Lost in the Theatre of Data, Dada, and Emotional Manipulation

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

“It is not only information that they need — in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it”What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves”what may be called the sociological imagination.”

— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

“‘Our own death is indeed, unimaginable,’ Freud said in 1915, ‘and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.’ It is thus the very habit of military situations that turn them theatrical. And it is their utter unthinkableness: it is impossible for a participant to believe that he is taking part in such murderous proceedings in his own character. The whole thing is too grossly farcical, perverse, cruel, and absurd to be credited as a form of ‘real life.’ Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place. Just before the attack on Loos, Major Pilditch testifies to ‘a queer new feeling these last few days, intensified last night. A sort of feeling of unreality as if I were acting on a stage”.'”

— Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present . . . .”

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Hi-diddle-dee-dee

An actor’s life for me..

Hi-diddle-dee-dum

An actor’s life is fun”

— Walt Disney, “Pinocchio”

It was 100 years ago this November 11^th when World War I ended. This “War to End All Wars,” resulted in the death of approximately 9 million soldiers and 9 million civilians. The brilliant leaders who waged this war — the crème de la crème — men who, in their own warped minds, possessed impeccable logic and rigorous reasoning, expected the war to be over in a few months. It lasted four years. Like their more current American counterparts before they launched the war against Iraq in 2003, they expected a “cakewalk” or a “slam-dunk” (the former term is racist and the latter a sports term, perfect unconscious verbiage for the slaughter of “lesser” humans). All these principals were data demented, they had lined up their little toy ducks in a row and expected a neat and logical outcome. Or so they said. The new weapons would make quick mincemeat of the enemy. Technology would expeditiously destroy to expeditiously save. Nothing has changed in one hundred years

Such instrumental logic and its positivistic data reductionism has now deeply infected the popular mind, as common sense has been destroyed by government and mass media propaganda so blatantly ridiculous that only a hypnotized person could believe it. But so many have been hypnotized and follow the repetitious and overwhelming streaming of each day’s markedly ad hoc “news,” following the Pied Piper to their doom via the wizardry of digital technology. Raptly attentive to the “politainment” that passes for journalism, they pin ball between alleged assertions of fact cobbled together with tendentious and faulty logic and theatrical displays of emotion meant to manipulate an audience of spectators in the national theatre of absurdity. It is all show and tell in which the audience is expected to react emotionally rather than think, with images and feelings having replaced concentrated reflection, and facts and evidence having disappeared like a coin from a magician’s hand.

This technological surround-sound theatre has reduced everything to play-acting, with audiences and their puppeteers playing reciprocal parts. Theodor Adorno analogizes thus:

“Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.”

Meanwhile, the real business of murder, mayhem, and economic exploitation continues apace. As one “small” example of a fact relegated to oblivion by our mainstream media, in Gaza this past week, Israeli occupation forces killed Nasser Azim Musabeh (12), Mohammed Nayef Ai (14), Mohammed Ali Mohasmmed Anshasi, (18), Iyar Khalil Al-Sha’er (18), Mohasmmed Bassam Mohammed (24), Mohammed Walid Haniyeh (23), and Mohammed Ashraf Awawdeh (23). But such facts don’t matter since these dead young people were already reduced to invisible people not worthy of a mention.

Rather, pseudo-debates and pseudo-events are created by media and political magicians whose goal is to confuse the audience through information (data) and emotional overload into thinking that they are “freely” choosing what is always the same, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno. It is a conjurer’s act of mind manipulation in support of a repressive political and economic ideology built on false dichotomies. The political/media empire creates its own “reality” that the captivated audience takes as reality, as their emotions swing from outrage to laughter and their electronic clickers jump them from show to show, from CNN or Fox or the New York Times to Saturday Night Live in the land where there is no business but show business. “Amusing ourselves to death,” as Neal Postman so aptly put it. To which I would add: As we put others to death outside the show.

The other day I was in a library and was looking through a large book of World War I photographs from the Imperial War Museum that I found lying on a table. They were arranged chronologically from the start of the war in 1914 to its end in 1918. Fascinating photos, I thought. I went through the book page by page, examining the photos one by one, beginning with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a young guy, on through the photos of stiff British war-hawk leaders in double-breasted suits, through photos of the trenches and the new weapons until I reached photos of the treaty to “end” it. By the conclusion, I felt exhausted and knew nothing new. Photos as data. Click, click, click: How many are enough? It was like spending an hour with the mainstream corporate media, and much of the alternative press. It was like a black and white movie in no motion. Same old, same old, as a young man I know often says when I ask him what’s new. Same old data via photographs. War is hell. Ditto. Bodies get blown to bits and decompose in mud. Ditto. Heads get separated from necks and blood pours forth. Ditto. War is hell. Ditto. Great leaders meet and end the carnage. Ditto.

Ditto Data Dada. I had to imagine the subsequent pages and years as these great leaders, so disgusted by war, prepared for the next one, and the one following, etc. Ditto, data, dada.

I understood then why the first famous Dadaist piece of art that emerged from absolute disgust with the data driven crazies who started and waged WW I was Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal signed by R. Mutt, a message to tell the “great” leaders to piss off.

But Dadaist art, like all avant-garde art, gets quickly sucked into the maw of the entertainment complex, which is another name for the propaganda complex. As the word media means etymologically — magicians — these sorcerer’s have developed and use every bit of black magic to engineer the consent of the bewildered herd, to blend the words of two of America’s key propagandists from the past: Edward Bernays, Freud’s American nephew and President Woodrow Wilson’s master propagandist for WW I, and the famous journalist Walter Lippman. Bernays put it straight and succinctly:

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering of consent. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process. It affects almost every aspect of our daily lives.

Last week I attended a production of the play Annie in a community theatre in a liberal town in the northeast. The show was sold out, and I was there because my lovely granddaughter was performing in the play, one whose story and music I was very familiar with. The show was delightful and the audience was enraptured by the performances and the wonderful music. If you are not familiar with the story, it is about an 11 year old orphan named Annie who, in 1933 when FDR has assumed the presidency, is in search of her biological parents. Together with other orphans in a NYC orphanage, she is treated miserably by a character named Miss Hannigan. By the play’s end, Annie is adopted by a wealthy man to presumably live happily ever after. At one point in the play, this wealthy man brings Annie to Washington D. C. to meet his friend, President Roosevelt. He says to FDR, Franklin, you need to do something and get my factories humming again. In this scene, Roosevelt and his cabinet, the wealthy man, and Annie sing the very upbeat song — “Tomorrow” — which Roosevelt loves since it offers hope in the dark time of the great depression. Everyone sings the stirring song, many in the audience silently singing along and the mood in the theater elevates. By the play’s end Annie is adopted by the wealthy man, whose name is Daddy Warbucks. This super-capitalist billionaire with a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a heart of gold has made his riches making weapons for WW I, though this is not spelled out in the show. I kept wondering what the audience of liberal-minded people were thinking, or if they were, about the strange fact the hero of the show was a man with a war-monger’s name whose factories had produced armaments that had created tens of thousands of war orphans and who was urging the liberal Roosevelt to get his munitions factories up and running again in 1933. I suspected they weren’t thinking about this at all and that the work of subtle propaganda was being magically induced at an unconscious level. For how could such a nice, caring guy, who adopts the cute Annie and who sings such tuneful songs, be a killer?

I guiltily thought: I shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts, as I also thought how can I not think them. Emotionally I felt one thing, and intellectually another. This was the classic double-bind.

Upon further reflection, I realized that this is how the finest propaganda works. It splits people in two and works subtly. Emotionally you are pulled one way, and intellectually another, if you are thinking at all. There are certain connections you are not supposed to make or verbalize, when to oppose the powerful sway of the media’s emotional appeals is considered a betrayal of your humanity and certain victims, such as a cute orphan or acceptable victims, even when that doesn’t follow logically.

But in the Magic Theatre that is American life, false choices are the essence of the show. Democrats vs. Republicans, Clinton vs. Bush, Bush vs. Obama, Obama vs. Trump, liberals vs. conservatives, and on and on endlessly. It’s Dada, my friends, all theater. The next election will change everything, right? “The sun’ll come out/Tomorrow, So ya gotta hang on/’Till tomorrow/ Come what may.”

Only when we leave the theatre can we see the real play. But that’s a bold act for which no Oscars, Tonys, or Emmys are handed out. And outside the theater’s warm embrace, it’s cold, and you feel like an orphan looking for a home, no matter how much blood-money purchased it. But don’t go in; it’s a trap.

What We Threw Away

Posted on October 5, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Patrick Armstrong

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Forty years ago I was quite impressed by the books of Jean François Revel in which he argued that The West was pretty much doomed because it was messy and indecisive. On the other hand, the communist world was decisive, centrally controlled, had a goal in mind and was patient and cunning in achieving that goal (the communisation of the planet, of course). They pushed on all fronts, where the West woke up and pulled itself together enough to push back, the communists recoiled, but the advance continued elsewhere. And so, bit by bit, the world became redder. These were, as I recall, the principal arguments of The Totalitarian Temptatio n (1977) and How Democracies Perish (1983). And there were plenty of other people bemoaning the fact that the inchoate Western democracies were frittering away valuable time.

And then, suddenly, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR fall apart and essentially took communism into the grave with them. The West was left standing. Still argumentative, inchoate, indecisive and all the rest of it but – and this is my point – still existing when the other was dead. And come to think of it, we’d outlasted that other stainless-steel perfection of centrally directed will and power, Nazi Germany. And there had been plenty of people in the 1930s who thought that, between communism and nazism, the West was doomed. This set me to thinking that Revel and the others had missed something in their analysis.

We outlived them. We survived, they didn’t. And that what I wondered about – there must be something in the West’s way of doing things that led to survival and something in the nazi or communist systems that led to death. I thought some more and the analogy that occurred to me is that there are many kinds of trees. Big ones, little ones, in-between sized ones. Some live in the wet, others in the dry, others half drowned by the sea and so on. There is in fact, a tree, or several trees, for almost any conceivable environmental condition. And therefore, there will always be trees. Why? Because instead of one Perfect Tree, there is a multitude of different trees. And of fishes, beetles, birds and so on. Nature is pluralistic: many many solutions for every imaginable situation and the ability to change to meet new challenges. Arnold Toynbee called this “challenge and response”; a society responds to a challenge: a good response and it survives to meet the next challenge, a bad response and it fades away.

Could this be the clue? Nazism and communism had One Big Answer for every question. That answer worked for a time until it met some questions it couldn’t answer and down it went. To grossly oversimplify things: the nazis loved force and they went to war with everybody, but you can’t win against everybody else, although you may do well for a while; a hammer and a sickle do not really mentally equip you for life in the later twentieth century; “a road to a blind alley” as Putin called it. Grossly simplified to be sure. If you prefer, ideological societies can only function inside the ontological assumptions of that ideology. But no ideology is any more than a small subset of boundless reality.

So what do we (or, sadly I have to ask, did we) have in the West? I think the three fundamental freedoms in the West are free speech, free politics and free enterprise. Looking at these through the lens of pluralism, they are pluralism of thought, pluralism of power and pluralism of action. Remember that the question I was trying to answer was why did the West survive? I wasn’t asking who’s better, more ideal, more moral; just why is one still around and the other two not? To me the answer was the same thing that allows us to be certain there will still be trees and beetles around in the future – pluralism: lots of different trees and beetles.

Take free speech or pluralism of thought. Everybody’s different, everybody has different ideas, insights, points of view. Let’s assume that, for some issue, mine is the winning idea today. But tomorrow you may have a better solution for the problem that appears tomorrow. If I suppressed you (“no man no problem”, as Stalin used to say) or otherwise prohibited your irrelevant (today) but relevant (tomorrow) idea, we would be in trouble tomorrow and less likely to survive until the next day. So, since we don’t know what tomorrow’s problems are, it’s best to let everybody think his thoughts because who can say whose ideas will be winners tomorrow? The same argument can be made for the other two pluralisms/freedoms. And so, by practising pluralism of thought, power and action, a society improves its chances of survival. That’s all: survival. But that was the question I asked myself in the first place.

So, to my mind, that was the great secret that communism’s fall had revealed – social or national survivability is best assured by pluralism of thought, power and action. So, in all humility, we should have understood that and proclaimed it. And, of course, the essence of pluralism is that you are free to be, and should be, yourself. All nations should be themselves: Russians should be Russian, Hungarians Hungarian and so on. Who can say who will have the next good idea? Who is so wise that he can direct his neighbour’s life? That to me was what should have been done and, had that been the message the West had preached, I think we’d all be better off today.

What instead? We had the fatuous proclaiming of “values”: we had ’em and they didn’t. All over the West stuffed shirts got up in parliaments to boast of “our values”. How we got them no one knew. Did God hand them out to some people but not to others? Russians, too lazy or shiftless or something, having missed the ceremony? Had they mysteriously grown in some national soil over long time? A relict of ancient Saxon customs that only their descendants could inherit? The product of centuries of learning? And what is a “value” anyway? A practical guide to action or a virtue that you either have or don’t? Was it something innate or something learned? Could they get these values? Could they be taught? But, whatever, we had ’em and they didn’t; we were virtuous, they weren’t. And there was another tiresome thing about this, especially when, as it often was, the values were given the adjective “European”. Franco, Hitler, Marx, Engels, Mussolini, Robespierre, Napoleon, Quisling and all the rest of them were Europeans. Every single one of them based his ideas and political views on sources deeply rooted in European thought and experience. And, for certain, had it not been for the Soviets and the Anglosphere, the “European values” Eurocrats and their flunkeys would have been boasting about today would have involved a lot more leather, jackboots and stiff-armed salutes. The whole enterprise resembled something from the movie Idiocracy: “Brawndo has what plants crave because plants crave what Brawndo has“. It was weirdly fascinating to watch.

Our “values” and our “virtue” entitled us to rule the world. We were licensed to do just about anything because we had “what plants crave”. And so triumphalist arrogance and complacent ignorance combined with the West’s monopoly of exportable brutal power. And so it went. An unexamined conceit, frighteningly widespread, became the justification, and cover, for less noble actions.

But some responses to challenges are not so successful and we must ask what has become of our boasted “values” today? Well, we’re still free to speak our minds. Not of course if it’s hate speech or fake news; who could defend that? And not, certainly, to offend anyone’s safe space. And you’d probably better not say anything in Russian. Political freedom? Not entirely gone I suppose, in those little corners not already bought up by lobbyists. And it would certainly be wrong to question anything said or done by “those brave men and women who put their life on the line for our safety”. Free enterprise of course still flourishes. In whatever tiny spaces a few gigantic and well-connected corporations have not yet got to.

Altogether, we can’t be very happy with the state of pluralism in the West. And if I’m correct that pluralism is the key to survival, how much longer do we have?

So who did win the Cold War in the end?

The Suicidal Empire

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

There are a lot of behaviors being exhibited by those in positions of power in the US that seem disparate and odd. We watch Trump who is imposing sanctions on country after country, dreaming of eradicating his country’s structural trade deficit with the rest of the world. We watch pretty much all of US Congress falling over each other in their attempt to impose the harshest possible sanctions on Russia. People in Turkey, a key NATO country, are literally burning US dollars and smashing iPhones in a fit of pique. Confronted with a new suite of Russian and Chinese weapons systems that largely neutralize the ability of the US to dominate the world militarily, the US is setting new records in the size of its already outrageously bloated yet manifestly ineffectual defense spending. As a backdrop to this military contractor feeding frenzy, the Taliban are making steady gains in Afghanistan, now control over half the territory, and are getting ready to stamp “null and void,” in a repeat of Vietnam, on America’s longest war. A lengthening list of countries are set to ignore or compensate for US sanctions, especially sanctions against Iranian oil exports. In a signal moment, Russia’s finance minister has recently pronounced the US dollar “unreliable.” Meanwhile, US debt keeps galloping upwards, with its largest buyer being reported as a mysterious, possibly entirely nonexistent “Other.”

Although these may seem like manifestations of many different trends in the world, I believe that a case can be made that these are all one thing: the US—the world’s imperial overlord—standing on a ledge and threatening to jump, while its imperial vassals—too many to mention—are standing down below and shouting “Please, don’t jump!” To be sure, most of them would be perfectly happy to watch the overlord plummet and jelly up the sidewalk. But here is the key point: if this were to happen today, it would cause unacceptable levels of political and economic collateral damage around the world. Does this mean that the US is indispensable? No, of course not, nobody is. But dispensing with it will take time and energy, and while that process runs its course the rest of the world is forced to keep it on life support no matter how counterproductive, stupid and demeaning that feels.

What the world needs to do, as quickly as possible, is to dismantle the imperial center, which is in Washington politically and militarily and in New York and London financially, while somehow salvaging the principle of empire. “What?!” you might exclaim, “Isn’t imperialism evil.” Well, sure it is, whatever, but empires make possible efficient, specialized production and efficient, unhindered trade over large distances. Empires do all sorts of evil things—up to and including genocide—but they also provide a level playing field and a method for preventing petty grievances from escalating into tribal conflicts.

The Roman Empire, then Byzantium, then the Tatar/Mongol Golden Horde, then the Ottoman Sublime Porte all provided these two essential services—unhindered trade and security—in exchange for some amount of constant rapine and plunder and a few memorable incidents of genocide. The Tatar/Mongol Empire was by far the most streamlined: it simply demanded “yarlyk”—tribute—and smashed anyone who attempted to rise above a level at which they were easy to smash. The American empire is a bit more nuanced: it uses the US dollar as a weapon for periodically expropriating savings from around the world by exporting inflation while annihilating anyone who tries to wiggle out from under the US dollar system.

All empires follow a certain trajectory. Over time they become corrupt, decadent and enfeebled, and then they collapse. When they collapse, there are two ways to go. One is to slog through a millennium-long dark age—as Western Europe did after the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Another is for a different empire, or a cooperating set of empires, to take over, as happened after the Ottoman Empire collapsed. You may think that a third way exists: of small nations cooperating sweetly and collaborating successfully on international infrastructure projects that serve the common good. Such a scheme may be possible, but I tend to take a jaundiced view of our simian natures.

We come equipped with MonkeyBrain 2.0, which has some very useful built-in functions for imperialism, along with some ancillary support for nationalism and organized religion. These we can rely on; everything else would be either a repeat of a failed experiment or an untested innovation. Sure, let’s innovate, but innovation takes time and resources, and those are the exact two things that are currently lacking. What we have in permanent surplus is revolutionaries: if they have their way, look out for a Reign of Terror, followed by the rise of a Bonaparte. That’s what happens every time.

Lest you think that the US isn’t an empire—a collapsing one—consider the following. The US defense budget is larger than that of the next ten countries combined, yet the US can’t prevail even in militarily puny Afghanistan. (That’s because much of its defense budget is trivially stolen.) The US has something like a thousand military bases, essentially garrisoning the entire planet, but to unknown effect. It claims the entire planet as its dominion: no matter where you go, you still have to pay US income taxes and are still subject to US laws. It controls and manipulates governments in numerous countries around the world, always aiming to turn them into satrapies governed from the US embassy compound, but with results that range from unprofitable to embarrassing to lethal. It is now failing at virtually all of these things, threatening the entire planet with its untimely demise.

What we are observing, at every level, is a sort of blackmail: “Do as we say, or no more empire for you!” The US dollar will vanish, international trade will stop and a dark age will descend, forcing everyone to toil in the dirt for a millennium while mired in futile, interminable conflicts with neighboring tribes. None of the old methods of maintaining imperial dominance are working; all that remains is the threat of falling down and leaving a huge mess for the rest of the world to deal with. The rest of the world is now tasked with rapidly creating a situation where the US empire can be dealt a coup de grâce safely, without causing any collateral damage—and that’s a huge task, so everyone is forced to play for time.

There is a lot of military posturing and there are political provocations happening all the time, but these are sideshows that are becoming an unaffordable luxury: there is nothing to be won through these methods and plenty to be lost. Essentially, all the arguments are over money. There is a lot of money to be lost. The total trade surplus of the BRICS countries with the West (US+EU, essentially) is over a trillion dollars a year. SCO—another grouping of non-Western countries—comes up with almost the same numbers. That’s the amount of products these countries produce for which they currently have no internal market. Should the West evaporate overnight, nobody will buy these products. Russia alone had a 2017 trade surplus of $116 billion, and in 2018 so far it grew by 28.5%. China alone, in its trade just with the US, generated $275 billion in surplus. Throw in another $16 billion for its trade with the EU.

Those are big numbers, but they are nowhere near enough if the project is to build a turnkey global empire to replace US+EU in a timely manner. Also, there are no takers. Russia is rather happy to have shed its former Soviet dependents and is currently invested in building a multilateral, international system of governance based on international institutions such as SCO, BRICS and EAEU. Numerous other countries are very interested in joining together in such organizations: most recently, Turkey has expressed interest in turning BRICS into BRICTS. Essentially, all of the post-colonial nations around the world are now forced to trade away some measure of their recently won independence, essentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The job vacancy of Supreme Global Overlord is unlikely to attract any qualified candidates.

What everyone seems to want is a humble, low-budget, cooperative global empire, without all of the corruption and with a lot less life-threatening militarism. It will take time to build, and the resources to build it can only come from one place: from gradually bleeding US+EU dry. In order to do this, the wheels of international commerce must continue to spin. But this is exactly what all of the new tariffs and sanctions, the saber-rattling and the political provocations, are attempting to prevent: a ship laden with soya is now doing circles in the Pacific off the coast of China; steel I-beams are rusting at the dock in Turkey…

But it is doubtful that these attempts will work. The EU has been too slow in recognizing just how pernicious its dependence on Washington has become, and will take even more time to find ways to free itself, but the process has clearly started. For its part, Washington runs on money, and since its current antics will tend to make money grow scarce even faster than it otherwise would, those who stand to lose the most will make the Washingtonians feel their pain and will force a change of course. As a result, everyone will be pushing in the same direction: toward a slow, steady, controllable imperial collapse. All we can hope for is that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement in time to avoid collapsing into a new post-imperial dark age.

Why the West cannot stomach Russians

Posted on April 13, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Vltchek

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’.

Fairy tales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the subconsciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact, the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”

The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”

Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.

Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.

And, above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.

Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians are falling to its own, unique category.

*****

Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.

To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.

Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.

They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.

When confronted, when attacked, they fight.

They rarely strike first, almost never invade.

But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.

In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

*****

It gets much worse than that.

Russia has this terrible habit… not only does it defend itself and its people, but it also fights for the others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.

It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 25 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.

The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.

Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West, and especially Europe, never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.

That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.

The excesses of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and others’ monstrous cruelties.

Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed with. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.

The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.

*****

It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.

What followed could be easily described as genocide.

The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.

Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.

It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.

Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?

Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.

Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?

Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.

Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.

I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…

Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

*****

But that nightmare did not last long.

And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.

Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!

Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.

And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks of the Western empire.

A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.

President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.

Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.

That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

*****

There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the West. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.

This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.

It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.

Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.

Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.

The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.

Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.

Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”

The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.

*****

In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.

Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.

Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!

In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want, to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.

They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.

It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.

Many victims are too scared to speak.

Russia is not.

It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.

Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about the Russian armor.

There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.

Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.

And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.

3 Characteristics of a True Political Awakening

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Waking Times

History is written by the winners, or so they say, but there is an agreed upon version of our story that is taught to us in school and reinforced in everyday life by the media and government propagandists. Coasting through life haphazardly believing in this standardized version of reality is a form of consciousness, a contemporary way of relating to a world where the individual is consumed by the group, and truth becomes evermore out of reach.

The typical level of political awareness in our society is fairly basic, simplified and incomplete, but it serves as a functional trap for the mind and the imagination, pigeon-holing individuals into a conformist. This psychological trap preys upon two basic human traits: conservatism and progressivism. And because these traits are biologically hardwired into the human psyche, they are exploited as a fissure to create disharmony and division amongst the public.

Many people only rise to a level of political consciousness which allows them to understand their predisposition to one or the other of these traits. Awareness often ends here, with extreme devotion to one side of the publicized political spectrum.

The truth is that human societies have always needed an even distribution of people with each of these ideological tendencies in order to achieve a balance between our need for external and internal control, protection and care. Political awakening involves rising above the prescribed psychology of division, into a position of appreciation of the qualities which unite us all.

This idea is enumerated in the following three characteristics of true political awakening.

Trust in the Statist System Collapses

To continue to trust and support a consistently abusive master is often referred to as Stockholm Syndrome. When a person experiences a true and deep political awakening, it is not longer possible to excuse any of the crushing affronts to human rights and human dignity that are intrinsic to state power.

State power is historically abusive. The manipulation of our money supply, endless wars, wasting of public resources, corruption, permitting the destruction of the natural world, terrorizing citizens with abusive police and punitive tax codes, and limiting prosperity with regulatory overkill are all standard operating procedure for the state.

In a statist world, the awakening individual is tasked with the challenge of seeing through all of this in order to free the mind and see the greater possibilities for freedom and cooperation in the human story.

So-Called Leaders Are Seen as Puppets of Division

Watching the pendulum of public opinion and discourse swing violently back and forth between the merits of two political parties is comical once you’ve recognized just how predictable and destructive it is. We are goaded into engaging in the divisiveness, encouraged by the rhetoric of the political establishment.

It is our unity they fear most. Falling into the trap of politically dogmatic ideological fortifications is more dangerous to our society than just about anything else, and the truly politically awake fly above the argumentative mentality of those who are trapped in the two-party paradigm.

The Recognition that Politics is Heavily Influenced by Powerful Forces

If politics is the arena of government, and government is clearly influenced by corporate interests, intelligence agencies and deep state operators, and supranational organizations, then it makes no sense to pretend that we have power in the political system. It makes no sense to pretend as though politicians are acting in the true interest of actual people. It makes no sense to pretend that we can save ourselves by calling on members of the state to represent us in their corrupt scene.

It is commonly known that politicians are beholden to special interests, and while they never talk openly about this influence, so many people carry on with the charade that politicians can wield power over these organization, for the benefit of the plebs. They cannot, for these forces are beyond their control. The politically awakened understand that the plots against humanity extend way beyond the political scene.

Final Thoughts

Unity is the one thing that any political elite has always feared the most. Without smashing down the perceived barriers in contemporary political consciousness we can only expect our society to become more fractured, chaotic and dangerous. Trust in that which deceives and harms us is simply not possible for the truly politically awakened.

False Flag Terrorism Isn’t a “Theory” … It’s ADMITTED and Widespread

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Source: Washington’s Blog

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror

In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this, this and this.

(2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. The staged attacks included:

The German radio station Sender Gleiwitz [details below]

The strategic railway at POSunka Pass (Jabłonków Incident), located on the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia

The German customs station at Hochlinden (today part of Rybnik-Stodoły)

The forest service station in Pitschen (Byczyna)

The communications station at Neubersteich (“Nieborowitzer Hammer” before 12 February 1936, now Kuznia Nieborowska)

The railroad station in Alt-Eiche (Smolniki), Rosenberg in Westpreußen district

A woman and her companion in Katowice

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include:

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans’ goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(3) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government – subsequently approved by Mussolini himself – admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy’s 1940 invasion of Greece.

(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).

(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

The U.S. Army does not believe this is an isolated incident. For example, the U.S. Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies said of Mossad (Israel’s intelligence service):

“Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

(9) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(10) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

(11) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(12) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” … so that “a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security” (and see this) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

The murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960)

Bombings in Portugal (1966)

The Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969)

Terror attacks in Turkey (1971)

The Peteano bombing in Italy (1972)

Shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974)

Shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977)

The Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977)

The abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978) (and see this)

The bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980)

Shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985)

(13) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]”.

(14) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(15) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(16) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(17) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(18) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(19) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained: “In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque.” In response to the surprised correspondent’s incredulous look the general said, “I am giving an example”.

(20) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations ….

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques, likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication.

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.

(21) The German government admitted (and see this) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted “escape tools” on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(22) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(23) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him “to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident”, thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(24) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author).

(25) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this.

(26) The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “Dirty Wars“. And see this.

(27) Similarly, a CIA “psychological operations” manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a “martyr” for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(28) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe – a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus – was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(29) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked”.

(30) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(31) As reported by the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the “war on terror”. They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies”. Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then – after killing them – posed the victims with planted evidence – “bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side” – to show Western diplomats.

(32) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying “iron bars inside the police station”. Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa subsequently admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(33) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have allegedthat 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 … even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(34) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.

(35) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(36) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(37) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester.

(38) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method: “False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.” While not a traditional false flag attack, this deception could lead to former detainees – many of whom were tortured – attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(39) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(40) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of ‘netwar’ – called for western intelligence services to create new “pseudo gang” terrorist groups, as a way of undermining “real” terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla’s ‘pseudo-gang’ strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

“Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists…

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls ‘action teams’ in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. ‘Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?’ the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. ‘We founded them and we financed them,’ he said. ‘The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.’ A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, ‘We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.’”

(41) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(42) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The soldiers apparently possessed explosives, and were accused of attempting to set off bombs. While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out. The extreme measures used to free the soldiers – rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial – could be considered an admission.

(43) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(44) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(45) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as “paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political ‘undesirables.’” The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and “Terrorism” (as well as “transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.”)

(46) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior … infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything …. And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, … beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(47) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany’s federal police chief admitted that – while the undercover officer worked for the German police – he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent “Black Bloc” anarchists.

(48) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged “anarchists” had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn’t know the undercover officers were cops.

(49) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(50) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that – at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 – undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this, for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(51) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(52) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal “lock boxes” which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(53) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this.

(54) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(55) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(56) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(57) Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government – a NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(58) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Libya, Syria, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It’s gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a “Stop Arming Terrorists Act”, and U.S. Congresswoman – who introduced a similar bill in the House – says: “For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

(59) The Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others. Ukrainian officials admit that the Ukrainian snipers fired on both sides, to create maximum chaos.

(60) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(61) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(62) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(63) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

(64) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(65) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(66) Similarly, police frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a “throwdown”–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable. Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot themduring a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes:

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division’s anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings.

(As a side note – and while not technically false flag attacks – police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways, as well.)

(67) A former U.S. intelligence officer recently alleged:

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

(68) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(69) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes:

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war. A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the
victims of the enemy’s unforgivable atrocities.

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor’s own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation.

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(70) Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the “benefits” of of false flags to justify their political agenda:

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened”.
– Josef Stalin

Postscript 1: It is not just “modern” nations which have launched false flag attacks. For example, a Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

Postscript 2: On multiple occasions, atrocities or warmongering are falsely blamed on the enemy as a justification for war … when no such event ever occurred. This is more like a “fake flag” than a “false flag”, as no actual terrorism occurred.

For example:

The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 … manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war

One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. – who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war – but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress

Another central lie used to justify the Gulf War was the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this

Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger:

had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More

The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11

CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb

The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by highly exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this

Afterword: The corporate media will likely never report on false flags … as it is ALWAYS pro-war.

America’s Retarded Awareness

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Denis Conroy

(RINF)

Alternative ideas don’t come easily to Americans. It seems that Americans imported colonial hierarchal practices from Europe to cultivate them to their own advantage. Over millennia, Europeans had come to accept the authority of Church, Monarchy or State Principalities to be the places where the ‘rightful-centres’ existed. The ‘rightful-centre’ was always beyond the reach of the masses. Pontiffs and warlords alike had built their power base upon the belief that the common people should accept the fact that the centre of power was somewhere above their heads and that it was the lot of underlings to live the life of fellow travellers.

The Confucian idea, that the centre was everywhere, had failed to penetrate the European pantheon. In Asia, actions and their consequences were measured in language that was neither hierarchical nor internalised within rhetorical borders, but connected to truths that had their origin in humanity-oriented-grass-root realism…ethics. Europe, for its part, went the way of evangelical Christianity by legitimizing religion as the celebrity voice par excellence. Operating in space above the heads of the common folk, Emperors and Popes engaged in the practice of issuing edicts that instructed the commoners on how they should think and respond to the celebrity classes doing their thinking for them.

Branding religion was the event that opened the door to the branding of everything. Patriarchal authority, the central tenet of the Old Testament, reappeared again in the guise of male-dominated New Testament culture when it was integrated into the Roman state. Rebranding regulations to secure the authority of the power-base required a narrative that sought to recluse authority from popular critique. The Founding Fathers in Rome or Washington, became very astute in crafting directives and devices that enabled them to toss their bountiful wisdom to an amorphous flock that would forever defer to their ‘wisdom’. The creation of an inscrutable Machiavellian dimension…secrecy…put in place to coddle the aspirations of the commoners, had the desired effect of separating them from the business of government.

By these means, the State as a force-unto-itself came into being, with lawmakers, merchants and agents of the evangelical stripe committing rank, energy and capital to fulfilling a dream of progress that would see them on a path to seeking mastery over all things…nature included…per subjugation of all things. This was the philosophy that the colonial mind found prepossessing…business-as-usual as a staple operation that would take devotees of their exceptional ilk anywhere they chose to go to, expropriate whatever resources were available to them, while defiling the health of the planet in the process…and think about what we Westerners became and what we did and to whom in the process?

When the genie was released from Europe’s empirical arse-crack, was it because the grass looked greener across the vast expanses of America’s prairies which appeared to be there for the taking? Was the Australian bush an all too alluring opportunity to rebrand someone else’s homeland? Europeans, living midway between science and barbarism went across the world to smote the idyllic ‘innocents’ living midway between paradise and paralysis, believing them to be inferior. With a pugnacious conviction born of arrogance, they swarmed through the greener-grasses with scant regard for life or limb.

So, moving on to present day America…which sees itself as the leader of the free world… who or what can explain the introverted perspectives that draw the national psyche into an ever-expanding empirical loop. There is much evidence available to show that a covert passion for Great-Game memes continues to haunt the power-elites in Washington. It now seems that American presidents may come and go but Henry Kissinger is here to stay. Henry…who served first as Nixon’s national security adviser and then as his secretary of state 1969 until 1974… and nowadays frequently seen slumped in a chair in the Oval Office, looking like a grim medieval gargoyle, whose drooping flesh and demeanour convey an image of intransigence…worthy of Machiavelli’s attention… hovering there to counsel the many presidents who pass through the White House, in the art of genuflecting before Zion. Henry, the Zionist Pope, keen to examine the credentials of all those aspiring to occupy this high office, conjures up the inevitable question; at what point in time did this secondary space and highest office in the land become a Zionist habitat?

Strangest of all, the recent election happened and hardly anybody gave a fig about the destructive consequences of America’s wars abroad. It was like permanent war was o.k. so long as it happens in somebody else’s country…or benefited Israel. The public, before-during-and-after the election, expressed zilch concern for the millions of people their government had destroyed. After all, the American corporate juggernaut was unstoppably hooked on exploiting the globe…leave no paddock unexploited…and the electorate, the fellow travellers… who accepted the propagandized narrative coming per media…from above their heads…would always accept corporate branded salve.

What helped them to ignore the consequences of permanent war was an inhouse injunction…the American narrative had become a religion that represented all that was good for business as gospel…and that was that! Confirming the only ‘reality’ they knew, the fellow travellers passively accepted a piece of the action. America’s brutality in the world at large would continue, signalling that ‘butcher shop’ carte blanche would go on, regardless of who was elected.

The election focused on brand and who would control the narrative. The winner was ‘more-of-the-same’…and that was good for business. The election was merely about people choosing their favourite celebrity, but the one who succeeded failed to fulfil the expectations of the liberal-elite and that meant a ‘wigs-on-the-green’ melee was in the offing. An awareness-deficient electorate left the rest of the world wondering if there was much difference between educated and uneducated Americans.

Where were the voices that might have stormed the barricades with rhetoric that condemned the American practice of sending its apprentices…butcher-boys all…abroad to kill! Kill! Kill! Awareness was absent because the electorate was too comfortable with the hierarchical world above their heads…Wall Street, the Pentagon and the accompanying galaxy of job opportunities available to the educated and uneducated alike. After all, inclusion in the system was all that mattered come payday… and after all, cash cows R us!

“According to U.S. Census 2013 data, 1.68 percent of Americans over the age of 25 have a PhD. This equates to approximately 2.5 million people. People with professional degrees such as MD or DDS make up 1.8 percent of the U.S. population making the total percent of Americans referred to as doctors equal to 3.16 percent.

The vast majority of adults in the U.S., over 88 percent, have a high school diploma or additional education. Around 31 percent of the population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, and almost 12 percent have a master’s degree or higher”…which begs the question; how can so many people live with so much carnage? Can it be that the American dream of freedom and independence, for so long the playbook of the straight white man expressing racial bravado in his quest for dominance, is now beginning to show evidence of him falling…in slow motion…upon his own petard?

As America grew bigger and bolder and wealthier, the echelons attached to the running of the state multiplied too. In subtle ways, the business of the people operating in the zone above the level of the common people became ever more numerous and secretive…after 9/11, the main perpetrators of secrecy became the CIA and the FBI, regulating the level of fear to kept the public focused on fabricated threats designed to promulgate the ‘war-on terror’ mantra. In the process, the temporal beast grew an extra dimension of the mystical kind to extend its purview beyond its own borders so that the people could believe that greatness was now a context in which America and Americans could shine and shove it to the world. What was happening abroad was bound to enrich them…and to hell with the consequences.

Americans, surfing the contours of their very own exceptional imperial arse-crack, in quest of ever easier access to mother nature’s assets, deluded themselves into believing that the assets allocated to sand-bunnies and other assorted detritus were mistakes that needed correcting. Deriving emotional security from the possession of their vast stock of ballistic missiles, the American imperial persona descended into a state of amnesia as a convenient way of ignoring the increasing problem of the body-count forever multiplying in the countries they were rendering dysfunctional. American boots on the ground had come to spell venality abroad and valour at home.

What was happening abroad was inconsequential…reportage at home became more heated, but it had little impact on a critique-resistant ‘exceptional’ entity like astigmatic America. Retarded awareness was turning the ‘great’ society into an intellectual cadaver…critique had caught some fatal disease that caused ‘John Brown’s Body’ to mournfully turn in its grave.

As Uncle Sam, in horizontal locomotion style, cast his war-ware across the Muslim world, people came to recognized the familiar appearance of the grim reaper, hidden in the folds of the stars and stripes, as their great airpower transported democracy eastwards. They were aware that death and destruction in their country had long ceased to receive much attention in Western media. America was too busy navel-gazing.

To be too preoccupied with one’s own anatomy or infrastructure is likely to cause serious problems for people who live in glasshouses. America’s post traumatic rage over the result of the 2016 presidential election might have gained something if people had stopped a moment to reflect on proverbial insightfulness for a moment, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

Ad hominem warfare in America is spreading like wildfire. The population is determined to leave no stone unturned. A veritable ‘kristallnacht’ of sorts, affecting the secondary classes…celebrity classes…more than the ‘deplorable-class’ suggests that the America dream and its affiliations with politic heft and hove is up shit-creek. The current brand of stone thrower lives in that space above the common people’s heads and personifies the American dream from a specific perspective; status, power, money, independence et al… and nothing gels!

But on second thought, perhaps proverbial wisdom needs revision; for example; insular people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw tantrums or missiles.

And there’s more; Wall Street, AIPAC, The Pentagon, The FBI, The CIA, The State Department, T.V. Talk Hosts, Established Media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and countless other membranous boundaries that represent the hydra-headed social order are all insular to a man (or woman). Insularity however, inevitably means more trouble for the uninitiated masses excluded from the banquet… secrecy being the better part of valour…but?

So, we don’t ever really know what goes on behind closed doors. Nobody ever comes through the door to explain why evangelical America threatens 150 million Russian Christians with nuclear annihilation. Nobody comes through the door to explain why American bombing throughout the Middle East is Guernica writ large in perpetuity…as was the case with Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc. etc., Nobody knows who decides which democratically elected government abroad is next in line for regime change. Nobody, on the other hand, is ever allowed to enter the closed doors that conceal the little men who ruminate over charts, statistics, numbers, surveillance data and funding dossiers that help insular careerists to navigate a path ever deeper into Doctor Strangelove’s hoary entrails where drone strikes and Armageddon is contemplated.

The American Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington all have their place in history as instructors…and instructors are there to advise one on how to move forward. The great achievement of the new great country which embarked on so many projects to develop infrastructure, failed to acknowledge that developing at so great a tempo left no time to reflect on the consequences of its actions. As it rushed headlong into the future, it lost sight of where it was coming from.

On becoming a country without a past, its memory span disappeared more and more as the locomotion of its enterprise took America ever deeper into an illusion that the country had to keep its foot on the accelerator 24/7 to achieve greatness for all. In the absence of grass-root ethics that might have revealed the connection between object and subject, respecting and being respected, ‘greatness’ became a synonym of pedigree and power… ‘us-and-them’ a code for superior and inferior, exceptional and unexceptional. The America of superman fame adopted the eagle as super-bird, not as a Phoenix rising in a new world, but as a symbol of a bird of prey with a mission to destroy…the corporeal devouring the spiritual! …History does repeat itself!

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest”…………..Confucius, 551—479 BC……..

Comey’s Quixotic Quest to Prove Russian Involvement in Elections

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey may be physically imposing at 6 feet, 8 inches tall. However, when it comes to his oratorical skills, or, in his case, the lack thereof, Comey is nothing more than a «snake oil» salesman trying to market fanciful conspiracies masked as fact. Trying to emulate one of his predecessors, J. Edgar Hoover, Comey said that when it comes to protecting the democratic process, Russia is «the greatest threat to any nation on earth, given their intention and their ability». Comey’s rhetoric is right out of the pages of the Cold War and Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist «witch hunts». Comey engaged in McCarthyite tactics by referring to WikiLeaks as «a conduit for the Russian intelligence services».

It is hard to tell whether President Trump agrees with Mr. Comey. Trump has indicated that it is within his power to fire Comey, but has given no further indication as to whether the FBI director will serve out the traditional ten-year term. There is one thing for certain. Comey may not want to appear as a right-wing, Cold War-mentality neoconservative, but his professional and personal history indicates that when it comes to Russia-bashing, it is in his blood. Comey supported and donated to the presidential campaigns of the psychotically anti-Russian John McCain, as well as the neocons’ darling Mitt Romney.

After leaving the Justice Department in 2005, Comey became General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s largest contractor. When it comes to war-making, Lockheed Martin has profited handsomely from ensuring that military tension remains a hair-trigger from war from the Baltic region and the Balkans to the Korean peninsula and the Middle East. Feeding the «war-porn» addicts in the U.S. Congress, including the likes of Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, improves the bottom line of Lockheed Martin, a firm in which Mr. Comey likely still has a significant personal financial stake.

Comey and his neocon friends have decided that the best way to challenge the anti-globalist populist wave that is sweeping the world is to deploy a wide brush and paint every sovereigntist political campaign and leader – both left and right – as Russian «tools» and Kremlin «agents». It worked for Hoover during the Cold War when he decided that the best way to avert the attention of the American public away from his friends in organized crime and his own well-known homosexuality was to claim that «Communists» had infiltrated every sector of American society. In his attempt to fill Mr. Hoover’s high-heeled shoes, Comey accuses Russia of being the greatest threat to free elections on earth.

One only need examine the record of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since its creation in 1947 to find out that it has been the United States that has been the greatest threat to free and fair elections around the globe. When it comes to election interference, no country – Russia, China, the former Soviet Union, apartheid South Africa, or North Korea – holds a candle to the boys at Langley. In 1948, a CIA full-court press of bribes, threats, and infiltration ensured the defeat of the Communist Party by the U.S.-supported Christian Democrats in the Italian general election. This same template was used again and again by Washington in countries ranging from Chile and Nicaragua to Australia and Russia.

Now, the CIA, headed by the neo-Cold Warrior and right-wing religious extremist Mike Pompeo, and its allies, are trying to turn the tables in suggesting that Russia has been able to almost singlehandedly affect the U.S. presidential campaign, the «yes» vote in the European Union Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the French presidential election, and the «no» vote in the Italian constitutional reform referendum. There is a major problem with this thinking. If Russia were as powerful as claimed by the Comey, Pompeo, and others, Austrian nationalist Norbert Hofer, not the anti-Russian emigré from Estonia, Alexander Van der Bellen, would have won the Austrian presidential election. And it would have been the Dutch Freedom Party nationalist Geert Wilders, not the globalist Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who would have been the victor in the Netherlands election.

If Russia’s intentions were as malignant as claimed by the neocons and the Cold Warriors, a dubious Russian-backed coup operation in Montenegro would have been successful and not a failure. When it comes to coup-making and putsches, it is Langley that excels, especially with its own unlimited funds, coupled with those of international hedge fund tycoon George Soros, at its disposal. It is American fingerprints that have been found in successful and aborted «color revolutions» in Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Macedonia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Armenia, and the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was joint CIA-Soros funds that gave rise to the bloody «Arab Spring» uprisings in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. The Arab Spring template has been moved by the globalist power centers to create havoc in socialist Venezuela, with their eyes soon to be set on Bolivia.

The strategy of the globalists and their puppets, such as Comey, Lindsey Graham, and others, is to demonize as «Russian agents» those who pose a threat to the «world order» fashioned by the CIA, Wall Street, and the Pentagon. Therefore, leftist anti-globalists like British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, French leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and U.S. Independent Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders are given the same McCarthyite «Russian agent» labels, as have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Alternative for Germany leader Frauke Petry.

Globalist politicians – left and right – now routinely engage in claims of Russia involvement in their nations’ political processes to mask their own ineffective leadership. In January of this year, Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said he could not rule out «Russian interference» in Sweden’s 2018 general election. There is little doubt that if Löfven loses, he will blame it all on «the Russians».

The New York Times suggested that Russia was financially backing Mr. Wilders in the Netherlands election but the paper paid scant attention to the fact that Israel is the Dutch opposition leader’s biggest financial «sugar daddy». It is amazing that the tools of the globalists, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, did not claim that Russia interfered in the February 5, 2017 general election in the Principality of Liechtenstein, because an anti-EU and anti-migrant party, «Die Unabhängigen», («The Independents»), came in third, beating a traditional third party.

Mr. Comey testified about intelligence proof he has confirming Russian interference in the U.S. election. Let’s examine the history of U.S. intelligence «proof». It includes intelligence reports from a phony Iraqi defector named «Curveball» that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, fake signals intelligence intercepts on a non-existent North Vietnamese naval attack on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, phony intelligence reports on Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi committing mass executions of Libyans in 2011, fake reports on Iranian nuclear weapons development after it ended its weapons program in 2003, and, more recently, a dubious intelligence dossier from a mid-level former British MI-6 employee who successfully shopped «dirt» to the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton campaigns on Trump and «golden shower» parties in Moscow. The dossier, embraced by Comey, is said to «prove» Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. British «dossiers» on just about everything, from the Number 10 «dodgy dossier» on Saddam Hussein’s weapons to the «dirty dossier» on Trump, are about as credible as everything else in the British tabloids. Comey should read Harry Potter books, not FBI and CIA intelligence reports, if he wants to wallow in fiction.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
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After the Crash

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Tag Archives: history

What We Threw Away

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Why the West cannot stomach Russians