exceptional. A contradiction to say the least.

Russia-gate is another myth of American exceptionalism made for and by the American oligarchy. It follows a long history of the American oligarchy’s need to create an “enemy” to vanquish as proof of its racial and economic superiority. Russian meddling in the 2016 elections has not been proven and will never be proven. The mental gymnastics that the US ruling class has performed to prove their own lie are truly astounding to watch. We have heard everything from Russian President Vladimir Putin conspiring with WikiLeaks and Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton to Trump benefitting from $100,000 worth in supposedly Russian purchased advertisements on social media to promote efforts of Black Lives Matter activists and white nationalists alike. It seems that with each passing day, examples of Russian meddling in US politics become only more absurd and detached from reality. That is, unless one could conceive of $100,000 worth in social media ads superseding the most militarized and high-tech surveillance apparatus in human history or the most corporately-controlled, war-thirsty political system in human history.

“The imaginary Russian threat to America is not terrorism or communism, but Russia as a state itself.”

Russia-gate has buried all truth underneath the lie that the US is under attack from Russia. Putin is under every bed and in every wireless router in America. Untold numbers of Russians are hacking into social media accounts and turning the “alt-left” into Russian trolls. Russia has been conveniently positioned as the most dangerous and heinous nation in the world to instill fear and pro-American chauvinism into the minds of struggling workers and poor people. Who better to promote the lies of American exceptionalism than the spooks in the American intelligence services that have been at the vanguard of Russia-gate since day one?

All seventeen intelligence agencies led by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan coalesced with Hillary Clinton and her big tent of Wall Street donors to spread the Russia-gate lie back in 2016. Russia-gate’s intelligence objectives were always numerous. The first objective was to make Trump’s campaign promise to ease relations with Russia a political impossibility regardless of the orange billionaire’s actual intentions. The second was to politically neuter the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the DNC’s theft of the primary. And the third was to demonize radical and revolutionary forces capable of moving struggling workers and poor people, especially Black people, in the United States away from the two-party system and toward efforts to imagine independent political alternatives. These goals ultimately explain why publications like yours truly have been labeled dupes of Russia and subsequently censored on social media and why the Green Party’s Jill Stein was subject to federal investigation for ties to Russia.

“The mental gymnastics that the US ruling class has performed to prove their own lie are truly astounding to watch.”

American exceptionalism is a potently racist and diseased ideological force that has prevented a public discussion on the consequences of Russia-gate from taking place. We have the Democratic Party and their allies in the intelligence services to thank for this. One can find banners and signs condemning Trump as Putin’s puppet or, homophobically, as “his bitch” at Democratic Party-led demonstrations. Hardline Democrats have expressed outrage over Trump’s mythical connections to Russia but have directed none toward the professional liars leading the campaign. American intelligence agencies are responsible for the COINTELPRO operations that assassinated scores of liberation fighters like Fred Hampton and sent many others like Mumia Abu-Jamal to a life of imprisonment. They are the same liars who told us there were Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Gaddafi-led genocidal crimes in Libya. These professional liars have led US operations to overthrow over fifty foreign governments around the world in the same number of years, killing millions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to enrich monopoly capital.

American exceptionalism requires that people in the US forget the atrocities of its government to be truly believed, especially in this time of crisis. The architects of Russia-gate have attempted to place the entirety of what calls itself the left in the US into a permanent political coma by blaming Russia for Trump. Under the spell of Russia-Trump fever, the racist and capitalist rulers of US imperialism can rest comfortably knowing that eight years of Obama-led imperialism — let alone, the genocidal foundations of the US — have been forgotten. Indications of deep unrest that occurred under Obama, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Sanders phenomena, have all been blamed on Russia. Trump has been vilified as a product of Russian-backed “alt-left” and “alt-right” insurgency when the reality is that the blame for Trump falls at the feet of the hobbling imperialist system.

“Russia has been conveniently positioned as the most dangerous and heinous nation in the world to instill fear and pro-American chauvinism into the minds of struggling workers and poor people.”

Russia-gate personifies everything that is wrong with narrow, Democratic Party-led anti-Trumpism. Trump has been made into a larger than life character in part because US imperialism needs him in the spotlight. If you can’t get rid of him, use him. Criminalizing Trump as a “Manchurian candidate” of Russia has given US imperialism room to continue its NATO-led war provocations in Eastern Europe, its imperial ventures in Syria, and its incessant war maneuvers toward Iran and Korea. It has also given the ruling class a convenient scapegoat to avoid accountability in the rapid decline in living standards across world. Millions are living half-lives under the threat of racist state-sponsored terror and mass unemployment and underemployment. Billions have no wealth at all. All of this is just fine so long as those pesky Russians stop meddling in US affairs.

Russia-gate is what American exceptionalism looks like in its most desperate state. The ideology makes it easy to fall into the trap of blaming Trump for everything, into calling him a fascist or worse, a Russian, as nearly the entire ruling class has pushed us into doing. It is easy to turn a blind-eye to the bi-partisan consensus on endless war and austerity when you have Putin on the brain. Trump can be labeled a fascist for scapegoating immigrants and blamed for Obama’s immigration policies, as prominent CNN and New York Times journalists were caught doing late last month. We can forget the hundreds of years of racist, capitalist oppression inherent to US empire and betray the impoverished masses whose lives are only becoming more imperiled by a system that has nothing to offer but worsening degrees of poverty and war.

“It is easy to turn a blind-eye to the bi-partisan consensus on endless war and austerity when you have Putin on the brain.”

Our commitment must be to the truth. There is no truth to Russia-gate. Russia-gate has muzzled the Black left and pushed the entire left into an even more conservative position than it was prior. Russia-gate has villainized Russia in a period when the world needs the people of the US to align with Russia and China and whoever else is willing stop endless US wars abroad. Russia-gate has once again exposed why it is so difficult for workers in the US to view themselves as an exploited class even when the system has so obviously failed them. That the ruling class can so easily criminalize Russia as it kills Syrians and lynches Black Americans with impunity only amplifies the urgency of the moment. We must vigilantly struggle to expose Russia-gate as a farce, a farce rooted in the mythology of American exceptionalism. We need more to reject this mythology if we are to participate in the global class war with any hope for victory.

 

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He is currently writing a book with Roberto Sirvent entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of US Empire. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

Peace is a Cliché: When the West cannot Control the World Unopposed it Means War

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Dedicated to my friend, a philosopher, John Cobb, Jr.

By Andre Vltchek

Source: Dissident Voice

The West likes to think of itself as a truly “peace-loving part of the world”. But is it? You hear it everywhere, from Europe to North America, then to Australia, and back to Europe: “Peace, peace, peace!”

It has become a cliché, a catchphrase, a recipe to get funding and sympathy and support. You say peace and you really cannot go wrong. It means that you are a compassionate and reasonable human being.

Every year, there are “peace conferences” taking place everywhere where peace is worshipped, and even demanded. I recently attended one, as a keynote speaker, on the west coast of Denmark.

If a heavy-duty war correspondent like myself attends them, he or she gets shocked. What is usually discussed are superficial, feel-good topics.

At best, ‘how bad capitalism is’, and how ‘everything is about oil’. Nothing about the genocidal culture of the West. Nothing about continuous, centuries-long plunders and benefits that virtually all Westerners have been getting from it.

At worst, it is all about how bad the world is – “all people are the same” cliché. And, also, there are increasingly, bizarre, uninformed outbursts against China and Russia which are often labeled by Western neo-cons as “threat” and “rival powers”.

Participants of these gatherings agree “Peace is Good”, and “War is Bad”. This is followed by standing ovations and patting each other on the back. Few heartfelt tears are dropped.

However, reasons behind these displays are rarely questioned. After all, who would be asking for war? Who’d crave for violence, terrible injuries and death? Who’d want to see leveled, charred cities and abandoned, crying infants? It all appears to be very simple, and very logical.

But then, why do we not hear too often that “peace speech” pouring from the devastated and still de facto colonized African or the Middle Eastern countries? Aren’t they suffering the most? Shouldn’t they be dreaming about the peace? Or are all of us, perhaps, missing the main point?

My friend, a great Indian writer and thinker, Arundhati Roy wrote, in 2001, reacting to the Western “War on Terror”:

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, “We’re a peaceful nation.” America’s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: “We’re a peaceful people.” So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.

When it comes from the lips of the Westerners, is ‘peace’ really peace, is ‘war’ really a war?

Are people in that ‘free and democratic West’, still allowed to ask such questions? Or is the war and peace perception just a part of the dogma that is not allowed to be questioned and is ‘protected’ by both the Western culture and its laws?

I’m not in the West, and I don’t want to be. Therefore, I’m not sure what they are allowed to say or to question there. But we, those lucky people who are ‘outside’ and therefore not fully conditioned, controlled and indoctrinated, will definitely not stop asking these questions anytime soon; or to be precise, never!

*****

Recently, through Whatsapp, I received a simple chain of messages from my East African friends and Comrades – mostly young left-wing, revolutionary opposition leaders, thinkers and activists:

Free Africa is a socialist Africa! We are ready for war! The young Africans are on fire! Death to the imperialist forces! Viva Bolivarian revolution! South-South Cooperation! Today we take the battle to the streets! Africa Must Unite!

Such statements would sound almost ‘violent’ and therefore could be even be classified as ‘illegal’, if pronounced openly in the West. Someone could end up in Guantanamo for this, or in a ‘secret CIA prison’. A few weeks ago, I directly addressed these young people – leaders of the left-wing East African opposition – at the Venezuelan Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Yes, they were boiling, they were outraged, determined and ready.

For those who are not too familiar with the continent, Kenya has been, for years and decades, an outpost of the British, US and even Israeli imperialism in East Africa. It was playing the same role that West Germany used to play during the Cold War – a window shopping paradise, stuffed with luxury goods and services.

In the past, Kenya was supposed to dwarf the socialist experiment of Tanzania under the leadership of Nyerere.

Today, some 60 percent of Kenyans live in slums; some of the toughest in Africa. Some of these ‘settlements’, like Mathare and Kibera are housing at least one million people, in the most despicable, terrible conditions. Four years ago, when I was making my documentary film, in these slums, for South American network TeleSUR, I wrote:

…Officially, there is peace in Kenya. For decades, Kenya functioned as a client state of the West, implementing a savage market regime, hosting foreign military bases. Billions of dollars were made here. But almost nowhere on earth is the misery more brutal than here.

Two years earlier, while filming my “Tumaini” near Kisumu city and the Uganda border, I saw entire hamlets standing empty like ghosts. The people had vanished, died – from AIDS and hunger. But it was still called peace.

Peace it was when the US military medics were operating under the open sky, on desperately poor and sick Haitians, in the notorious slum of Cité Soleil. I saw and photographed a woman, laid on a makeshift table, having her tumor removed using only local anesthetics. I asked the North American doctors, why is it like this? I knew there was a top-notch military facility two minutes away.

“This is as close as we get to real combat situation”, one doctor replied, frankly. “For us, this is great training.”

After the surgery was over, the woman got up, and supported by her frightened husband, walked away towards the bus stop.”

Yes, all this is, officially, peace.

*****

In Beirut, Lebanon, I recently participated in discussion about “Ecology of War”, a scientific and philosophical concept created by several AUB Medical Center doctors from the Middle East. Doctor Ghassan ‘Gus’ Abu-Sitta, the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon, explained:

The misery is war. The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict. A great number of people on our Planet actually live in some conflict or war, without even realizing it: in slums, in thoroughly collapsed states, or in refugee camps.

During my work, in almost all devastated corners of the world, I saw much worse things than what I described above. Perhaps I saw too much – all that ‘peace’ which has been tearing limbs from the victims, all those burning huts and howling women, or children dying from diseases and hunger before they reach their teens.

I wrote about war and peace at length, in my 840-page book “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”.

When you do what I do, you become like a doctor: you can only stand all those horrors and suffering, because you are here to help, to expose reality, and to shame the world. You have no right to decompose, to collapse, to fall and to cry.

But what you cannot stand is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is ‘bulletproof’. It cannot be illuminated by correct arguments, by logic and by examples. Hypocrisy in the West is often ignorant, but mostly it is just self-serving.

So, what is real peace for the people in Europe and North America? The answer is simple: It is a state of things in which as few Western people as possible are killed or injured. A state of things in which the flow of resources from the poor, plundered and colonized countries is pouring, uninterrupted, predominantly to Europe and North America.

The price for such peace? How many African, Latin American or Asian people die as a result of such arrangement of the world, is thoroughly irrelevant.

Peace is when the business interests of the West are not endangered, even if tens of millions of non-white human beings would vanish in the process.

Peace is when the West can, unopposed, control the world, politically, economically, ideologically and ‘culturally’.

“War” is when there is rebellion. War is when the people of plundered countries say “No!”. War is when they suddenly refuse to be raped, robbed, indoctrinated and murdered.

When such a scenario takes place the West’s immediate reaction ‘to restore peace’ is to overthrow the government in the country which is trying to take care of its people. To bomb schools and hospitals, to destroy supply of fresh water and electricity and to throw millions into total misery and agony.

As the West may soon do to North Korea (DPRK), to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran – some of the countries that are being, for now, ‘only’ tormented by sanctions and, foreign -sponsored, deadly “opposition”. In the Western lexicon, “peace” is synonymous to “submission”. To a total, unconditional submission. Anything else is war or could potentially lead to war.

For the oppressed, devastated countries, including those in Africa, to call for resistance, would be, at least in the Western lexicon, synonymous with the “call for violence”, therefore illegal. As ‘illegal’ as the calls were for resistance in the countries occupied by German Nazi forces during the WWII. It would be, therefore, logical to call the Western approach and state of mind, “fundamentalist”, and thoroughly aggressive.

Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

The most common of these is probably the notion that all of these problems are due to the malignant influence of one of two mainstream political parties, and if the other party could just get in control of the situation all the problems would go away. Other explanations include the belief that humans are just intrinsically awful, blaming minorities like Jews or immigrants, blaming racism and white supremacy, or going all the way down wild and twisted rabbit holes into theories about reptilian secret societies and baby-eating pedophile cabals. But really all of mankind’s irrational behavior can be explained by the basic human impulse to amass power and influence over one’s fellow humans, combined with the fact that sociopaths tend to rise to positions of power.

Our evolutionary ancestors were pack animals, and the ability to rise in social standing in one’s pack determined crucial matters like whether one got first or last dibs on food or got to reproduce. This impulse to rise in our pack is hardwired deeply into our evolutionary heritage, but when left unchecked due to a lack of empathy, and when expanded into the globe-spanning 7.6 billion human pack we now find ourselves in due to ease of transportation and communication, it can lead to individuals who will keep amassing more and more power until they wield immense influence over entire clusters of nations.

2. Money rewards sociopathy.

The willingness to do anything to get ahead, to claw your way to the top, to betray whomever you need to, to throw anyone under the bus, to step on anyone to pass them in the rat race, will be rewarded in our current system. Being willing to underpay employees, cheat the legal system, and influence legislators will be rewarded exponentially more. People with a sense of empathy are often unwilling to do such things, whereas sociopaths and psychopaths are. About four percent of the population are sociopaths, and about one percent are psychopaths, with some five to fifteen percent falling somewhere along the borderline. The less empathy you have, the further you are willing to go, and the further up the ladder you can climb.

3. Wealth kills empathy.

If that weren’t bad enough, studies have shown that controlling large amounts of wealth actually destroys one’s sense of compassion for one’s fellow man. When you are able to use wealth to obtain everything from security to loyalty to personal relationships, you no longer have to be tuned in to the brain’s empathy center the rest of humanity depends on to get an accurate reading on what’s going on with the people we’re surrounded by. Most people need to be constantly feeling around their families, coworkers, employers, friends and acquaintances in order to ensure their own safety, social standing and security, whereas a wealthy person can simply purchase those things. Being born into wealth or having it for a long time can prevent that sense of empathy from being as strong as it is in the rest of the population.

4. Money is power.

A 2014 Princeton study showed that ordinary Americans have essentially zero influence over their nation’s policy and behavior regardless of how they vote, while wealthy Americans have a great deal of influence. This is because the ability to use corporate lobbying and campaign donations effectively amounts to the legalized bribery of elected officials, which means that money translates directly into political power. This creates a ruling class which is naturally incentivized to use their influence to increase their own wealth while decreasing everyone else’s, because since power is relative, the less money everyone else has the more power the ruling class has.

This is why billionaires keep hoarding more and more wealth while using legalized bribery to stifle economic justice legislation. It isn’t because they want to be able to buy thousands of luxury cars or dozens of private jets; they can only use one at a time the same as everyone else. They hoard wealth to keep the rest of the population from having it. Because money equals power, spreading wealth around would be tantamount to making everyone king, and because power is relative, making everyone king would mean that no one is king.

Rulers, historically, do not give up power easily, and this elite wealthy class is no exception. Hence all their aggressive attempts to suppress any movement against the status quo from the unwashed masses.

5. This same ruling class controls the media.

It’s common knowledge that most media is controlled by plutocrats, whether it’s the old money plutocrats who control the legacy media or the new money Silicon Valley plutocrats who control much of the new media. Media control is an essential component of rule; this has always been the case, since the days when kings would order dissident books burned and bishops would torture dissident orators to death. This is why the first thing a new plutocrat does as soon as rising to a certain level of wealth is start buying up media influence, like Jeff Bezos did when he bought the Washington Post in 2013. Bezos bought WaPo not because he is a stupid businessman who thought newspapers were about to make a lucrative resurgence, but because he is a brilliant businessman who knows that the status quo he is building his empire upon requires a propaganda firm that the public will trust and believe.

6. People are always manipulating each other.

Cultivating an acute awareness of when you are being manipulated, and considering whether someone might have a motive to do so, is an essential component to making sense of the world.

It is very rare to encounter someone who won’t try to manipulate you in any way. Generally people you’ll encounter in your life will try to influence the way you perceive them and your relationship to them, they’ll try to pull you in in some ways and push you out in others, try to hook you up to their personal agendas and goals and shape you in a way that fits with their shape. There’s nothing inherently malevolent in such behavior, it’s just what people do and what they always have done. Again, humans are social creatures, and we do what we can to increase our standing within our social circles.

The big problem is when skillful manipulators find their way into positions of large-scale influence like government or media. Unfortunately, these are the types who tend to get elevated into such positions, because they can manipulate their way in, and generally they do so for reasons of personal ambition rather than altruism. These skillful manipulators form an essential echelon of the ruling class’ loyal servants, and are the minds behind the pro-establishment narratives you’ll suddenly see circulated from think tanks to media platforms to the establishment lackeys on Capitol Hill.

7. Society is made of narrative.

Most of human experience is filtered through our mental stories about it, from our sense of self, to our ideas about who we are, to our beliefs about how we’re supposed to behave in society, to what money is and how it works, to where power exists and who we’re supposed to obey. All of these things are purely conceptual constructs which only exist in the realm of thought; a “dollar” exists to the extent that we’ve all agreed to pretend it’s a real thing and that it has a certain amount of purchasing power. At any time we could collectively decide to change the rules about how power functions or what money is and how it operates, and then instantly the rule of the elite class would be over without anyone firing a shot. It really would be that simple.

That’s how powerful a force narrative is, which is why the ruling plutocrats fight so hard to keep us from seizing control of it. This is why whistleblowers and outlets like WikiLeaks are aggressively and constantly smeared and demonized in the corporate media; if they can create suspicion of truth-tellers then they can keep them from being trusted, and thus keep them from being believed. This tool has been used to minimize the impact of everything from on the ground reports of what’s happening in Syria to leak drops from Edward Snowden; if you can create enough suspicion of someone it doesn’t matter if they’re speaking 100 percent truth; nobody will believe them, and thus the dominant narrative will remain the same.

Maintaining an awareness that there is always an unending battle to control the narrative and manipulate it to advance plutocratic interests is an essential part of understanding the world.

8. The lines between nations are imaginary.

Those lines drawn on the map between countries are pure narrative as well; they’re only as real as the collective public agrees to pretend they are. The ruling elites know this and exploit this. They don’t think in terms of nations and governments, they think in terms of individuals and groups of individuals.

Key strategic region in the Middle East? No need to take over the whole country, just flood it with extremist groups who are loyal to your agendas and control its oil fields. Primo naval real estate in the southern hemisphere? No need to annex it and plant your country’s flag there, just secure enough influence over the important moving parts using corporate contracts, trade agreements, military/intelligence treaties and secret deals and you can use it however you want.

This is why I am dismissive of arguments that “Israel controls America” or “America controls Europe”. There is no “Israel” or “America”; they’re made-up ideas which rulers once upon a time treated as real, but in the modern days of nationless plutocracy they no longer do. There are individuals, there are corporations, there are government agencies, there are factions and groups, and these are what the ruling elites deal with. Governmental structures are only tools which are used by the ruling elites for the purpose of manipulation, control, and military violence, and they only do so insofar as it is useful. The idea of real nations and governments is a cutesy fairy tale sold to the masses so they won’t see the manipulations.

9. Powerful forces are naturally incentivized to collaborate with each other toward mutual interests.

You can be a low-grade millionaire and still live like a relatively normal civilian, but once you start obtaining giant amounts of wealth control you need to start collaborating with existing power structures or they’ll snuff you out to prevent you from rocking their boat, because again, money equals power. This is why Jeff Bezos contracts with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board, and it’s why Facebook and Google collaborate extensively with government agencies; they never would have been allowed to grow to their size if they had not. Plutocratic dynasties which have been in place since long before Amazon, Facebook and Google figured this out many generations ago, and have agreed to push forward in a direction of mutual interest that doesn’t upset the status quo that their wealth is built upon.

This is extremely true of the west, where an effective empire has been created by a complex transnational alliance of mostly western plutocrats, but it is true outside of that empire as well; there are power alliances to be found everywhere that there is power.

10. There is an immense amount of wealth that can be grabbed in the chaos of war and conflict.

In the same way that existing power structures are naturally incentivized to quash any emerging power which would upset their status quo, alliances of power structures push to crush non-aligned power structures the world over. Whenever you see the tight western alliances and their media propaganda arms attacking the interests of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Venezuela etc., you are seeing an alliance of power structures working to disrupt the interests of another alliance of power structures in order to absorb their assets.

The chaotic, Wild West environments that these conflicts create allow for an amount of underhanded looting and pillaging that you could never get away with in your own country, in the exact same way the colonialists and conquistadors of old could never have gotten away with brazenly grabbing gold, land and slaves from their fellow Europeans in Madrid or Rome but were given no legal trouble in the new world. The colonialists and conquistadors pushed into the Americas, Africa and Asia on the pretense of spreading Christianity and civilization; modern day conquerers push into non-aligned power structures on the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy in precisely the same way.

This chaos doesn’t require direct military conflict to be profitable; the uncritical enmity against Russia that the western plutocratic alliance has manufactured with its media control has allowed them to be blamed for everything from incriminating WikiLeaks documents to a corporate raid by Ukrainian oligarchs without any questions asked. Anyone who has ever had to deal personally with a sociopath knows how much they love to exploit the gray areas that chaotic situations give them, and geopolitical conflicts create those situations in spades.

11. The neocons are always wrong.

This one’s really easy. If you ever want to be on the right side of history for a foreign policy debate, look at what Bush-era PNAC neocons like John Bolton and Bill Kristol are saying about it, and take the opposite position. Neocon thought leaders have been loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything since the turn of the century, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria, and they’re not about to start being right now.

12. The push towards truth always starts with yourself.

You can’t out-manipulate seasoned manipulators. The main error most people make when trying to deal with a sociopath is to try and manipulate them back. Don’t even try. They have years of experience on you because they literally have done nothing else. While you were laughing and crying and worrying and connecting and relating to people, they were working out how to play humans like Garry Kasparov worked out how to play chess. And when you have literal teams of sociopaths collaborating together to amass power, you my dear child, do not have a chance. Don’t play their game. You will lose.

The only way to win this is to set your compass resolutely to “true.” Always be honest with yourself. Find all the different ways that you are manipulating others and see them and acknowledge them. Find your tribal allegiances and your desire to be right, and tip your hat to their existence. The more self-aware we are, the less levers we have to be manipulated by. If you are blindly partisan or loyal to a particular faction, that makes you gullible to propaganda because your wishful thinking and your desire to be right come into play. Get honest with yourself about who you are and what you want, and you will start to become an un-playable piece on the board.

If we can’t beat these bastards with truth, we don’t deserve to win.

The Global Pivot Away From America

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By Graham Vanbergen

Source: TruePublica

There was a day when the world realised they’d had enough of America. It wasn’t when America turned it back on the Herculean effort to sign the world up to the Paris Climate Agreement or TTIP or America’s continuous support for Israel’s murderous actions in Gaza or various other deals that took years to iron out and negotiate that have since been trashed. It was a moment we knew was going to happen but least expected to prove so important.

This was a deal that took the combined effort of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China and Russia. It took twelve years to negotiate. America was a key player and the deal signed, sealed and delivered on October 18th 2015. It was the Iran nuclear deal.

That landmark agreement stopped the escalation of nuclear weapons programs, not just in Iran, but actually in the Mid-East more widely.

With no evidence from any source of Iran breaching its nuclear deal, Iran now has many trading partners. However, America was not one of them. Rightly, the Iranians did not trust their old foe. And so it came to pass that Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, as expected last month.

Palpable European anger to protect the deal and keep it on track spawned a completely new global confidence to move in the same direction. The EU had prepared banking and trading systems to support EU companies doing business with Iran. China was committed having signed a huge joint oil pipeline deal and then launched the petroyuan. Russia has many reasons to protect this deal – obviously and also trades not USDs but Rubles and through a bartering system. Then India announced a few days ago a trade deal with Iran, again bypassing USDs. Then EU diplomats, working on a collaborative agreement in Cuba since 2016 announce that deal to be done and dusted just a few days ago. Last week, 14 African countries announced their intention to switch from USDs to China’s Yuan. All have dumped trading predominantly in US dollars for one reason or another.

On the 10th May, the EU declared that America had just become Europe’s number one threat to its economy.

The EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs, Pierre Moscovici warned Trump’s protectionism represented a “dangerous nexus.”

To that end, the European Union continues to retract from the USA. EuActiv reports that: “The EU and China announced on Friday (1 June) that they would expand trade and investment cooperation amid the global trade dispute triggered by US tariffs.”

Wang Yi, state councillor and minister of foreign affairs of China confirms: “In the context of growing uncertainties in the world, it is even more important for China and the EU to deepen our strategic partnership.”

What has really happened here is a global pivot. Leaders are striking whilst ‘the iron is hot’. Wang’s visit to Brussels, in the framework of the annual EU-China high-level strategic dialogue, came hot on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s confirmation of additional tariffs against Europe and other nations’ steel and aluminium exports. Trump has, to all intents, ended up galvanising other world leaders into real action.

This pivotal moment may take some time to be made fully functional, maybe decades.

In the meantime, China’s One Belt One Road or Belt Road Initiative (BRI) costing nearly $1trillion is well underway and cannot be ignored. A modern Silk Road that links China, Russia, Europe and Africa in trading routes across land and sea.

Foreign minister Wang Yi has described the initiative as a “symphony of all relevant parties”.

Beijing believes it will kick start “a new era of globalisation”.

One party not included in this symphony is America.

According to the global consultancy McKinsey, the BRI has the potential to massively overshadow the US’ post-war Marshall reconstruction plan, involving about 65% of the world’s population, one-third of its GDP and helping to move about a quarter of all its goods and services.

The ‘belt’ is a series of overland corridors connecting China with Europe, via Central Asia and the Middle East.

One year ago last May, China hoped to put some meat on the bones at an international forum in Beijing but the initiative was greeted with a mix of excitement and suspicion. Beijing saw 28 heads of state and government leaders but German Chancellor Angela Merkel turned down an invitation as did US president Donald Trump.

Today, that initiative now looks like a go. Europe has all but given China the green light. Merkel included.

America has just proven itself to be the new bogeyman on the international geopolitical block. It is headed up by an unstable administration whose warped worldview, beset with paranoia sees nothing but enemies hiding in the dark. It wants a destabilised world because that’s what America does best and profits from most. In the meantime, everyone else just wants to trade, get on and make some money.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google compete for Pentagon Cloud warfighter project

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By Will Morrow

Source: WSWS.org

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are competing to secure a multi-billion-dollar Department of Defense contract to build and oversee the US military’s Cloud computing infrastructure, which will be used to control every aspect of the Pentagon’s global operations.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project will transfer the large number of separate data control centers currently being run by the Pentagon into a centralized Cloud network that will be administered by one of the technology giants. The contract is reported to be worth up to $10 billion over the next decade, potentially making it the Department of Defense’s single largest acquisition ever. The winning bidder is expected to be announced in September.

The company that secures the contract will be completely integrated into all of the US military’s fighting operations. According to Nextgov, Brigadier General David Krumm, the deputy director for requirements for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described JEDI as a “global fabric” that will connect the headquarters with active combat forces, from an F-35 fighter jet pilot to a Pacific submarine captain to an Army platoon leader. “This is going to make a difference like few things have to get information to our warfighters,” Krumm said.

The Department of Defense hosted an industry conference on the project on March 7 in Arlington, Virginia, attended by technology companies, including representatives from Amazon and Microsoft. Krumm told the audience that JEDI would “change the way that this nation, its soldiers, its sailors, its Marines and its airmen fight and win our nation’s wars.”

The Cloud network will be required to hold data at all security classification levels, meaning security officials with top secret security clearances will be working at the facilities.

On May 16, Bloomberg Government published images of the advertisements produced by Amazon and Microsoft on electronic billboards in the Pentagon railway station about how their companies’ technology could support the military in battle.

Microsoft’s ad featured an image of a special operations soldier and the caption, “The cloud gets actionable insight while the action is still unfolding.” An Amazon Web Services ad included the statement, “Time to launch: months minutes,” to underscore that the cloud infrastructure will help coordinate missile launches.

The JEDI program was first announced in September 2017, a month after Trump’s Defence Secretary James Mattis carried out a tour of Silicon Valley boardrooms. Mattis met with Google’s Founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as executives at Facebook and Amazon, to discuss further integrating their technologies into the US armed forces.

The Defense One website reported on April 12 that “Brin in particular was eager to showcase how much Google was learning every day about AI and cloud implementation,” citing an anonymous senior Defense Department official. Mattis “returned to Washington, D.C., convinced that the US military had to move much of its data to a commercial cloud provider—not just to manage files, email, and paperwork but to push mission-critical information to front-line operators,” the article noted.

Significantly, the article notes that while Amazon and Microsoft have publicly expressed their desire to secure the contract, Google has “kept its own interest … out of the press. Company leaders have even hidden the pursuit from its own workers, according to Google employees Defense One reached.”

Google’s integration into the military’s operations has triggered widespread opposition among its employees. A letter published in April written to Google’s CEO Pichai and signed by more than 3,000 Google workers, demanded that the company cease its collaboration with the Pentagon.

The letter was a response to Google admitting in March that it is providing the military with artificial intelligence software that can be used to detect objects in video surveillance footage, under what is called Project Maven. This technology can be directly used to develop automatic targeting for the US drone murder operations in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Defense One article stated that “Maven is more than either Google or the Defense Department has admitted publicly, according to the senior defense official who called it a ‘pathfinder’ project, a starting point for future collaboration between the Pentagon and Google.”

Media reports indicate that the company most likely to secure the JEDI contract is Amazon. The company is considered to have an edge because it is already operating a Cloud network for the US intelligence agencies, under a $600 million contract reached in 2013.

Since September 2016, Amazon has been providing facial recognition technology called Rekognition to police forces and private intelligence contractors. Rekognition is able to process video footage from police body cameras, surveillance cameras and CCTV to “identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time, enabling timely and accurate crime prevention” (see: “Amazon providing facial recognition technology to police agencies for mass surveillance”).

The distinction between the technology corporations and the state has become almost entirely blurred as they become ever-more integrated into the military-intelligence apparatus. This takes place as Washington is working to outpace its major geostrategic rivals, above all China and Russia, in the arena of advanced warfare technology and artificial intelligence, in preparation for a catastrophic war that would inevitably involve the use of nuclear weapons.

As they integrate themselves into the American military build-up, the technology giants are collaborating in mass political censorship of left-wing and anti-war websites, above all the World Socialist Web Site, in order to suppress mass opposition to war. Since April 2017, Google has altered its search result algorithms in order to censor the WSWS and other left-wing and anti-war websites.

 

The author also recommends:

Google, drone murder and the military-intelligence-censorship complex
[19 May 2018]

Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack

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More than two years after the allegation of Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was first made, conclusive proof is still lacking and may never be produced, says Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — including two “alumni” who were former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.

On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the “conclusions” of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were “inconclusive.” Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA “Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections” of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement.  That did not prevent the “handpicked” authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee … to WikiLeaks.”  Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.

Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA “assessment” became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump.  It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself.  No, it had to have been the Russians.

Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still “can’t share the evidence” with me … or with anyone else, because it does not exist.

WikiLeaks

It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders.  When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.

Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions “to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.”  The diversion worked like a charm.  Mainstream media kept shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer’ Fox, Bernie didn’t say nothin’.

Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating “forensic facts” to “prove” the Russians did it.  Here’s how it played out:

June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish “emails related to Hillary Clinton.”

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

June 15, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”

The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.

Enter Independent Investigators

A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the “handpicked analysts” who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do.  The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the “hack” that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider — the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the “fluid dynamics” principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)

One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not from Russia.

In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated, “We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.”

Our July 24 Memorandum continued: “Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

“No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA’s Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]

Marbled

“Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the “Marble Framework” program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as ‘news fit to print’ and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since.

“The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, it seems, ‘did not get the memo’ in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: ‘WikiLeaks’ latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.’

“The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use ‘obfuscation,’ and that Marble source code includes a “de-obfuscator” to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

“More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a ‘forensic attribution double game’ or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.”

A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical director, and I commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The Baltimore Sun.

The CIA’s reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates “demons,” and insisting; “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Our July 24 Memorandum continued:  “Mr. President, we do not know if CIA’s Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA’s Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.  [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this.  Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]

“We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today’s technology enables hacking to be ‘masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin’ [of the hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.

“‘Hackers may be anywhere,’ he said. ‘There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can’t you imagine such a scenario? … I can.’

New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published 16-minute interview last Friday.

In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

“Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

“We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental.” The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.