Tag Archives: imperialism

Endless War Has Been Normalized And Everyone Is Crazy

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Since I last wrote about the bipartisan shrieking, hysterical reaction to Trump’s planned military withdrawal from Syria the other day, it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse. I’m having a hard time even picking out individual bits of the collective freakout from the political/media class to point at, because doing so would diminish the frenetic white noise of the paranoid, conspiratorial, fearmongering establishment reaction to the possibility of a few thousands troops being pulled back from a territory they were illegally occupying.

Endless war and military expansionism has become so normalized in establishment thought that even a slight scale-down is treated as something abnormal and shocking. The talking heads of the corporate state media had been almost entirely ignoring the buildup of US troops in Syria and the operations they’ve been carrying out there, but as soon as the possibility of those troops leaving emerged, all the alarm bells started ringing. Endless war was considered so normal that nobody ever talked about it, then Trump tweeted he’s bringing the troops home, and now every armchair liberal in America who had no idea what a Kurd was until five minutes ago is suddenly an expert on Erdoğan and the YPG. Lindsey Graham, who has never met an unaccountable US military occupation he didn’t like, is now suddenly cheerleading for congressional oversight: not for sending troops into wars, but for pulling them out.

“I would urge my colleagues in the Senate and the House, call people from the administration and explain this policy,” Graham recently told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is the role of the Congress, to make administrations explain their policy, not in a tweet, but before Congress answering questions.”

“It is imperative Congress hold hearings on withdrawal decision in Syria — and potentially Afghanistan — to understand implications to our national security,” Graham tweeted today.

In an even marginally sane world, the fact that a nation’s armed forces are engaged in daily military violence would be cause for shock and alarm, and pulling those forces out of that situation would be viewed as a return to normalcy. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite. In an even marginally sane world, congressional oversight would be required to send the US military to invade countries and commit acts of war, because that act, not withdrawing them, is what’s abnormal. Instead we are seeing the exact opposite.

A hypothetical space alien observing our civilization for the first time would conclude that we are insane, and that hypothetical space alien would be absolutely correct. Have some Reese’s Pieces, hypothetical space alien.

It is absolutely bat shit crazy that we feel normal about the most powerful military force in the history of civilization running around the world invading and occupying and bombing and killing, yet are made to feel weird about the possibility of any part of that ending. It is absolutely bat shit crazy that endless war is normalized while the possibility of peace and respecting national sovereignty to any extent is aggressively abnormalized. In a sane world the exact opposite would be true, but in our world this self-evident fact has been obscured. In a sane world anyone who tried to convince you that war is normal would be rejected and shunned, but in our world those people make six million dollars a year reading from a teleprompter on MSNBC.

How did this happen to us? How did we get so crazy and confused?

I sometimes hear the analogy of sleepwalking used; people are sleepwalking through life, so they believe the things the TV tells them to believe, and this turns them into a bunch of mindless zombies marching to the beat of CIA/CNN narratives and consenting to unlimited military bloodbaths around the world. I don’t think this is necessarily a useful way of thinking about our situation and our fellow citizens. I think a much more useful way of looking at our plight is to retrace our steps and think about how everyone got to where they’re at as individuals.

We come into this world screaming and clueless, and it doesn’t generally get much better from there. We look around and we see a bunch of grownups moving confidently around us, and they sure look like they know what’s going on. So we listen real attentively to what they’re telling us about our world and how it works, not realizing that they’re just repeating the same things grownups told them when they were little, and not realizing that if any of those grownups were really honest with themselves they’re just moving learned concepts around inside a headspace that’s just as clueless about life’s big questions as the day it was born.

And that’s just early childhood. Once you move out of that and start learning about politics, philosophy, religion etc as you get bigger, you run into a whole bunch of clever faces who’ve figured out how to use your cluelessness about life to their advantage. You stumble toward adulthood without knowing what’s going on, and then confident-sounding people show up and say “Oh hey I know what’s going on. Follow me.” And before you know it you’re donating ten percent of your income to some church, addicted to drugs, in an abusive relationship, building your life around ideas from old books which were promoted by dead kings to the advantage of the powerful, or getting your information about the world from Fox News.

For most people life is like stumbling around in a dark room you have no idea how you got into, without even knowing what you’re looking for. Then as you’re reaching around in the darkness your hand is grasped by someone else’s hand, and it says in a confident-sounding voice, “I know where to go. Come with me.” The owner of the other hand doesn’t know any more about the room than you do really, they just know how to feign confidence. And it just so happens that most of those hands in the darkness are actually leading you in the service of the powerful.

That’s all mainstream narratives are: hands reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world, speaking in confident-sounding voices and guiding you in a direction which benefits the powerful. The largest voices belong to the rich and the powerful, which means those are the hands you’re most likely to encounter when stumbling around in the darkness. You go to school which is designed to indoctrinate you into mainstream narratives, you consume media which is designed to do the same, and most people find themselves led from hand to hand in this way all the way to the grave.

That’s really all everyone’s doing here, reaching out in the darkness of a confusing world and trying to find our way to the truth. It’s messy as hell and there are so many confident-sounding voices calling out to us giving us false directions about where to go, and lots of people get lost to the grabbing hands of power-serving narratives. But the more of us who learn to see through the dominant narratives and discover the underlying truths, the more hands there are to guide others away from the interests of the powerful and toward a sane society. A society in which people abhor war and embrace peace, in which people collaborate with each other and their environment, in which people overcome the challenges facing our species and create a beautiful world together.

People aren’t sleepwalking, they are being duped. Duped into insanity in a confusing, abrasive world where it’s hard enough just to get your legs underneath you and figure out which way’s up, let alone come to a conscious truth-based understanding of what’s really going on in the world. But the people doing the duping are having a hard time holding onto everyone’s hand, and their grip is slipping. We’ll find our way out of this dark room yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Largest Conspiracy Theory Peddlers Are MSM And The US State Department

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The US State Department has issued a statement accusing the Syrian government of having carried out a false flag chemical weapons attack in northwestern Aleppo with the intent to blame it on the jihadist factions in the region, citing “credible info” that the public has not been permitted to see. Never mind the known fact that there are actual, literal Al Qaeda affiliates who have admitted to using chemical weapons in Aleppo, and who are known to have used chemical weapons throughout Syria even by the State Department’s own admission: the Official Narrative is that only the Syrian government uses chemical weapons, so the chemical weapons usage must necessarily be a false flag staged by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Except they didn’t use the words “false flag”. Despite the accusation being the exact definition of the thing that a false flag attack is, you won’t see the US government using that term, nor will you ever see it used in this instance by any of the authorized mainstream narrative-framing institutions like CNN or Fox News. This is because the term “false flag” is reserved solely for mention when referring to crazy, kooky Kremlin propaganda, as in the insane, unhinged, tinfoil hat belief that terrorists in Syria might possibly have some kind of motive to stage a false flag chemical attack in order to get the US, UK and France to act as their air force in a retaliatory strike against the Syrian government. That kind of false flag would be completely inconceivable to any right-minded empire loyalist, and is forbidden to even think about.

At the same time we are seeing a push from the mass media to advance a narrative that the Yellow Vests protests in France are due to Russian influence, with Iraq-raping neocon Max Boot publishing a column today in the Washington Post that is based entirely around the talking point that two trending Russian topics on social media have been “giletsjaune” and “France,” and Bloomberg putting out an article blatantly titled “Pro-Russia Social Media Takes Aim at Macron as Yellow Vests Rage”. Their entire theory is that since there are people in Russia talking about a major event that everyone else in the world is also talking about, the protests against Macron’s unpopular centrist policies are therefore the result of a conspiracy seeded by Russia.

But you’ll never hear this theory about a Russian conspiracy referred to as a “conspiracy theory” by the mainstream press. The theory that Russian elites have conspired to infiltrate the highest levels of the US government has been given serious treatment at the top echelons of media and political influence, despite its lacking any discernible evidence whatsoever, but when they talk about these alleged conspiracies they always make a point of using the word “collusion” instead. There is no actual difference between the words collude and conspire when used in this way, but the former is used because a deliberate effort has been made to stigmatize the word “conspiracy” while the word “collude” remains effectively neutral in the public eye.

But the fact of the matter is that conspiracy theories have gone mainstream, and there is no legitimate reason to call the authorized, power-manufactured conspiracy theories by a different name than the grassroots narratives like those about 9/11 or the JFK assassination. Indeed, due to the nature of populist folk narratives there is a lot more publicly available evidence contradicting the official 9/11 and JFK assassination stories than there is for the establishment Russia conspiracy theories, because those narratives often boil down to nothing more than secretive intelligence agencies saying “This is true because we said so.” Since grassroots conspiracy theories are unable to rely on empty assertions from authority, they tend to be built upon information that is publicly available.

Some people get annoyed with me for using the term conspiracy theory at all, but I insist that the phrase is itself intrinsically neutral: a theory about a conspiracy. The problem is not the phrase, it is the stigma that has been attached to that phrase by establishment media and establishment politicians; shifting to a different phrase to describe theories about conspiracies would only ensure that that phrase becomes stigmatized in the exact same way by the same sort of campaign. This would only ensure the survival of the tactic of regurgitating a pre-stigmatized label in the war of ideas instead of advancing actual arguments. The fact of the matter is that powerful people do indeed conspire, those conspiracies do indeed need to be talked about, and the largest promulgators of conspiracy theories are not Infowars or RT, but mainstream media and the US State Department.

Those who dismiss an idea by calling it a “conspiracy theory” without providing further argumentation are simply admitting to you that they have no argument, and it is right to point this out when they do it, because something being a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean it’s not grounded in facts. Some conspiracy theories are good and are backed by solid evidence, some are stupid and are circulated for intellectually dishonest reasons. Once upon a time you would be called a conspiracy theorist for saying the west is arming terrorists in Syria or the DNC is conspiring to ensure the primary victory of Hillary Clinton; those things are now conspiracy facts, as history has vindicated the solid theories which predicted them. Other conspiracy theories are promulgated by dim-witted partisan loyalists for no other reason than dim-witted partisan loyalty, like the aforementioned Russiagate conspiracy theory, or the QAnon conspiracy theory which claims Donald Trump is leading a rebellion against the Deep State as cryptically reported by an anonymous user on 8chan.

Other conspiracy theories are subscribed to simply because they help people escape the cognitive dissonance of conflicting beliefs. For example, a strong believer in capitalism who sees the undeniable signs that a plutocratic class has control of their government, but who cannot accept that this plutocratic takeover was facilitated by a rampant capitalist system which ensures that the greediest sociopaths rise to the top, may avoid cognitive dissonance by explaining the existence of the corrupt dominator class with conspiracy theories about Jews or pedovore cults. A liberal who cannot accept that neoliberal empire loyalists like Macron have failed to “make centrism cool” as Max Boot predicted will avoid cognitive dissonance by explaining the failures of the Church of the Status Quo with conspiracy theories about Russian social media campaigns.

Conspiracy theories, in reality, are nothing more than people’s attempts to explain what is going on in their world. Why Trump got elected. Why things stay shitty despite our perfectly rational attempts to change them. Why voting doesn’t seem to make much difference in the actual behaviors of one’s government. Why we keep marching into stupid wars, Orwellian dystopia and climate collapse despite having every incentive not to. Why the wealthiest of the wealthy keep getting wealthier while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Some attempts to explain these things will come from a well-informed and intellectually honest place, and some will come from a myopic and intellectually dishonest place. Their individual merits can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

And in my opinion the conspiracy theories coming from the world’s most powerful institutions are the most dishonest by far. I saw a recent post by the WikiLeaks Twitter account which referred to the corporate media as “the narrative business pretending to be in the news business,” which is in my opinion a perfect way to phrase it. The real currency of the world is not gold, nor is it bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military force; it’s narrative control. The ability to control the stories people tell about what’s going on in their world means the ability to control how they think, how they vote, how they behave, and how they all agree money and power itself operates within our society. Since society is made of narrative, controlling the narrative is controlling that society.

Conspiracy theories are a way for those in power to manipulate the narrative without actually giving the public any hard facts and evidence, and the world’s most powerful institutions are increasingly relying on conspiracy theories because they don’t have facts and evidence on their side. And why would they? The same power establishment which deceived the world into destroying Iraq is obviously far too depraved to be able to justify its global hegemony with factual evidence. All they have is narrative control, and they’re starting to lose even that.

GHW Bush: Honoring a War Criminal

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

America honors its worst. Throughout his career as a House member, UN envoy, GOP National Committee chairman, ambassador to China, CIA director, vice president and president, GHW Bush was an unapologetic imperial spear carrier.

He supported all US wars of aggression and launched his own – against nations threatening no one. His actions showed profound indifference to rule of law principles and human suffering.

Countless millions were grievously harmed by an agenda he backed and led as president. Major media shamefully praised what demands condemnation and accountability, even posthumously.

Praising “his leadership and choices on the global stage,” the NYT claimed “historians will almost certainly treat him more kindly than the voters did in 1992” – establishment ones only, not honorable truth-tellers.

A Jeb Bush/James Baker op-ed shamefully said they “never met a man as remarkable as George HW Bush” – a profound perversion of truth.

Wall Street Journal editors praised his war on Iraq, ignoring his naked aggression and genocidal sanctions, the latter responsible for the deaths of around 5,000 Iraqi children under age-five monthly while in force.

He was involved in Washington’s Contra war in Nicaragua. It followed the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s (FSLN) overthrow of US-supported tyrannical Anastasio Somoza’s fascist regime.

As president, he ordered the invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989, aiming to prove his toughness against a defenseless nation no match against America’s military might.

Manuel Noriega was Washington’s man in Panama from December 1983 until yearend 1989, a valued CIA asset until forgetting who’s boss.

No longer being convenient stooge enough for his imperial master led to his downfall.

Bush’s machismo and imperial arrogance bore full responsibility for thousands of Panamanian civilian deaths and injuries, many more thousands displaced.

Residential neighborhoods were destroyed in poorest parts of the country, including by incendiary devices used to torch structures.

Tanks crushed victims. Panamanian defense force members, civilians, journalists, and others were executed in cold blood.

Bush proved his cajones by mass slaughter and destruction. In the aftermath, he shamefully said it was “worth it” – smashing nations a US specialty before and after the rape of Panama.

William Blum earlier called (fantasy) “democracy” America’s deadliest export. Its agenda makes the world safe for Wall Street and other corporate favorites at the expense of ordinary people everywhere.

Commenting on carnage in Panama, Blum said “(t)he invasion and ensuing occupation produced gruesome scenes: People burning to death in the incinerated dwellings, leaping from windows, running in panic through the streets, cut down in cross fire, crushed by tanks, human fragments everywhere.”

Accountability never follows the highest of US high crimes, victims blamed for US wrongdoing every time.

Most Americans know nothing about the so-called 1989 Christmas invasion, why it was launched, the devastation caused, or human toll.

Raping Panama, deposing and arresting Noriega, along with Bush’s Gulf War walkover of Iraq let him crow that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

Horrendous Nuremberg-level crimes don’t matter. Noriega fell out of favor for not cooperating with Washington’s contra war on Nicaragua.

Media hysteria vilified him, citing things that didn’t matter when he was Washington’s man in Panama.

When no longer wanted, his fate was sealed, how Washington treats other foreign leaders no longer useful, notably Saddam Hussein.

The January 1991 Gulf War followed imposition of sanctions in August 1990. Enforced for over a dozen years, they were genocidal. A Kuwait-funded PR campaign whipped up public support for naked aggression – ending on February 28.

US forces committed high crimes of war and against humanity, including mass slaughter and destruction of essential to life facilities.

Terror-bombing blasted power plants, dams, water purification facilities, sewage treatment and disposal systems, telephone and other communications, hospitals, schools, residential areas, mosques, irrigation sites, food processing, storage and distribution facilities, hotels and retail establishments.

Transportation infrastructure, oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks, chemical plants, factories and other commercial operation, civilian shelters, government buildings, and historical sites were also destroyed.

The Panama and Gulf War were two of history’s great crimes. In Iraq, virtually everything needed for normal life was destroyed or heavily damaged.

Genocidal sanctions killed up to two millions Iraqis, two-thirds of them children under age-five. Bush II’s 2003 “shock and awe” blitzkrieg through 2007 took up to 2.0 million more lives, mostly young children.

Two imperial wars of aggression and genocidal sanctions destroyed the cradle of civilization. War and related violence in Iraq continues to this day, the nation occupied as a US colony.

Bush I’s new world order agenda, continued by his successors, including Bush II, features endless wars of aggression, state terror on a global scale, along with growing homeland tyranny, heading toward becoming full-blown.

A special place in hell awaits GHW Bush, Bush II when he passes, and all other US war criminals.

They include everyone supporting Washington’s imperial agenda, including congressional  members authorizing funds without which wars can’t be waged.

An earlier article said the Bush I, II, and entire family dynasty speaks for itself – a crime family for over a century.

 

Related Articles:

The Amazing GWHB Hagiography

The state funeral for George H. W. Bush and the ritual of oligarchy

If There’s A Hell Below, That’s Where He’ll Go: The BAR Obituary on George H.W. Bush

 

The Troika of Tyranny: The Imperialist Project in Latin America and Its Epigones

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By Roger Harris

Source: CounterPunch

Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are today threatened by US imperialism. The first salvo of the modern Age of Imperialism started back in 1898 when the US seized Cuba along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War.

The Age of Imperialism, as Lenin observed, is characterized by the competition of the various imperial powers for dominance. That inter-imperialist rivalry led to World War I. Lenin called those putative socialists who supported their own national imperialist projects “social imperialists.” Social imperialism is a tendency that is socialist in name and imperialist in deed. Imperialism and its social imperialist minions are still with us today.

US Emerges as the World’s Hegemon

The United States emerged after World War II as the leading imperialist power. With the implosion of the Socialist Bloc around 1991, US hegemony became even more consolidated. Today the US is the undisputed world’s hegemon.

Hegemony means to rule but even more so to dominate. As the world’s hegemon, the US will not tolerate neutral parties, let alone hostile ones. As articulated in the Bush Doctrine, the US will try to asphyxiate any nascent counter-hegemonic project, no matter how insignificant.

In the Caribbean, for instance, the US snuffed out the leftist government of Grenada in 1983 in what was code named Operation Urgent Fury. Grenada has a population smaller than Vacaville, California.

The only powers that the world’s hegemon will tolerate are junior partners such as Colombia in Latin America. The junior partner must accept a neoliberal economic regime designed to serve the interests of capital. Structural adjustment of the economy is demanded such that the neoliberal “reforms” become irreversible; so that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Colombia recently joined NATO, putting that junior partner’s military under direct interaction with the Pentagon bypassing its civilian government. The US has seven military bases in Colombia in order to project – in the words of the US government – “full spectrum” military dominance in the Latin American theatre.

Needless-to-say, no Colombian military bases are in the US. Nor does any other country have military bases on US soil. The world’s hegemon has some 1000 foreign military bases. Even the most sycophantic of the US’s junior partners, Great Britain, is militarily occupied by 10,000 US troops.

The US is clear on its enemies list. On November 1, US National Security Advisor John Bolton, speaking in Miami, labelled Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba the “troika of tyranny.” He described a “triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua.”

Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are targeted by US imperialism because they pose what might be called the “threat of a good example;” that is, an alternative to the neoliberal world order.

These countries are suffering attacks from the imperialists because of the things they have done right, not for their flaws. They are attempting to make a more inclusive society for women, people of color, and the poor; to have a state that, instead of serving the rich and powerful, has a special option for working people, because these are the people most in need of social assistance.

Sanctions: The Economic War against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba

The US imperialist rhetoric is backed with action. In 2015, US President Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to US security” and imposed sanctions. These sanctions have been extended and deepened by the Trump administration. The US has likewise subjected Cuba to sanctions in a seamless bipartisan policy of both Republicans and Democrats for over half a century. Now the US is the process of imposing sanctions on Nicaragua.

Unilateral sanctions, such as those imposed by the US, are illegal under the charters of both the UN and the Organization of American States, because they are a form of collective punishment targeting the people.

The US sanctions are designed to make life so miserable for the masses of people that they will reject their democratically elected government. Yet in Venezuela, those most adversely affected by the sanctions are the most militantly in support of their President Nicolás Maduro.

Consequently, the Trump administration is also floating the option of military intervention against Venezuela. The recently elected rightwing leaders Bolsonaro in Brazil and Duque in Colombia, representing the two powerful states on the western and southern borders of Venezuela, are colluding with the hegemon of the north.

The inside-the-beltway human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, fail to condemn these illegal and immoral sanctions. They lament the human suffering caused by the sanctions, all the while supporting the imposition of the sanctions. Nor do they raise their voices against military intervention, perhaps the gravest of all crimes against humanity.

Liberal establishments such as the advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) try to distinguish themselves from hardline imperialists by opposing a military invasion in Venezuela while calling for yet more effective and punishing sanctions. In effect, they play the role of the good cop, providing a liberal cover for interference in the internal affairs of Latin American nations.

These billionaire-funded NGOs have a revolving-door staffing arrangement with the US government. So it is not surprising that they will reflect Washington’s foreign policies initiatives.

But why do some organizations claiming to be leftist so unerringly echo the imperialists, taking such umbrage over Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua while ignoring far greater problems in, say, Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, which are US client states?

Most Progressive Country in Central America Targeted

Let’s take Nicaragua. A year ago, the polling organization Latinobarómetro, found the approval rating of Nicaraguans for their democracy to be the highest in Central America and second highest in Latin America.

Daniel Ortega had won the Nicaraguan presidency in 2006 with a 38% plurality, in 2011 with 63%, and 72.5% in 2016. The Organization of American States officially observed and certified the vote. Polls indicated Ortega was perhaps the most popular head of state in the entire western hemisphere. As longtime Nicaraguan solidarity activist Chuck Kaufman noted, “Dictators don’t win fair elections by growing margins.”

Nicaragua is a member of theanti-imperialist Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America with Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states. Speaking at the UN, the Nicaraguan foreign minister had the temerity to catalogue the many transgressions of what Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and express Nicaragua’s opposition.

These are reasons enough for a progressive alternative such as Nicaragua to curry the enmity of the US. The enigma is why those claiming to be leftists would target a country that had:

+ Second highest economic growth rates and the most stable economy in Central America.

+ Only country in the region producing 90% of the food it consumes.

+ Poverty and extreme poverty halved; country with the greatest reduction of extreme poverty.

+ Reached the UN Millennium Development Goal of cutting malnutrition by half.

+ Nicaraguans enjoyed free basic healthcare and education.

+ Illiteracy had been virtually eliminated, down from 36% in 2006 when Ortega took office.

+ Average economic growth of 5.2% for the past 5 years (IMF and the World Bank).

+ Safest country in Central America (UN Development Program) with one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.

+ Highest level of gender equality in the Americas (World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2017).

+ Did not contribute to the migrant exodus to the US, unlike neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

+ Unlike its neighbors, kept out the drug cartels and pioneered community policing.

In April of this year, all of this was threatened. The US had poured millions of dollars into “democracy promotion” programs, a euphemism for regime change operations. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a cabal of the reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy, conservative business associations, remnants of the US-sponsored Contras, and students from private universities attempted a coup.

Former members of Ortega’s Sandinista Party, who had long ago splintered off into political oblivion and drifted to the right, became effective propogandists for the opposition. Through inciting violence and the skillful use of disinformation in a concerted social media barrage, they attempted to achieve by extra-legal means what they could not achieve democratically.

Imperialism with a Happy Face

We who live in the “belly of the beast” are constantly bombarded by the corporate media, framing the issues (e.g., “humanitarian bombing). Some leftish groups and individuals pick up these signals, amplify, and rebroadcast them. While they may genuinely believe what they are promulgating, there are also rewards such as funding,media coverage, hobnobbing with prominent US politicians, and winning awards for abhorring the excesses of imperialism while accepting its premises.

Today’s organizations that are socialist in name and imperialist in deed echo the imperial demand that the state leaders of the progressive movements in Latin America “must go” and legitimize the rationale that such leaders must be “dictators.”

They try to differentiate their position from the imperialists by proffering a mythic movement, which will create a triumphant socialist alternative that fits their particular sect’s line: chavismo without Maduro in Venezuela, sandinismo without Ortega in Nicaragua, and the Cuban Revolution without the Cuban Communist Party in Cuba.

The political reality in Latin America is that a rightwing offensive is attacking standing left-leaning governments. President George W. Bush was right: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” There is no utopian third way. Each of us has to determine who are the real terrorists, as the juggernaut of US imperialism rolls out a neoliberal world order.

Chaos: The New Imperialist Game Plan

For now, the coup in Nicaragua has been averted. Had it succeeded, chaos would have reigned. As even the most ardent apologists for the opposition admit, the only organized force in the opposition was the US-sponsored rightwing which would have instigated a reign of terror against the Sandinista base.

The US would prefer to install stable rightwing client states or even military dictatorships. But if neither can be achieved, chaos is the preferred alternative. Libya, where rival warlords contest for power and slaves are openly bartered on the street, is the model coming to Latin America.

Chaos is the new imperialist game plan, especially for Bolton’s so-called troika of tyranny. The imperialists understand that the progressive social movements in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba are too popular and entrenched to be eradicated by a mere change of personnel in the presidential palace. Much more drastic means are envisioned; means that would make the bloody aftermath of the US-backed Pinochet coup in 1973 in Chile pale by comparison.

In Venezuela, for example, the opposition might well have won the May 2018 presidential election given the dire economic situation caused in large part by the US sanctions. The opposition split between a moderate wing that was willing to engage in electoral struggle and a hard-right wing that advocated a violent takeover and jailing the chavistas.

When Venezuelan President Maduro rejected the US demand to call off the elections and resign, he was labelled a dictator by Washington. And when moderate Henri Falcon ran in the Venezuelan presidential race on a platform of a complete neoliberal transition, Washington, instead of rejoicing, threatened sanctions against him for running. The US belligerently floated a military option for Venezuela, stiffened the suffocating sanctions, and tipped the balance within the Venezuelan opposition to the radical right.

The US is not about to allow Venezuela a soft landing. Their intent is to exterminate the contagion of progressive social programs and international policy that has been the legacy of nearly two decades chavismo. Likewise, for Cuba and Nicaragua. We should also add Bolivia in the crosshairs of the empire.

We’ve seen what Pax Americana has meant for the Middle East. The same imperial playbook is being implemented in Latin America. Solidarity with the progressive social movements and their governments in Latin America is needed, especially when their defeat would mean chaos.

Written in History: The Death of America’s Hyper-Power Fantasy

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By Martin Sieff

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In 1987, Paul Kennedy, a British professor of history at Yale University, unleashed a political and intellectual firestorm with the publication of his great (677-page) book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Kennedy produced a magisterial overview of the competition for global power over the past 500 years from 1500 AD to the present.

Kennedy proposed the thesis that any power that achieved, imagined it had achieved or sought to achieve and maintain a dominant hyper-power role of global dominance was doomed to lose it and then rapidly decline in overall power, wealth, prosperity and influence.

Kennedy argued – with a wealth of detail drawn from different nations over his vast period of half a millennium – that the very attempt to achieve and maintain such power forced every nation that attempted it into a ruinous pattern of strategic overstretch.

This demanded every major global empire in their turn to devote ruinously far too many economic resources to unproductive military power and ever more costly global commitments and conflicts.

The more ambitious the commitments, the quicker came military defeat, economic ruin and national collapse, Kennedy documented.

Kennedy published his book however at exactly the wrong moment for its abundantly documented conclusions and arguments to be taken seriously in the United States. The Cold War was just ending. The heroic actions of the Russian people in rejecting communism and leading in the dismantling of the Soviet Union were being misinterpreted as an eternal and lasting victory for the United States and for the forces of free market capitalism and minimum government regulation.

Kennedy was therefore subjected to a furious firestorm of abuse, especially from the emerging neoconservatives who under President George W Bush succeeded in imposing their reckless policies on nations across the Middle East and Eurasia. Kennedy, unlike his enraged critics was a gracious and tolerant gentleman as well as great scholar and took the firestorm in his stride.

Now more than 30 years after Kennedy published his great work, we can see how prescient, wise and visionary it truly was.

In 2016 President Donald Trump was elected on a platform of dealing with domestic crises raging from economic ruin and impoverishment to an out of control drug and opioid abuse epidemic and the collapse of law and order across the long US land border with Mexico.

That outcome provided telling testimony to the previous US policies of wasting at least $2 trillion on entirely unsuccessful nation-building and government-toppling projects ranging from Iraq to Afghanistan and since extended into such nations as Ukraine, Syria, and Libya

All the national pathologies of bankruptcy, exhaustion, decline and ever spreading human misery that Kennedy in his book traced in previous empires can now be clearly delineated in the policies of the post-Cold War United States.

The bottom line lesson to be drawn from Kennedy’s great book that so outraged neoconservatives at the time was a simple and stunning clear one: Unipolar Moments are just that and nothing more. They last for moments not ages.

Instead, the very attempt to maintain a unipolar moment of apparent global supremacy by any power automatically instead will raise up a host of challenges to that power that will rapidly exhaust and then doom it.

Kennedy traced this process of inexorable over – commitment and decline in 17th century Habsburg Spain. He followed it again in 18th century Bourbon France. He documented it once more in the rise, pride and inevitable fall of the British Empire and in the rash German attempts to create dominant global empires in both world wars of the 20th century.

A generation before Kennedy published his great work, British historian Correlli Barnett, focusing only on the British Empire, published in 1972 his own classic “The Collapse of British Power.” Barnett focused on a one, single unipolar moment – the 1920s and 1930s when the British ruling class, like their American successors today imagined that they were the divinely-appointed global policeman charged by Providence with maintaining their own conceptions of right and wrong over the whole world.

The British at least were reluctantly forced to cede independence to their vast global territories. It is doubtful whether the American people will be so lucky: The US Deep State establishment and their tame, unthinking media puppets remain blindly committed to inflexible expansion, conflict and strategic gambling with the peace and even survival of the world.

Thirty years after his magnum opus was published, Paul Kennedy’s message of warning remains unheeded. America’s Unipolar Moment is long since dead and gone. America’s pretensions to rule supreme as the world’s unchallenged hyper-power have become a dangerous and unsustainable fantasy.

A wakening to sanity is long overdue and the hour is late: National catastrophe can be the only other outcome.

Whither Russiagate?

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: OffGuardian

Two years have passed since the 2016 presidential election. Allegations that foreign interference had influenced the result, perhaps decisively, began to surface even as the last ballots were being counted. Against all odds underdog Donald J. Trump had been elected president and the Establishment, which denigrated him throughout the campaign, had to find a scapegoat to explain their failure to elect the preferred candidate. The scapegoat turned out to be Russia.

The Robert Mueller led inquiry into the election has been running since May 2017. It has been tasked with determining whether the Trump campaign colluded corruptly with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the election. It has worked hard to delegitimize the president without that being its stated objective and has had a certain measure of success in doing just that.

But apart from a couple of low-level convictions for perjury, Mueller has come up with nothing that convincingly demonstrates that Moscow had some kind of plan to disrupt the elections and thereby damage American democracy. There was, to be sure, some Russian government sponsored probing and what might be described as attempted influencing, but that is what intelligence agencies do to justify their existence. The worst culprit when it comes to election interference worldwide is undoubtedly America’s own Central Intelligence Agency, which has been doing just that since 1947. But apart from some low-level activity, there has been nothing to suggest some kind of grand design orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin to overthrow or cast into confusion the American government.

No one should ever let a good story line go to waste, so the U.S. mainstream media has bought into the proposition that Russia did both interfere in and influence the result of the election based on the assumption that where there is smoke there must be fire with little in the way of evidence being provided. Some media outlets have maintained that the margin of victory for Trump was actually “made in Russia,” meaning that he is ipso facto Moscow’s puppet. It should be noted that this is the same media that embraced Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and transatlantic gliders back in 2002 and the Syrian use of chemical weapons more recently, suggesting that the relationship between demonstrated facts and what comes out in the reporting is very tenuous.

To keep the story fresh, both government and the media have now been suggesting that there has already been an attempt by Russia to interfere in the 2018 midterm election which will take place on Tuesday. The New York Times describes an “elaborate campaign of ‘information warfare’ to interfere.” On October 19th, federal prosecutors charged Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova of St. Petersburg Russia, a woman whom they labeled the project’s “chief accountant.” She allegedly managed a budget to “sow division and discord” in the lead-up to the voting. The Times goes on to describe how “She bought internet domain names and Facebook and Instagram ads and spent money on building out Twitter accounts and paying to promote divisive posts on social media.”

And the list of culprits has also been expanded to include China and Iran, if one goes by PBS’s coverage of the story. One would not be surprised to see North Korea added to the list, as it is convenient to keep all of one’s enemies in one place, all on the march to destroy American democracy and its political institutions before the GOP and Democrats finally get around to doing it.

One might easily regard the never ending Russiagate saga as a bit of an amusement, but there are actually real-life consequences to corrupting the popular sentiment in a large and powerful nuclear armed nation like the United States by constantly discovering new enemies to stimulate the selling of newspapers and television ad time. At a minimum, phony threat accusations create paranoia and also mistrust in the institutions that are supposed to be protecting the country.

And there are also other less tangible consequences, namely that the constant crying wolf over the Russians and Chinese corrupting America’s political system actually does tell the voters that their vote does not matter as outside forces beyond their control will determine the result anyway.

Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University, has been arguing for some time that the pursuit of Russiagate and the various delusions that have become attached to it is doing grave damage not only to the bilateral relationship between Moscow and Washington but also to perceptions of the state of the U.S. political system. His latest article in The Nation entitled Who is really undermining American democracy? has as a sub-heading “Allegations that Russia is still ‘attacking’ US elections, now again in November, could delegitimize our democratic institutions.”

Cohen argues plausibly how the “undermine American democracy” meme may itself erode confidence in U.S. political institutions because if the trick of claiming outside interference can to be used successfully once it will be used again even after Trump is gone. If there are claims by losing candidates that Russia or some other foreign power interfered in the midterm this week it will inevitably jumpstart a witch hunt to find those congressmen who were “helped.” The legitimacy of congress itself will be in question.

Cohen also argues that “Russiagate has revealed the low esteem that many U.S. political-media elites have for American voters—for their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy… Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation of programs—official, corporate, and private—to introduce elements of censorship in the nation’s ‘media space’ in order to filter out ‘Kremlin propaganda.’ Here, it also seems, elites will decide what constitutes such ‘propaganda.’”

It is the ultimate irony that the most powerful and least threatened country in the world – the United States of America-runs on fear. The obsession with possible foreign interference in U.S. elections reflects the fundamental insecurity of the elites that actually manipulate the system to benefit themselves and their constituencies. If the midterm results do not satisfy the Establishment and the “foreign menace” again is surfaced as causative it will, in truth, be the beginning of the end for American democracy as mistrust of the integrity of the government institutions will continued to be eroded. The alternative? Tell Robert Mueller to put his cards on the table and prove what is being generally accepted as true regarding Russia or fold up his tent and go home because he is no longer need.

Digital Book Burners

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

Jamie Fly, a former high-ranking Bush era neocon, believes you shouldn’t have the right to post on social media.

“Fly went on to complain that ‘all you need is an email’ to set up a Facebook or Twitter account, lamenting the sites’ accessibility to members of the general public. He predicted a long struggle on a global scale to fix the situation, and pointed out that to do so would require constant vigilance,” write  Jeb Sprague and Max Blumenthal. 

This attitude shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neocons believe they are a special breed, the chosen few of an intellectual crème de la crème, and the rest of us are merely bread and circus spectators on the sidelines as they forge our collective history (and increasingly possible ruin). 

Fly is a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. He “served” in the National Security Council and the Defense Department during the Bush presidency. He also worked at the Claremont Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. Fly tutored presumptive presidential candidate Marco Rubio on foreign policy and he is the former director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a staunch neocon advocacy group founded by arch neocons William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor. 

He is now a senior fellow and director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, an organization funded by the US government and NATO. The German Marshall Fund organized the Alliance for Securing Democracy and its Hamilton 68 effort to destroy alternative media under the false (and largely debunked) claim it is a cutout for Russia and Vladimir Putin who are, we are reminded daily, dedicated to destroying democracy and taking down the exceptional and indispensable nation. 

Jamie Fly and his coconspirators Laura Rosenberger and J.M. Berger know the Russians aren’t responsible for thousands of alternate media websites and social media accounts. They know this phenomenon, which began with the birth of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, is homespun and has absolutely nothing to do with Russia. It is their mission to make sure the establishment is free to promulgate its lies and war propaganda without counterbalance and the interruption of truth. 

These folks are digital book burners on par with Nazis who burned books in Berlin on the Opernplatz in May of 1933. Like the Nazis, they want to silence those who counter the narrative. For the Nazis, the targets were communists, socialists, anarchists, and all who opposed fascism, while our new book burners—liquidators of heresy against the ruling elite—are focused on groups and individuals challenging the lies and half-truths of the state regardless of ideology.

For the elite, populism and nationalism represent a twin threat to the emerging globalist scheme of a one-world government and currency directed by a cadre of unelected bureaucrats and ideologues. 

Donald Trump portrayed himself as a patriot and nationalist—Make America Great Again—however after the election the same old crowd of CFR operatives, Goldman Sachs alumni, and hardcore neocons staffed his administration, thus making the realization of his campaign promises virtually impossible. 

The ruling elite, their functionaries and proxies have declared war on “alternative facts,” that is to say information contrary and even hostile to the narrative. While it is true the corporate media has lost some influence, it still projects a powerful influence on public opinion, especially in the current highly polarized political climate.

For instance, it is now assumed a Trump supporter send bombs to Democrats, and this has become a trending topic on social media. There is zero evidence a Trump supporter had anything to do with this incident, and yet the hashtag “MAGABomber” has gone viral on social media, demonstrating how easily it is to sell lies and fabrications to a polarized public. 

Fly and his digital book burning associates will not stop until the last vestiges of the alternative media are wiped out. This process is underway now with a number of popular alternative media websites losing significant traffic following removal from social media. 

As Mr. Fly says, this is only the beginning. They will not stop until the challenge is defeated and the digital information landscape is once again completely in control of the psychopaths at the top and their well-paid minions pushing the idiotic lie that Putin and the Russians are responsible. 

Freedom Rider: Jamal Khashoggi and U.S. Hypocrisy

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Freedom Rider: Jamal Khashoggi and U.S. Hypocrisy

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

The corporate media cry crocodile tears over the apparent murder of an elite, CIA-connected “dissident,” while papering over US complicity in Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

“The Saudis may kill 50 Yemeni children on a school bus and get only a few mild rebukes, but killing a prominent man is another story entirely.”

The disappearance and presumed murder of Jamal Khashoggi puts the corrupt relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States in high relief. The two countries have been partners in crime over many years. Together they used jihadist proxies to make wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria that furthered U.S. interests. The brutal Saudi attack on neighboring Yemen could not happen without U.S. diplomatic and logistical support. The Donald Trump presidency has brought the two even closer. The relationship is now a true love affair complete with personal dealings between Saudi royals and the Trumps.

Khashoggi was a member of a prominent Saudi family with strong ties to the royal house. His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was an arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra and BCCI scandals. But Jamal Khashoggi had a parting of the ways with crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler, and he left Saudi Arabia in 2017. He was a long time Saudi spokesman, CIA asset and a Washington Post journalist. All of those credentials made him an elite insider in the United States too.

“His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was an arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra and BCCI scandals.”

Khashoggi entered a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2ndand was never seen again. According to media reports the Turkish government has audio and video proof that he was murdered and that his body was dismembered and disposed of elsewhere. The Saudis may kill 50 Yemeni children on a school bus and get only a few mild rebukes. But killing a prominent man who has all the right political and intelligence agency connections is another story entirely.

Ordinarily compliant American senators are now going through the motions of asking questions and proposing sanctions or other punishments against the kingdom. Corporate media like the New York Times, Financial Times, CNN and CNBC have dropped out of the Future Investment Initiative meeting which is known as Davos in the desert. The plight of starving Yemenis gets little attention, but a hit job committed openly and without fear of recourse is too much. Liberal sensibilities were offended by the crassness of the act and by the position of the victim.

“The plight of starving Yemenis gets little attention, but a hit job committed openly and without fear of recourse is too much.”

The outrage is coming long after the Saudis began their war crime against Yemen. They have been bombing and starving that country since 2014 and are responsible for an estimated 50,000 deaths. They have blockaded ports and denied access to food and medicine. Yemen is in the midst of a cholera outbreak and millions are displaced refugees.

These atrocities were not enough to put Saudi Arabia on the list of infamy where it belongs. Barack Obama, darling of the liberal imperialists, was only slightly less subservient to the kingdom than Trump is today. The Yemen attack began during his term in office. He continued the tradition of $100 billion defense deals with the feudal monarchy and made the relationship a top priority. He cut short a 2015 visit to India in order to meet the newly crowned King Salman and brought along a who’s who entourage including Condi Rice, James Baker, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi. Saudi Arabia was and is a key partner in U.S. imperialism.

Trump differs from Obama and other presidents only in his inability to be diplomatic. When first asked about a possible response to Khashoggi’s disappearance he made it clear that he would do nothing to threaten war contractor profits. In defending the crown prince he mentioned Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed by name as he dismissed any talk of sanctions.

“Barack Obama was only slightly less subservient to the kingdom than Trump is today.”

Of course Trump style politics provides further complications. Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner has formed a close friendship with Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s security clearance gave him access to information which he gave to the crown prince. Kushner is the likely source who turned in Saudi royals, also connected to the CIA, who opposed the de facto ruler. These people were imprisoned, at least one was killed, their assets were seized and many now live under house arrest. Trump publicly supported the move in one of his famous twitter messages.

It is easy to find yet another reason to look askance at Trump and his vulgar and incompetent family but Saudi Arabia will be a U.S. partner in wrong doing no matter who is in the White House. Prince Bandar bin Sultan was known as “Bandar Bush” because of his close relationship with two presidents and their confidantes.

The nuances of keeping friends on a short leash are lost on Trump. Media reports say that the Trump administration was aware that Khashoggi was in danger of being detained but didn’t protect a man who had worked with and for past administrations since the 1990s. The Saudis started a near war with Qatar in 2017 and were supported by Trump in the effort. Qatar is a close ally of Turkey, the country where they chose to disappear Khashoggi. They would not have acted so recklessly unless they were certain of U.S. compliance.

“The Saudis would not have acted so recklessly unless they were certain of U.S. compliance.”

Trump again tears away the veneer of U.S. foreign policy. He is not smart enough to hide the dirty dealings. He doesn’t know when to reign in friends and he encourages rash behavior. But that doesn’t really make him worse than his predecessors. He is just less savvy and incapable of behaving within the norms laid down by tradition.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end with Trump and Kushner. It can be seen in the corporate media who cover for a war crime against Yemen. They are easily bought off by a prince who opens movie theaters and allows women to drive. But they also know who funds the think tanks and who has the connections with their bosses. They may despise Trump but it isn’t for the reasons they ought to dislike him. They are a party to the hypocrisy, as much as the foreign despots or their presidential partners. There are no heroes in this story. There is only a missing man and corruption in high places in two nations.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.