Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Thurghood Marshall Courthouse in New York City, where Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long sex trafficking operation invovling numerous elite figures. Dan Cohen reports from the demonstration.
NEW YORK – On December 4, protesters and survivors of sex trafficking gathered outside the Thurghood Marshall Courthouse in New York City to demand justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose trial is ongoing.
“Epstein and Maxwell trafficked children for 25 years and Maxwell is only charged with one count of child trafficking,” investigative journalist Nick Bryant told the crowd.
“Testimonies indicate that Epstein demanded sexual acts from women and girls up to three times a day,” explained Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking In Women, adding:
If true, that would be 1,032 acts of sexual violence a year. And with at least 3 decades of Epestin’s reported patterns of sexual abuse, that is over 32,000 instances of rape and sexual assault by Epstein alone. And 30, 40 years later, there are four survivors in that courtroom that are accusing Maxwell of pimping. Four!”
While the legal system has leveled a mere six charges against Maxwell, mass media from Google and Wikipedia to television networks uniformly describe her as a “socialite.”
Both Google and Wikipedia characterize Maxwell as a “socialite”
It’s a stark contrast to the media treatment of Alisha Owen – a survivor of a similar pedophilia ring involving powerful businessmen, political and intelligences figures – who spoke at the rally.
“I am no longer going to just be a survivor. I am going to be a warrior,” she told the cheering crowd. “On the front page of the Omaha World Herald, they called me short, fat and ugly. ‘This couldn’t possibly happen to her, she’s short, fat and ugly….’ It was so brutal. So I think the media bears a responsibility,” Owen remarked to MintPress News.
On top of being smeared by her local newspaper, Owen says she was pressured by the FBI to recant her testimony. “Between 50 and 100 times, the FBI was, ‘You’re gonna change. You know, you’re gonna recant. You’re gonna say you’re a liar…’ The FBI told me, ‘You’re gonna be an old woman.’ I was supposed to be in [for] 250 years.”
But no outlet has given such an explicit display of sympathy as Bloomberg News, which asked if Ghislaine Maxwell is a victim in the affair.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial is set to be one of the biggest of the #MeToo era. But the jury may have to grapple with a unique question: is Maxwell herself a victim? https://t.co/vPRayRUB43
It’s no surprise, given that the owner of the outlet, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, is tied to Maxwell and Epstein. Photos from 2013 show Bloomberg and Maxwell together:
Another photo of Ghislaine Maxwell with vertically challenged Democrat/Independent former Mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg pic.twitter.com/wLJ0viEQHY
And Epstein’s infamous Little Black Book contains five different phone numbers for Bloomberg.
Also curiously missing from most mainstream reporting on Epstein and Maxwell are questions about their ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
Jeffrey Epstein was an FBI informant, and former Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who in 2008 was the U.S. attorney in Miami, cut a plea deal with Epstein after he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Ghislaine Maxwell’s late father, Robert Maxwell, is reported to have been a Mossad operative.
What became of the Epstein dirt?
With Epstein dead in what many suspect was a covered-up murder, and Maxwell facing only a handful of charges, the elite figures who visited Epstein’s mansions – from Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to Bill Gates and Ehud Barak – are not under investigation. As journalist Chris Hedges explained:
The videos that Epstein apparently collected of his guests engaged in sexual escapades with teenage and underage girls from the cameras he had installed in his opulent residences and his private island have mystersously disappeared, most probably into the crucial hole of the FBI along with other evidence.”
With the system that allowed Epstein and Maxwell to commit their crimes intact, the protesters vow to carry on their struggle for justice.
The mother of all scams instituted by US dark forces last year took post-9/11 tyranny to a diabolical new level.
What remains of free and open US and other Western societies are earmarked for elimination.
Abolishing fundamental freedoms altogether nears completion. Yet most people are unaware of what’s going on in plain view.
In interfacing with others in my residential building and neighborhood, I’m appalled at the state of public ignorance.
Explaining reality engenders disbelief, indifference, or anger directed at me.
Without public awareness of nearly full-blown tyranny in the US and West, we’re doomed to loss of virtually everything just societies most cherish.
I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating.
The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists.
Replaced by police state-enforced totalitarian rule, full-blown tyranny is near at hand.
Naomi Wolf believes it arrived.
In her 2008 book, titled “End to America,” she explained the road to tyranny in 10 steps, as follows:
1. “Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.”
The above followed the 9/11 mother-of-all-state-sponsored false flags to that time.
Multiple wars on invented enemies followed abroad — combined with war on fundamental freedoms at home.
I explained what followed 9/11 in a detailed article titled: Police State America: A Look Back and Ahead.
Over the past 20 years, US state terrorism worldwide hardened to its present form.
2. “Create a gulag.”
The US has the world’s largest by far, operating at home and abroad in multiple countries.
Guantanamo is the tip of the iceberg abroad.
I discussed the US system in numerous articles — including The US Gulag Prison System and Mass Incarceration in America.
Abroad I wrote about Torture and Abuse in America’s Global Gulag.
I explained America’s appalling human rights record domestically and abroad.
3. “Develop a thug caste”
Wolf calls its elements “paramilitary groups of scary young men (used) to terrorize citizens.”
In US Black and Latino inner-city communities, police all too often terrorize discriminated against residents harshly in other ways.
4. “Set up an internal surveillance system”
Mass surveillance is pervasive in the US and West.
Big Brother is real. It’s no longer fiction. It’s part of unchecked extrajudicial power in the West.
5. “Harass citizens’ groups”
The FBI and other parts of the US national security state created a legal and extrajudicial total surveillance society through technological and infiltration means that includes targeting activist groups like the Black Panthers for elimination.
6. “Engage in arbitrary detention and release”
Wolf explained that it’s a plot to scare people into compliance.
7. “Target key individuals”
“Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line,” Wolf explained
8. “Control the press”
Censorship in the US is the new abnormal. It’s all about controlling the official narrative, wanting conflicting views suppressed.
Digital democracy is the last frontier of media freedom in the US and West.
Is it next on the target list for elimination by dark forces wanting unchallenged control?
Will my writing and other free expression like it be criminalized ahead — on the phony pretext of protecting national security?
9. “Dissent equals treason”
Will speech, media, and academic freedoms be eliminated this way in the West?
10. “Suspend the rule of law”
Wolf says we’ve reached this stage in the US and West.
Weeks earlier, she said we’ve “arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to” tyranny.
Emergency measures are in place in many states, she explained.
Vaccine passports may be required in the US and West for unrestricted access to public places — including for employment and education.
Following draconian lockdowns last year, millions of US small business were forced to close permanently for loss of enough revenue to keep operating.
Social distancing restricts or prohibits the First Amendment right of assembly — on the phony pretext of protecting public health.
Mandatory face masks in most parts of the country when indoors — and in Massachusetts outdoors — don’t protect and risk harm from longterm use.
Big Tech is censoring critics of draconian covid-related policies that are all about destroying our health and freedoms, not the other way around.
“(H)ijacked” science was replaced by medical tyranny.
Truth-telling is increasingly considered treasonous.
Fundamental freedoms are disappearing with scant public opposition against the transformation of America into full-blown tyranny — on the phony pretext of protecting us.
As long as scant resistance at most exists against what’s going on, countless millions in the West and elsewhere may perish.
Full-blown tyranny enforced by police state ruthlessness may make survivors wish they went with them.
Corporations like General Mills and ExxonMobil aren’t going to save us from white supremacist violence or climate annihilation with their piddly tweets.
modicum of attention to the world at large, you’ve noticed that white supremacists constitute a bit of a problem in America. They led an insurrection at our Capitol recently. They’ve been involved in many mass shootings. I, along with many others, was nearly killed by one a few years ago in Charlottesville, Va.after he tried to murder as many peaceful protesters as possible. Our police forces are brimming with white supremacist assholes. And I think they had a popular TV show about ducks and beards not too long ago.
So I believe we can all admit that there are large groups of racist pricks wandering around our country — usually armed, rarely friendly. Everyone knows it. I bet even the racist parents of a 32-year-old white supremacist know he’s a dick. At Thanksgiving dinner they probably tell him, “Listen, Robbie. We’re very proud of you. We love what you’ve done with hating Black people online. But the thing is — you’re kinda a dick. Can you just be more polite? Just approach people slowly and kindly ask if they would like to be racist with you. You don’t have to make such a scene — with all the guns and the camo.”
Anyways, I bring this up because I don’t think we’re going to solve America’s militant hate group problem until we get the help of Fruit by the Foot and Gushers. …You heard me.
We all know that this country will not heal without further efforts from the gummy candy community. I mean, you remember when they solved racist policing in this country, don’t you? In the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, Gushers literally tweeted, “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We’re working with Fruit by the Foot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you.”
Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We’re working with @fruitbythefoot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you. pic.twitter.com/7y1DgUYitN
t just brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? Gushers was there for Black lives. (Although this tweet does raise the question, “If Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black Community” then what would it be? Do gummy candies taste different if there aren’t Black people around? What would be the point of that? Why invent a racist candy like that?)
Point being, after Gushers’ unprecedented alliance with Fruit by the Foot (both of which are owned by General Mills), racist police brutality in America ceased to exist (one assumes). And so, building on that success, I think we clearly need another gummy-based Manhattan Project to tackle the unnerving prevalence of extremist hate groups and racist ideology. Perhaps if they made a statement that only good little Proud Boys get Fruit by the Foot? That might do it.
Or perhaps (he writes knowingly) this could be just one of the countless examples of corporate America trying to act like they aren’t an actual negative force on community, sustainability, fairness, and equality.
Chevron and ExxonMobil and banks and credit card companies and franchise restaurants all often tell us they care about Black Lives or care about the LGBTQ+ community or are working to create a safe space for folks with disabilities or they tell us we’re all in this together.
Corporations only care about you as far as they can extract profit from you. That is their only goal. The moment Black lives or white lives or Asian lives don’t make them a profit, they no longer give a shit. The moment people try to demand something from them that will benefit the community and world but not improve their bottom line, those companies are not there to listen — just look at the current fight for unionization at Amazon. Or try going up to Wells Fargo and saying, “Hey, I saw your ad that we’re all in this together. I was so glad to hear that. Really made me feel blisstastic. Seeing as we’re all in this together, I would like to ask you to stop funding oil pipelines that are killing, um, everything. Oh, and also can you stop working with weapons contractors, too? They like to kill children and stuff. So what do ya say? ….Hello? Hello? I thought we were in this together? …Does this mean you also won’t babysit my cockatoo next week?”
Corporate America does not care about you or me or any of us outside of what they can extract from us, and that’s as true for Betty Crocker as it is for ExxonMobil. For example, it has become a problem in America that workers (the ones lucky enough to still have a job or three) are working themselves to the bone. People literally fall asleep or collapse on the job. They’re trying to work non-stop in order to afford meaningless consumer goods like, well, health care. And it’s kind of common sense that if we raised the minimum wage or gave workers free child care and more paid time off then they wouldn’t be suffering so much. So Ford Motor Company saw this problem and said, “Hold my beer.”
The good people at Ford have come out with a new answer to this tragic issue. It’s a hat that keeps you awake while you’re collapsing on the job. No, really. The commercial writes itself — “Just strap this thing to your fucking head while your subconscious brain is telling you that if you don’t sleep soon you’ll DIE, and the hat will tell your conscious brain, “NO! Fight the urge to give in to your urgent biological needs!”
’m hopeful Ford will soon come out with a version of this dystopian headgear that connects to a long tube which you just place up your backdoor so it can vacuum out any waste your body needs to expel. Once you have that device bolted into your skull and secured up your rear, you’ll actually be able to drive for upwards of 56 hours without hitting the brake pedal once. There is a small chance brain matter will ooze out your ears and your heart will explode. But if that happens — guess who’s getting Employee of the Month?!
Corporate America consists of totalitarian entities laser-focused on short-term greed. These corporations have become largely decoupled from reality, from humanity, from sustainability, and from the environment. Any time they take a breather from their rapacious, glutinous greed to belch out some tired exclamation of care for social justice or care for environmental rejuvenation or care for ending inequality and hate — those moments are beyond meaningless. In fact, those moments are actually harmful due to the number of people who honestly believe they mean something, who think the corporate world can ever be a force for good rather than the center of our own waltz off the cliff.
If we want to end oppression, we must end inequality. If we want to end inequality, we must evolve beyond our rancid exploitative socioeconomic system and the corporations that thrive in it.
In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)
We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.
This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.
The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.
The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.
The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.
The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.
The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”
The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.
That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.
“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”
The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.
All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.
Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:
“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)
All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”
Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)
I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Jugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.
American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.
Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.
The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.
Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)
The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.
One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.
However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?
This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).
As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.
Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)
Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 —Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
January 20 was a day of mourning for countless numbers of people harmed by Biden that went on for nearly half a century in public office.
The same holds for misery he’ll inflict on countless more ahead —ordinary people exploited so privileged ones can benefit, including himself and family members.
He built a dishonable career on a foundation of shilling for powerful interests that included waging wars on humanity at home and abroad.
His record as US senator and vice president reflects virtually everything disturbing about dirty politics as usual in Washington.
It includes endless examples of breaching the rule of law and betraying the public trust.
In 2002, then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren slammed him, saying:
“His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.”
Even the NYT criticized him in 2005 for “vot(ing) against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month.”
Throughout his public life, he backed predatory corporate interests and the military, industrial, security complex at the expense of peace, equity, justice and the rule of law — notions he always disdained.
He’s one of the ugliest ugly Americans in Washington — past and present, a figure to be despised, never trusted.
Along with his political record of shame, he was accused many times of acting inappropriately toward women and girls.
At least eight women accused him of inappropriate touching and/or violating their personal space — then refusing to apologize for his unacceptable behavior.
He was criticized for offensive remarks about the physical appearance of young girls when campaigning.
Former staffer in Biden’s Senate office Tara Reade accused him of inappropriate touching and more, saying the following:
He “used to put his hand on my shoulder and run his finger up my neck.”
In 1993, she accused him of pressing her up against a wall, kissing her neck, prying her legs open with his knees, and penetrating her digitally — a serious charge.
She filed a police report in Washington, accusing him of sexual assault.
She also filed a Senate complaint. Around half a dozen former Biden staffers said they were told about the assault incident.
Other women accused Biden of sexual assault and harassment.
Reade’s former neighbor in the 1990s Lynda LaCasse said Biden’s assault “happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it.”
Last May, Biden denied the accusation, claiming it “never happened.”
Around the same time, Reade called on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, adding:
“(I)f Joe Biden takes” a polygraph test, so will she.
Describing the alleged incident, Reade said:
“He’s talking to me and his hands are everywhere and everything is happening very quickly.”
“He was kissing me and he said, very low, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ ”
“He said, ‘Come on, man. I heard you liked me.’ ”
When Biden entered the presidential race last year, eight women publicly accused him of sexual harassment, including unwanted kissing, hugging and inappropriate touching.
Former Nevada state assemblywoman Lucy Flores earlier accused Biden of making her feel uncomfortable by inappropriate touching and kissing.
He’s “not just a hugger,” she said. He “very clearly was invading women’s spaces without their consent in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.”
“Does he potentially have the capacity to go beyond that? That’s the answer everyone is trying to get at.”
On inauguration day January 20, Reade commented on his ascension to power, saying the following:
Viewing the inauguration was “unspeakably hard to watch.”
“Coming forward about being sexually harassed and assaulted in 1993 when I was Joe Biden’s staffer was excruciating on so many levels.”
“Biden used his power and resources with certain media to erase me and silence me.”
“I stand in solidarity with all survivors coming up against such power.”
“I will not be silenced. Instead of talking about saving the country’s soul he should be held accountable for his actions.”
“The hard part is I believe in many policies that will move forward as I am a progressive independent, but it is unspeakably hard to watch the man who assaulted me go to the most powerful position in the land.”
“I’m sorry that I’m politically inconvenient but my perpetrator was Joe Biden. And people need to deal with it.”
Separately, Reade tweeted:
“Today is yet again another difficult day for survivors of sexual violence.”
“While I’m thankful Trump was defeated, the idea of the man who assaulted me as our president is still terribly painful.”
“I will be sharing resources for survivors today for #Inauguration2021.
“Instead of talking about saving the country’s soul he should be held accountable for his actions.”
“The hard part is I believe in many policies that will move forward as I am a progressive independent, but it is unspeakably hard to watch the man who assaulted me go to the most powerful position in the land.”
Trump once bragged about being able to do whatever he wanted with women with remarks like:
“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Draw your own conclusions about the duo.
A Final Comment
Psychology Today earlier called sexual assault “any sexual activity that occurs without consent,” adding:
It’s “a pervasive problem. In America, one in three women and one in four men experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, according to the National Institutes of Health.”
“And those numbers are likely an underestimate due to the shame and fear that prevent many survivors from reporting abuse.”
“Sex and violence are closely linked,” notably by “dominant men forcing themselves on women.”
“(S)exual assault is more about power than…sex…motivation stem(ming) from the perpetrator’s need for dominance and control.”
Children and adolescents are affected like adults.
Biden is a political predator many times over, his long record of shame well documented.
Now in the nation’s highest office.
He got there the old-fashioned way — by stealing it.
In the United States, representatives of the Muslim community have high hopes for the new head of state, Joe Biden. The reason for this was the promise to lift the ban on the Islamophobic campaign and create comfortable living conditions for American Muslims. However, experts are confident that the promises made by Joe Biden and his deputy Kamala Harris are populism.
According to the expert community, the restrictions imposed on Muslims in the United States can hardly be lifted on the basis of a single decision by the head of the White House. Islamophobia is ingrained in the life of American society, as a result of which it cannot be neutralized by political will alone. In this regard, American intolerance towards Muslims is a certain manifestation of internal aggression maintained at the mental level mainly in relation to its own citizens. Undoubtedly, it was the state institutions of the United States that over the decades have created the “ideal” conditions for the development of Islamophobia. Exercising total control over the activities and movement of representatives of the Muslim community and supporting programs to combat “radical Islam”, Washington purposefully instilled hatred of the followers of Islam in American society.
It is worth noting that, according to experts, only in the period from 2001 to 2015 in the United States, Muslim public and religious figures were much more likely to be prosecuted on terrorism charges than representatives of other confessions. Moreover, it was American Muslims who received much harsher criminal penalties, which is evidence of a biased American justice system.
Similar cases became popular under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, when only Muslims were involved in the “anti-state conspiracy” case. It is noteworthy that weapons were found on practically all Muslims accused in this case. At the same time, not a single “white” American or supporter of ultra-right ideology was involved in the case, even as a suspect.
The same Islamophobic trend is evident in the American media environment. Thus, in the specified period of time, 2001-2015, the number of anti-Muslim publications in the New York Times and Washington Post alone was 7.7 times higher than the number of publications in which representatives of other religious denominations were mentioned.
Meanwhile, this is only the public part of American life. There are many more manifestations of Islamophobia at the everyday level, when ordinary Muslims face many restrictions on a daily basis on the basis of following the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. In particular, in some American catering establishments, Muslims are prohibited from entering, and the local police can arrest a person without charge only because of his belief in Allah.
These problems are ingrained in the United States, as a result of which the new head of state, Joe Biden, is unlikely to be able to instantly change the situation.
The situation is complicated by the fact that Donald Trump still refuses to admit defeat. Based on this, he can deliberately use the factor of Islamophobia to provoke new acts of violence in order to put pressure on the Joe Biden cabinet.
It would be naive to believe that Islamophobia in the United States arose under Donald Trump. However, it was with the assistance of Donald Trump that American intolerance towards Muslims was elevated to the level of a national brand. Therefore, to eradicate this phenomenon, it will be necessary not only to change attitudes towards Muslims using political decisions. Work is also needed to overcome anti-Muslim hatred at the mental level of American society.
قد تكون إحدى حسنات دونالد ترامب وهي قليلة على أية حال كشفه لتركيبة النظام الأميركي بشكل فضائحي على المستويات كافة، وخروجه الدائم عن المعايير المتبعة في التعاطي مع كلّ ما يتعلق بالمظهر العام للنظام في أميركا.
ترامب يعود الآن في خضمّ الانتخابات الرئاسية ليكشف عن فضائح النظام الأميركي الانتخابي ما يضعه في خانة النظام الانتخابي الذي يمكن التحكم به والتلاعب بآلياته وبالتالي بنتيجته، ولطالما تفاخرت أميركا على الآخرين أنها الديمقراطية الأولى ليأتي رئيس أميركي ويكذّب هذه المزاعم.
في جديد ما كشفت عنه الانتخابات الأميركية الحالية عملية تصويت الأموات او تنخيبهم، وهذا أمر تعوّد عليه الشعب اللبناني لكن أن يكون هذا الأمر متبعاً في أميركا، فهذا الشيء الجديد ولا ندري أيّ طرف أعطى الطرف الآخر براءة الاختراع هذه، اللبناني أعطاها للأميركي أم العكس هو الصحيح، لكن في هذه النقطة تساوى لبنان وأميركا.
أمر آخر كشفته تصريحات حملة ترامب وتغريدة لترامب نفسه على «تويتر» قبل أن يتمّ حذفها من إدارة موقع التواصل الإجتماعي بحجة أنها مخادعة. وهذا الأمر هو دفع الرشى لكسب الأصوات، وهذا الأمر تمّ في بعض الولايات المتأرجحة القرار حسب إدارة حملة ترامب التي قرّرت رفع دعاوى وتقديم طعون بسبب استخدام الأموال والإعلام ونفوذ وادي سيليكون ضدّ ترامب في الانتخابات.
من ناحية الديمقراطيين ذكرت صحيفة «ديلي ميل» المقرّبة من الحزب الديمقراطي أنّ المسؤولين عن حملة ترامب الانتخابية حرّضوا ناشطي الحزب الجمهوري في ولايات عدة على الاتصال بناشطين من الحزب نفسه في ولاية بنسلفانيا للإدلاء بأصواتهم بشكل متأخر ومشكوك بشرعيته حتى يتسنّى لمحامي ترامب تقديم الطعون ورفع الدعاوى لوضع الشكوك في العملية الانتخابيّة وإلغائها معتمدين على توثيق توقيت الانتخاب المتأخر خارج المهلة الزمنية للانتخابات.
من جهة أخرى يتّهم الديمقراطيّون روسيا وإيران بإنشاء مئات الحسابات الوهميّة على «تويتر» و»فيسبوك» للتأثير على العملية الانتخابية في أميركا، وقد وضع المسؤولون الأمنيّون في جهاز «أف بي أي» الأميركي بروتوكلَي عمل مع كلّ من شركتي «تويتر» و»فيسبوك» للحدّ من التأثيرات في وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي على الانتخابات الأميركية…
في سلسلة من المقالات والأبحاث المعمّقة أشرنا إلى تعاظم الاحتمال لانهيار داخلي في الولايات المتحدة. تسارع الأحداث في شوارع المدن الأميركية والانفلات الإعلامي في الفضاء السياسي والفوضى في الحوار التصادمي بين مكوّنات المجتمع الأميركي، فكلّ ذلك ينذر بأنّ شيئاً ما سيحدث قريباً. في مقال مثير للباحثة هيلين اندروز على موقع «الأميركان كونسرفاتيف» (الأميركي المحافظ) كتبت في مطلع هذا الشهر أنّ المناخ السائد في الولايات المتحدة يشبه المناخ الروسي سنة 1917. أن يصدر كلام من هذا النوع في الولايات المتحدة أمر لافت للنظر ولكن أن يصدر من موقع محافظ فهو دليل على خطورة الوضع الداخلي.
اعتبرت الباحثة انّ عام 2020 عام التدحرج نحو مناخات 1917 ذلك رغم الإنذارات المتكرّرة منذ الستينات في القرن الماضي والتي شهدت أعمال عنف وتمرّداً من قبل الشباب. لكن تلك الإنذارات لم تترجم إلى عمل يقود إلى الثورة ما جعل النخب ترتاح أن «الثورة» لن تحدث في بلد كالولايات المتحدة. لكن ما يحدث اليوم قد يكون مختلفاً عما حدث في الستينات من حركات احتجاجية لم تؤدّ إلى التغيير المطلوب آنذاك. وتسترسل الباحثة في سرد المناخ القائم في 1917 في روسيا مع ما يحدث اليوم في الولايات المتحدة. لكن «الثورة» المقبلة قد تكون مختلفة عن الثورات في العالم التي تريد التغيير. فهي «ثورة» تريد تثبيت الأمر الواقع وتقوم بحركة مناهضة لأيّ تغيير!
فحركة المقاومة في الولايات المتحدة (نعم هناك حركة اسمها المقاومة تهدف إلى خلع الرئيس الأميركي) تقول بوضوح إنها لن تقبل إعادة انتخاب ترامب في 2020 كما رفضتها في 2016. فالرئيس الأميركي كان ظاهرة تتمرّد على التوازنات القائمة وبالتالي حاولت تلك «المقاومة» الإطاحة بترامب عبر فضيحة «روسيا غيت» أيّ التدخل الروسي المزعوم في الانتخابات سنة 2016. ويعتبر الكاتب والأستاذ الجامعي مايكل ريكتنوالد أنّ الجبهة العريضة المعادية لترامب والتي تسعى الإطاحة به بأيّ وسيلة ممكنة مؤلّفة من ماكينة الحزب الديمقراطي، الديمقراطيين الأوفياء، المعادين لترامب من داخل الحزب الجمهوري تحت يافطة «أبداً لا لترامب» منهم من المحافظين الجدد كـ وليام كريستول ودوغلاس فيث، والدولة العميقة المؤلّفة من الجهاز البيروقراطي والمؤسسات الأمنية والمجمع العسكري الصناعي والمالي، ثم مجمل الإعلام الشركاتي المهيمن باستثناء بعض الجزر الصغيرة المستقلّة، وحركة «انتيفا»، وحركة «بي أل أم» (حياة السود مهمّة) المموّلة من الشركات الكبرى المالية والمعلوماتية على حدّ سواء. هذا التحالف يعيش وفقاً للكاتب في عالم موازي بعيداً عن هموم المواطنين الأميركيين العاديين ولا يريد التغيير. الاحتجاج ضدّ العنصرية «مقبول» من قبل الدولة العميقة طالما لا يمسّ بالمعادلات الاقتصادية والمالية القائمة.
وما يزيد من قلق المراقبين هو تباشير عن إمكانية تدخّل القوّات المسلّحة الأميركية حلبة الصراع القائم لصالح القوى المناهضة لترامب ما يزيد في وتيرة البارانويا في صفوف الجبهة الأخرى. ويعتبر الباحث أنّ تصريحات وزير الدفاع السابق في إدارة ترامب جون ماتيس حول ضرورة اقتلاع كلّ من لا يحترم الدستور تحذيراً لترامب. كما أنّ رئيس هيئة الأركان المشتركة انتقد الرئيس عندما أراد الأخير زجّ الجيش في قمع المظاهرات الاحتجاجية ضدّ العنصرية. ويُضاف إلى ذلك ضلوع مدير مكتب التحقيق الاتحادي السابق جيمس كومي في تبنّيه لملفّ مزوّر من أحد العاملين في وكالة الاستخبارات حول تورّط الرئيس الأميركي مع روسيا خلال الحملة فيضيف إلى مصداقية التهم التي يوجّهها ترامب وأنصاره إلى تواطؤ الأجهزة الأمنية في محاولات الإطاحة به. فالإيحاء بأنّ القوّات المسلّحة ومختلف الأجهزة الأمنية تنظر بعين الرضى لمشاريع الإطاحة بترامب جعلت المرشّحة السابقة هيلاري كلنتون تحثّ جوزيف بايدن على عدم القبول بالهزيمة فيما لو فاز ترامب في تشرين الثاني.
في المقابل يعمل أنصار ترامب، مع أنهم لا يحظون بتأييد الإعلام المهيمن، على نبش كلّ الفضائح التي تعود إلى المرشح بايدن ونجله هنتر. الاعلام المهيمن إما يتجاهل عمداً الاتهامات الموجّهة ضدّ فساد جوزيف بايدن ونجله أو يستحفّ بمصداقيتها. ونذكر أيضاً تصريحات وزير الخارجية مايك بومبيو حول عزمه لنشر الرسائل السرّية لهيلاري كلينتون تثبت تورّطها في فضائح عديدة وذلك خلال الأيام المقبلة قبل موعد الانتخابات. كما أنّ الحركات اليمينية المتطرّفة والعنصرية البيضاء تساهم في استمرار موجة الكراهية السائدة في البلاد. فالحقد والكراهية بين الفريقين المتنافسين يأخذ أبعاد خطرة للغاية حيث إمكانية التفاهم أصبحت شبه معدومة وأنّ الفصل قد يكون في الشارع.
أما الباحث الأميركي الذي يكتب تحت اسم جون كوينسي آدامز، وهو اسم مستعار للرئيس السادس للولايات المتحدة وهو ابن جون آدامز الرئيس الثاني وأحد مؤسّسي الدولة الأميركية، فيعتبر أنّ الولايات المتحدة «انتهت» كما كتب في مقال في موقع «استراتيجيك أند كلتشر فونداشين» (موقع مؤسسة الاسترتيجيا والثقافة) وذلك في 25 أيلول/ سبتمبر 2020. ويقيم مقارنة بين واقع الحال في الولايات المتحدة وواقع الحال في روسيا قيل عشرين سنة.
النقطة الأولى تعتبر أنّ من يتحكّم بالقرار في الولايات المتحدة الآن هي الاوليغارشية المالية التي لم تساهم في بناء الجسور والطرقات والمرافق العامة ومجمل البنى التحتية والقاعدة الصناعية والزراعية. بل هي مجموعة من مضاربين ماليين في معظمهم. في المقابل فإنّ الاوليغارشية التي لم تبن أيضاً أيّ شيء في روسيا بل استفادت من التفكك والفساد لبناء ثروات طائلة وتحكّمت بروسيا بعد تفكيك الاتحاد السوفياتي تضاءل نفوذها بشكل ملحوظ مع صعود الرئيس بوتين.
النقطة الثانية هي أنّ الثقة في الدولة تتزايد يوماً بعد يوم في روسيا بينما تتراجع بشكل سريع في الولايات المتحدة. معظم الروس يعتبرون السياسيين من اللصوص والنصّابين إلخ… في المقابل تشير استطلاعات الرأي العام في الولايات المتحدة ازدياد حالة القرف من السياسيين ومن الحكومة والدولة. فثقة الأميركيين بالدولة تراجعت بسبب عدم الشفافية (69 بالمائة) كما أنّ العلاقات والخطاب السياسي فقد الحدّ الأدنى من اللباقة والتهذيب (72 يالمائة).
النقطة الثالثة هي تراجع الكفاءة والقدرة العسكرية الأميركية بينما تتصاعد بشكل ملحوظ في روسيا. أشرنا في مقالات سابقة إلى عدم الجهوزية العسكرية الأميركية وذلك على لسان رئيس هيئة الأركان المشتركة وتقارير مراكز الأبحاث. كما أنّ الإخفاقات في الميدان ظهرت للجميع، سابقاً في فيتنام، وحالياً في أفغانستان والعراق. كما أنّ نوعية التسليح الروسي أفضل وأقلّ كلفة من التسليح الأميركي وخاصة في السلاح الكاسر للتوازن.
النقطة الرابعة هي أنّ الولايات تنفق الكثير على التسليح ومعظمه يذهب هدراً بينما روسيا أكثر ترشيداً ورشاقة في نفقاتها العسكرية. فروسيا تحرص على عدم تحويل وارداتها إلى التسلّح مستفيدة من تجربة الماضي في سباق التسلّح الذي أدّى إلى انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي. التركيز هو على السلاح النوعي والأقلّ كلفة. لذلك نرى تزايد في الإنفاق العسكري الأميركي وتراجع في الإنفاق العسكري الروسي.
النقطة الخامسة هي أنّ كلّ من روسيا والولايات المتحدة تشهد تراجعاً ملحوظاً في معدّلات الولادة. فخلال العقد الماضي تراجع عدد السكان في روسيا بنسبة مليون بسبب انخفاض معدّلات الولادة وتزايد معدّلات الوفيات بسبب الكحول. وإذا استمرّت الحال فإنّ روسيا قد تخسر ثلث عدد سكّانها الـ 146 مليون في عام 2050. في المقابل فالولايات المتحدة تواجه تراجعاً في الولادة وتزايداً في الوفيات بسبب المخدّرات والإقبال على الانتحار. لكن الإحصاءات الأخيرة تشير إلى أنه تمّ تثبيت معدّلات الولادة في روسيا بينما عدد السكان في الولايات المتحدة يتراجع. وهنا تكمن المشكلة لأنّ الحلّ في تثبيت عدد السكّان لن يأتي إلاّ عبر الهجرة. والهجرة يعني تغييراً كبيراً في نسبة المكوّنات العرقية في الولايات المتحدة وما يرافق ذلك من تغيير في الثقافة والقيم والتي تصطدم مع الموجة العنصرية المتفشية في الولايات المتحدة.
كلّ ذلك يدّل على أنّ الوضع في روسيا أكثر استقرار مما هو عليه في الولايات المتحدة وأنّ الأخيرة في طريقها إلى الانهيار الداخلي إنْ لم تصحُ النخب على الواقع وتقوم بالإجراءات الجذرية اللازمة. لكن ما نشهده في هذه الأيام هو تأجيج متزايد نحو مواجهة في الداخل الأميركي خارج إطار المؤسسات بسبب موقف «المقاومة» للتغيير وموقف من يريد التغيير وإنْ لم تكن ملامح التغيير المطلوب واضحة. وهذا ما يزيد خطورة في الوضع لأنّ غياب هدف مشترك ينذر بالتفتّت والانشقاق.
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*كاتب وباحث اقتصادي سياسي والأمين العام السابق للمؤتمر القومي العربي
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” – Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998
For decades, Andre Vltchek, an old-school journalist and artist (but a young man) who traveled the world in search of truth and who always stood up straight, tried to revolve the world and encourage people to revolt against injustice. In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness and indefatigable courage. He told it straight. This irritated certain people and some pseudo-left publications, who sensed in him a no bullshit fierceness and nose for hypocrisy that frightened them, so they stopped publishing his writing. He went where so many others feared to tread, and he talked to people in places that were often the victims of Western imperialistic violence. He defended the defenseless and encouraged their defense.
Now he is dead. He died in the back seat of a chauffeur driven rental car on an overnight drive to Istanbul, Turkey. He was sleeping, and when his wife attempted to wake him upon arrival at their hotel, she couldn’t. He was 57-years-old.
Let him sleep in peace, but let his words ring out, his passionate cries for justice and peace in a world of violent predators.
Those who knew him and his work feel a great, great loss. His friend and colleague Peter Koenig wrote this touching goodbye.
As Koenig says, Vltchek was always defending those around the world who are considered disposable non-people, the Others, the non- whites, victims of Western wars, both military and economic, in places such as West Papua, Iraq, Syria, Africa, etc. He had a chip on his shoulder, a well justified chip, against the one-sided Western media and its elites that were always lecturing the rest of the world about their realities.
He was recently in the United States, and here is what he wrote:
But notice one thing: it is them, telling us, again, telling the world what it is and what it is not! You would never hear such statements in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. There, people know perfectly well what it really is all about, whether it is about race or not!
I have just spent two weeks in the United States, analyzing the profound crises of U.S. society. I visited Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. I spoke to many people in all those places. What I witnessed was confusion and total ignorance about the rest of the world. The United States, a country which has been brutalizing our Planet for decades, is absolutely unable to see itself in the context of the entire world. People, including those from the media, are outrageously ignorant and provincial.
And they are selfish.
I asked many times: “Do black lives matter all over the world? Do they matter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and do they matter in West Papua?” I swear, I received no coherent answer.
Somebody has to tell them… Somebody has to force them to open their eyes.
A few years ago, I was invited to Southern California to show my documentary work from Africa (my feature documentary film Rwanda Gambit, about West-triggered genocides in both Rwanda and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo), where millions of black people are dying, in order for the vast majority of the U.S. whites to live in piggish opulence.
But before I was allowed to present, I was warned: ‘Remember, people here are sensitive. Do not show too much of brutal reality, as it could disturb them.’
Hearing that, I almost left the event. Only my respect for the organizer made me stay.
Now I am convinced: it is time to force them to watch; to see rivers of blood, which their laziness, selfishness, and greed have triggered. It is time to force them to hear shouts of the agony of the others.
But as everyone knows, it is nearly impossible to force people to open their eyes and ears when they are dead set against doing so. Andre tried so hard to do that, and his frustration grew apace with those efforts that seemed to fall on deaf ears.
He was a relentless fighter, but he was a lover, too. His love for the people and cultures of the world was profound. Like Albert Camus, he tried to serve both beauty and suffering, the noblest of vocations. A lover of literature and culture, the best art and beauty ever produced, he was appalled at the way so many in the West had fallen into the pit of ignorance, illiteracy, and the grip of propaganda so tight that “what is missing is life. Euphoria, warmth, poetry and yes – love – are all in extremely short supply there.”
He sensed, and said it, that nihilism rules in the United States beneath the compulsive consumerism and the denial of the violence that the U.S. inflicts on people across the world. It was selfishness run amok. Me me me. It was, he felt, soul death, the opposite of all the ostensible religiousness that is a cover story for despair. He wrote:
It has to be stopped. I say it because I do love this life, the life, which still exists outside the Western realm; I’m intoxicated with it, obsessed with it. I live it to the fullest, with great delight, enjoying every moment of it.
Poetry, music, great literature, these he loved as he fought on the barricades for peace.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 