The World Wants to Be Deceived

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him.  It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries.  I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:

There are great puddles of blood on the world
where’s it all going all this spilled blood
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
funny kind of drunkography then
so wise . . . so monotonous . . .
No the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons
rain . . . snow
hail . . . fair weather
never is it drunk
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It doesn’t give a damn
The earth

But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.

I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless.  Why bother?  At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true.  I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.

For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins.  I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media.  And the people who believe them.

It is not easy.  No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.

When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down.  And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs.  This is the protection racket by omission and commission.

Maybe an anecdote would help. A week ago, I ran into an old friend at a coffee shop.  Hersh’s article, aspects of which I question, had just come out and I asked him if he had seen it.  He said he hadn’t but didn’t know anything about such pipelines being blown up.  I was stunned.  A devout consumer of mainstream media, yet he somehow missed this major September 2022 event in the U.S. war against Russia that was reported widely by the media he relies upon.  Those media went on to suggest that Russia blew up its own pipelines, a claim beyond ridicule but one that was part of its war propaganda narrative.  My friend is a guy who has strong opinions about everything and finds NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, etc. to be credible news sources.  How could he have missed one of the major stories of 2022, one that The New York Times, etcwas reporting on into December, still suggesting that Russia did the deed?  How could he have missed the pipeline story whose reverberations spread through all aspects of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine when it was referenced in so many reports of gas and oil prices, a cold winter for Europe, and so many other issues?  Its ramifications are manifold and have been reported as such, but he had never heard of it.  I was stunned.

I wanted to quote him Dylan’s facetious words from “The Ballad of the Thin Man”: “’Cause something is happening/And you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?”  But I did not.

I have spent a week wondering how it is possible that he didn’t know anything about the pipeline explosions.  I am sure he wasn’t lying to me.  So how explain it?

In the interim, as I have been trying to comprehend these matters, the Super Bowl with its mesmeric half-time spectacle replete with crotch grabbing has come and gone, and I have read an interesting article by Ethan Strauss, a sports journalist, “Why America Needs Football. Even its Brutality” that raises important questions.

Much has been written about football’s violence and the injuries it causes, the most recent example being the near fatal injury to Damar Hamlin of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills that garnered headlines for weeks (even though why he suffered cardiac arrest has been left unanswered since that would raise the COVID vaccine problem, which is also taboo).  Strauss notes the many arguments calling for the banning of football – the war game – because of its violence.  He notes that it is very true that football is very violent but that this is part of its great appeal.  He writes:

And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.

Today, at 6:30 p.m., eastern time, begins the biggest spectacle of them all: the Super Bowl, where we channel those ancient animal spirits into a highly commercialized event that ends with fireworks and a shiny trophy.

We should celebrate that.

He doesn’t argue for the celebration of war, which he opposes, but for the war-like game of football.  To Malcolm Gladwell’s statement in support of the banning of football as “a moral abomination” – “This is a sport that is living in the past that has no connection to the realities to the game right now and no connection to American society.” – he responds quite rightly that Gladwell is wrong:

In 2022, 82 of the top 100 TV shows in America were NFL games, and the top 50 most viewed sporting events were football games or events that immediately followed football games. By contrast, in 2016, only 33 of the top 50 were football-related. The country has lost interest in so much else, but football remains a huge draw and, in fact, is gaining relative market share.

Americans love violence, not just the military propaganda that precedes the Super Bowl game, but the smashing hits that players make and take in the games.  It is hard to deny.  Strauss goes on to show how over ninety percent of former NFL players who suffer from daily lifelong pain say they would do it again.  The violence is intoxicating and Americans get drunk on it.  It is the American Way.

I don’t agree with all of Strauss’s points or assumptions, especially his imperative that “we have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage,” but he clearly is right that despite all the rhetoric about how terrible violence is, there is something about it that Americans love.  D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.  It has never yet melted.”

But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world.  It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about.  Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al.  The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media.  The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy.  Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise.  But essentially it is one massive deception.

There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind.  To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe.  This is so even as the propagandists’ trial balloons are popped in the society of the comedic spectacle.

But back to my friend I mentioned earlier. He hates violence in all its forms, is strongly opposed to war, and has a most compassionate heart, yet he remains devoted to the media that have lied us – and continue to do so – into war after war, a media that clearly fronts for the warfare state.  I still can’t explain how he knew nothing about the pipeline explosions.  Nor can I explain his allegiance to the media that lie to him daily.

Even as his government, led by that very media, leads the world toward nuclear annihilation, he remains true to his media informants.

I am stunned.

In the Blood

Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth
I grew to adulthood half-crazed
With fear and numbed wonder.

I always wished to believe otherwise,
That people were good at heart,
Wanted to live in mutual peace
And tend the green earth as if
It were a garden
As if pity vivified all living things.

Somehow the blood that was in me
Said otherwise,
Spoke truth to the power
Of my wish,
While everywhere around me lay the lie.

But my blood, this blood that became me
While millions were being butchered
And Bing Crosby crooned I’m dreaming
Of a white Christmas,
This red blood said otherwise.

Do not accept the way they say
“Good Morning”
And the way they nod as they pass,
As though they didn’t want to kill
Each other.

Do not believe their eyes
And the way they pray to the skies
To save them.
Do not believe their beliefs,
All lies woven to deceive.
For at heart they truly hate
The green earth.

Do not believe the way they say
“Good Evening”
For they wish the darkest night
To descend upon us,
The nothingness of their knowledge
To swallow all.

That is what will release them,
That is all.

Thus my blood spoke to me,
A child of a sanguine century,
Born in a normal time,
The periodic slaughter of millions
By the civilized nations of the earth.

And despite all appearances,
I have never believed them.
Never.  Not at all.

Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion and shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, war is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

How Can the US Accuse Any Nation of Violating ‘Rules-Based International Order’?

North Dakota’s Governor ordered the state’s National Guard to clear the protest encampment of Lakota Sioux water protectors and their supporters during the 2016-17 protests against a pipeline through tribal lands. Click on image to play video (video courtesy RT television)

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the US government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, it just too much to let pass.

The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a trained bird), accusing Russia not just of preparing for an “imminent invasion’ of Ukraine, but of violating international law and “rules-based international order,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken likes to put it.

The Biden administration’s top diplomat has made repeatedly blasted both Russia for threatening Ukraine with an invasion by moving troops and equipment to its border and to the border between Ukraine and Belarus, Russia’s ally to the west, and China for its threats to Taiwan and for a rights crackdown in Hong Kong, a Chinese Special Administrative Region that had been promised 30 years or “no change” but was put under new stricter national security laws following violent student protests and university occupations in 2019-20.

But how can the US make such accusations against the Russians and the Chinese governments when the US for nearly eight years, has been bombing, launching rocket and drone attacks, and sending troops, under both CIA and Pentagon control, against both ISIS and Syrian government troops and aircraft — even attacking and killing Russian mercenary troops at one point, who, unlike the US, were in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.

US military actions in Syria are completely outside of any “rules based international order.”

International rules, when it comes to warfare, are crystal clear, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which is an international treaty signed and ratified by the US government along with most other nations of the world and incorporating all the laws of war. The primary law, violation of which is described as the gravest war crime of all “because it contains with in it all other war crimes.” Called a Crime Against Peace, it states that no nation may attack another except if that nation faces an “imminent threat” of attack.

There are no codicils expanding on or getting around that proscription.

The US has committed that  Crime Against Peace countless times, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Somalia, in Sudan, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in Cuba, in Niger, in the Congo, in Panama, in Grenada — indeed in so many places I’m sure I’m not remembering them all. Suffice to say that my whole life (I was born in 1949), my country has been a violator of the UN Charter’s ban on launching illegal wars.

Rules-based order? What the F**k is Blinken talking about? The US makes its own rules. In fact, whenever the US launches some illegal invasion or air attack against a country, the biggest complaint we hear in the US is that the president has ordered up and launched a war “without Congressional approval”

The implication is that if Congressional approves an illegal war or act of war, that makes it legit.  It doesn’t.

What makes it worse when the US makes such accusations against Russia and China is that it is accusing two countries which, as objectionable as their actions or threats might be,  at least have a better argument for their legality than does the US.

Let’s start with China. The government in Beijing stands accused by Blinken and the US government under a series of presidents, with threatening Taiwan, an island that historically was a part of China, but became functionally independent in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party won its revolution on the mainland, founding the People’s Republic of China, and the remnants of the Nationalist Party and its army fled to Taiwan, murdering tens of thousands of local Taiwanese and Hakka Chinese people, and establishing a brutal dictatorship under Nationalist leader and major domo Chiang Kai-Shek. China has never acknowledged the independence of Taiwan, which for 50 years prior to the end of World War II had been a colony of Japan, a spoil of victory in the China-Japan War won by Japan against the Ching dynasty in 1895.

The US initially recognized Taiwan, after the Chinese Communist revolutionary victory in 1949, as an independent country, but Richard Nixon, in a slick realpolitik maneuver masterminded by his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in order to recognize China and drive a wedge between that country and the Soviet Union, agreed to cease recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation, removed the US embassy from the island, and set one up in Beijing. In other words, at that point, from the US point of view at least, Taiwan’s status became an internal affair of China’s, not an international affair.

The same applies to the Chinese crackdown on rights in Hong Kong. Since July 1997, Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony, and reverted to being part of China. Now it’s true there were negotiations between the Beijing government and departing British government.  During those years of transition, Hong Kong’s appointed colonial Governor Chris Patten, former head of the British Conservative Party, carefully avoided allowing Hong Kongers to obtain long-sought universal suffrage to elect all members of the territory’s legislative council, Legco, before the British departure (a move which would at least have left the Beijing facing a local government that actually represented all the people of Hong Kong, instead of Legco representatives representing various business sectors like banking, the legal profession, the retail industry, property owners, etc).

China agreed during those negotiations to gradually increase the number of Legco members elected from geographic constituencies, and to leave basic freedoms of speech, press, etc. untouched “for 30 years.” But when students rose up to protest the arrests of Hong Kong residents and their deportation to face trials in China, it set in motion a confrontation between democracy advocates in Hong Kong and authoritarians in Beijing, and ultimately to a new Beijing-imposed national security law for Hong Kong that has turned the city into essentially just another bit of China. But again, while it was certainly a draconian over-reaction to legitimate local protests, that action by China is not a violation of international law — just violation of an agreement between a departing (and loathed) colonial power, a legacy of the European Opium War against China, and a new vastly more powerful China. It’s a bit like the US’s brutal crackdown on immigrants at the Mexican border or on Native defenders of water rights in North Dakota. Disgusting, and perhaps criminal under US law, but hardly a violation of some kind of “rules-based international order.”

As for Russia, even the plebiscite in Crimea, some 97% of the population there voted that they wanted to leave Ukraine and return to being part of Russia, as the peninsula had been until 1954, when new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, as a gift to the region he had grown up in, transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet to the Ukrainian Soviet, which the US has criticized as somehow fraudulent (Crimea is about 85% ethnic Russian). With 85% of eligible people voting, that plebiscite provided Russia with the justification for reclaiming  jurisdiction over Crimea. Russia’s action, criticized by the US as “aggression,” is less of a violation of democratic norms though than the massive disenfranchisement of blacks and other people of color in Republican-run “red” states of the US — a process that is now being accelerated to warp speed with the approach of the 2022 off-year Congressional elections. If the Biden administration really cared about justice and democracy it would be laser-focused on defending voter rights, not on shipping deadly weapons to Ukraine.

If the US government cared about following a “rules-based international order,” the it would pull all US military forces out of Syria, pull the US Navy out of the Persian Gulf, stop using drones to kill people in Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, stop sending US Special Forces wherever the president wants to send them, and rejoin the World Court and respect its adjudication of violations of international rules and laws.

Then we wouldn’t have to listen to all the hypocritical crap uttered by Biden, Blinken and their ilk.

Someday, I’m sure there will come a reckoning, when US leaders will finally be held to account for their long record of crimes against humanity. Until then, we will have to endure all this epic hypocrisy.

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

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

By Andre Vltchek

Source: Dissident Voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, all this is, officially, peace.

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘False flag,’ another weapon in the US arsenal

By Dave Alpert

Source: Intrepid Report

Now hear this . . . Noam Chomsky, respected intellect and political guru of the “left,” a man that ridiculed and denounced the efforts of the 9/11 Truth Movement, has joined the ranks of the conspiracy theorists.

On Monday, March 27, Noam, in an interview, as reported by AlterNet, stated that Donald Trump could stage a “false flag” terror attack in order to consolidate his power.

Trump’s administration is currently on thin ice. Not only does he not have the support of Democrats, but members of his own party have been distancing themselves from him. It also should be noted that Trump’s standing amongst the voters, according to poll numbers, is at an historic low.

George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, from January 2001 to December 2002, Paul O’Neill, revealed in his book, “The Price of Loyalty,” published in 2004, that the war in Iraq was planned from the first National Security Council meeting, soon after the administration took office. At the first cabinet meeting of the new Bush administration, O’Neill observed that the debate was not “should we attack Iraq?” but rather “how do we go about attacking Iraq?”

It was and is clear that the Bush administration needed to gather popular support for an invasion of Iraq through an event that would guarantee such support. Fortunately, along came 9/11, a perfect example of how a “false flag” event is organized and implemented.

Predictably, the people rallied behind the Bush administration’s stated desire to hold the guilty parties accountable and pursue retribution. Bush was given carte blanche powers to fulfill his promise to find and destroy those responsible for the savage attack on US soil.

Trump knows that people are losing faith in his presidency and, according to Chomsky, will look to scapegoat someone or some group in order to draw our attention away from his failings and, as the G.W. Bush administration did, mobilize support. Trump has already identified those he is likely to scapegoat, the vulnerable, the immigrants, the Muslims, the terrorists, etc.

Chomsky states, “I think that we shouldn’t put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.” WOW, he really said that?

The first and crucial step in a planned false flag event is for the government initiating the action to prime the public by demonizing the target, the country or group that will be scapegoated and assume the blame for the event, and creating fear and anger among the populace. For that, Trump has a fairly large group of possible scapegoats if, in fact, Chomsky’s projections get played out. As mentioned above, there are, of course, Muslims as well as extremists from any of the immigrant groups coming from countries that the US has decimated or from our Mexican neighbors to the South, as well as any group that can conveniently be labeled “terrorists.”

Immediately after the event, there is a comprehensive narrative and a convenient, ready-made culprit is identified by officials. With the help of law enforcement and the media, the narrative is repeated often enough to convince the public of its accuracy. Not only is the official explanation not questioned by the media, their responsibility is to ensure that no alternative views of the event in question are heard. In fact, the media often actively denounce and mobilize against alternative theories regarding the events in question. Most often they marginalize the people who raise questions about the official version, labeling them as “conspiracy nuts.”

Coincidently, it should be noted, if you believe in coincidences, a large percentage of major domestic or international terror attacks have involved simultaneous “training drills.” This list includes, but is not limited to, the infamous NORAD drills of 9/11, the 7/7 London Bombings, the 2011 Norway shooting, the Aurora shooting, and the Boston Marathon.

These training drills serve to confuse respondents to the “terror” attack. During the 9/11 attack, a military officer could be heard, when he was informed, asking “Is this real time?” At the time of the attacks, several military exercises were in progress and were a factor in immobilizing and confusing respondents. Is this another coincidence?

So, the question still hangs out there, unanswered, “Why now, Mr. Chomsky?” Why project the possible false flag operation orchestrated by the Trump people, while ignoring the overwhelming real evidence demonstrating that 9/11 was a false flag event?

The answer to that question may be in Chomsky’s personal feelings about Trump, the man. Chomsky has called Trump a “con man” who will drag civilization “down to the utter depths of barbarism.”

Yet, Mr. Chomsky, despite the events of the past century, when various US presidents have played the role of “con men” and have dragged civilization down to a deadly and destructive level of barbarism, has decided to vent his anger and frustration at Trump, who I’m certain will also continue his assignment to drag the world into a state of savagery. After all, world domination and making America great again is not for sissies.

Yet, he and many other so-called leftists abandoned the 9/11 Truth Movement, made up of people who did not accept the government’s mythological version of that day and were seeking truth.

During the past 16 years, millions of people were either killed, mutilated, or displaced from their homes as a result of 9/11. Where have these “progressive” voices been during this time? Now he’s going to speak out . . . screw him!!!

The Lid is Off

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By Charles Eisenstein

Source: CharlesEisenstein.net

It is getting harder to keep a secret these days. The collective shadow of our society, once safely relegated to the dark basement of the unmentionable, is now exposed to daylight, forcing us to face our contradictions. I’ll offer three examples: Donald Trump’s leaked recordings, Hillary Clinton’s emails and Wall Street speeches, and the endless procession of videos of police brutality.

Once upon a time, “locker room talk” like Donald Trump’s lewd and degrading remarks leaked to the media would have stayed safely sequestered from public view. Misogynistic locker room banter existed, as it were, in an alternate universe. What was said on the golf course or the barroom didn’t register as part of a man’s public reputation; in those places, men were free to say things that would be unforgivable in public. The coexistence of these two realms was seldom questioned. As a high school and college athlete, I remember hearing the kinds of things Trump has said, and they were quite unremarkable in that context. A boy could say the most brutish, repellent things in the locker room without damage to his reputation outside it. Respectable society would never find out. Likewise, when reporters and politicians mingled outside the public performances of their roles, an unwritten understanding kept their conversations safely off the record. I imagine Donald Trump feeling a sense of betrayal at the revelation of his remarks, as if a boy reported to another boy’s girlfriend what he said about her in the locker room.

I think this division into two realms extended to internal, psychological divisions in the individuals making the degrading boasts and comments about women. In polite company, they became people who did not harbor such thoughts. The locker room alter-ego was safely contained in a different psychic compartment. I can imagine a Donald Trump being sincerely – sincerely! – scandalized to hear in polite company the very things he himself said in the safety of the mens’-only field of misogyny. I can imagine him condemning what was said in all earnestness, with zero awareness of hypocrisy.

So it is that rape culture is allowed to persist. It needs a shadow zone. The locker room conversations that objectify and degrade women and contribute to rape culture need a “locker room” in which to happen, a wall of separation between it and the larger realm of general social acceptability.

This wall of separation is breaking down, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of recording technology and the impossibility of stopping the distribution of the recordings on the Internet. Contradictions, whether personal or social, that could once remain hidden are coming unstoppably to light. It is getting harder to uphold a divided self.

As with sex, so with money. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time maintaining a wall of separation between her public posture of economic populism and her decades-long ministration to the needs of Wall Street. In former times a politician’s speeches to elite insiders would exist in an inviolably separate realm from his or her public image. In inside circles of power, the politician would be free to express himself directly. No concealment of his allegiances was necessary, because no one outside the political and corporate elite was listening. So of course, Hillary Clinton was loathe to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street banks. Those speeches were the equivalent of locker room talk, which is supposed to stay in the locker room. Here, though, the context is financial domination rather than sexual domination.

Something similar applies to Clinton’s infamous deleted emails. There is nothing new about the contrast between the public presentation of governance and its ugly inner workings. The exercise of political power has never been pretty. The backroom deals, the threats and coercion, the buying of favors… all the nastiness that the email scandal hints at is characteristic of politics as we know it. The difference today is that it can no longer be confined to the back room. In other words, it is getting harder to maintain the appearance of democracy in a reality of oligopoly.

It is perhaps necessary that Clinton and Trump are both such extreme expressions of the suppressed shadow of our culture, presenting itself in unambiguous form for clearing. Liberal pundits have repeatedly observed that the bigoted sentiments Donald Trump expresses are merely the undisguised version of what Republicans have been saying in code for a long time. The hidden erupts into view. Clinton, meanwhile, is no ordinary establishment politician; she is the very epitome of the establishment, embodying its insincerity, lack of imagination, normalized corruption, and narrow technocratic commitment to preserving the status quo.

This is not meant as a personal criticism. My purpose here is not to condemn Hillary or the Donald; it is to illuminate the dissolving of the insulating compartments that allow contradictions and hypocrisy to exist. Probably in person, each of them is a complex individual like you and me, a mixture of beauty and pain, playing the roles laid out for them. I imagine that in their most private moments neither fully identifies with those roles nor believes in the game into which they have been thrust, any more than you or I believe in it. The elites usually precede the people into cynicism. In any event, our current moment of social evolution is calling each of them, in their public roles, to be an avatar of a cultural shadow archetype, presented to us in extreme form so that it cannot be ignored.

Clinton and Trump are a product of their conditions, playing the “game of thrones” according to the secret rules of the insiders, in a system that has long allowed, encouraged, and in some ways nearly required hypocrisy. That system is coming to an end. We are entering by fits and starts an era of transparency in which, we may someday hope, secret rules and hypocrisy will have no purchase.

Another arena with a longstanding division between sanitized public presentation and gritty reality is law enforcement. As with misogyny and political corruption, there is nothing new about police brutality and nothing new about its disproportionate application to brown-skinned people. For a long time though, it was sequestered in the realm of the unmentionable, relegated to the left-wing margins of political discourse or the statistics of academic papers. No longer. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone video cameras and other video surveillance has lifted the lid off the dark political unconscious and exposed its contents to light.

Here again, this exposure is making the two contradictory functions of the police – serving and protecting, and bullying and abusing – impossible to maintain simultaneously. It is only possible if the latter function is well hidden in the shadows.

I could go on to make similar points about drone strikes, refugee camps, clearcuts, and all the other injury and injustice that technology and social media are bringing into view. For a long time, propriety and ideology have buffered normalcy from the ugly inner workings of its maintenance. For example, the ideology of development has buffered us from the horrors of Third World sweatshops, strip mines, dispossession of land, and so forth. Lurid caricatures of violent criminals hides the grinding injustice of the legal system. The triumphal narrative of exploration and progress obscures the genocide of indigenous cultures. These various buffers, which allow contradictions to stand, have been necessary to operate a civilization built on exploitation and ecocide. Open up any social institution – politics, finance, business, education, medicine, academia, and even philanthropy – and you will find within it the same ugly machinations of power.

Today these buffers are disintegrating, despite the best efforts of established power to maintain secrecy, prosecute whistle-blowers, and control information. We might thank technology for bringing the dark underbelly of our system to light, but I think something larger is afoot. The trend toward transparency that is happening on the systems level is also happening in our personal relationships and within ourselves. Invisible inconsistencies, hiding, pretense, and self-deception show themselves as the light of attention turns inward. The tools of self-examination are proliferating on every level, from the personal to the collective. Herein is a link between the political developments I’ve described and the world of self-help, spirituality, or consciousness. At its best, these comprise ways of shedding light onto our internal contradictions and blockages in order to create a kind of inner transparency. On the interpersonal level too, a lot of work around partnership and community also aims for transparency, for example to expose hidden resentments, repressed desires, and unconscious conflicts. Illuminating the contradictions between the story and the actuality of a relationship brings the possibility of healing.

When previously hidden contradictions rise to consciousness and collide, the result is first denial and rage, followed by cognitive dissonance and the breakdown of normalcy. We see that happening today in the public sphere. That process can be disorienting, even paralyzing, as familiar orienting certitudes turn false. Who are we as a people? What is reliable? What is possible? What is real? We aren’t what we thought we were, and it isn’t what we thought it was. This confusion is a good thing. It is a sign of liberation from the old story that confined us. The exposure and clearing of hidden contradictions brings us to a higher degree of integrity, and frees up prodigious amounts of energy that had been consumed in the maintenance of illusions. What will our society be capable of, when we are no longer wallowing in pretense?

Exploiting the Dream

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Black Agenda Report recently posted two excellent commentaries on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. More specifically, the hypocrisy of the corporate media’s treatment of King and his ideas after his death, and the Obama administration’s desecration of the commemoration on the eve of another war.

From “Dr King was a Man, ‘The Dreamer’ is a Zombie”:

The week spent commemorating :”the Dream” is a great way to forget the real past, ignore the real present and avoid responsibility for the future. It’s a great excuse to assemble stars and celebrities and politicians, to pretend that the rise and prominence of the black political class was the foreordained outcome of the historic Freedom Movement in which the real Dr. King lived, worked and died. It’s a great distraction from the fact that apart from their own careers, the black political class, right up to and including President Obama, have achieved very little in the way of substantive victories for our people in the last four decades.

For me, one of the lessons of Dr. King’s career and that of “the Dreamer”, who was born after the flesh and blood man was murdered, is the willingness of establishment media to rewrite history even as it’s being made, to blunt popular consciousness, to erase past sins, to stunt and limit our vision of the better world we know is possible. The Dreamer is a zombie, immortalized in a monumnet paid for by Wal-Mart, Boeing, Bank of America, British Petroleum and other corporate criminals. The folks I ran with four decades ago, and run with today disagreed with Dr. King, but we admire him. We never had much use though, for “The Dreamer.”

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dr-king-was-man-%E2%80%9C-dreamer%E2%80%9D-zombie

From “The Dreamer With a Kill List”:

Just before launching yet another unprovoked war to preserve the empire, Barack Obama stopped by the Lincoln Memorial to star in the commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington. He was joined by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the men most responsible for pulling the Democratic Party deep enough into the corporate camp to afford the billion dollar elections that brought Obama to power. The pretense was that the presidents were there to show solemn respect for the Movement that defeated official American apartheid. The truth is, they came to take possession of the occasion – a gift from their minions in the Black Misleadership Class, who believe nothing has value until it is blessed and possessed by Power.

…It is inconceivable that Dr. King would share the stage with a president who was at that moment preparing a savage and illegal attack on a sovereign country. Dr. King’s voice has been censored and his dream vandalized, repackaged and presented as a gift to a corporate agent with a Kill List.

Read the full commentary here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/dreamer-kill-list

Black Agenda Report also just posted this episode of Black Agenda TV, an example of a independent journalism far superior to corporate cable TV in terms of substance and professionalism. One of the highlights is an in-depth interview with Dr. Cornel West.

Manufacturing Consent Through Race

Excerpt of an astute and incisive op-ed from former Black Panther Larry Pinkney on Intrepid Report:

The pathetic and subservient U.S. corporate-stream media (including MSNBC, FOX, CBS, PBS, NBC, and ABC, etc.), along with the corporate-owned politicians of the Democrat and Republican parties are deliberately stifling free speech and the open and honest free flow of information and informed debate by covertly and/or overtly playing the color card against the common interests of the everyday people of this nation. Make no mistake about it—they are in fact reinforcing hypocrisy and racism.

… The peoples of Mother Earth need us and we need them and each other and our precious Mother Earth! In the words of Malcolm X, “I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” Like his predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama and his Democrat and Republican minions are war criminals and consummate prevaricators, and should be dealt with accordingly—irrespective of their pigmentation or gender!

The peoples of Mother Earth need us and we need them and each other and our precious Mother Earth! In the words of Malcolm X, “I am for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” Like his predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama and his Democrat and Republican minions are war criminals and consummate prevaricators, and should be dealt with accordingly—irrespective of their pigmentation or gender! – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.R9PpT453.dpuf

Read the full article here: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601

It’s an important reminder that the tactic of “divide and conquer” is repeatedly used by people in power because it works. Through the use of a part-black spokesperson, military/industrial interests more effectively consolidate power by slandering and delegitimizing opposition to their policies.  Pinkney also offers solutions to overcome such strategies (ie. promoting unity and raising political consciousness).

The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society.

Somehow the U.S. constitutional rights to free speech and the free flow of information, etc., allegedly enjoyed by the struggling everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation, have been made null and void, because a colored, partially black man, is in the White House as chief executive and commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. The reality of this psychological and political enslavement and repression is in fact hypocrisy and so-called political correctness on steroids.

The pathetic and subservient U.S. corporate-stream media (including MSNBC, FOX, CBS, PBS, NBC, and ABC, etc.), along with the corporate-owned politicians of the Democrat and Republican parties are deliberately stifling free speech and the open and honest free flow of information and informed debate by covertly and/or overtly playing the color card against the common interests of the everyday people of this nation. Make no mistake about it—they are in fact reinforcing hypocrisy and racism.

– See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf

The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society. – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf
The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society. – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf
The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society. – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf
The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society. – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf
The very fact that those who lodge legitimate and strong criticism of drone man, ‘kill list,’ NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA spy master Barack Obama are labeled as being racist is, in itself, perhaps the strongest indicator of just how deeply embedded hypocrisy and racism continue to be in U.S. society. – See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10601#sthash.4ZLCe9Ry.dpuf