Tag Archives: propaganda

When the Truth Lies Dead and Buried – Resurrect Logic

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

If you read Western mainstream propaganda these days, you’ll find the truth hidden so deep no archaeologist could unearth it. A case in point is a buried lead in a story from the New York Post suggesting Russia has secret plans to hit NATO hard in the coming months.

According to the Post’s Chris Nesi, leaked secret documents released by German newspaper BILD tell of Europe preparing for Vladimir Putin to expand his military operation in Ukraine and to attack NATO ally countries next year. If readers take the headline and a keen graphic illustrating Putin’s alleged diabolical plan, you’d be in the right stocking up those bomb shelters in Wisconsin and Luxembourg.

Fortunately, Nesi’s story is entirely misleading. It suggests BILD got hold of Russian secret plans, conveniently categorised as a “plot” to sound more sinister, when in fact, German generals made plans to etch out WW3 like some chessboard game. The New York Post super sleuth waited until the article’s end to tell readers the truth about these “plans.” Here’s the passage.

“While the plans obtained by BILD are a potential scenario prepared by generals in the German army, European allies take Russia’s threat seriously and are preparing accordingly.”

The biggest problem with these misleading stories is the downstream effect of main outlets, and their tabloid cousins, spreading the lies to the broader public. Iona Cleave of The Sun titled her version “COUNTDOWN TO CONFLICT Putin’s ‘step-by-step plan to bring West to brink of WW3’ revealed in leaked intel doc…including date of ‘Day X’ in 2025.” In this case, the lead of the story is not just buried. It’s cremated and scattered into the digital air before publication by the tabloid. Still, grocery shoppers in London and Edinburgh catch the stunning revelations about “X-Day” while waiting in the checkout line. The Putin bad man campaign continues, and the everyday citizen wonders what their government will do to protect them.

Then the narrative arrives for curious business people via Banking News: “Britain sends 20,000 troops to mammoth NATO exercise against ‘Putin threat’.” Mail Online takes things further by quoting the former head of NATO forces in Europe, retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, assuring readers the “plot” is actual. So, the German Ministry of Defence’s so-called step-by-step doomsday guide is deftly transformed into a bored staff officer scenario-building game in leather armchairs somewhere beneath the Brandenburg Gate into a bonafide Putin strategy to take over Europe.

The media is not the only conduit for Russophobia these days. Leaders of state like Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, say the Russians will not stop at Ukraine’s borders. American President Joe Biden has warned my people that if Putin wins a victory over Ukraine, Russia will attack a NATO country. And the minions of continual conflict for the Liberal Order are out in force in academia, business, and on the NGO and think tank circuit. One fine example is retired Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who’s gone on the media/propaganda circuit to sell more gas masks and military headgear via companies he’s affiliated with, told The Telegraph, “Putin may be about to launch an apocalyptic assault.” For those unfamiliar, Colonel Hamish Stephen de Bretton-Gordon commanded NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion between 2005 and 2007. He was in all the right places about the time America was introduced to the post-9/11 idea of a “war on terror.” He later led a company profiting from his and other analysts’ apocalyptic prophecies. When regime change schemes came to Syria, it was the good colonel who “informed” the House of Commons and the waiting BBC audience of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his people. Bretton-Gordon and many others trained by the spooks and the Anglo-American military-industrial complex play a continuous melody of crisis and fear.

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

Logic, the holy of holies these days, seems as lost as the Ark of the Covenant. Who could fail to notice, for instance, Russia taking up a defensive stance to save her soldiers’ lives and those of countless civilians in Ukraine cities like Kyiv, Karkhov, and Dnipro? With nearly half a million troops held in reserve and with Ukraine’s forces decimated, why haven’t the Russians already pushed through the weak spots on the way to the Dnieper River? And what about the billions and billions in arms and cash Western states have now lost to an impossible cause?

Looking at the latest tally of destroyed Ukraine equipment since the start of the operation tells the real story. So far, the Russians have knocked out almost 600 Ukrainian warplanes, 265 helicopters, almost 11,000 UAVs, 450 SAM systems, 14,645 tanks and armoured vehicles, 1,202 rocket launching systems, 7,750 artillery pieces, and 17,507 special military vehicles. Unbiased experts put the number of Ukraine dead at between 400 and 500 thousand combatants. And the number of wounded surely exceeds a million by now.

And finally, let’s remember that the elitist-controlled Western media, the politicians, and the so-called experts have been telling us Russia was finished for years now. Sanctions, the blown-up pipeline, and the weapons and money dump to Zelensky were supposed to weaken Russia. This is not the truth. Russia is more vital now than ever since the 1980s, militarily and economically. This points to another point of lost logic. Why would Russia want to take over states protected by NATO? Europe is a consumer continent. It’s where a billion people need feeding, not a breadbasket for good Russian families. There is nothing in Europe that Russia needs. It is Europe, on the other hand, that desperately needs Russia and the other BRICS countries. So, who are the most likely aggressors in all this?

Never believe their slogans, especially not NATO/good, Russia/bad.

The Four Horsemen of Gaza’s Apocalypse

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Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies towards Israel and the Middle East.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as ill-advised and dangerous. 

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools. He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H. W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator. 

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.  We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we need you.  The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians, Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation, but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank. He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. 

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal” and “political.” 

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched earth campaign in Gaza. 

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza, almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60 percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S. to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank. 

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of power, including the Israel lobby.  

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military. 

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands. He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting. He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018. 

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated. “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter the cost.”

[….]

A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”

Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.

[….]

McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start. Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk was deaf to what was happening around him.

Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency, but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it. McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority —  an Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7 — to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu. 

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered, evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S. credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world. It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.  

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and detained without charge since Oct. 7. 

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the Middle East.

If You’ve Just Started Paying Attention To US Foreign Policy

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There are always, ALWAYS lies, obfuscations and manipulations involved in marketing a new war to the public, or in hiding its involvement in foreign wars from public attention.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

If you’re among those who have only just begun paying attention to US foreign policy and western media bias in light of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Biden’s act of war against Yemen, it’s important to understand that none of the depravity you’re seeing is new. The lies. The insane double standards. The murderousness. The western political/media class always does this.

Every war the US involves itself in is always facilitated by lies promulgated in one voice by the official government in Washington and by the “independent” “free” press (actually propaganda services) of the western world. They deceived the world about Ukraine. They deceived the world about Yemen. They deceived the world about Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are always, always lies, obfuscations and manipulations involved in marketing a new war to the public, or in hiding its involvement in foreign wars from public attention.

All of this manipulation and deceit is necessary to hide the fact that the US-centralized empire is the most tyrannical power structure on this planet. And make no mistake, it is an empire. Washington serves as the hub of an undeclared empire comprised of alliances, partnerships, assets, public deals and secret agreements which knit a large number of nations together into what functions as a single power structure with regard to international affairs.

Most of the beneficiaries of this power structure reside in the west, or global north, while the most exploited and abused victims of this power structure tend to reside in the east, or global south. There are all sorts of rules and regulations and narratives and justifications for why this all happens the way it happens, but if you mentally “mute” the soundtrack on the verbal overlay and just look at what’s actually happening, what you will see is the lion’s share of the world’s wealth and resources moving northward and westward from populations of a darker average skin tone toward populations of a paler average skin tone. Wherever that movement is hindered, diverted, threatened or inconvenienced, you will see western war machinery moving southward and eastward to get it back on the desired track.

Most major international conflicts can be understood as either direct or indirect efforts by the US empire to shore up planetary domination, which are often met with resistance by populations who wish to retain their sovereignty. Much of this conflict happens in the middle east because that’s where the world gets a lot of its oil from, with US-aligned nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia frequently serving as the frontline for hostilities with non-US-aligned nations like Iran and Syria as well as non-US-aligned forces like Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Hamas.

This struggle for US planetary hegemony is disguised by the western political/media class as something other than what it is, because you can’t allow the public in a democratic nation to understand clearly that their government is on the side of evil. They’ll frame it as a US-led international coalition to liberate a nation from a tyrannical dictator. As a humanitarian intervention to protect human rights. As support for Israel’s right to defend itself. As protection of freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. But what’s actually happening is the world’s most powerful and murderous power structure killing human beings in western Asia in order to secure control over a crucial resource.

You see this all over the world against nations which refuse to allow themselves to be absorbed into the US-centralized power structure like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, with China being by far the strongest of these and Russia a distant second. And you will notice that you have heard every nation I just mentioned cast in a very negative light by the western press over the years. This is not a coincidence. 

You don’t need to believe anything I’m saying on faith. If you just keep in mind what I said and start watching the patterns for yourself while seeking out the truth day by day, you will see it for yourself. You will see the same patterns emerging over and over again, year after year. Over and over again you will see the US and the states that are aligned with it acting with extreme aggression toward non-US-aligned powers in ways that benefit the US-centralized power structure, and you will see the western press deceiving the world about what’s happening. The next Official Bad Guy you see dominating western press coverage on international affairs will be a non-US-aligned power, and if you apply diligent research and critical thinking you will find that they are not presenting an accurate picture of what’s happening.

Just keep learning and studying the patterns with open curiosity and self-honesty, and the picture will inevitably become clear to you. And then you will clearly see who’s really driving the bulk of the violence and disorder in our world.

Biden, Israel’s accomplice in Gaza, pretends to be a bystander

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While the White House claims to be “frustrated” with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, US support for the carnage continues.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

On October 15th, President Biden took umbrage at a suggestion that his administration could not back both the Ukraine proxy war and Israel’s assault on Gaza at the same time.

 “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation… in the history of the world,” Biden told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”

Three months and well over 20,000 defenseless Palestinians slain later, the self-declared leader of the most powerful nation in the history of world now claims to be a helpless bystander.

According to four US officials, Biden is “increasingly frustrated” and “losing his patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected “most of the administration’s recent requests related to the war in Gaza,” Axios reports. “The situation sucks and we are stuck,” one official complained. “The president’s patience is running out.” Another official fumes that “there is immense frustration” in the Oval Office. According to Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen: “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger. They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”

Van Hollen is correct that the administration is getting slapped in the face by Israel. But he omits that Biden is a willing scene partner in a barely disguised performance: pretending to be up in arms about Israel’s genocidal conduct while doing everything he can to support it.

As Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon explained last month, any US demand of Israel’s military is perfunctory. “They didn’t agree to a ground invasion — we invaded,” Danon said. “They didn’t agree to [attacking] Al-Shifa hospital — we ignored their request. They wanted a pause without hostages — we didn’t accept that. We have no American ultimatum. There is no deadline from the US.”

The US not only imposes no conditions on its support for Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, but has twice bypassed Congress to expedite weapons for it. After all, this administration professes to have “no red lines” when it comes to Israeli aggression, and is fronted by a president who has declared that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire.

While Biden and his aides now pretend to have their hands tied, their instrumental role is undeniable. “Biden is president of the United States, still the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and a country without whose support Israel has no future,” former US diplomat Patrick Theros writes. “A firm public demand to cease and desist immediately would have enormous domestic political repercussions in Israel — far less in the United States. Biden would not have to publicly threaten to cut off weapons deliveries; a few words delivered in private to Netanyahu and a few members of his war cabinet would probably suffice.”

“If you want to use your leverage, use your leverage,” former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy says of Biden’s stance. “You’ve chosen to give Israel a blank check.”

That choice continues. In meetings with Israeli officials on Nov. 30th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken informed his counterparts that they had “weeks, not months” to “wrap up combat operations at the current level of intensity,” US officials later told the New York Times. Upon a return visit to Israel this week, Blinken again touted his push for what he called “the phased transition of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.” That “transition” to a “lower-intensity phase,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday, “is coming here very, very soon.”

But away from the news cameras, the posture changes. A senior US official now explains to the Washington Post that it’s in fact “pointless to urge them [the Israelis] to change.” Accordingly, “Washington’s priority has now shifted to tolerating Israel’s high-intensity operation throughout January, while insisting instead that it downgrade the tempo in February.”

In other words, the US has decided to tolerate Israel’s genocidal tempo in Gaza as normal. From Washington’s point of view, saving thousands of Palestinian lives from murder at the hands of US-supplied weaponry would be pointless.

Biden is so committed to continuing the Gaza slaughter that he has even expanded the war zone to Yemen. In a statement announcing his authorization of US strikes last week, Biden declared that he was acting to protect “freedom of navigation” and the “free flow of international commerce.” Since mid-November, the group that controls most of Yemen, Ansar Allah (misleadingly known in the US as the Houthis), has been targeting commercial ships – primarily those with Israeli links – passing through the Red Sea in a bid to compel the Israeli government to halt its assault on Gaza. By contrast with Israel’s operations, which has an official death toll of 23,000 and counting, Ansar Allah has not killed anyone. It even lost at least ten fighters in a US counterattack on December 31st. As Biden noted, Ansar Allah’s main impact has been to threaten “weeks of delays in product shipping times.” (Others estimate that the delay time can in fact be counted in days).

As in Gaza, the ultimate targets of US aggression in Yemen are civilians. While the Pentagon claims to be targeting Ansar Allah’s military capabilities, the “greater risk from the air attacks is likely borne by ordinary Yemenis,” the New York Times notes. This risk to ordinary Yemenis is consistent with longstanding US policy, specifically the current Biden team’s 2015 decision under President Obama to green-light the Saudi-led war on Yemen that has caused the ensuing humanitarian crisis. Around 21 million Yemenis – two-thirds of the country – rely on aid for survival, while more than four million are internally displaced.

In facing “one of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities,” the Times adds, Yemen faces “a dubious distinction now shared by Gaza.” Given its critical support for Israel’s assault, the US therefore has the dubious distinction of fueling two of the world’s worst humanitarian calamities.

Because of Israel’s blockade and military assault, the risk of famine in Gaza is “growing by the day,” Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official now warns. “As ground operations move southwards, aerial bombardments have intensified in areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety.” For Gaza’s civilians – more than 90% of them displaced — “dignified human life is a near impossibility.”

According to one anonymous official with Israel’s occupation authority for Gaza (COGAT), the lack of dignity for Palestinians in Gaza is a genetic trait. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” the official told Haaretz. “…There were stockpiles of food in Gaza. Don’t forget that this is an Arab, Gazan population whose DNA is to hoard, certainly when it comes to food.”

It is apparently in the White House DNA to share its Israeli client’s avowed bigotry. In a statement Sunday night, President Biden marked “100 days of captivity” for the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Biden’s emotional message failed to even mention the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, wounded, and displaced under US-backed Israeli assault over that same period.

“No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden said of the hostages. By refusing to acknowledge them, Biden is affirming via omission that he believes the exact opposite — and in fact infinitely worse — for Gaza’s two million Palestinian hostages. After 100 days of genocide, the people of Gaza are fated to endure continued atrocities as a direct result of US policy, no matter the Biden team’s ongoing effort to pretend otherwise.

How the U.S. Regime Carries Out Its Oppression

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

HOW IT DOES DOMESTIC OPPRESSION

On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, says the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

HOW IT DOES FOREIGN OPPRESSION

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022 in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

On 17 June 2015, I headlined “THE WHO’S WHO AT THE TOP OF THE COUP” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia, “he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

CONCLUSION

The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

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

War Propaganda Intensifies as US Mainstream Media Calls for War on Iran to Stop the “Axis of Resistance”

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Remember when the mainstream media especially FOX News was calling for an attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein and the Bath Party was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)?  FOX News was the main cheerleader for the US and its European allies to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein.  To be fair, CNN and MSNBC and other news outlets were also cheerleading for war, but FOX News was clearly, the loudest voice.  Today, FOX News is at it again with other right-wing media networks who have been also calling for the US and its allies to bomb Iran to stop the Axis of Resistance that includes Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraqi resistance groups and now Yemen, with the Houthi rebels who have been launching missile attacks against Israeli and Western commercial ships in the Red Sea in support of Gaza. 

Fox News senior strategic analyst, who a former General with the US Army, Jack Keane, a war hawk who served as an advisor to manage the US occupation of Iraq and a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.  Keane is also chairman of AM General, a heavy vehicle and automotive manufacturer that produces military Humvees for civilian and military use.  Recently, Keane spoke on FOX News regarding the 60 + strikes conducted by US and British fighter aircraft on Yemen.  The main points he made on the FOX network was that US and its British allies already had their targets pinpointed due to Centcom, the US central command, “they were likely tracking the Houthis were trying to hide some of this capability for the last few days.  But we got excellent surveillance there, and likely we will, we are able to determine whether they are moving a lot of this, they will finish the assessment, believe me, I think if there is capability there, that is still significant, we should reattack and then we got to remind ourselves what’s really happening here.” 

Keane went on to say that Iran is “the center of gravity”, therefore it must be attacked to stop its proxies in the region:

The center of gravity for the aggression in the Middle East that we’re experiencing is Iran. We have said this time and time and time again, and to deter the proxies themselves by hitting them will not be sufficient.  We have got to go after Iran themselves by hitting them will not be sufficient.  We have got to go after Iran, they are, as I mentioned, the center of gravity, Centcom has a table of targets that they have provided to the administration in how to go about doing that comprehensively to shut down their support for these proxies that has got to be high on our list.  And what that really means Brian, we have got to re-set the strategy in dealing with Iran in the region and admit the fact that this thing has failed.  When they came in, they removed the Trump sanctions.  Iran’s flush with oil money now, as a result of it, they went after the nuclear deal.  That failed    

Keane is not the only psychopath who wants World War III, another frequent quest on FOX News, Lindsey Graham who is South Carolina’s Republican Senator and a Pro-Israel activist was quoted in a FOX News article, ‘Lindsey Graham calls for warning Iran of retaliation if Hamas escalates, tells ‘Squad’ to ‘shut the hell up’ reported that the “South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham castigated the far left’s “appeasement” of Iran’s regime, which he said has not prevented attacks by Hamas against Israel, telling the Palestinian-friendly “Squad” contingent in Congress to “shut the hell up.”  On America Reports, a show produced by FOX News, Graham said that “The only way you’re going to keep this war from escalating is to hold Iran accountable. How much more death and destruction do we have to take from the Iranian regime? I am confident this was planned and funded by the Iranians.”

Sounding like a far-right Israeli politician, Graham also said that “Hamas is a bunch of animals who deserve to be treated like animals” he added that “Israeli forces should use this opportunity to invade Palestinian territory and “dismantle” the militant group.”  Graham used the Hitler comparison to the Hamas’ resistance as “an effort to kill Jewish people on par with that of former German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.” 

In 2005, a few years after Iraq was already invaded and destroyed, Pew Research found that FOX News was more biased in reporting on the war in Iraq than CNN and MSNBC, “measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air” and that “the news channel was also decidedly more positive in its coverage of the war in Iraq, while the others were largely neutral. At the same time, the story segments on the Fox programs studied did have more sources and shared more about them with audiences.”  This does not mean CNN and MSNBC is innocent nor any better on the lead-up to the war on Iraq, but FOX News is surely on the frontline when it comes to war propaganda. 

Iran is the ultimate prize for the neocons in Washington and Israel.  Israel wants to get the US military into another war but this time to attack Iran.  They are using the mainstream media that they control to gain support from the US population who are clueless about what is happening in the Middle East.  FOX News is a major part of the propaganda machine, so they will continue to call for another major war to appease their Zionist masters in Israel. 

In an article published in 2003 by The Guardian that was correctly titled, ‘Their Master’s Voice’ on Rupert Murdoch, the owner of FOX News said that “you have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him.”   It goes on to say how much influence Rupert Murdoch, who is a neocon at heart, has in his media empire:

Murdoch is chairman and chief executive of News Corp which owns more than 175 titles on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. His television reach is greater still, but broadcasting – even when less regulated than in Britain – is not so plainly partisan. It is newspapers which set the agenda

What was Murdoch’s agenda during the war in Iraq? In an interview in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, one of the newspapers that Murdoch owns, said that “We can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam…I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it.” He was also asked about another war criminal-at-large and former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair:

I think Tony is being extraordinarily courageous and strong… It’s not easy to do that living in a party which is largely composed of people who have a knee-jerk anti-Americanism and are sort of pacifist. But he’s shown great guts as he did, I think, in Kosovo and various problems in the old Yugoslavia”

Fox News is cheerleading for another war but this time against Iran who is not Iraq.  Iran has the capabilities to hit every US base in the Middle East especially those in Iraq and Syria. It has a formidable military that is ready to defend their territorial integrity. If the US and their Israeli counterparts decide to attack Iran, rest assured, the entire Middle East would erupt and they would support Iran and that will be the end of all US bases in the region and possibly, the end of a 75-year-old occupation of Palestine.      

FOX News has supported every war, it has supported every assassination of foreign military and political leaders, and it has supported every regime change operation on all corners of the globe.  There is nothing “Fair and Balanced” with FOX News and their paid propagandists who basically work for Military arms manufacturers, major corporations, the right-wing part of the American and European political establishment and of course, Israel. 

This is dangerous war propaganda all over again, we can call it, Iraq 2.0., but this is much worse because this coming war will involve many countries and resistance groups, especially those in the Middle East.   

Something Lost, Never to Be Found Again

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Defeat in Ukraine may be but one part to an accumulation of western ‘defeats’. Defeat in Israel would strike at the very core of U.S. political being.

By Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

A strange ennui and distracted attention envelops the West today.

Hat-tip to Simplicius’ Bones of Tomorrow, in which he reflects on a Culture that has become debased; its lures that used to trap us into the ‘Myth of the West’ lie withered, as patently false idols. The dimming fire has squandered any sense of ‘magic’ in the guttering West, or indeed of hope to recoup this something ‘lost’. It is the wistful realisation that – as it stands – the myth is never likely to offer anything of lasting value again.

The figments of a utopian future once promised, nonetheless continue their seductive hold on our psyche, but only on attention-hopping, hypnotic touch-screens. Cultural touchstones crumble around us like rotting edifices one after another. Yet, we are too distracted to take real notice, or to absorb the significance. Counter ‘currents’ in the shadows gleefully applaud.

Where we stand now is where we’ve always stood – in the quicksands of time. A passing of the guard; one world fading, deep into the slow, declining burnout phase, the natural process of decay and renewal, whilst taking us forward towards some next, still-to-sprout, green shoots. A sense of something lost and never to be found again, which we all endure these days.

The ‘Elect’ though, have deliberately raised the stakes. They do not want to ‘let go’. They have determined that, with the western train wrecked on its own cultural ‘wall’, the ‘End of Time’ story of convergence on a common future is ‘over’ too.

And along with it, the claimed western mandate to dictate the ‘direction forward’ is over also.

Beneath the gimcrack and baubled veneer, the western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, that superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have been transmitted down the ages so that those in the West today, are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA” has transpired to be nothing more than the faded tinselry of hollow narrative.

This is the deep fear of western political leaders – they know the ‘Narrative’ to be a fiction. Nonetheless, they go on telling it to themselves, despite knowing that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth. Absent the Myth, they sense, the western project, and western prosperity, could disintegrate utterly.

The ‘Elect’ hoped that the dredged-up, chimeric dreams of material prosperity and western savoir faire could still prop the Myth ‘aloft’, but only (and only if) the West possessed the better narrative. The right narrative was everything. It had to outmatch and outshine the ‘clunky narratives’ of adversaries. This deceptive covenant had to endure at all costs, lest the baubled veneer of the Myth come undone.

So the narrative ‘factory’ is put hard to work. The kinetic war in Ukraine is settled in an evident and overwhelming Russian victory – albeit without it yet being ‘over’. Of course not: Ukraine was but one single battlescape in the wider struggle to force the ‘Rimland’ (the Atlanticist world) to accept an agreed upon frontier between it and the ‘Heartland’ (Russia, China and their Asian depth), and gracefully to renounce its claim to exceptionality in determining our global future.

The MSM media therefore is abuzz with analysis of how to define a ‘western win’: Is it possible to ‘flip’ the narrative of Ukraine, they ponder, to being ‘another’ western win? They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

Call the Ukraine conflict a ‘stalemate’, and insist that it represents a ‘defeat’ for Putin and a ‘win’ for Biden, since Russia was unable to seize the whole of Ukraine (falsely imputing this to have been Moscow’s objective, from the start). This approach is thought rather ‘cool’ by western analysts: Frame the narrative of a ‘win’ and ensure that from top-to-bottom of society, all adhere to the correct narrative without demur.

But this is little more than a simple projection from the YouTube ‘influencer’ culture, by which random individuals earn ‘street cred’, (and lots of cash), by curating slick narratives – whether about fashion, or political events. It may work insofar as the addled western public is concerned, but it has limited traction beyond western cultural tinselry.

The flaw when ‘flip-narratives’ are weaponised geo-politically, however, is that propaganda which is so divorced from a reality that is evident simply is not a winning narrative (except in the most fleeting of ways). Plainly said, it leads to the self-isolation of its authors.

The glee with which evident western ‘reverses’ seemingly can be narratively ‘flipped’ by Intelligence ‘leaks’ propagating rank lies to support a narrative has become a contagion amongst western intelligence services. Yet rather, this ‘deceptive covenant’ is a poisoned chalice.

If the West had any remaining sense, it would concentrate more on setting a ‘narrative of western defeat’ in Ukraine, rather than promulgating yet another rotting ‘narrative of victory’.

Why so?

Because a wise leadership would be preparing its people for defeat. Unlikely and false stories of glory on the battlefield come back to bite the perpetrators, as (metaphorically) the wounded and dead return to contradict visibly the tale of victory.

The West, by contrast, is still fed on stories of western leadership, election, innate qualities and exceptionalism. Put simply, this ‘influencer’ fad signally is failing to help westerners cope with the tectonic shifts occurring across the globe. Its peoples are wholly unprepared for the ‘Winter that is Coming’.

Yet, the purveyors of ‘winning’ hug themselves in sheer glee as their ‘flipped’ delusions are relayed through a compliant MSM.

Childish propaganda and lying however will only serve to make the new era all the more painful. A ‘narrative of defeat’, told with integrity, by contrast, is one that helps a people to understand how a particular crisis arose and came to afflict them. It should also signal a way forward. In Iran this was understood: ‘Ashura’ gave the key to understanding the pain and crisis Iranians had been enduring, and the Mahdi signalled a future that lay beyond immediate crisis.

The need for a return to an integrity of messaging is all the more pressing as attempts to repair one reversal, with a false narrative – inverting realities to achieve the putative ‘win’ – will only lead to further losses.

Deceit is exposed in the instant. Trust takes a decade to build. Does the West really believe it can recoup in this way? Nobody beyond their authors believes these western Intelligence narratives, post- Ukraine. They are now tainted for the long run. In the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle.

There is another factor at play here too. EU spokesman on foreign affairs, Peter Stano, when asked this month by TASS about the Ukrainian missile strikes on the Russian city of Belgorod, resulting in over two dozen civilian casualties, said: “Regarding the specific incident in Belgorod, no information that comes from Russia can be considered trustworthy”, the spokesman added, accusing Moscow of “constant lies, manipulation and propaganda”.

Here lies the dark underside to ‘Win Narratives’ that become unyoked from the facts on the ground: The EU spokesman is compelled to affirm the mandatory narrative of Ukraine’s “right to defend itself … from aggression” – but then to nix anything and everything that Russia may say.

Put plainly, ‘win narratives’ kill empathy; they kill active listening and understanding. Diplomats are supposed to practice deep listening. If what they hear jars with what they expect, or want to hear, they are supposed to listen harder, and try to run-down what it is that lies out-of-sight, behind what they hear, so to understand what was intended, and to better understand their interlocutor. The West does not practice this now.

People often ask why is there so little empathy evident today? Why do states talk past each other? Why are channels of communication jammed? Well, that’s why: Flipped narratives based on easily exposed untruths.

Yet the western defeat in Ukraine may be but one part to an accumulation of western ‘defeats’. Defeat in Israel, for one, would strike at the very core of U.S. political being – too close to the quick to be lightly brushed aside. And there may be more hurts to come in the Middle East.

Just to be clear: the spinning of a fabric of delusion, unfaithful to the granular truth lurking beneath, ultimately hurts its authors. It leaves people disorientated, insecure, kicking at the loose gravel of the past, rummaging for some understanding of the crashing defeat, for which they are wholly unprepared.

The risk is then of a nation being swept off-course to ultimate catastrophe by the romance of ‘winning’ slogans such as ‘together we will win’ (heard all across Israel today): “Anyone who has studied German history and watched Goebbels’ career, sees what a dangerous instrument propaganda is – one that can lead to a [catastrophic] national loss of way.”

Fake Intellectuals Working For Think Tanks Funded By the Arms Industry Are Driving Support For War After War After War

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By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Source: Covert Action

A few days after the October 7 attacks in northern Israel, The Atlantic Council ran an inflammatory article on its website by Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer, entitled “It doesn’t matter whether Iran planned the Hamas attack—Tehran is still to blame.”[1]

The article referenced a Wall Street Journal article that claimed unfoundedly that Iran was responsible for planning the attacks, and expressed belief that even if Iran didn’t directly plan it, Iran was still responsible because it had supported Hamas in the past.

The article went on to support an aggressive military response by the U.S. and Israel that could potentially entail bombing Iran. The latter was a long-held dream of neoconservatives who have wanted to overthrow the regime of the Ayatollahs since it took over from the Shah, a U.S. and Israeli client, in a 1979 revolution.

Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (Clarity Press, 2023) looks at the influence of think tanks like The Atlantic Council in driving gargantuan U.S. military budgets and endless wars that have no end in sight.

The Atlantic Council has been particularly hawkish with regards to Russia, helping to fuel a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine that has decimated a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and left us on the threshold of World War III.

Diesen is an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

His book emphasizes the undue influence that think tank pseudo-intellectuals play because of their ubiquitous presence in the mainstream media as well as academia and because of their authorship of policy reports that often guide government policy.

Rather than being even-handed or in any way objective in their analysis, the think tank fellows follow a preordained narrative.

According to Diesen, their job is to manufacture consent for the goals of their paymasters—weapons manufacturers and oil companies who profit off of war along with foreign governments courting more U.S. military aid.

Diesen writes that “think-tanks have become a symptom of hyper-capitalism in which all aspects of society have become an appendage to the market. Even political influence is regulated by the free-market, in which think tanks are an important component.”

Diesen notes that a brilliant achievement of propaganda has been to convince the population that propaganda is only an instrument of authoritarian states—that the U.S. is supposedly combating—and not liberal democracies.

The think tanks help condition the public to fear foreign threats and support wars of aggression under the veneer of providing independent expert analysis.

Paul Craig Roberts, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, has called The Atlantic Council the “marketing arm of the military-security complex,” while Diesen calls it “NATO’s Propaganda Wing.”

The Atlantic Council’s financial report from 2019/2020 reveals that it received over $1 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), according to Diesen. It also received major contributions from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. State Department, a Saudi oil billionaire (Bahaa Hariri), Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, Crescent Petroleum, and Burisma, an energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarchs which appointed Hunter Biden to its board along with former CIA counter-terrorism director Cofer Black.

The Atlantic Council’s close ties to the CIA were further evident when its former executive vice-president, Damon Wilson, was appointed CEO of the NED, a CIA offshoot that promotes propaganda and supports dissidents in countries whose governments have been targeted by the U.S. for regime change.

Former CIA Director James R. Woolsey is listed as a lifetime director of the Atlantic Council, while former CIA Directors Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and David Petraeus are listed on its Board, along with such war criminals as Henry Kissinger, and Condeleezza Rice.

Over the past decade, the Atlantic Council has published countless reports on Russia’s kleptocracy and disinformation being spread allegedly by Vladimir Putin, and has hosted anti-Russian dissidents and Belarusian opposition figures such as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who called for more aggressive intervention by the U.S. in Belarusian politics. 

One of The Atlantic Council’s fellows, Michael Weiss, spreads his anti-Russia invective as an editor at the popular online media outlet, The Daily Beast. He helps run a neo-McCarthyite website, PropOrNot that promotes the worst kind of fear mongering imaginable, attacking independent media outlets, including the Ron Paul Institute, for allegedly advancing Russian propaganda.

In 2015, the Atlantic Council helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles—the same year that it presented its Distinguished Leadership Award to Marillyn Adams Hewson, then the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which produces Javelin missiles and many other lethal weapons.

Since the commencement of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, The Atlantic Council has doubled down on its long-standing Russophobia, calling for bombing Russia and starting World War III.

Last February, Matthew Kroenig, the Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, argued for consideration of the U.S. preemptive use of ’tactical’ nuclear weapons.[2] This would not only kill thousands of people directly but likely cause what scientists characterize as a “nuclear winter” by injecting so much smoke and debris into the air that it will block sunlight and cause a precipitous drop in global temperatures, affecting food production across the globe.

Triggering New Cold and Hot Wars

The Atlantic Council’s support for war with Russia is characteristic of think tanks which played a crucial role in pushing the decision to expand NATO after the Cold War.

George F. Kennan and other foreign policy experts had warned against this because NATO was perceived as a hostile military alliance by Russia and it would undermine new European security initiatives involving Russia. Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara at the time also called for a new “peace dividend” by which the U.S. would reduce its military budget and address social needs with taxpayer dollars.

The overriding imperative of the weapons industry, however, was to revitalize cold war thinking to ensure continuously high military budgets and the expansion of NATO and the think-tanks were enlisted to fulfill that end.

Diesen points out that the Brookings Institute, one of the oldest American think tanks, played an instrumental role in the Russia Gate hoax, which greatly contributed to the spread of Russophobia underlying the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

A primary researcher and contributor to the Steele dossier, the seminal document in Russia Gate which spread false information about Donald Trump being blackmailed because of an alleged encounter with Russian prostitutes, was an employee of the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko, who was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI.

Working under Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and renowned anti-Russian hawk, Danchenko claimed to have accrued incriminating information against Trump from a meeting with Russian-American Chamber of Commerce President Sergey Millian, who said that this meeting never actually took place.[3]

The Atlantic Council was another false purveyor of Russia Gate whose revenues increased tenfold from 2006-2016 when it began demonizing Vladimir Putin and smearing politicians like Tulsi Gabbard who advocated for cooperative diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia.

Leaving out the fact that Putin revitalized Russia’s economy after the failed privatization and shock therapy initiatives of the 1990s, The Atlantic Council made people believe that Putin invaded Ukraine on a whim and would destabilize all of Europe if he was not stopped.

This kind of analysis obscures the true origins of the conflict in Ukraine and the Western role in supporting NATO expansion and a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s legally elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the outbreak of civil war.

The Atlantic Council continues today along with other think-tanks to whitewash Ukrainian war crimes, corruption and close ties with the far-right and neo-Nazis.

Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute even celebrates Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on opposition politicians and media, while hypocritically framing the struggle against Russia as one of authoritarianism versus democracy.

McFaul and others have made clear that a primary U.S. foreign policy goal is to try and delink Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russia while expanding U.S. natural gas sales in Europe.

In 2019, the RAND Corporation, the think tank of the intelligence agencies, issued a report calling for threatening NATO expansion and the arming of Ukraine in order to draw Russia into a conflict that would facilitate its overextension militarily and economically and cause the Russian government to lose domestic and international support.

The same report advocated for intensifying the ideological and information war against Russia to weaken the legitimacy and stability of its government, and voiced support for the anti-corruption crusade of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whom Diesen identifies as a British intelligence asset supportive of policies designed to weaken the Russian Federation.

RAND earlier had advocated for provoking civil war within Syria through covert action and informational warfare and by capitalizing on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict in order to undermine the nationalist Assad regime and draw Russia into the conflict there.

RAND also advocated for the destabilization of the Caucuses in order to cause a fissure between Russia and its traditional ally, Armenia, hence weakening Russia.

This latter goal was achieved when Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan expressed no-confidence in Russia’s ability to protect it after Azerbaijan—heavily armed by the U.S. and Israel—invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

RAND had also issued policy recommendations for reducing Russian influence in Moldova and undercutting Russian trade with Central Asia and promoted regime change in Belarus to destabilize a Russian ally and alter the country’s orientation westward.

Following this prescription, the NED and other U.S. agencies provoked an uprising in 2020 against Belarus’ socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was demonized in western media though he helped curb inequality and poverty considerably while resisting the rapid privatization initiatives carried out by other post-Soviet leaders.

CNAS and Team Biden

One of the most influential think tanks today is the Center For a New American Security (CNAS), which received huge sums from oil companies like Chevron and BP, financial giants like Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase, and Amazon and Google from Big Tech.

CNAS’s former CEO, Victoria Nuland, was a former adviser to Dick Cheney and a key architect behind the 2014 coup in Ukraine.[4]

CNAS’ founder, Michèle Flournoy, was a board member of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy helped develop counterinsurgency policy for Afghanistan and contributed to convincing Barack Obama to invade Libya. More recently, she has advocated for an aggressive military buildup in the South China Sea to counter a rising China.

When Joe Biden became president, at least 16 CNAS alumni were selected for foreign policy positions. CNAS had pushed heavily for making Kamala Harris Vice President as her foreign policy team consisted of an army of CNAS think-tankers—including Flournoy.

The appointment of CNAS alumni to prestigious positions and their lobbying influence epitomizes the so-called revolving door in which high level White House and Pentagon officials who serve corporate-military interests while in power are rewarded with lucrative paying jobs in which they continue to serve the same underlying interests.

Diesen emphasizes at the end of his book that think tanks in the modern U.S. have helped to subvert democracy and obstruct U.S. foreign policy in the interests of wealthy corporations that profit from endless wars. He sees as a solution more public disclosures about the sources of think tank funding and public pressures that could help reduce their influence.

Another more radical solution is a socialist revolution that would result in the nationalization of the weapons industry, taking profit out of war, and reorganizing research, development and production toward fulfilling human needs.

  1. Panikoff is the Atlantic Council’s Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. ↑
  2. In John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, and Deborah Veneziale, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 42. ↑
  3. The New Knowledge think-tank fabricated a story of Russian interference in the 2017 Alabama state election with the intent of causing the defeat of Republican candidate Roy Moore. ↑
  4. Nuland was also a fellow at the Brookings Institute. ↑