HOW THE LEFT BECAME CHEERLEADERS FOR US IMPERIALISM

OCTOBER 27TH, 2022

JONATHAN COOK

One of the biggest problems for the left, as it confronts what seems like humanity’s ever-more precarious relationship with the planet – from the climate emergency to a potential nuclear exchange – is that siren voices keep luring it towards the rocks of political confusion and self-harm.

And one of the loudest sirens on the British left is the environmental activist George Monbiot.

Monbiot has carved out for himself a figurehead role on the mainstream British left because he is the only big-picture thinker allowed a regular platform in the establishment media: in his case, the liberal Guardian newspaper. It is a spot he covets and one that seems to have come with a big price tag: he is allowed to criticize the corporate elite’s capture of British domestic politics – he occasionally concedes that our political life has been stripped of all democratic content – but only, it seems, because he has become ever less willing to extend that same critique to British foreign policy.

The U.K. is a "democracy in name only," says The Guardian's @GeorgeMonbiot on the ongoing political crises in Britain. pic.twitter.com/8Zi3I0Xfj3

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) October 21, 2022

As a result, Monbiot holds as a cherished piety what should be two entirely inconsistent positions: that British and Western elites are pillaging the planet for corporate gain, immune to the catastrophe they are wreaking on the environment and oblivious to the lives they are destroying at home and abroad; and that these same elites are fighting good, humanitarian wars to protect the interests of poor and oppressed peoples overseas, from Syria and Libya to Ukraine, peoples who coincidentally just happen to live in areas of geostrategic significance.

Because of the vice-like corporate hold on Britain’s political priorities, Monbiot avers, nothing the corporate media tells us should be believed – except when those priorities relate to protecting people facing down ruthless foreign dictators, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Then the media should be believed absolutely.

Monbiot’s embrace of the narratives justifying Washington’s “humanitarian” interventions abroad has been incremental. Back in the late 1990s, while generally supporting the aims of NATO’s war on the former Yugoslavia, he called out its bombing of Serbia as a “dirty war”, highlighting the ecological and economic destruction it entailed. He would also sound the alarm – if ambivalently – over the Iraq war in 2003, and later become a leading proponent of jailing former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair as a war criminal for his involvement.

But as the ripples from the Iraq war spread to other parts of the Middle East and beyond, often in complicated ways, Monbiot took the good will he had earned among the anti-imperialist left and weaponized it to Washington’s advantage.

By 2007, he was swallowing wholesale the evidence-free narrative crafted in Washington and Tel Aviv that Iran was trying to acquire a nuclear bomb and needed to be stopped. In 2011, he was a reluctant supporter of the West’s campaign to violently depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, turning the country into a failed state of slave markets.

In 2017, he legitimized President Trump’s grounds for bombing Syria and minimized the significance of those air strikes, which were a gross violation of international law. Washington’s rationalizations for the attack – based on a claim that President Assad had gassed his own people – started to unravel when whistleblowers from the United Nations’ chemical weapons inspections agency, the OPCW, came forward. They revealed that U.S. intimidation of the OPCW had led to the inspectors’ findings being distorted for political reasons: to put Assad in the frame rather than the more likely culprits of jihadists, who hoped a false-flag gas attack would pressure the West into removing the Syrian leader on their behalf.

Monbiot has staunchly refused to address the testimony of these OPCW whistleblowers, while at the same time implicitly maligning them as being responsible for feeding “conspiracy theories”.

In the case of the Ukraine war, Monbiot has insisted on adherence to the NATO narrative, decrying any dissent as “Westplaining”. Throughout this shift ever more firmly into the imperial NATO camp, Monbiot has besmirched prominent anti-war leftists, from the famed linguist Noam Chomsky to the journalist John Pilger, as “genocide deniers and belittlers”.

A Lemming Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the Terminal Collapse of the Anti-War Left

FIRST SHOCKWAVES

If this characterization of his position sounds unfair, watch this short video he recently made for Double Down News. According to Monbiot, the left’s slogan is a simple one: “Whatever the situation around the world is, you side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed. That is the fundamental guiding principle of justice, and that is the principle we on the left should stick with, regardless of the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed.”

We on the Western left stand with the people of Ukraine against Putin's imperial aggression. Just as we must stand against every variety of imperialism.pic.twitter.com/j31UiPNBKG

— George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) October 13, 2022

As an abstract principle, this one is sound enough. But no one characterizing themselves as speaking for the anti-imperialist left should be using a simple rule of thumb to analyze and dictate foreign policy positions in the highly interconnected, complex and duplicitous world we currently inhabit.

As Monbiot knows only too well, we live in a world – one pillaged by a colonial West to generate unprecedented, short-term economic growth for some, and mire others in permanent poverty – where global resources are rapidly being exhausted, beginning the gradual erosion of Western privilege.

We live in a world where intelligence agencies have developed new technologies to spy on populations on an unprecedented scale, to meddle in other states’ politics, and to subject their own populations to ever more sophisticated propaganda narratives to conceal realities that might undermine their credibility or legitimacy.

We live in a world where transnational corporations – dependent for their success on continued resource plunder – effectively own leading politicians, even governments, through political funding, through control of the think tanks that develop policy proposals, and through their ownership of the mass media. Here is a recent article by Monbiot explaining just that.

We live in a world where those same corporations are deeply entwined with state institutions in the very war and security industries that, first, sustain and rationalize the plunder and then “protect” our borders from any backlash from those whose resources are being plundered.

And we live in a world where the first shockwaves of climate collapse, combined with these resource wars, are fomenting mass migrations – and an ever greater urgency in Western states to turn themselves into fortresses to defend against a feared stampede.

ZEALOT FOR WAR

Monbiot knows this world only too well because he writes about it in such detail. He has won the hearts of many on the left because he describes so eloquently the capture of domestic politics by a shadowy cabal of Western corporations, politicians and media moguls. But he then concludes that this same psychopathic, planet-destroying cabal can be trusted when it explains – via its reliable mouthpieces in the right-wing press, the BBC, and his own Guardian newspaper – what it is doing in Syria, Libya or Ukraine.

And worse, Monbiot lashes out at anyone who dissents, calling them apologists for dictators, or war crimes. And he brings many on the left with him, helping to divide and weaken the anti-war movement.

Monbiot has never written a column on the worst assault on press freedom in a generation: the political persecution of Julian Assange. Soil erosion, he said, took precedence. Now he's prioritised a witchhunt of left heretics on Ukraine over Assange's freedom. He's an utter fraud pic.twitter.com/OtJ7pTE6gx

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 2, 2022

One might have assumed Monbiot would have entertained a little more doubt in his foreign policy prescriptions over the past decade, if only because they have so squarely chimed with the United States and NATO narratives amplified by the establishment media. But not a bit of it. He is a zealot for the West’s wars when they can be presented either as humanitarian or as battling Russian imperialism. (For examples, see here, here, and here.)

The problem with Monbiot, as it is with much of the British left, is that he treats the various modern, great-power imperialisms – American, Russian and Chinese – as though they operate in parallel to each other rather than, as they do, constantly intersect and conflict.

To see the world as one in which the U.S. “does imperialism” in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Russia separately “does imperialism” in Syria and Ukraine may be satisfying to anyone with a desperate need to appear even-handed. But it does nothing to advance our understanding of world events.

The interests of great powers inevitably clash. They are fighting over the same finite resources to grow their economies; they are competing over the same key states to turn them into allies; they are waging conflicting narrative battles over the same events. And they are trying – always trying – to diminish or subvert their rivals.

To claim that the war in Ukraine somehow stands outside these great-power intrigues – and that the only justified response is a simple one of cheerleading the oppressed and reviling the oppressor, as Monbiot requires – is beyond preposterous.

ECONOMIES DECIMATED

To imagine that the U.K. and wider West are somehow on Ukraine’s side, are sending untold billions in arms even as recession bites, are opposed even to testing the seriousness of Russian offers of peace talks, and are blocking Russian oil even though the results are decimating European economies – and all because it is the right thing to do, or because Putin is a madman bent on world conquest – is to be entirely detached from joined-up thinking.

It is entirely possible, if we engage our critical faculties, to consider far more complex scenarios for which there are no good guys and no easy solutions.

It might – just might – be that Russia is both sinner in Ukraine and sinned against. Or that Ukrainian civilians are victims both of Russian militarism and of more covert U.S. and NATO intrigues. Or that in a country like Ukraine, where a civil war has been raging for at least eight years between far-right (some of them exterminationist) Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities, we would be better jettisoning our narrative premises of a single “Ukraine” or a single Ukrainian will. This kind of simple-mindedness may be obscuring far more than it illuminates.

Pointing this out does not make one a Putin apologist. It simply recognizes the lessons of history: that world events are rarely explicable through one narrative alone; that states have different, conflicting interests and that understanding the nature of those conflicts is the key to resolving them; and that what great powers say they are doing isn’t necessarily what they are actually doing.

And further, that elites – whether Russian, Ukrainian, European or American – usually have their own class-serving set of interests that have little to do with the ordinary populations they supposedly represent.

In such circumstances, Monbiot’s dictum that we must “side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed” starts to sound like nothing more than unhelpful sloganeering. It makes a complex situation that needs complex thinking and sophisticated problem-solving harder to understand and all but impossible to resolve.

Throw nuclear weapons into the mix, and Monbiot the environmentalist is playing games not only with the lives of Ukrainians, but the destruction of conditions for most life on Earth.

COVERT MEDDLING

Western solipsism of the kind indulged by Monbiot ignores Russian concerns or, worse, subsumes them into a fanciful narrative that a Russian army that is struggling to subjugate Ukraine (assuming that is actually what it is trying to do) intends next to rampage across the rest of Europe.

In truth, Russia has good reasons not only to take a special interest in what happens in neighboring Ukraine but to see events there as posing a potentially existential threat to it.

Historically, the lands that today we call Ukraine have been the gateway through which invading armies have attacked Russia. Long efforts by Washington, through NATO, to recruit Ukraine into its military fold were never likely to be viewed dispassionately in Moscow.

That was all the more so because Washington has been exploiting Russian vulnerabilities – economic and military – since the collapse of its empire, the Soviet Union, in 1991. The U.S. has done so both by converting former Soviet states into a massively enlarged, unified bloc of NATO members on Russia’s doorstep and by brashly excluding Russia from European security arrangements.

The U.S. moves looked overtly aggressive to Moscow, whether that was the way they were intended or not.

But Russia had good grounds to interpret these actions as hostile: because Washington has been not-so-covertly meddling in Ukraine over the past decade. That included its concealed role in fomenting protests in 2014 that overthrew an elected government in Kyiv sympathetic to Moscow, and its clandestine military role afterward, in training the Ukrainian army under President Obama and arming it under President Trump, which readied Ukraine for a coming war with Moscow that Washington appeared to be doing everything in its power to make happen.

Then there was the problem of the Crimean Peninsula, hosting Moscow’s only warm-water naval port and viewed as critically important to Russia’s defenses. It had been Russian territory until the 1950s when the then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine, at a time when national borders had been made largely redundant within the Soviet empire. The gift was supposed to symbolize the unbreakable bond between Russia and Ukraine. Khrushchev presumably never imagined that Ukraine might one day seek to become a forward base for a NATO openly hostile to Russia.

And of course, Ukraine is not simply a gateway for invaders; it is also Russia’s natural corridor into Europe. It is through Ukraine that Moscow has traditionally exported goods and its energy resources to the rest of Europe. Russia’s opening of the Nord Stream gas pipelines direct to Germany through the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine, was a clear signal that Moscow saw a Kyiv under Washington’s spell as a threat to its vital energy interests.

Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?

Notably, those same Nord Stream pipelines were blown up last month after a long series of threats from Washington officials, from President Biden down, that the U.S. would find a way to end Russian gas supplies to Germany.

Russia has been excluded by Germany, Sweden, and Denmark – all U.S. allies – from participation in the investigation into those explosions on its energy infrastructure. Even more suspiciously, Sweden is citing “national security” (code for avoiding embarrassing a key ally?) as grounds for refusing to publish findings from the investigations.

LETHAL POWER

So where does all this leave Monbiot’s rule: “Whatever the situation around the world is, you side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed”?

Not only does his axiom fail to acknowledge the complex nature of global conflicts, especially between great powers, in which defining who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed may be no simple matter, but, worse, it disfigures our understanding of international power politics.

Russia and China may be great powers, but they are not – at least, not yet – close to being equal to the US super-power.

The US has 800 military bases around the world.

The rest of the world has 30 outside of its own borders. pic.twitter.com/edhxKXRMp8

— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 5, 2018

Neither can match the many hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world – more than 800 of them. The U.S. outspends both of its rivals many times over on its annual military budget. That means Washington can project lethal power around the globe on a scale unmatched by either Russia or China. The only deterrence either has against the military might of the U.S. is a last-resort nuclear arsenal.

Overwhelming U.S. military supremacy means that, unlike China or Russia, Washington does not need to win over allies with carrots. It can simply threaten, bully or bludgeon – directly or through proxies – any state that refuses to submit to its dictates. That way, it has gained control over most of the planet’s key resources, especially over its fossil fuels.

Similarly, the U.S. enjoys the manifold benefits of having the world’s principal reserve currency, pegging prices – most importantly energy prices – to the dollar. That does not just help reduce the costs of international trade for the U.S. and allow it to borrow money cheaply. It also makes other states and their currencies dependent on the stability of the dollar, as the U.K. has just found out when the value of the pound plunged against the dollar, threatening to decimate the business sector.

But there are other advantages for the U.S. in dominating global trade and currency markets. Washington is well positioned to impose economic sanctions to isolate and immiserate states that oppose it, as it is doing to Afghanistan and Iran. And its control of the world’s main financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, means they act as little more than enforcers of Washington’s foreign policy priorities before agreeing to lend money.

SHADOW CAST

Both militarily and economically, the United States molds the world we live in. For those in the West, its grip on our material well-being and on our ideological horizons is almost complete. But the American shadow extends much further. All states, including Russia and China, operate within the framework of power relations, global institutions, state interests, and access to resources shaped by the U.S.

What distinguishes the status of Russia and China as great powers from the status of the U.S. as a solitary superpower is the fact that their role on the international stage is necessarily more reactive and defensive. Neither can afford to antagonize the American behemoth unnecessarily. They must protect their interests, rather than project them as Washington does.

That means neither is likely to start invading neighbors that wish to ally with the U.S. unless they feel existentially important state interests are being threatened by such an alliance. That is why Western narratives claiming to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to take as their starting points two improbable assumptions: that President Putin is solely responsible for launching the Ukraine war, over the heads of the Russian military; and that Putin himself is mad, evil or a megalomaniac.

To make such a case – the premise of all Western coverage of events in Ukraine – is already to concede that the only rational explanation for Russia invading Ukraine would be its perception that vital Russian interests were at stake – interests so vital that Moscow was prepared to defend them even if it meant incurring the wrath of the mighty American empire.

Instead, Monbiot and much of the left are throwing in their hand with the racist prescriptions of the apologists of U.S. empire: that Washington’s great-power rivals act in ways decried by the U.S. solely because they are irrational and evil.

This is a power-politics analysis of the playground. And yet it passes for neutral reporting and informed commentary in all establishment Western media. Catastrophically, Monbiot has played a crucial part in seeding these destructive ideas – ones that can only lead to intensified conflict and undermine peacemaking – into the anti-war movement.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Jonathan Cook is a MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

Modern political history makes no sense if Napoleon is not a leftist revolutionary

April 02, 2022

Source

By Ramin Mazaheri

“The peasant was a Bonapartist because the Great Revolution, with all its benefits to him, was, in his eyes, personified in Napoleon.” – Karl Marx

(This is the third chapter in a new book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. Please click here for the article which announces this book and explains its goals.)

To be against Napoleon Bonaparte in the 19th century was to totally reject grassroots, democratic French opinion, and thus to be against the French Revolution itself. It was to cede the view of Napoleon Bonaparte to his enemies: the English snob, an in-bred Austrian king, a colluding and traitorous Italian noble, a Hungarian aristocrat, etc.

Modern Western political history simply makes no sense – it loses the thread of expanding power away from the absolute ruler – if we do not take the view that Napoleon Bonaparte was a leftist, as his citizen contemporaries did. Making Napoleon a demon of bloodlust and ambition, just another fascistic military man, a secret reactionary, etc. – all is designed to obscure the importance of 1789 and to reverse it.

The willing desire to lose the thread of progressive history was especially evident in the awful reporting surrounding the 200th anniversary of his death, in 2021. The coverage in France was surprising sparse and can be summed up with three words: “tyrant” and “controversial legacy”. A fake-leftist, and thus totally deluded, view was routinely proffered, typified by state media France24’s article: “Napoleon: Military genius or sexist, slaving autocrat?”

The official anti-Napoleon smokescreen was personified by President Emmanuel Macron’s speech on the bicentenary, which ended with: “I have no intention to say if Napoleon realised or instead betrayed revolutionary values. I will of course steer clear of such territory.” Of course he will steer clear – Western Liberal Democrats always do, because they are the ones who work to ensure that the revolutionary values of 1789 are never realised.

Here is your simplest retort to those who accuse “tyrant”: Napoleon was voted First Consul for life and then emperor by millions of people, and the “voted” part is what made it these appointments spectacular political advances for its era. The other monarchs of this era were merely more unelected dictators. Secondly, his constitutions were also ratified by many millions – another spectacular leftist advance. These things simply cannot be dismissed because it would be more than a century before they would be emulated in most of Europe. The number of referendums on monarchy in global history only total a few dozen, and nearly all were after 1950.

Simply ask if the king of Saudi Arabia, Morocco or the behind-the-scenes monarchs of Europe would ever put themselves to a public vote? When it comes to the schism between the Muslim and Western worlds perhaps the single largest problem is that the latter totally forgets the violent threat, the crude insult, the perpetual crime which is hereditary monarchy. Because the West forgets this they also fatally misunderstand their own European history since 1789, and they fail to see Napoleon Bonaparte as a leftist hero.

Making Napoleon Bonaparte worse than his absolute monarch peers is a preposterous revision of history and totally excludes the political view of the European peasant and working class. Ask a subject who never voted for his monarch: There is no “controversial legacy”.

Yellow Vest: “We are here to protest against the abusive government and this kingship-presidency of Emmanuel Macron. The Yellow Vests are here to promote a true vision of democracy and to redistribute our nation’s wealth. Every election there is more and more abstention because people don’t believe in mainstream politics anymore.”

(Note: this book intersperses over 100 quotations taken from actual, marching Yellow Vests which were originally published in news reports on PressTV.)

What an objective view reveals is this: Revolutionary France saw not just one but seven “Coalition Wars” to restore monarchy, privilege, feudalism, torture, inequality, racism and the oppression of an aristocratic elite. From 1792-1815 Europe’s elite refused to make peace with the socio-political advances of the French Revolution, which the French people democratically chose again and again and again. England was the only nation which participated in every war, and it repeatedly paid off other nations to join them.

The simplest retort to those who call the French Revolution “imperialist” is this: The French Revolutionary Empire at its greatest height – in 1808 – was the result of defensive wars which it won. All the Empire’s territory was gained as punishment for aggressive wars against France or lost by rebelling populaces choosing to side with France, with the sole exception of Portugal. All seven Coalition Wars were attacks on France, all to prevent democracy from spreading across autocratic Europe.

The “Napoleonic Wars” have absolutely no reason to be set off from the more accurate “European Wars Against the French Revolution” unless that reason is obfuscation. This 23-year period must be looked at as a whole, because it wouldn’t have mattered if it was Napoleon in charge or not as long as the ideals of the French Revolution were being employed – the Revolution would have always been aggressed. Like Iran, Cuba and the USSR know, 23 years of military invention by royalists or Western Liberal Democrats to stifle progressive, anti-elite political systems is simply de rigeur.

This chapter is not a whitewashing of Napoleon Bonaparte, but a refusal to say that his entire revolutionary career from 1789 to 1815 should be judged on the basis of the last few years. Napoleon’s primary leftist and anti-revolutionary failure was his development of dynastic intentions. However, we are not taking about this turn to personal gain until 1810, when he married Marie-Louise, a princess of the Austrian Hapsburgs, the corrupt and wasteful absolute monarch ruler of most of the continent. In Napoleon: The Myth of the Savior, Jean Tulard, perhaps the pre-eminent French historian of this era (and not a pro-Napoleon one in my estimation) wrote, “On St. Helena, Napoleon, ‘brutally awakened from his dream of monarchic legitimacy’ confided that he should have married a French woman and, above all, not a princess. He saw clearly, but too late.” Napoleon’s error was in forgetting that he already enjoyed more leftist legitimacy than any monarch ever – he was the first to be voted in. The counter-revolutionary monarchs of everywhere else would never accept that because the French Revolution was – above all – against unsanctioned autocracy. Similarly, putting his brothers in charge of countries which willingly joined France was another leftist error in line with dynastic intentions, but this wasn’t really unpopular until the imposition of Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain, who replaced the feudal Bourbons, in 1808. Napoleon himself said that one of his greatest mistakes was reintroducing the ranks of the nobility, also in 1808. The three criticisms here are all related – the restoration of elite privilege and hereditary oligarchy – but we would be inaccurate and unfair to not emphasise that this trend occurred two decades into Napoleon’s spectacularly successful revolutionary career!

Was Napoleon’s vision of the French Revolution that of the left of the Revolution, epitomised by Robespierre and the Jacobins? No, but calling a lifelong revolutionary soldier like Napoleon Bonaparte a “non-revolutionary” because he was not completely on the left side of the revolutionary spectrum is to absurdly say there is no “revolutionary political spectrum”. It is to say that the “revolutionary political spectrum” is the same as the non-revolutionary, typical “political spectrum”, in a total falsehood. It is to undemocratically excise the revolutionary viewpoints of his millions of comrades, and also of the democratic majority of his time. What is certain is that it is to reveal essentially no first-hand experience with any real revolution at all, as such a view of revolution is a fool’s fairy tale of pure idealism.

By distorting Napoleon – by saying that Elvis was always “fat Elvis” and never the king of rock and roll who shook the world – today’s 1% can keep 1789 totally dead. Napoleon is the key to keeping 1789 alive and continuing to implement its most progressive, leftist ideals.

It is simply astounding that the left doesn’t find so much to embrace in Napoleon Bonaparte. As much as I would like to write 10,000 words about Napoleon’s career in order to give a modern leftist appraisal, I simply do not want to alienate readers (and translators, LOL). I promise that I could. What I list before the conclusion section is only the absolutely critical facts of his political career which demonstrate his leftism.

The 1790s: Napoleon’s leftism was vetted over and over by the revolution

Prior to the Revolution Napoleon was born a minor noble in Corsica, putting him in the top 2% of France. However, being a minor noble in poor Corsica was to have title and little property – it’s not Burgundy. When half of France’s nobles exiled themselves over the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen Napoleon was already in the 1%. Napoleon Bonaparte – like Mao, Castro and others – was another leftist hero who defied the dominant view of his elite class.

Napoleon grew up in the aftermath of the repression of Corsica’s independence movement. The incredibly progressive Corsican Republic (1755-69) included a liberal constitution, the first implementation of female suffrage and was the first-ever practical application of the modern political ideas of people like Voltaire and Rousseau. France took control of the island, and they were a big improvement from the previous landlord, Genoa. When the French Revolution began Napoleon saw it as capable of bringing even more progress to Corsica. Thus Napoleon was one of the very first of many “foreigners” (he was born shortly after France took control of the island, and thus was truly French) to seek domination not by France but by the ideals of the French Revolution.

As the 1790s went by Napoleon was obviously vetted over and over by the Revolution. In 1793, Napoleon was friendly with none other than Augustin Robespierre, Maximilien “The Irreproachable” Robespierre’s brother, who surely would have sniffed out someone not committed to the ideals of 1789. When the brothers were executed in 1794, marking the end of the leftist Jacobin era and the start of the Directorate era (1794-99), the Directorate tried to get him to quit by downgrading him to the infantry.

Lucky for them Napoleon refused to leave: in Paris on October 5, 1795, he would save the Revolution from a major royalist revolt using what was the undoubted foundation of his military genius – his knowledge of new artillery technology.

He became a national hero, and thus the Directorate spied on him to check for dangerous traits. Their spying general wrote back to the Directorate: “It is a mistake to think he is a party man. He belongs neither to the royalists, who slander him, nor to the anarchists, whom he dislikes. He has only one guide – the Constitution.” Facts: Robespierre was anything but an anarchist, and being a constitutionalist in Europe in 1796 made one a revolutionary. Failure to accept this will create misperceptions which will extend to misunderstandings of our present day.

Confidence renewed, the Directorate gave Napoleon command of the Army of the Alps. He started by immediately court-martialling two of his soldiers for shouting “long live the king”.

Of course the Italians and others embraced the revolution being offered by France’s peasant army! In liberated lands we find the same actions of the French Revolutionaries: feudal dues and tithes abolished, Jews not forced to wear the star of David and Muslims no longer second-class citizens, the first uncensored newspapers allowed to open, slavery abolished, the first constitutions legalised. Keep all that in mind the next time you read of how Napoleon “enslaved Europe” – such total reversals of reality are only used for the truly great leftist leaders. It was so popular ex-Papal states petitioned to join the new Cisalpine Republic. “In annexed countries teaching was allowed to keep its own identity; French did not become an obligatory second language, there was no attempt to destroy the soul of conquered provinces,” writes Tulard. The French Revolution, itself intensely patriotic, fostered patriotism elsewhere – this would be called “nationalism” and is part of the reason the French were eventually forced out in annexed countries, ironically.

The great man-ism inherent in Western Liberal Democracy wants to talk about Napoleon’s military genius in things such as issuing bold flanking orders. It’s foolish: We can credit Napoleon’s military genius for doing something without precedent – storming a bridge under heavy fire – or we can credit the revolutionary inspiration of the actual troops that did the storming. Napoleon’s ability to inspire (well-known, and real) is still not at all the same as the zeal inspired by revolutionary principles.

Napoleon biographer Vincent Cronin writes in Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography: “In analysing why Napoleon won battles in Italy, one is also analysing why he always – or nearly always – emerged successful from a battlefield. The first quality was discipline. Napoleon, with his legal forbears, was a great person for law and order. He insisted that officers issue a receipt for everything requisitioned, be it a box of candles or a sack of flour. … In letter after angry letter he condemned sharp practice by army suppliers…. Napoleon was merciless towards these men and when one of them made him a gift of fine saddle horses, hoping that would close his eyes to embezzlement, Napoleon snapped: ‘Have him arrested. Imprison him for six months. He owes us 500,000 ecus in taxes.’” Here we see the moral legitimacy which won him followers in the army, and that is better than issuing bold flanking orders.

Egypt: After examining and giving up the idea of invading England, invasion of Egypt was

the best way of striking always counter-revolutionary England, and not mere adventurism. Napoleon read the Koran on the way to Egypt and declared it “sublime”. He was inspired enough to say in his first declaration, “Cadis, sheiks, imams – tell the people that we too are true Muslims.” The French Revolution was universal in scope, like Islam, and Napoleon did not believe in the Trinitarianism of Roman Catholicism, like Islam. The muftis found Napoleon sincere as a person but not actually willing to become a Muslim – they proclaimed Napoleon’s God messenger and a friend of the Prophet. With humanitarian ideals and actions, and replete with the famed scientific corps, it is thus totally different from France’s imperialist invasion of Algeria in 1830.

In August 1799 he got his first news from Europe (due to the British blockade) that the 2nd European War Against the French Revolution had begun and that France was collapsing: Russian-Anglo forces in the Netherlands (which had joined the Revolution willingly), Austro-Russian forces in Switzerland (joined willingly as well) and Italy (joined willingly as well), Turco-Russian force in Corfu, Greece. Napoleon waded into that for personal glory, some say – to save the Revolution, say the less cynical.

As First Consul: Good leaders get elected and then re-elected – this truly all started with Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon made a political alliance with none other than Abbot Emmanuel Sieyès, the same “abbé Sieyès” whose 1789 manifesto What is the Third Estate became the manifesto of the French Revolution and the literal groundwork for the entry of the lower class into politics. (The pamphlet begins, famously: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.”) Still not leftist enough for some, though…?

The undoubtedly revolutionary principle of constitutionalism upon which Napoleon rested is reflected in the poster put up after his participation in the coup of 1799 (Coup of 18 Brumaire) and the start of the Consulate era (1799-1804): “THEY HAVE ACTED IN SUCH A WAY that there is no longer a Constitution.”

Was constitutionalism the only demand of the French Revolution from 1789-1799? No, it was simultaneously revolutionary and “middle-of-the-road”. Napoleon never did side with the royalists – that would have been undeniable betrayal of the Revolution – nor with the Jacobins, nor with their executors the less-leftist Thermidorians who ran the 5-man Directorate (one of whom was currently asking for 12 million francs to restore the Bourbons). Instead, Napoleon placed himself above party politics and alongside the concept of constitutionalism which, along with his repeated military defences of France and the Revolution, won him popular acclaim. Of course Napoleon embraced many other primary political ideals of the Revolution: an end to feudalism, an end to absolute monarchy, the division of common land, civil equality, the suppression of tithes and seigniorial rights, and nationalisation of the property of the Roman Catholic Church. What’s vital to recognise is that the social aspects of the revolution – free education, health care, food – weren’t even much discussed until 1796, via leftist hero Gracchus Babeuf, the continuer of the Robespierreian left. Faulting Napoleon for not holding out for free education for the masses is to critically forget that these social questions were in the infancy of political expression, and certainly were limited to the progressive vanguard of an already unprecedentedly progressive revolution.

In 1800 his coup and his constitution were both overwhelmingly approved by millions in a vote – a vote totally unprecedented in scope, reach and political progress. People who wish to ignore these votes are simply baffling, and biased. The coup was bloodless, as well. Napoleon – the alleged new dictator – is credited with giving the new constitution the idea of universal male suffrage and not just for property owners.

France won the Second European War Against the French Revolution – a bit of peace, finally. Napoleon the general became Napoleon the elected public servant. His administrative energy was as amazing as his martial energy: “The ox has been harnessed – now it must plow,” he said.

Napoleon took great interest in consolidating the best of Roman, custom/precedent and Revolutionary laws into the new Code Civil: equality before the law, end to feudal rights and duties, right to choose one’s work, inviolability of property, right to divorce and freedom of conscience. All were unprecedented leftist advances. The Code Civil is not at all the “Napoleonic Code” but more accurately the “French Revolutionary Code”. It was “an instrument of war against feudalism,” to quote Tulard, and its influence is inestimable and global.

Napoleon curbed widespread brigandage and pacified rebellions which had lasted years. He brought peace to France after a decade of civil war, and yet he did not give the army a privileged position. He even forbade them from getting involved in civil matters, something he considered “madness”.

He declared an amnesty for those living abroad, which anyone personally familiar with revolution knows has an inestimable positive effect, but also some negative ones.

Napoleon ended yet another war in 1801, when French churches finally reopened after the signing of the Concordat. The agreement okayed French nationalisation of Church lands (the sales of which did the most to effectuate the economic revolution downwards), maintained religious freedom, did not declare Roman Catholicism the official religion of the state, allowed the French state to pay clerical salaries (giving them a decent standard of living), had the clergy swear an oath of allegiance to the state, and banned nearly all the monasteries (viewed as parasitical and useless in France, whereas the useful teaching nun orders would soon be doubled). Of course, this recently-installed Pope would ultimately side with the monarchists against the Revolution, but there’s no doubt that Napoleon secured the Revolution’s aim in neutering the Church’s power in France, a major goal.

On only two occasions did he involve himself in local governance of the prefects: one of them was to stop a prefect from forcing vaccinations. Draw your own inference regarding the coronavirus epidemic of 2020-22.

The currency never had to be devalued, the cost of living became stable, he spent more on education than anything else, built three great roads, canals and ports each, attained full employment, stable prices, positive trade balance, increasing population, and presided over a 180-degree shift in public spirit after a decade of civil violence.

So of course he was popular – he was making the principles of the French Revolution law, which broke with the absolute monarchy which reigned essentially everywhere else.

Elected emperor: Democracy combines old forms with new ideas – conservatives are overdramatic

By 1802 Napoleon had committed the crime of making the Revolution workable, peaceful and – worst of all – attractive. A Third Coalition was declared; at home royalists keep trying to assassinate him.

“Thus the need to establish monarchical power in France for the sake of permanent peace was put forward. The word ‘form’ was essential. The spirit of the Revolution would be respected but the outwards appearances of executive power would need changing; it required a a title which would fit in with those of other European countries,” writes Tulard.

In 1802 he was was voted Consul-for-life by 3.5 million people (against 0.008 million opposed), a staggeringly progressive occurrence for the time – ignoring this is to lose the entire thread and principles of the French Revolution! However, it’s easy to lose this thread when one ignores the constant attacks on your country’s revolution, which is not allowed to evolve in peace.

“It was in fact precipitated by the renewal of conflict with England (in 1803). … Rather, there was a tendency to increase his power in order to ensure the defence of the land. A dictatorship of public safety was needed. How could it be entrusted to anyone other than Bonaparte? At this moment the Royalists inopportunely chose to renew their plotting…. The revolutionaries saw in the consolidation of the First Consul’s power… the only bulwark against attempts to restore the monarchy.”

It is with this lifetime appointment in 1802 that many Republicans were dismayed and many leftists say the Revolution ended. If one wants to call it “despotism”, it’s false: it’s “elected despotism”. It’s a paradox, it’s revolutionary, it’s provoked by foreign aggression, it’s better than anyone else’s around, it’s an emperor and empire but it’s still leftist! “It seemed, above all, to be the surest means of maintaining a stable government putting an end to intrigue and plotting. This in no way represented the acceptance of a Bourbon-style dynasty. The Empire was first and foremost a dictatorship of public safety, designed to preserve the achievements of the Revolution.” Again, that’s from an author who is not strongly pro-Napoleon – he is, however, a Frenchman who understands his country’s history.

Napoleon has still not betrayed the revolution at this point in any serious way! In a move which was preceded by much discussion, he took the crown of Emperor from the Pope’s hands in a public coronation (another first) not because of the bosh about how it was his own arrogant and usurping personal power which won the crown, but because it was the people which had crowned him, and no one else. This is all a huge difference from the divine, theocratic right of kings, which Prussia, Russia, Austria and countless other local kings would insist on in total autocratic form until 1914.

If the French Revolutionary Emperorship was a typical emperorship – and thus no ideological threat – why did it not cause the European Wars Against the French Revolution to stop? The answer is obvious to those who are objective.

In 1806 the Fourth Coalition saw Prussia and Russia attack – France wins again and Prussia is compelled to finally renounce serfdom.

In 1808, popular revolt against the Spanish king in the “Tumult of Aranjuez”, which is still celebrated today, ended the Bourbon dynasty. The overthrow of the Bourbons, and the sheltering of the new ideals of the French Revolution, allowed Latin America to win their independence.

The French Revolution has spread to the New World. It had already spread to the oldest of the Old World: Mohammad Ali founded modern Egypt in 1805 after France had defeated the Mamluks.

The French Revolution starts to topple – revolutionary zeal starts to wane following decades of foreign attacks

This is where things start to turn badly: 1808 Spain is not yet at the point of 1789 France. Proof? After 1815 Spain is the only place where feudalism would actually be restored. The guerrilla war saps France, which is supported by Spain’s progressives, abolished the Inquisition and ended feudal rights – hardly a terrible legacy.

The war in Spain coincides with when Napoleon starts to let the emperorship go to his head and thinks more of preserving his dynasty than of the Revolution – he is always thinking of France, however. His Continental Blockade against England would have bankrupted them… if France didn’t also have to fight in Spain and Russia, too. The French Revolution is always attacked from all autocratic sides – this must be remembered because it so greatly shapes their possible choices. After a few years the Continental Blockade turns into pro-French economic imperialism, in a non-leftist mistake. Spain, the Blockade, dynasty – these are the three key mistakes Napoleon made. However, he does not deserve a permanent “Ogre” caricature for these three because two of them are fights against autocracy.

The Fifth Coalition of 1809 saw the awful Hapsburgs’ last stand, the arrival of huge modern wars of attrition, conscripted armies, and the growth of nationalist movements which Revolutionary France had expressly fostered.

Tsar Alexander refuses to allow Napoleon to marry into the royal family, so he marries into the Hapsburgs instead. The marriage did not cement an alliance for peace – which was entirely the aim – because Austrian royalty, like the simply awful Metternich, were not only Teutonic racists but completely aware that France represented revolutionary change which was incompatible with autocracy. It was Metternich (who takes the mantle from France’s Talleyrand as the most dreadful and shameless politician of his generation) who is credited with the propaganda theme of “Napoleon as mere personal ambition”.

France invades Russia because Moscow refused to end their threats to the revolution – first Russia, then England, then peace, finally, was the plan.

Why didn’t the French Revolution free the serfs? Certainly leftists today would have acclaimed Napoleon more. He said: “They wanted me to free the serfs. I refused. They would have massacred everyone; it would have been frightful. I warred against Tsar Alexander according to the rules; who would have thought they’d ever burn Moscow?” Such objections miss the entire point of the French invasion of Russia – to force the Tsar to accept peace towards the French Revolution, and there would have been no peace if the serfs had been freed. France was already trying to administer the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and other places – how could they administer huge Russia as well?

Indeed, who could have guessed that the Tsar would defeat his own peoples in order to defeat Napoleon, i.e. the scorched earth tactic, which Clausewitz proved “were only applied accidentally by headquarters,” per Tulard. Say slaver monarchs defeated Napoleon – it makes fools of Russian serfs to say that their sacrifices were correct instead of manipulated; they would get their revenge against such misguided, brutal managers a century later.

Napoleon was keeping 250,000 seasoned troops in Spain at this time, let’s recall. He said his two main mistakes were not wintering in Vitebsk, Belarus, and and instead going to Poland. He ignores the original option – staying in Moscow – which had plenty of noble-abandoned supplies to live off of. The second was in trying to get peace from the Russian monarchists, who never wanted peace, like all monarchists. “I thought that I should be able to make peace, and that the Russians were anxious for it. I was deceived and I deceived myself.” The Tsars liked their autocracy, old Nap!

After the disastrous retreat the monarchs of Europe jumped on Revolutionary France in 1813 with the immediate Sixth Coalition, the first knockdown blow to the French Revolution after 20 years of trying. Not far from Paris Napoleon resolved to die in battle – to pass the throne on to his son – and though he went where fire was thickest and his uniform was tattered by shot he was not killed.

The fall of Paris was shocking: Paris, which hadn’t seen a foreign invader since Joan of Arc 400 years earlier, spectacularly fell without even a full day of fighting because the re-propertied nobles had spread defeatism, paid for subversion and colluded to reverse the French Revolution, which of course they still hated. The elitist concept of royalism would still play a major role in French politics for another 65 years, keep in mind.

After decades of fighting not only were his marshals old and worn out, but so was the original revolutionary generation. What Napoleon needed was a Cultural Revolution to refresh the ideals of the French Revolution, but of course such a thing had not been invented yet. Such a leftist idea would have led to more civil war in France, which was only able to end its civil war with the moderate Napoleon adopting many of the forms of monarchism, after all.

Banished to Elba, he famously returned. When France saw that the Bourbons wanted to push the clock back to 1788 this did have the immediate effect of a Cultural Revolution, restoring the vitality of the ideals of the French Revolution. Napoleon landed and dared people to fire on him all alone, ever the anti-civil war patriot. He was literally pushed all the way to Paris by the peasants and urban proletariat – the army would only rally to him later. He entered like a hero and totally avoided bloodshed – all it took was the sight of him in his overcoat and bicorne hat. It’s really rather stunning, and something only a leftist – a man of the people – could have ever done.

The Bourbons fled, of course. The “Additional Act” was added on to the Constitution, which added checks to the power of Napoleon, granted total freedom of expression, an enlarged electoral college (Napoleon again oversees a broadening of democracy), the right to elect mayors in towns less than 5,000 inhabitants, trial by jury and was approved by 1.6 million voters. It wouldn’t be until 1867 that Britain’s electorate would reach that size.

The vote enraged royalist autocrats continent-wide, and they resolved to immediately overturn the progressive democratic will of France, again. Metternich spread the fiction of Napoleon as ambition personified and rejecting peace.

Above all, what France needed was a period of peace to consolidate these changes – Napoleon’s aura was not the same, liberal ideas were taking further root and France had been awakened to the fact that their revolution was powerful but not invincible. They almost had it: Wellington declared Waterloo “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”, but instead of wiping out Wellington the next day Napoleon spent the morning visiting the wounded – Napoleon the quick had become a sentimental old soldier. The Coalition refused to make peace – of course. Instead of dissolving the National Assembly, as a dictator would, he trusted it and asked for full powers: they told Napoleon to abdicate or be deposed.

Now the French Revolution was truly over. It would be 33 years until there would be another vote.

The defeat of Napoleon – tyrant, slaver, sexist – heralds not a left-wing renaissance, but a right-wing one, really?

Just as Napoleon and the French had warned for decades, the clock was wound back across Europe: Poland was re-wiped off the map by Russia and Prussia, Hapsburgs in north Italy, Bourbons in Naples and Spain, Pope Pius VII restored the Inquisition and the Jewish ghettoes, England responded to calls for parliamentary reform with the massacre at Peterloo – vicious counter-revolution everywhere. The censorship imposed by Metternich is total, with spies everywhere – Europe is a true police state for the benefits of monarchs and aristocrats… again. The French Revolution was truly over because a monarchical oligarchy conspired to stop it.

In 1821, living in cruel imprisonment imposed by Britain on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon died of stomach cancer, like his father, at the age of 51. His last words: “France – army – head of the army – Josephine”.

They act as if Napoleon waged wars on the peoples of Europe, instead of on the autocrats of Europe?

They act as if he won his royalty by birth, marriage or violence, instead of by vote?

They act as if his administration was marked by corruption instead of revolutionary ideas, progress and domestic unity?

Bah… the haters of Napoleon – what can be done? He deserves the longest chapter in this book, because to smear Napoleon Bonaparte is to smear the French Revolution. The two are not synonymous, as Napoleon once claimed – but now, I think, you know what he meant.

In 1823 his memoirs, The Memorial of Saint Helena, would become the 19th century’s best-selling book, moulding the worldview of several generations.

It is truly amazing how relatively few things there are in France named after Napoleon. However, his stunning tomb at Invalides is – thankfully – not a military shrine but a monument to his 10 greatest achievements as a domestic revolutionary politician. It’s truly amazing: comparing the negative view which so many have Napoleon, and the 10 progressive political advances etched in marble at Invalides.

The common leftist criticism that Napoleon Bonaparte used foreign war to liquidate the revolution, domestic conflict and class conflict completely ignores the fact that the Seven European Wars Against the French Revolution were defensive and not initiated by France.

The criticism which equates Bonaparte with Bourbon – calling them two absolutist systems, with the former merely being more allied with the nouveau riche bourgeois class – completely ignores the historic votes, constitutions, and the quality of governance. It also totally ignores the peasant gains stemming from the French Revolution’s ending of feudalism.

The claim that the French Revolution was “imperialist” totally ignores the fact that the French Revolution wasn’t even “French”: Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium – these are just the countries where the people were able to join the Revolution, and certainly many more wanted to.

All great revolutions are always externalised – ideas do not know national boundaries. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, for example, both spread and was a part of an idea that spread: in 1978 the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan established the socialist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan; in 1979 the Grand Mosque of Mecca was under siege for two months to oppose the House of Saud monarchy; in 1982 Saddam Hussein committed the massacre of the Islamic Dawa Party, the crime for which he would be ultimately sentenced to death. Where does Iran 1979 fit in this, who can say with total precision? France, Haiti, the Cisalpine Republic, the Batavian Republic (Netherlands 1795-1806) even the USA and League of Iroquois – where does 1789 France fit, precisely? What makes France and Iran different is that their revolutions succeeded and lasted, and thus they must be celebrated and learned from.

In a quote of Trotsky’s which sounded the death knell of capitalism entirely too early, Napoleon Bonaparte represented “the bourgeoisie’s impetuous youth”. We must, therefore, look at the “impetuous youth” of Bonaparte’s bourgeois victory as a victory for the people precisely because it was the only victory which could be permanently extracted in that awful autocratic era – the liberal rights which 1789 fought for were advancements; bourgeois rights were advancements; peasants, not nobles, getting land should not be derided as a “bourgeois revolution” but were advancements. It is the West’s total blind spot regarding the social evil of monarchy – which is the only accurate standard of comparison Napoleon and the French Revolution can be compared to: their peers – which blinds them to the obvious historical truth.

We can expect the right to paint Napoleon poorly, but what the left seems to ignore is that what every historian eventually admits is that the peasants and the working class – the mass of the people – wanted, trusted, elected and re-elected Napoleon Bonaparte as the French Revolution’s chief. This makes Napoleon Bonaparte just like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Khomeini, etc.

Now we grasp the Western Liberal Democratic campaign against Napoleon’s legacy: he was a true, beloved leftist.

Napoleon truly must be reclassed with those figures along the left. We cannot allow reactionaries to say that Napoleon, the dominant personage of that 26-year era – somehow did not embody it, but rather embodied its negation. What an absurdity!

Perhaps the whole point of this chapter – to fellow leftists – is to prove: We can admire Robespierre, Danton, Marat and Babeuf while also admiring Napoleon. Napoleon certainly must be reclaimed from today’s aristocratic bourgeoisie – this chapter should make it clear why they would never even want a leftist like him.

Gaining the trust of the democratic mass explains – more than any other factor – how Napoleon was able to lead France to stability in 1799 and beyond. Western Liberal Democrats haven’t been able to do either – gain the trust of the masses or provide stability for them – from its very conception. As de Tocqueville observed:

“On coming to power Bonaparte imposed an additional 25 centimes of tax and nothing is said. The people do not turn against him; on the whole what he did was popular. The Provisional Government was to take the same measures in 1848 and was to be cursed immediately. The former was making a much-desired revolution, the second was making an unwanted one.”

What was unwanted across Europe in 1848 was the success of the counter-revolutions, which successfully refused to implement the ideals of 1789. In France, however, what was quickly unwanted was the first implementation of Western Liberal Democracy.

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Upcoming chapter list of the brand-new content in France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. The book will also include previous writings from 2018 through the 2022 election in order to provide the most complete historical record of the Yellow Vests anywhere. What value! Publication date: June 1, 2022.

Pre-orders of the paperback version will be available immediately.

Pre-orders of the Kindle version may be made here.

Pre-orders of the French paperback version will be available immediately.

Pre-orders of the French Kindle version may be made here.

Chapter List of the new content

• New book announcement – ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s best values’ – March 15, 2022
• Introduction: A Yellow Vests’ history must rewrite both recent & past French history – March 20, 2022
• The UK’s endless reaction: 1789 & feudalism’s end creates modern conservatism – March 25, 2022
• Glorious Revolution of 1688: England declares ‘death to all other revolutions’ – March 29, 2022
• Modern political history makes no sense if Napoleon is not a leftist revolutionary
• The Revolutions of 1848: Because Liberalism can’t say the ‘Counter-Revolutions of 1848’
• Louis-Napoleon: The revolutionary differences between Bonapartism & Western Liberal Democracy
• The Paris Commune: The true birth of neoliberalism and EU neo-imperialism
• Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s
• On ‘Leon Trotsky on France’ in order to reclaim Trotsky from Trotskyists
• The Yellow Vests’ childhood: Seeing French elites, only, swayed by neoliberalism
• No one here is actually in charge: How the EU empire forced the Yellow Vests
• The radicalisation by Europe’s ongoing Lost Decade: the Great Recession changes France
• To Yellow Vests he’s the radical: Macron and ‘Neither Right nor Left but the Bourgeois Bloc’
• Yellow Vests: At worst, the most important French movement for a century
• Who are they, really? Ask a reporter whose seen a million Yellow Vest faces
• Yellow Vest Win: Ending the West’s slandering of all popular movements as far-right xenophobes
• Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western anarcho-syndicalism & unions as leftism’s hereditary kings
• Yellow Vest Win: The end of Western parliamentarianism as the most progressive government
• Yellow Vest Win: Reminding us of the link between fascist violence & Western democracy
• What the Yellow Vests can be: a group which can protect liberalism’s rights, at least
• The 2022 vote: The approach needed for ‘Before’- what came ‘After’ polls closed

On Haaretz: Can Settler Colonialism Be Liberal and Apartheid Be Progressive?

December 13, 2021

Palestinians at an Israeli military checkpoint. (Photo: via ActiveStills.org)

By Ilan Pappe

Can you imagine in the heyday of Apartheid in South Africa, a political movement or newspaper that would be regarded as liberal, and commended worldwide for its bravery, notwithstanding expressing their support for the Apartheid system itself? Can you imagine what would have happened if the thrust of the anti-apartheid movement in Africa would be based on the idea that Apartheid itself is fine, but some of its atrocious policies are unacceptable? Would apartheid have ever ended if this was the gist of the opposition to it? The answer is obvious – only those who opposed apartheid to the core contributed to its fall.

In the case of Israel, it seems that even pro-Palestinian outfits and activists do not fully comprehend the elasticity of liberal Zionism and its role in providing a shield of immunity to the Zionist regime itself. A case in point is the newspaper, Haaretz, entirely loyal to the Zionist ideology and part of the settler-colonial project from its very beginning and, yet, it is commended worldwide.  Its reports are used as the most authentic and truthful evidence of what goes on, in particular, in the occupied territories (it is more cautious when dealing with the more sophisticated apartheid exercised against the ‘48 Arabs, the Palestinian citizens of Israel).

It is not as if there are no alternative sources to Haaretz; there are, among others, the six human rights organizations which Israel, with American consent, declared as terrorist organizations (MERETZ, the only liberal Zionist party in the Knesset, with whom Haaretz is rightly identified with, at first raised its objections to the move, than it had a short meeting with the head of the Shaback, and has not uttered a word ever since).[i]

A recent critique, coupled with appreciation, on the usage of the term Apartheid by Betzelm (B’tselem) has shown that the difference between Palestinian human rights organizations’ reports and those of the Zionist left is in the contextualization of the facts within a wider ideological and moral discussion.[ii] These Palestinian organizations may provide similar information, as Haaretz, Betzelm or Human Rights Watch do on the Israeli abusive policies but, unlike the other sources, they contextualize their report with a profound understanding about the destructive nature of Zionism and the settler-colonial state of Israel.

Even the worst atrocity can be tolerated and explained, if it is de-contextualized – namely is not related to an ideology – and, thus, the discreet dots of Israeli criminality are not connected together to provide the full and truthful picture of the real intent of the settler-colonial project of Zionism that will not end until it is stopped – which is to eliminate the Palestinians and Palestine. I am sure we all understand that elimination can take more than one form: it could be genocide, it could be incremental ethnic cleansing, sieges, closures, blockades and starvation, as well the erasure of heritage, history and culture. It can take place in dramatic operations or on a daily basis and can be directed towards the individual or the society, as a whole.

The need to appropriate and also regulate the criticism of Israel is the major project of Liberal Zionism – sometimes referred to as the Israeli Left – and its main mouthpiece is Haaretz. The newspaper is also connected to an NGO called Akevot (footprints) and its chief historian, Adam Raz, proudly broadcasting his Zionism. Occasionally, Raz shares with the readers new evidence on the 1948 massacres or abuses of the ‘48 Arabs under military rule. He also publishes books in Hebrew on the topic and is the editor of the mouthpiece of the Berl Katzanelson Fund, Telem (Katzanelson was the chief ideologue of the Zionist Labour movement, who advocated openly and relentlessly the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians since the 1930s). Thankfully, his manipulative method was exposed recently by one of the last remaining Israeli historians with a solid moral backbone, Rona Sela, in the Jerusalem Quarterly.[iii]

Palestinians, and those who support the struggle, benefit from being exposed to the material; it would be much better to be able to access it ourselves, which we will not be able to do. Those who run the archives, as well as Haaretz, understand that liberal Zionist historians can be trusted with this damning material. Liberal Zionism has always been obsessed with finding the balance between the high moral ground and the wish to portray Israel as a civilized State that errs here and there (which usually means killing Palestinians throughout history). The message is clear: none of these mistakes, even if they are war crimes or crimes against humanity, to which the Liberal Zionist admits, should cast doubt on Zionism, or the very idea about the legitimacy of Israel to remain a racist and ethnic Jewish State at the heart of the Arab world.

When it comes to the truth, the Palestinians have nothing to lose. Even without the reports in the Haaretz on the present or past abuses against the Palestinians, there are enough sources, including this particular venue, that tell the world what it needs to know on Palestine’s past and present. These other sources contain ample information for anyone interested to form an educated and moral position on the ongoing Nakba in Palestine.

So why do I, and many others, still use Haaretz as a source? The main reason is that, unfortunately, we feel, perhaps wrongly, that we still need to legitimize or, rather, ‘Kosherize’ basic truths about Palestine through Israeli and Zionist sources. As a “new historian” in Israel, I fully understood the initial uneasiness with which our works were received by Palestinian scholars who had already worked on the subject.

The “new historians” contributed to the legitimization of the Palestine narrative; but it is outrageous that it needed to be legitimized. I have personally dealt with this dilemma and have shed the “new historian” reference and, instead of being a legitimizer, I see myself as a professional historian of Palestine, totally committed to the struggle – who contributes, rather than supplements – to the solidification of the Palestinian narrative; a narrative which is still denied in too many places, as is the Nakba altogether.

However, it is time to clarify and focus our strategy, at least as scholars and activists, at a time when the global political elites – with a handful of exceptions – still use the liberal Zionist aspect of life in Israel to justify their unconditional support for the Apartheid State of Israel. I am aware that we are all waiting eagerly, and I hope this will unfold in the near future, for a repristinate and united Palestinian collective leadership to take us forward in the struggle of liberation, either as Palestinians or as their supporters. In the meantime, a lucid and accurate language which includes a clear definition of Zionism with all its more deceiving innuendoes is as important as any other aspects of the struggle for justice and freedom in Palestine.

We can demand from our liberal Zionist friends that they walk the extra mile into anti-Zionism, as much as we demanded clear anti-Apartheid moral stances from our white friends in apartheid South Africa. There is no progressive settler colonialism, liberal ethnic cleansing or enlightened occupation. These are all forms of inhumanity that we should oppose in the name of humanity.

Footnotes: 

[i]  The last condemnation by the paper and the party was on October 23, 2021, and since then total silence.

[ii] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/10/btselems-bombshell-apartheid-report-stating-the-obvious

[iii] https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/A%20Question%20of%20Responsibility.pdf

– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Ian Jenkins: “George Monbiot’s Far-Right Projection”

October 8, 2021

image via Off Guardian

Absolutely brilliant article by Ian Jenkins, published at Off Guardian.

“George Monbiot is shocked.

But what has shocked George is not the rising tide of poverty and starvation in the world or the unprecedented transfer of wealth to a tiny number of oligarchs.

He is not shocked by the practical collapse of the rule of law or by the brutal actions of police officers in nations claiming to be liberal democracies.

It is possible that these things shock him as well, but if so, there is no sign of this in his recent article for the Guardian.

No. Monbiot is shocked by “leftwingers” being “lured” to the “far right” by “conspiracy theories” in the context of resistance to state measures in relation to Covid-19, including opposition to lockdowns, removal of basic civil rights, mass vaccination with experimental mRNA technology and the prospect of vaccine “passes” or even mandatory vaccination.

In employing these terms Monbiot’s article is a distillation of the familiar techniques used to attack dissenting voices on Covid during the past 18 months and for a considerably longer time on other issues such as climate change, Brexit and globalisation.

This form of attack –always in defence of dominant or mainstream narratives and the actions of governments and their corporate “partners” and always expressed in terms of “concern” – employs pejorative terms such as “far right”, “white supremacist” without defining them adequately or at all.

We are never asked to consider what we understand by the term “far right” or how the label “conspiracy theory” – itself a category with a fascinating back story and history for employment by state powers to attack critics and deflect legitimate questioning – is being used and no attempt is made to define where the line lies between legitimate questions and analysis and more fantastical or “extremist” explanations of events.

A detailed discussion of these terms goes beyond the remit of this response to Monbiot’s article – but it is worth noting that, as would be expected, they are not defined with any clarity by Monbiot.

[Eva’s note: This is precisely what this immoral shill did re matters Syria: Smeared those of us who took principled stances against the war on Syria, called us names “genocide deniers”, “conspiracy theorists”, etc…, and served the dominant narratives & their murderous agenda in Syria.]

However, regardless of what he means by these labels, his piece is so fundamentally based on logically fallacies and so scattergun in the way he employs them that it is sufficient to confront his claims on their own lack of coherence.

Monbiot opens his article with an anecdotal warning that acquaintances of his within the “countercultural movements where my sympathies lie” are “dropping like flies” from the deadly plague of Covid.

This opens of the question of how this assertion matches current data and whether Monbiot’s experience matches those of the public at large.

Whether this perception of sweeping pestilence is borne out by statistics or not, Monbiot states that this is not a general plague, visited randomly on all such acquaintances, but is one only affecting those with “anti-vax” beliefs.

These are the crazy folk advocating outlandish ideas like the benefits of “natural immunity” (which Monbiot places in scare quotes, presumably in case his readers might think that the human immune system was a real thing) or “denouncing vaccines and refusing to take the precautions that apply to lesser mortals”.

As a result of their sins against “the Science”, regardless of readily available statistics on the inefficacy of these “precautions”, some have been hospitalised Monbiot tells us – though where this is happening and due what underlying or operating causes is unclear.

It is worth noting at this point that Monbiot is at pains throughout this article to locate himself as part of a “counterculture” or “alternative scene” while devoting the entire piece to repeating mainstream narratives and attacking those who oppose them.

Quite how a Brasenose-educated mainstream journalist (whose previous “activism” earned him a visiting fellowship at Oxford’s Green College at the behest of a former UK ambassador to the UN) qualifies as a figure on the “alternative scene” is a question that could quite legitimately be asked.

Not content to bemoan that his “countercultural” acquaintances are putting their own lives at risk – Monbiot then accuses them of “actively threatening the lives of others”.

This shifts these non-complying leftists from a state of recklessness regarding their own health and into the realm of criminal intent.

This is a technique that anyone who has been questioning the mainstream Covid narrative will be familiar with – having spent 18 months being accused of wanting to kill grannies and murder the vulnerable: even in the face of mounting evidence that it is the state that has been engaged in the culling of these groups and which has certainly been responsible for their immiseration.

The thought process for this imputation of homicidal intent runs like this: masks, lockdowns and vaccines prevent transmission, transmission equals disease and disease equals death.

There is, of course, ample scientific evidence to question each stage of this chain of causation [see here], but Monbiot merely asserts each causal step as unassailable truth sufficient to impute murderous intent to all who fail to comply with the edicts of the biosecurity state.

It could be said in response that it would be possible to lay similar accusation of “threatening the lives of others” against those, like Monbiot himself, who advance the ideology of “net zero” – which would likely result in innumerable deaths from starvation and exposure to cold – but that would be to adopt the tactics of one’s opponent and as Marcus Aurelius put it – “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy”.

Having attributed murderous intent on those holding “anti-vax beliefs” Monbiot now casts his net wider to bemoan the passage of “conspiracy theories travelling smoothly from right to left”, including the claims of “white supremacists”, which he states the misguided children of the left are repeating without knowing their origin.

Monbiot does not trouble himself to identify the nature of these white supremacist claims before moving swiftly on to decry the tragic situation in which:

hippies who once sought to build communities [are] sharing the memes of extreme individualism […] spreading QAnon lies and muttering about a conspiracy against Donald Trump

And bemoan that:

the old boundaries have broken down, and the most unlikely people have become susceptible to rightwing extremism”.

There is no attempt to define what is meant by “rightwing extremism” at this point, with Monbiot finding it sufficient to present anecdotal evidence of muttering QAnon hippies – a group I must confess to have never encountered in the ranks of those opposing the Covid agenda, where the QAnon psyop is more likely to be mocked than embraced.

The reader is left none the wiser as to what “extreme individualism” means either. Maybe these “hippies” are inventing their own personal languages or choosing to live as hermits?

But despite the absence of any concrete examples that might act as a warning to the unwary, Monbiot is still concerned that this is a sign of something going “badly wrong in parts of the alternative scene”.

In fact, Monbiot is merely employing the fallacy of composition – the logical fallacy so beloved of many on the modern so-called “left”, in which an entire, highly diverse, group of people advancing versions of a particular idea can be represented by the most extreme individuals also advancing that idea.

Presumably what we are to believe here is that if a Qanon placard, hastily scrawled in crayon by some fringe nutter, is sighted at a protest or if some misguided basement-dweller comments on a Facebook thread then all attending the protest or commenting on the thread are of one mind with these outliers.

Such shoddy thinking has been the mainstay of those employing agents provocateur to discredit movements and campaigns in the past.

It is at this point – perhaps inevitably given the general adherence to Godwin’s Law amongst his milieu – that Monbiot, in an attempt to tie the ideas of these misguided counter-culturalists to the “far-right”, embarks on a rather woolly, cherry-picking and historically inaccurate identification of an “overlap” between “new age” and “far-right” ideas – specifically with Nazi ideology.

There has long been an overlap between certain new age and far-right ideas. The Nazis embraced astrology, pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship.

Monbiot draws attention to the Nazis’ embrace of “pagan festivals, organic farming, forest conservation, ecological education and nature worship”. But then seemingly not quite sure where he is going with this line of thought, and perhaps perceiving the possibility that as a “green” activist himself he is in danger of associating himself with Nazi ideology, he quickly regroups and states that the Nazis also…

promoted homeopathy and “natural healing”, and tended to resist vaccination.

At this point, Monbiot at least has the decency to point out that just because someone believes in natural medicine and ecology, they are not necessarily a Nazi, which is very good of him and is no doubt a comfort to many of his readers who would identify themselves as being part of the Green movement.

However, it is what Monbiot fails to say about the Nazis that is most telling.

After all, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was not homeopathic practitioners who stood trial for crimes against humanity, it was the allopathic doctors who had carried out medical experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.

And the Nuremberg Code did not set out prohibitions against “natural healing”, but rather against the administration of experimental pharmaceutical products to individuals without their informed consent.

Monbiot also fails to address the Nazi belief in population reduction as central to their views of ecology – especially the targeted removal of those deemed to be inferior and whose presence within the borders of the Third Reich was routinely represented as that of vectors of infection, an unclean influence endangering the health of the Good Germans.

It would not be difficult to find echoes of this Malthusian and eugenicist philosophy today – but Monbiot fails to do so.

It is quite a feat to take the example of the centralised totalitarian state of the Third Reich, obsessed as it was with racial purity, racial “hygiene” and conformity through the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination of all arms of the state around central narratives), and associate it with those who have concerns about matters such as individual rights, the Rule of Law and constitutionality.

Is Monbiot unaware that Nazi ideology was diametrically opposed to these values?

Monbiot also points to a process by which European fascists sought to reinvent themselves in the 1960s and 70s by entering the ecological movement to promote ideas such as ethnic separatism or indigenous autonomy. Though he again fails to explain where, and by whom, these ideas are being raised in the current situation.

Monbiot frames the anti-vaccine movement as:

a highly effective channel for the penetration of far-right ideas into leftwing countercultures”.

He then goes on to provide possibly the most bizarre non-example of this that could be imagined – even in a piece as poorly constructed and logically fragile as this – citing the invitation of “anti-vaxxer”, and well-known liberal, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr to the Trump Whitehouse as his example.

For several years, anti-vax has straddled the green left and the far right. Trump flirted with it, at one point inviting the anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr to chair a “commission on vaccination safety and scientific integrity”.

One is left wondering at this point whether Monbiot even knows who RFK Jnr is – surely he does – and how on earth he thought this example would be the best one to present to a Guardianista audience (who still see Trump as the personification of right-wing evil), as evidence of right-wing “anti-vaxxers” influencing the left.

Monbiot’s article now dissolves into an ill-defined attack on ‘conspiracy theories’, which he claims are bolstered by Facebook directing vaccine hesitant people towards “far-right conspiracy” groups.

None of these alleged right-wing groups are named or their views described, with Monbiot being content, to:

• a) make a link, without evidence, between “wellness” movements and antisemitism
• b) mock the idea of bodily sovereignty (without defining or arguing this as a legal and/or ethical concept) and
• c) make a vague derogatory reference to beliefs in a “shadowy cabal … trying to deprive us of autonomy”.

Here Monbiot blurs the concept of some form of biological purity with the legal idea of bodily sovereignty, a piece of linguistic and conceptual legerdemain that he employs again later in his conclusion.

To be fair, in his talk of “shadowy cabals” Monbiot doesn’t mention pan-dimensional lizards or the Illuminati – but he may have just run out space to include these.

He is also not clear on where there leads people criticising high-profile globalist organisations such as the World Economic Forum – who far from being “shadowy” publish all of their plans on a glossy website and upload talks and panel discussions from their glitzy annual meetings at Davos.

Of the censorship of legitimate opinion on Facebook, which will be far more familiar to most than being steered to a neo-Nazi group, Monbiot makes no mention.

Monbiot then surrenders any pretence at argument and reminds the reader that they “should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy” amongst critics of the biosecurity state and brings up the “Pureblood” meme.

There’s a temptation to overthink this, and we should never discount the role of sheer bloody idiocy. Some anti-vaxxers are now calling themselves “purebloods”, a term that should send a chill through anyone even vaguely acquainted with 20th-century history.

If you are unfamiliar with this fringe social media phenomena, it is one in which the unvaccinated borrow a term from Harry Potter to distinguish themselves from those who have received an mRNA injection. This is, without doubt, a distasteful and counterproductive meme – though its origin is difficult to establish – and provides an open goal for Monbiot (and others) to link those opposing vaccine mandates with the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis.

Ironically here Monbiot states that one cannot expect people this stupid to “detect the echo of the Nuremberg laws”, while being completely blind himself to the other striking contemporary echoes of these discriminatory laws.

It is clear that the current parallels with the Nuremberg Laws do not proceed from those using the “Pureblood” label, who do not seem in any way interested in discriminating against the vaccinated or in excluding them from normal participation in society or from accessing basic services.

In addition, though quick to raise the spectre of the Nuremberg Laws, it is worth observing that Monbiot appears have no interest whatsoever in the Nuremberg Code.

It is in the next section of his article that Monbiot comes closest to touching on something approaching truth, as he describes, without explicitly stating it to be the case, the breakdown in the relevance of a left/right divide experienced by so many over the past 18 months.

I believe this synthesis of left-alternative and rightwing cultures has been accelerated by despondency, confusion and betrayal […] there has been an almost perfect language swap. Parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt.

He accurately describes the disillusionment of many who would have considered themselves to be on the ‘left’ as they watched “left-ish” political parties become acquiescent or even supportive of corporate power, while a libertarian right has arisen which rails against excessive corporate control, resulting in what he describes as a “perfect language swap” in which “parties that once belonged on the left talk about security and stability while those on the right talk of liberation and revolt”.

Putting aside the complete lack of evidence for this in the actions and language of the Conservative Party that governs his own country – there is still some truth to what Monbiot says here. In the past 18 months the most unquestioning and aggressive support for Covid policy has been found on the left, a position Monbiot proves as eager to defend as any other member of the “Lockdown Left” – as they have come to be known by many disappointed and outraged people of the left (myself included).

Monbiot then seeks to utilise necessity, the “tyrants plea” as Milton put it, to override the objections that some on the left may have to the criminal record of Big Pharma or their potential revulsion at the “coercive political control” of the responses to Covid.

Mass vaccination is “needed” and lockdown and other measures are “required to prevent Covid-19 spreading” – though ample data points to none of this being the case.

He then extends this free pass to tyranny to the fight against “climate breakdown” and the “collapse of biodiversity”, which he tells his reader have made “powerful agreements struck by governments” necessary – something which he admits can be hard to swallow for a left, particularly an environmental left, resistant to such power plays and instead focused on the “local and the homespun”.

Doubtless such cottage industry approaches to the environment do exist, but there is also a multi-billion dollar oligarch-funded environmental lobbying and PR industry which promotes the case for heavy-handed and society-changing ‘climate action’, and which has brought to the attention of the world such pre-fabricated prophets of doom as Greta Thunberg and funded astroturf movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

Notably Monbiot makes no mention of this whatsoever.

Feeling that he has made his case – though in fact no case has been made at all – Monbiot now arrives at his solutions, which he finds in the “hippie principle” of “balance”. (Though quite where this principle is expressed and who the particular “hippies” are Monbiot does not trouble himself to relate).

Monbiot is careful not to lose his “left” audience at this point, and emphasises that this “hippie principle” is not the ”compromised, submissive doctrine that calls itself centrism” as this leads to “extreme outcomes” such as the “Iraq war, endless economic growth and ecological disaster”.

Instead, he proposes the “balance between competing values in which true radicalism is to be found”.

Remarkably he locates this “balance” in “reason and warmth, empiricism and empathy, liberty and consideration” having demonstrated scant evidence of any of these values throughout the rest of his article.

Presumably it’s this ‘reason, warmth etc ‘ that leads to outcomes such as curtailment of civil liberties, mandatory vaccination and depopulation through pursuit of utopian goals such as zero carbon.

But it is Monbiot’s penultimate paragraph that contains his most dangerous piece of (un)reasoning. We might seek “simplicity” he regretfully opines, like some modern-day Mrs Merdle, but…

the human body, human society and the natural world are phenomenally complex and cannot be easily understood.”

All things which may be true, but which do not imply that we should not seek to understand them.

The conclusion that Monbiot draws from this is chilling:

Life is messy. Bodily and spiritual sovereignty are illusions.

The consequences of this statement cannot be overstressed. If bodily sovereignty is an illusion, where does the bar exist to the intervention of the state or any other coercive force on the individual?

There would, for instance, be no bar to rape, or to forced abortion, sterilisation or any other surgical or medical intervention on the human body.

After all, where there is no sovereignty there can be no consent.

It is to defend the idea of “bodily sovereignty” that the Nuremberg Code was drafted, and it was the discarding of this fundamental ethical concept that gave license to the experiments of Mengele.

Yet Monbiot does not pursue this idea to its logical conclusion, content to dismiss its potentially horrific consequences with a shallow and unsubstantiated statement: “there is no pure essence; we are all mudbloods”.

Here Monbiot, as he does earlier in his article, possibly wilfully, appears to confuse some biological idea of bodily purity (or absence of contamination), to which he attributes connotations of racial purity, with the legal/human rights notion of bodily sovereignty. What he means by “spiritual purity” is, again, anyone’s guess.

Monbiot concludes with a nakedly hypocritical recipe for “enlightenment” as coming from…

long and determined engagement with other people’s findings and other people’s ideas”.

Having displayed absolutely no interest in engaging in any such activities himself. “Self-realisation” he tells us, “requires constant self-questioning” – though he clearly deals in unchallengeable absolutes – and that

true freedom emerges from respect for others”.

Ignoring the inverse case that true tyranny comes from demonising, misrepresenting and disrespecting other people and their views, or by lotting together diverse individuals and ideas under ill-deserved labels such as “far-right” or “conspiracy theorist”.

It is hard to overstress how dangerous the ideas in Monbiot’s article are – a fact made worse by their seeming ubiquity in current mainstream publications and by the casual way they are introduced in relation to a range of issues to discredit legitimate questioning of dominant narratives.

The true danger we face comes not from those on the left being “seduced” by the ideas of the “far right” – a phenomena for which little evidence seems to exist. But rather that anyone would be seduced by the faux-left and superficially “spiritual” and “equitable” concepts offered by Monbiot and others.

Ideas which, when their ill-evidenced assumptions, spurious reasoning and hypocrisy are exposed, potentially light a path to horrendous destinations.”

Leaked: Smith College memo demands workers admit White privilege

Ramin Mazaheri  (@RaminMazaheri2) is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

March 02, 2021

by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog

As a daily reporter, columnist and author it seems I have developed a reputation for unparalleled bravery in exposing truths which the 1% want to keep hidden.

That is the only reason I can think of to explain why an anonymous whistleblower chose me to release this shocking internal memo from embattled Smith College.

The memo demands that their White workers, “admit to White privilege, and work on my so-called implicit bias as a condition of my continued employment”, to nick a phrase from a recently resigned employee of the school, Jodi Shaw.

A thorough recap of the Smith College saga (and the above quote) can be found by reading this article from The New York Times, “Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College”. To summarise: In 2018 an 18-year old Black female student at Smith College (which is part of the nation’s elite “Seven Sisters” historical women’s colleges) wrongly accused several White service workers of racism, “misgendering” and other threatening behaviors. The workers were later found innocent of all accusations, but they still lost their community standing, personal safety, privacy and socioeconomic well-being, and all without apology or compensation.

The case has remained in the American spotlight mainly because it serves as an example of fake-leftism run amok. In order to distinguish the real from the fake, I agreed to publish this leaked form which White Smith College employees must now sign in order to avoid another embarrassing incident.

—RM

From: Smith College Board of Trustees

To: White Smith College employees

Re: Work Sets You Free (sign or be fired)

We at Smith College are committed to providing these United States of America – excepting the states which swung for Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020 – with the highest quality of education possible in order to create a more perfect and enlightened union.

This is why our annual tuition is set at $78,000 per year – in order to deny any sort of deplorable infiltration by the non-elite – be they financial, sexual, ethnic or ideological non-elite – into the upper echelon of American society.

Therefore I, the undersigned and guilty White defendant/employee, hereby agree with, consent to, and admit the following in order to continue my employment with Smith College:

By being White I benefit from “White privilege”.

Repeat and internalise the following:

“Whether I am a tenured professor who cannot be fired or a longtime janitor, as a White person we Whites are all the same. This is true in ideas, speech and – of course – looks.”

“I confirm that Whiteness is our only important socioeconomic characteristic. By being White we have undoubtedly reaped enormous financial and social benefits from being White.”

“Even if we are signing this pact from our single-wide trailer home while our neighbour is having yet another meth-induced psychotic episode, our Whiteness has always guaranteed prosperity and social success.”

“By being White I cannot possibly have an intelligent analysis of racial and social relations in the United States and/or beyond. I hereby swear to stop reading books as it will just confuse me further, due to my Whiteness.”

The White workers in the service sector who were falsely accused in this case by must additionally admit: “My experience being falsely accused, dismissed from work, socially harassed and/or unfairly shunned has no bearing on anything at all, nor should it, because these problems happened to a White person.”

By being White I have an implicit bias.

Among White people an implicit bias is universal. It includes but is not limited to: White supremacism, Nazism, the supremacy of Whites, race-based totalitarianism, White supremacy and the Confederacy.

Smith College is in Massachusetts, but any service sector worker whose ancestors died for the North in the Civil War must still admit their bias in favor the defeated Confederate States of America who killed their ancestor.

Being non-White means never having to say you are sorry.

The 18-year old Black student who accused our uppity hired help was not at all just another overdramatic, socially brutal and self-centered 18-year old for the following reason: she was Black.

Also: because she was a “she”. Smith College trustees fully support #MeToo’s “Believe all women” motto, yet we even more strongly support, “Believe all rich liberal arts college students”.

In fact, Smith College – a hallowed, 145-year American institution – has always had the same motto: “The customer is always right.” Thus we commend The New York Times for accurately reporting that we have lived up to that very demanding slogan: “We used to joke, don’t let a rich student report you, because if you do, you’re gone,” said Mark Patenaude, a janitor.” We proudly note that Smith College gives as many as six scholarships to non-rich students over every three-year period.

Smith College will immediately implement the following, as relayed by The New York Times: “…the creation of dormitories — as demanded by (the accusing student) and her A.C.L.U. lawyer — set aside for Black students and other students of color.” Smith College employees must ignore complaints from Smith College students who find a cross burning in front of their dorm room in order to expedite this “re-segregation” plan.

Being White means you are an obstacle to any and every “social justice mission”.

We hold such a truth to be self-evident in enlightened 21st century America, where – with the recent restoration of Joe Biden – a true leftism now reigns supreme. It is one which must be ruthlessly implemented in all non-American nations.

This is why we denounce The New York Times’ introduction of pernicious class warfare – which is not at all acceptable in “leftism with American characteristics” – and so very, very early in their article: By relaying the following intellectual concept proposed in the 61st paragraph of a 66-paragraph article (and from someone from the untouchable janitor class, no less!), all Smith College employees are now banned from talking to The New York Times.

“He (Patenaude) recalled going through one training session after another in race and intersectionality at Smith. He said it left workers cynical. (Editor’s note: such classes were not for teaching faculty but only for workers.) “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege,” he said. “I believe in money privilege.”

This worker will soon be fired for suggesting that economic class is even close to being as important as race, gender, sexuality, religion, ableness, handedness, hair color, height, weight, eye color, favourite sports team or shoe size in modern American society.

And to prove there is no “money privilege” at Smith College: White Smith College service sector workers who additionally pay the $78,000 yearly tuition are hereby exonerated from signing this agreement.

Your signature here _______________________________

The myth of the ‘lesser evil’: Why US progressives back Biden

President Joe Biden took office this month after defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 vote (AFP/file photo)

Joseph Massad

29 January 2021 11:26 UTC 

As beneficiaries of the country’s imperialist system, supposedly progressive Americans have never truly sought radical change

Ever since I arrived in the United States to begin my university education in 1982, I have been baffled by arguments used by white (and some Black and Latino) American progressives, leftists and socialists to justify voting for Democratic presidential and congressional candidates.

Unlike mainstream liberal and conservative Americans, who believe their country is God’s gift to the world, the arguments of progressives often stress that Democrats are the “lesser evil” of the two contending parties.

The Democratic commitment to the rich was made amply clear with the major subsidies given to them by Clinton and Obama

Many agree that, in the words of Gore Vidal: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property party… and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

Still, progressives always proceed according to the “lesser evil” theory. If I raised the question of US imperial policy, dubbed “foreign policy” in the US liberal mainstream media, I would be told by the more astute progressives that both parties were “equally imperialist”, and therefore their vote for the Democrats was justified by distinctions in their “domestic” policies.  

Still, because the elected Democratic presidents after Ronald Reagan, namely Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were as neoliberal as Reagan and proceeded with his agenda of mercilessly dismantling the US welfare state, I remained at a loss as to what magnitude of difference existed between the two parties.

The more class-conscious socialists assured me that they were under no illusions that either party defended the white poor, let alone the downtrodden, impoverished racial minorities of Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. Indeed, they insisted that both parties defended the rich, with the Democrats also defending the middle class in a limited way, although that commitment had declined measurably since the Clinton years.

So what, I asked, are the essential benefits to middle-class Americans that you are defending as progressives, socialists and leftists? Their sober responses highlighted issues of healthcare, social security and women’s reproductive rights. I replied that all of the above had been weakened by the neoliberal Democrats.

Enriching the rich

Support for women’s right to abortion declined considerably when the Clinton administration declared that abortions should be “safe, legal and rare”. Obama acknowledged the arguments of pro-lifers and called for reducing the demand for abortion, while Joe Biden, until his recent campaign, was a regular supporter of the 1976 Hyde Amendment (he changed his position in 2019), which prohibits federal healthcare programmes from directly funding abortion procedures except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape.

As for Social Security, a bipartisan effort began the war on it in a set of 1983 congressional amendments, which Reagan signed into law. Both Clinton and Obama attempted to cut Social Security and government health benefits to Americans during their respective administrations, but were prevented from doing so by the Monica Lewinsky scandal in Clinton’s case, and public opposition in Obama’s.

Biden and former President Barack Obama have been described as a ‘lesser evil’ (AFP)

As for health services, attempts to offer universal healthcare to all Americans were obstructed by Clinton and later Obama, who adopted a Republican plan to subsidise private, for-profit health insurance companies, rebranded as “Obamacare”, and who paved the way for the horror that Americans found themselves in with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. The US empire is falling apart. But things can always get worseOscar RickettRead More »

While President Donald Trump also proposed cutting health benefits, which he did not do, anti-Trump propagandists accused him of proposing to cut Social Security, which he never did.

What about the Democratic policies of enriching the rich? Yet again, the party’s commitment to the rich was made amply clear with the major subsidies given to them by Clinton and Obama. The latter subsidised them to the tune of  $350bn in his bailout of the banks at the expense of middle-class homeowners whose houses were foreclosed upon. Obama did not hold Wall Street firms accountable for the economic meltdown, which followed Clinton’s 1999 repeal of New Deal-era banking regulations, but rewarded them instead.

Ideological blindness

So what justifies progressive, leftist and socialist Americans voting for the Democrats as the “lesser evil”? Is it ideological blindness, or attachment to the cosmetic political language of Democratic politicians, whose actions might have been worse than Trump’s, but whose style of delivery tends to be “kinder and gentler”?  

Why did the policies of Clinton, which transformed the criminal justice system in 1994 to expand the mass incarceration of African Americans, not cause a public outcry among liberals? Indeed, it was none other than Biden who helped to write the crime bill – the same Biden who opposed the racial integration of schools in Delaware back in the 1970s. And what about Kamala Harris, the grand incarcerator, who may succeed Biden in the 2024 election, assuming he does not step down due to ill health before then?America Last: Coming to terms with the new world orderRead More »

Why did Obama’s deportation of millions of “illegal” immigrants not garner the kind of popular opposition that Trump’s policy, which is a mere continuation of Obama’s atrocities, has encountered? While the American Civil Liberties Union challenged Obama in the courts, such legal opposition never translated into a public outcry against the “Deporter-in-Chief”.

Why was there no outrage over the fact that it was only in the last few months of Obama’s eight-year term that his Justice Department finally prosecuted one lone white cop for the racist murder of an African American?

In four years, Trump’s Justice Department did not prosecute a single white killer-cop, but this was a continuation of Obama’s practices. Yes, Obama’s Justice Department pursued “pattern of practice” investigations against police departments, which Trump discontinued – but that is hardly a major achievement on Obama’s part.

Hypocrisy and propaganda

And, yes, the so-called “Muslim ban” – yet another of Trump’s racist policies against some Muslim-majority countries – which people forget was based on a list of countries prepared by none other than Obama.

A legitimate feeling of horror was expressed on account of the 13 federal executions of convicted criminals carried out by the Trump administration in recent months, but these were never compared with the thousands of people that Obama killed by checking targets off his weekly drone kill list. Does it not matter to US progressives and leftists that unlike his Democratic predecessors, Trump, while continuing some of the subcontracted wars that Obama started – and presiding over a rise in civilian deaths as a result of US actions – did not launch a single new all-out war on some hapless country?

There is no such thing as American ‘foreign’ policy when US power controls the entire globe, making foreign policy ‘domestic’ policy

Could all these people who voted for Biden (slightly more than half of those who voted) – especially the benighted, white liberal intelligentsia – not know that many of the things they complained about during Trump’s rule were in fact done by their own beloved liberal presidents?

Most of them know, and their campaign against Trump was nothing but hypocrisy for the sake of propaganda, so that the poor and downtrodden would believe that Trump was evil while Obama, Clinton, Biden and Harris were good – or at least, the “lesser evil”.

Complicit in imperial crimes

In my conversations with progressive, leftist and socialist Americans over the decades, I have tried to point out that the US is not just the “leader” of the world, as asserted by liberal and conservative Americans equally committed to US jingoism, but that the US has been since 1991 the primary ruler of the world.

I explain to them that as US citizens, they are the only people on Earth who have the right to vote for a government that rules the entire globe, and that they are thus complicit in American imperial crimes when they decide, based on some illusory domestic agenda of the “lesser evil”, to vote for a government that would launch wars and kill hundreds of thousands of people. I add that there is no such thing as American “foreign” policy when US power controls the entire globe, making foreign policy “domestic” policy. 

Iranians burn a US flag during a rally in Tehran on 12 April 2019 (AFP)

Like their liberal and conservative “patriotic” and imperialist compatriots, many progressive and socialist Americans are not moved by such arguments. Indeed, they enjoin poor white Americans (“the deplorables” as former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called them), along with downtrodden Black, Latino and Native American communities to join them in celebrating the Biden victory.

Why do they expect these Americans to celebrate with them, let alone the rest of the Third World – where millions have been killed by US firepower and covert operations since 1945, in wars launched by both Democratic and Republican leaders – when they know the US will probably initiate more wars against them? The reason is that these “progressive” and leftist Americans, like their liberal and conservative compatriots, are beneficiaries of the racist, classist and imperialist US system, which has always prevented them from seeking any real radical change.

The most they are willing to do is vote for a leftist imperialist Democrat, such as Bernie Sanders – who, like them, commits to changing very little, yet presumably also represents “the lesser evil”.

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated to a dozen languages.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Democrats’ ‘divide and conquer’ Senate show trial may jeopardize duopoly

Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., right, and Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., confer during the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing for Gina Raimondo, nominee for Secretary of Commerce, in Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC on January 26, 2021. / AFP / POOL / Tom Williams

(Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2) is currently covering the US election. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea, and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China,’ which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.)

Tuesday, 26 January 2021 10:40 PM  [ Last Update: Tuesday, 26 January 2021 10:44 PM ]

Press TV and The Saker

By Ramin Mazaheri

Much ink could be spilled about the upcoming, and second, Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, but that would be a waste of ink – the trial has nothing to do with social justice or patriotism and everything to do with aggravating political divisions for elites’ gain.

We could say it’s just “politics as usual”, but only if: the “True Rate of Unemployment” wasn’t pushing 30%, even per Politico; 2020 didn’t witness the biggest annual rise in the US poverty rate since the 1960s; America didn’t just have its most disputed election in anyone’s memory; there weren’t armed soldiers protecting politicians nationwide, or, according to nearly 40% of the country, there weren’t armed soldiers making sure politicians are illegitimately installed in the White House. In the US right now politics are not usual, whatsoever.

It is incredibly bad journalism the way the US Mainstream Media endlessly overplays the number of Republican defectors against Trump – they get way, way too much press, and of course it’s because they don’t want to admit Trump has any grassroots support (which is not from neo-Nazis). One might have easily imagined that scores of House Republicans were about to vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, yet only 10 out of 211 did (5%). To give one mainstream example, it was totally misleading of the Los Angeles Times to write that a “bipartisan House majority voted to charge him” after the House’s January 13 vote, and in their lede paragraph, no less, and to even mention the 10 Republicans in their headline. Trump remains the most popular Republican by leaps and bounds – there is no way 17 of 50 Republican senators will end their re-election chances just to appease a Never Trumper movement which only won the general election by a 51-47 margin. Trump’s first Senate trial was a landslide – by supermajority standards – for “not guilty”: 52-48 in favor of Trump.

Given the assurance of acquittal (again) we should ask who benefits from this second trial, and who does not benefit?

Obviously, the enormous mass of everyday Americans will see no benefit from the trial, and I listed just a few of the once-in-a-century reasons why they have more pressing concerns. It is never declared in the US media that the US public has no real appetite for the Senate trial – they need and want the governors of the nation to govern, and right now.

The only way Americans could possibly be convinced that the nation needs to shut down Congress for weeks with a trial whose conclusion is not in doubt is via constant Mainstream Media talking heads shrieking about its necessity, and with the very same fervor that they were shrieking that Russia stole the 2016 election. This is fake-news, too, and it certainly takes airtime away from discussing things like the “True Rate of Unemployment”.

Trump conveys threats to Senate Republicans ahead of his impeachment trial
Former US President Donald Trump has conveyed messages to Senate Republicans, indirectly warning them not to vote in favor of impeachment.

The only people among average Americans who insist that seeing ex-president Trump in the dock is more pressing than resolving the multiple areas of socioeconomic disaster are the most bloodthirsty and rabid of the Never Trumpers. How can one easily switch off four years of demonization? Answer: many simply are psychologically unable to move on, and even though they got what they want – Trump is out of the White House. But while these people – generally upper- and upper-middle class persons who are not very touched by the economic crisis – are loudly obnoxious they are not in actual control of the levers of power.

It’s primarily the nation’s elite-level politicians who really want to make America’s Marianas Trench-depth cultural-political divide even deeper, but not for the reasons one may think.

Many Congressional Democrats are no doubt embarrassed and vengeful over having been turned into cowering, world’s fanciest gas mask-wearing deserters on January 6 – these people control the legislative docket and they want Trump to look afraid now. That would be a self-centered and over-emotional reaction, but why should we ascribe self-sacrifice for the well-being of the nation among the virtues of Congressional Democrats?

The Capitol Hill protest did make many Democrats even more dead-set on getting Trump out: Despite being elected president once and narrowly winning re-election – or rather, precisely because of this electoral success – Democrats want to try and ensure that Trump cannot run in 2024, and a Senate conviction would bar Trump from ever holding public office again. Again, they are deluded by endless MSM spin if they think they have a realistic chance of turning so many Republicans.

Those are two plausible motivations for the Senate trial, but they are not sufficiently convincing.

Which nation will US Democrats try to destroy in the next 4 years?
Joe Biden is about to take the reins of foreign policy, and a bigger creation of the totally anti-internationalist, fake-leftist Democratic establishment could not be found. History shows we need to be prepared, so it’s worthwhile to look at the countries which Biden is likely to try and destroy. After all, Democrat presidents always try to destroy somebody.

How elite Democrats gain from a trial, but America loses (unless a 3rd party truly sprouts)

There seem to be so many tiny groups which gain in the many instances where one reads “but America loses”? Thirty million Americans file for unemployment in 2020 – the S&P 500 gains $14 trillion in value over the same timeframe (up 16% annually). Four hundred thousand Americans die from coronavirus – the first vaccine announced only two days after Joe Biden prematurely declares victory, allowing Biden to change the media focus from his divisive and promise-backtracking early declaration.

By forcing a trial in the Senate Democrats seem to think they can win big by playing “divide and conquer” or even just “divide and divide”.

In the latter scenario Democrats certainly gain by forcing Congressional Republicans to openly divide themselves into pro- and anti-Trump factions, which will necessarily be revealed during the Senate vote on the 2nd impeachment. That vote will be like the 2003 Iraq War vote for Democrats (but only if we falsely imagine today’s Democrats to actually be an anti-war party anymore). If nothing else is gained for elite Democrats – who happily watched households crumble and workers go hungry until after Biden’s election to finally become willing to negotiate a second, paltry household stimulus – a Republican Party distracted by squabbles, and thus open to being bought into defection on certain key votes, is enough reason to waste everyone’s time with a Senate show trial.

The “divide and conquer” scenario is more worrying for national health, because the pro-War Democratic Party does like to conquer human beings: There are incredibly shocking efforts to blacklist, censor and seemingly criminalize Trump supporters. By forcing Trump’s Congressional supporters into the open Democrats will know exactly where to set their stigmatizing sights. I cannot believe that Democrats are going to lead a multi-month, much less multi-year, “Trumperphobia” campaign, but I also couldn’t believe the 2016 Russophobia campaign lasted until even after the 2019 Mueller Report’s exoneration of Russia. Is it possible that Democrats are going to persist in their anti-Trumper cultural pogrom for years rather than honestly discuss America’s decline?

Trump blackmails GOP to avoid conviction in the Senate: Analyst
Trump’s threat of creating his own political party is meant to blackmail the Republican Party to avoid conviction in the Senate, according to Myles Hoenig.

But the main question is: How deep is the American duopoly? Answer: the deepest and oldest in the world.

What if Democrats are actually trying to create a Republican Party division into two parties, with the Trumper faction defecting to a new “Patriot” or “America First” party? That would end the need for Democratic legislative majorities – all they’d need is a plurality (as in every other modern democracy).

Is it possible that Trump will actually undo America’s awful legislative duopoly and bring in a multi-party system? Like most good things Trump has done, this boon would be an unintended consequence of Trump’s actual political agenda.

Are Democrats looking to end the two-party system by giving Trumpers a clear indication that they can either organize, drop out or get persecuted by the US system? Are anti-Trump Republicans daft enough to think that the Republican Party will stay Reaganite forever, even after Reaganites allowed the Great Financial Crisis to mushroom into the Great Recession for so many of their voters?

I would say that – in the end – Democrats are not looking to end the duopoly, in which they are the party which is paid no matter what: they are paid to make sure actual leftist ideas lose, by combining them with fake-leftists idea such as identity politics, and they are paid to make sure leftist gains are truly, truly minimal when they do occasionally have power.

But Democrats are US politicians, after all – they cannot think long-term, and they openly admit they spend 2/3rds of their working hours focused on getting campaign money for their re-election – and so they really don’t know what they are doing, or even care about the medium- and long-term consequences of their actions. The Senate trial of Trump is useless theater, but who knows what these professional actors really feel or if they even feel anything at all? If they feel anything it is for their supporters and “work family”, which can be found on Wall Street and not Main Street.

Just as the January 6th protest was improvised and not the start of a long-term “Occupy Capitol Hill” movement – it had none of the determination and planning of Egypt’s Tahrir Square” (in a nod to this week’s 10th anniversary of that wonderful progressive movement, which was repeatedly sabotaged by Washington and Tel Aviv and their Egyptian compradors). Democrats are now improvising a way to keep inflicting opprobrium, censorship and maybe even criminal convictions on the odious – yet quite popular and taboo-breaking – Trump. Just like in 2016: anything to keep from discussing the real roots of any sort of “drain the Swamp” political feeling and America’s undeniable decline. 

Elite Democrats don’t have Russia to kick around anymore, let’s remember – all they have is Trump and his 74 million supporters. Kick them too much and Democrats might break their own precious duopoly.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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Biggest threat to global leftism returns to power: US fake-leftism (1/2)

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

January 08, 2021

by Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2) for the Saker Blog

It was an interesting ride, at least, but the Electoral College’s vote for Joe Biden marks the definitive end of the Donald Trump presidency.

Preview in new tab

Trump was somebody you could never support in a vacuum, only by comparison; there’s nothing wrong with a united Europe but not this American-penned, neoliberal version, so it’s clear why Britain chose Brexit; France has long been the West’s only hope, so it’s not fair to put the politically advanced, physically courageous, full of solidarité Yellow Vests in with this group, but all three here are certainly related.

I never supported Trump. What I support is the fight against fake-leftism, which is the perhaps the biggest threat to real leftism.

Many Anglophones now have no idea what I am talking about. That’s a problem.

There’s a problem when you Google such a hugely important concept like “fake-leftism” and Ramin Mazaheri has multiple hits on the very first results page: what on earth have Anglophones been talking – or not talking – about?

Fake-leftism is such a huge threat because we all know what the right-wing wants – they are totally clear about it, and that is at least respectable. It must be conceded that while some of their values (like rabid anti-socialism) have no merit at all, some of their other values are respectable and cannot destroyed any more than yang can destroy yin.

So in many vital ways fake-leftism is as big a threat to leftism as rightism because fake-leftists are right-wingers in disguise on some issues and totally deluded about what true leftism is on other issues – they distort, distract and undermine real leftism and thus are actually perpetually engaged in pushing things always to the right.

So spending time fighting fake-leftism is certainly just as vital as opposing right-wing forces. Unfortunately, there are enormous, tedious, ineffective reams of the latter and yet so little of the former that I am seemingly in the position to monetise the term “fake-leftism” with T-shirts and coffee mugs?

Let’s start in the opposite direction: what is fake-rightism?

It’s very interesting to listen to American fascist media. I am not referring to Fox News, nor even Christian conservative radio. The US has genuinely, openly fascist media you can find on the fringe, but I’m not going to give them free publicity by listing them.

As a daily hack journalist it’s my job to listen to everyone and quickly provide copy; and perhaps temperamentally I am simply lucky in that I can listen to people I disagree with without getting angry.

These American fascist media are full of unacceptable racism and hatred but still can provide some very unique takes on Trumpism, as Trumpism is a right-wing ideology which they naturally grasp more about than I do: For example, they actually assert that Trump lost because he betrayed his White Power base – which is to say that Trump lost because he was not racist enough – and the fact that the only group he lost votes from in 2020 as compared to 2016 was White men proves that. Considering how close the vote was, the idea should be considered, at least. However, I have and I find it insufficient and actually just more typically-Western “race and tribe and religious differences are everything” (we are talking about the analyses of racist fascists, after all) and actually mere identity politics (we are talking about the analyses of modern Americans, after all).

But something they said once stuck out for me: The Republican Party is the party paid to lose. That was funny because I was interviewing a Green Party candidate in my recent work in the US for PressTV and he said the same thing about the Democratic Party. We absolutely cannot draw a false equivalence between the far-right and the far-left (though, of course this is exactly what is done all the time in the know-nothing corporate Mainstream Media), but both are totally right.

That is very easy to explain, but nobody wants to explain it. I can explain it quickly, I just can’t get it published in any Mainstream Media, because the MSM does not want to promote clear political understanding as that would threaten the grip of the 1%.

The Republican Party is slightly watered-down Western fascism – which was never discredited by defeat in the US, unlike in Europe due to World War II. Modern Republicans are actually a “fake-fascist” party: they have rejected open racism (the apartheid of Jim Crow). This explains why you can find American fascist media openly rejecting both Republicans and even Trump – many modern Republicans have rejected a key pillar of fascism, after all – openly espousing racism and claims of racial superiority. American fascists also point out that Trump never built the Mexico wall, and that many Republicans encourage making the US less White via immigration – two more pillars of fascism which have gone unbuilt, so it’s no wonder genuine American fascists rejected Trump long before the Electoral College did.

Again, it’s not hard to explain, but who in the MSM takes American fascism seriously? The US MSM only wants to support the 1%, not to be intellectually rigorous, honest and willing to openly discuss American failures. Just look at how Russiagate was foisted on the US public from 2016-19 for proof of the latter.

At the very least I think we can agree that on the left wing (and probably the centre wing) of the Republican Party their racism and xenophobia is hidden – this runs contrary to fascism’s open racism. So to true American fascists people who do this would be labelled as “fake-fascists”.

Despite the clear accuracy of this logic the term of “fake-fascist” is – per a Google search – so unpopular that it also appears open to monetisation. But only a fascist would ever try to monetise everything, of course, and only a fascist would ever even try to denounce somebody’s fascism as “fake” or “insufficient”.

Yes, I promised to write about fake-rightism and gave you fake-fascism. I have a perfectly good answer to which allows me to move on: This is America, where fascism was never discredited and thus fascism is actually rampant (even if often a bit watered-down).

But what is the Democratic Party? It is fake-leftism

About this there is enormous, gigantic misunderstanding. It is so enormous that Google says that little old Ramin Mazaheri is a top exponent of what is the Democratic Party: It is a fake-leftist party.

Again, the far-right and the far-left are not at all, not at all, not at all the same, but political know-nothings, political-nihilists and lazy thinkers all like to claim that they are. So it’s important to briefly clarify why comparing socialists and fascists does not actually compare two extremes:

On the extreme left of the global spectrum of political thought anarchists occupy the furthest pole, with communists to the right of them, and then socialists to the right of them, and then centrists (combining elements of both left and right) to the right of them. Thus, socialism IS leftism and NOT far-leftism on the global spectrum of political thought. This is not up for debate – definitions are clear and accepted, and you are not allowed to make up your own if you want to talk among others without ruining the discussion.

Contrarily, the different national spectrums of political thought are indeed up for debate and are quite, quite mutable – merely look at how “Trumpism” clearly just become at least half of the Republican Party.

But the global political spectrum is almost totally immutable – it requires a stunning revolution in thought to upset it. One must concede that humans have thought about politics for a very long time, and that’s why it’s so hard to change the global political spectrum: what’s more to the left of anarchism, which posits that every person has total liberty and that nobody is in charge of anyone else? What’s to the right of totalitarian fascism, which has been most fully experienced by the victims in places like Apartheid South Africa, slave-owning states and Israel? Iranian Islamic Socialism was a huge, stunning revolution – many don’t know where to really place it on the global political spectrum – but it didn’t move the poles, right? Right.

So we know what things are on the global political spectrum when we see it, and the US Democratic Party is undoubtedly fake-leftist. We can argue about whether it is on the centre or right of the global political spectrum but it is definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY wrong to place it on the global political spectrum’s left.

So wrong it would be laughable if this issue of fake and real leftism were not so hugely vital.

Let’s unwelcome back the US fake-left’s return to power

I have written about this so much that even Google must acknowledge it, but I must admit I took some time off from writing about fake-leftism recently. I don’t think it was out of the boredom caused by repetition, but also because 21st century fake-leftism was deposed by Trump in the US, by Brexit in the UK and by the Yellow Vests in France – it became far more interesting to try and humbly publicly analyse these movements and why they arrived.

But with Biden’s ascension I realise I have to get back on the horse, because fake-leftism is back on the horse – it’s a huge threat to global leftism, after all, and one that goes totally, totally, totally unaddressed.

Part 2 of this article will remind us of just how right-wing the US Democratic Party is. This is perfectly obvious when what Joe Biden and his supporters actually believe are held side-by-side with the basic tenets of actual leftism. Because the West is so rabidly anti-leftist the basic, globally similar tenets of leftism are never openly discussed, and thus people get so very confused about what leftism is that they actually come to believe that Democrats are a “left” party on the global political spectrum. That’s absurd.

One last note, just to expand out this article as much as possible: In 2017 I supported Marine Le Pen for only the two weeks between Round 1 and Round 2 in France’s presidential election because I opposed Emmanuel Macron’s “fake-centrism”. Macron went on to wage incredibly fascistic violence against the Yellow Vests, extended the state of emergency for 2 years, closed down Muslim community centres, gutted longstanding French measures of economic redistribution and protection, and did many other things which would have caused an uproar…if they had been done by Le Pen. Macron was always a fake-centrist – he was also very far on the right, and the failure to call things by their proper names led to even worse long-term social disorder than if the repugnant Le Pen had won.

The repugnant Trump won in America, and so many great leftist-inspired movements absolutely dominated large swaths of Trump’s tenure: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and a few others were not perfect, but mainly because in the US fake-leftism is so powerfully misleading and problem-inducing.

Let’s put aside Trump – perhaps only until 2024 – and focus on saying hello to the restoration of fake-leftism in the US.

It is very unfortunate to see you.

*************************************************************

Dispatches from the United States after the presidential election

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020

The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020

80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020

Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA – December 5, 2020

Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote – December 8, 2020

Biden won? 2016-2020 showed what the US does to even mild reformers – Dec 18, 2020

Alleged Nashville bomber not Muslim: Western media disappointed – January 2, 2020

This week in the US: The ‘model nation’ for no nation anymore – January 7, 2020

America’s Color Revolution

January 07, 2021

by Paul Craig Roberts reposted on the Saker by permission
source:

The Establishment has imposed a color revolution on the American people.  Ekaterina Blinova is a journalist who reognized that a color revolution has occurred in America under the guise of a presidential election. https://sputniknews.com/us/202011221081242712-politburo-are-dems-striving-to-win-it-all–turn-us-political-landscape-into-one-party-system/

The Establishment used the Democrats for their purpose, because Trump was in office under the Republican banner.  Trump, of course, is a populist, but there is no party that represents the people, so Trump ran as a Republican.

The leftwing, or the fraud that passes for one, thinks it is now in the money.  This is a naive expectation.  The Establishment is in charge, and there will be no leftist agendas unless they serve the Establishment.  If Antifa and BLM cut up, their funding will be cut off, and the presstitutes will be sicced on them.

Biden and Kamala are mere figureheads put in office by a stolen election.  Any agenda they think that they have is irrelevant.  Here is the Establishment’s agenda:

First: Prevent any political organization of the “Trump Deplorables.”  Any who attempt to form a real opposition party will be made an example of.  In America it is child’s play to frame up anyone.  We saw the show in Russiagate, and Trump will now be exhausted with endless frameups as the Establishment pursues him into oblivion.  If the President of the United States can be so easily framed up, an unknown political organizer in the red states can be disposed of at will.

Second: Increase the demonization of white people and the destruction of their confidence.  White Americans are still a majority and, therefore, a potential political force.  Their demonization is already institutionalized in the educational system, in the New York Times’  propagandistic “1619 Project,” and in the “racial sensitivity” training that all white employes of US corporations, governments, and US military have to take.  Trump ordered a halt to the anti-white indoctrination sessions in the Federal government and US military, but the new regime will quickly reinstate the required indoctrinated as a sop to deluded blacks, feminists, and leftwingers.

Third: The Second Amendment will be overturned or bypassed.  Trump supporters will be disarmed in order to more easily terrorize them and prevent them from protecting  their property and persons if the Establishment believes it is efficacious to unleash armed anti-white militias on them in order to bring them into line. White self-defense will be more or less criminalized.

Fourth: The Establishment will increase its fomenting of racial and gender conflict in order to keep Americans too divided to resist its increasingly odious control measures, whether they be the use of Covid to suppress freedom of movement and association, charges of being a  foreign agent in order to suppress free speech as in the Assange case, or round up and  internment of Trump Americans trying to organize a political party that represents the people instead of the Establishment.

Fifth: Citizenship for the millions of illegal aliens and open borders in order to reduce the white  population to an isolated minority.

These measures will suffice for the Establishment to complete the transformation of the United States from a democracy accountable to the people to an oligarchy of entrenched vested interests.

By the time insouciant white people wake up to their fate, violent revolution will be impossible. Modern weapons in the hands of the state are devastating.  Mass spying and control techniques that exist today go beyond those in dystopian novels such as Orwell’s 1984. Free speech is a thing of the past.  Free speech no longer even exists in universities.  As I write Twitter, Facebook and the presstitutes are suppressing the free speech of the President of the United States, and the President of the United States is powerless to do anything about it.  https://thehill.com/policy/technology/533027-twitter-locks-trumps-account-for-at-least-12-hours?rnd=1609978506

The Establishment’s control over the media means that no charge against President Trump is too extreme to cause a protest.  The enormous support shown for Trump in Washington on January 6 with estimates of participants ranging from 200,000 to 2,000,000 was easy for the Establishment to turn into a liability by infiltrating the rally.

It was naive for President Trump and his supporters not to realize that infiltration was guaranteed as it was necessary for the Establishment to turn massive support into a massive liability.  This would achieve two purposes.  One purpose was to terminate the challenge to the electors in the Senate, and it succeeded.  Here, for example, is Republican Senator Mike Braun from Indiana dropping his intent to object to the electors from the swing states where the election was stolen: “I think … that today change things drastically. Yeah, whatever point you made before that should suffice. Get this ugly day behind us,” he said. Even Rand Paul was intimidated:  “I just don’t think there’s going to be another objection. I think it’s over at that point.”  https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533033-gop-senators-hopeful-theyve-quashed-additional-election-challenges?rnd=1609980353  Here is Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler whose reelection to the Senate was stolen from her acquiescing in Trump’s and her own stolen elections:  “When I arrived in Washington this morning, I fully intended to object to the certification of the electoral votes. However, the events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider and I cannot now, in good conscience, object,” Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.).  https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533052-congress-affirms-biden-win-after-rioters-terrorize-capitol

The other purpose served was to insure that Trump would not go out as a president whose reelection was stolen but as an insurrectionist.  And it has succeeded.

Internationally Trump was denounced by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg for not respecting democracy. “The outcome of this democratic election must be respected,” declared Stoltenberg. Stolen or not it is democracy to be rid of Trump.  https://www.rt.com/usa/511743-uk-france-nato-condemn-capitol/

British prime minister Boris Johnson declared that the US is the world symbol of Democracy and that it is vital there is a peaceful and ordered transfer of power, as if there was an actual insurrection taking place and an election not stolen.

The French President Macron declared: “What happened today in Washington, DC today is not American, definitely.”  In other words, it is unamerican to protest a stolen election that the Establishment refuses to address. [I watched presentations by independent experts to the Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan legislatures that proved beyond all doubt the presidential election was stolen. Half of the professional presenters were people of color.]

The German Chancellor Merkel blamed Trump for creating an atmosphere that led to a challenge to democracy in the US Capitol.  https://www.rt.com/news/511778-germany-merkel-america-trump-capitol/

Republican senators themselves, former members of Trump’s cabinet,  and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff jumped on Trump with both feet. The no longer Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Trump’s “unhinged thugs” “tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed. This failed insurrection underscores how crucial the task before us is” to restore Establishment control.  https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533039-mcconnell-after-rioters-storm-capitol-they-tried-to-disrupt-our-democracy

Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina said: “The President bears responsibility for today’s events by promoting the unfounded conspiracy theories that have led to this point.”

Republican Senator Mitt Romney from Utah said: the violence was “an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States.” https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533034-richard-burr-says-trump-bears-responsibility-for-riot

“There is no question that the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the third-ranking House Republican. “He lit the flame.” https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533052-congress-affirms-biden-win-after-rioters-terrorize-capitol

Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the presstitutes that “Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump.  His use of the presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”

General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Trump administration said Republicans “who have continued to undermine a peaceful transition in accordance with our Constitution have set the conditions for today’s violence.”

The presstitutes had a field day with misleading and lying headlines. One of the worst offenders was The Hill, formerly a source of real news on what was going on in Congress, but today a highly partisan Trump-hating source of Establishment propaganda.

With the American Establishment’s foreign puppets, Republicans, Trump’s own cabinet members, military leaders, and the presstitutes speaking with one voice setting up President Trump as an insurrectionist threat to democracy, the Democrats’ wild charges seemed credible.

Democrat Senator Schumer from New York, the new Senate Majority Leader, Democrat House Speaker Pelosi, and a large number of Democrat members of Congress, together with the New York Times, have called for Trump’s impeachment or his removal from office by invoking the 25th Amendment.  Here is the new Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) making the case:

“What happened at the U.S. Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by the president. This president should not hold office one day longer,” Schumer said in a statement.

“The quickest and most effective way — it can be done today — to remove this president from office would be for the Vice President to immediately invoke the 25th amendment. If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president,” he added. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533124-schumer-calls-for-25th-amendment-to-be-invoked-after-capitol-riots

Here is Pelosi:  https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/07/lawmakers-trump-25th-amendment-455832

Here is Adam Smith, Democrat from Washington state and chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, calling for Trump’s removal from office:  “President Trump incited & encouraged this riot. He & his enablers are responsible for the despicable attack at the Capitol. VP Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump, otherwise Senate Republicans must work with the House to impeach & remove him.  https://thehill.com/policy/defense/533136-house-armed-services-chair-calls-for-removing-trump-from-office

For the New York Times, it doesn’t not suffice to remove Trump from office. He must be prosecuted as well.

To understand the extraordinary hatred of President Trump by the Establishment, listen to his inaugural address.  He described the Establishment accurately as a force arraigned against the American people, a force that he intended to dismantle and restore America to the American people.  This was a revolutionary challenge, a reckless one as Trump is a populist, not a revolutionary leading a determined movement.  Moreover, Trump was so uninformed about Washington that he never succeeded in appointing anyone to his government, other than General Flynn (an immediate casualty of the Estatlishment) who agreed with his agenda of normalizing relations with Russia, bringing the troops home from the Middle East, ending NATO, and bringing the jobs home that American corporations had exported to China.  Here was Trump unarmed taking on the American Establishment.  This was an act of suicide as it has turned out to be.

People who think in terms of party politics have no likelihood of understanding the situation. The struggle is not Democrats vs. Republicans. or red states vs. blue states.  It is the Establishment against the people.  If you have any doubt about this, note that the US National Association of Manufacturers, always a throughly Republican organization, agrees with Schumer and Pelosi that Trump must be removed from office.  Here is the organization’s statement: “Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy.” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/532988-democratic-lawmakers-call-for-pence-to-invoke-25th-amendment-remove The National Association of Manufacturers want Trump out because they are the ones responsible for China’s rise, the US trade deficit and the destruction of half of the US middle class. All the goods and services imported from offshored production count as imports.  It is the offshored production that is responsible for America’s trade deficit, not China.

The presstitutes throughout the Western world have intentionally misrepresented the January 6 rally in Washington in support of Trump.  The rally had to be misrepresented, because no one in politics today anywhere in the Western World can demonstrate such massive support other than Donald Trump.  No one turned out for Biden or Kamala during the presidential campaign.  Their events, soon cancelled, had no attendees.  Yet, they won the election?  What saps people are. Who turns out for Merkel, Macron, Boris Johnson.  No one even knows who the leaders are in the rest of the Western World.

Trump could not be permitted to leave office with such a massive showing of support—a terrible embarrassment to the corrupt scum who “speak for the people.”  So the support had to be discredited by turning it into an insurrection ordered by Trump against Democracy, a holy word that is observed nowhere in the Western World.

The people who entered the Capitol were a tiny minority of those who attended the rally which was entirely peaceful and well behaved. It was so peaceful and well behaved that Facebook will ban and delete all photos and videos of Wednesday protests: https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/06/facebook-will-ban-and-delete-all-photos-and-videos-of-any-aspect-of-wednesday-protests/  The facts are not consistent with the presstitute narrative and must be suppressed.

Here is a description of agitators who suddenly appeared and provoked the entrance into the Capitol by a few Trump supporters who, unlike the rioters in Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere, did not behave as rioters and did no damage.  The report is from a person present not as a Trump supporter but as a person to film the event. The report was sent to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller.  I have left the person’s name off so that he doesn’t get investigated by the FBI:

“I was in Washington, D.C. today filming the Trump rally and related events.  I also ran across your post concerning the Capitol demonstration tonight.  Perhaps this short account will help you assess what others are saying in a small way.

“I was also at the Capitol before the crowd appeared setting-up my camera on a stone wall around the perimeter of the back of the capitol (the rear facing Constitution Avenue).  Then I waited for President Trump’s speech to end and for supporters to walk-up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol.  I was located at the precise location where supporters first rushed up the slope towards the back of the Capitol after casting aside a section of the first Capitol perimeter barrier.  Supporters gathered roughly at the center of the back of the capitol, but a circle began to grow around the perimeter as the crowd grew larger.  I had no sense that the growing crowd intended to rush the Capitol.

“After a large crowd emerged at the perimeter a man in perhaps his late 30’s or early 40’s showed-up, pacing quickly to his left then to his right before the crowd, and essentially began hurling insults at the crowd challenging their political wisdom.  He excoriated the crowd for thinking that their attendance would be taken seriously by members of congress.  (Hard to say that he was wrong about that, whoever he was).  I cannot recall his precise words, but for a very short period he engaged in a shouting exchange with supporters, and suddenly supporters pushed aside the first barrier and rushed towards the back of the Capitol.  Others on the northern edge of the perimeter followed suit.  But the first rush was right at the center of the back of the Capitol.  I followed the rush to the bottom of the Capitol back steps, and began filming again from atop an inner perimeter stone wall.

“The police, so it appeared, were a little surprised by the rush, and this gave supporters an opportunity to race up the steps.  One or two men even made it as far as the steps leading up to the scaffolds on the south side of the Capitol before police arrested them.  By this time, five or ten men had climbed to the top of the tall steel tower structure facing the Capitol.  Then the police erected and lined-up behind a new barrier perimeter at the foot of the Capitol steps.  Police at the top of the Capitol steps aimed rifles down on the crowd (perhaps rubber bullet rifles, I could not tell).  The crowd began arguing with police and pressing hard against the new barrier.  The police sprayed men pressing directly against the barrier with tear gas from time to time causing them to retreat.  “Meanwhile, the men at the top of the tower began rallying the crowd to challenge the new barrier (over bull horns) by filling any gaps between the barrier and the stone wall that I was using as a filming vantage point.  Another man worked the crowd with a bull horn immediately in front of me and also encouraged supporters to climb over the inner perimeter stone wall (my filming vantage point) and create a wall of pressure on the new barrier at the bottom of the Capitol back steps.

“After about 30 minutes to an hour I dropped to the bottom of the stone wall to reload my camera when suddenly the barrier gave way and police attempted to fortify it by blasting tear gas into the area between the stone wall and the barrier.   I was hit by the gas myself and struggled back over the stone wall in order to breathe.  The gas threw many crowd members into a panic. And I was nearly trampled as I struggled to lift my camera and heavy gear bag over the wall after two women began pulling desperately on the back of my coat to pull themselves up and over the moderately high wall in retreat.

“After the second perimeter barrier gave way, the men with the bull horns began working the crowd very hard to fill-up with Trump supporters the steps of the Capitol and the scaffolding on both sides of it.  At this point one of the calls, which the men with bull horns repeated from time to time in order to encourage people to climb the Capitol steps was “this is not a rally; it’s the real thing.”  Another frequent call was “its now or never.” After about a two hour effort peppered with bull horn calls of this nature the entire back of the Capitol was filled with Trump supporters and the entire face of the Capitol was covered with brilliant small and very large Trump banners, American flags, and various other types of flags and banners.

“Sometime after the rush on the back of the Capitol, people were apparently able to enter the Capitol itself through the front. But I was not witness to anything at the front or inside the Capitol.

“One clearly bona fide Trump supporter who had apparently entered the Capitol himself was telling others emotionally and angrily (including press representatives of some sort, even a foreign newsman) that he witnessed someone inside the Capitol encouraging violence whom he strongly suspected was not a legitimate Trump supporter (apparently on the basis that the man showed no signs at all of Trump support on his apparel).  I did not pay that close attention to his claims (for example the precise claim of the violence encouraged) because, naturally, I had not yet read your post and it had not occurred to me that professional outsiders might play a role in instigating particular violent acts in order to discredit the event.

“I overheard one Trump supporter (who followed the rush on the Capitol himself) say aloud, “I brought many others to this rally, but we did not sign on for this” as he watched matters escalate.

“Still, from my seat, I would say that large numbers of very legitimate Trump supporters felt that it was their patriotic duty to occupy the Capitol in light of their unshakable beliefs that (1) the 2020 election was a fraud, (2) that the vast majority of the members of congress are corrupt and compromised, and (3) that the country is in the throes of what they consider a “communist” takeover (although many use the expression “communism” as a synonym for “totalitarianism”).   They are also convinced that the virus narrative is a fraud and an essential part of an effort to undermine the Constitution –in particular the Bill of Rights.  They have a very real fear that the country and the very conception of any culture of liberty is on the verge of an irreparable collapse.  For most (if not a very large majority) rushing the Capitol was a desperate eleventh hour act of partiotism –even of the order of the revolution that created our nation.  Some Trump supporters sang the Star Spangled Banner and other patriotic songs as others climbed the Capitol steps.  They also demonstrated a measure of respect for the Capitol itself.  I saw no attempt by anyone to deface the Capitol simply for the sake of defacing it.

“The incontrovertibly compromised press has called this event a riot.  But from what I saw and heard this would indeed be a gross and intentionally misleading oversimplification at best.  At least from the standpoint of supporters, if their Capitol event was a riot, then so was the Boston Tea Party.  It also seems to me that some professional help (very aware of deep sentiments) might have come from somewhere to make sure that the party happened.”

See also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/alternative-timeline-nyt-mostly-peaceful-protesters-call-for-electoral-accountability-inside-capitol/

When I was on the Stanford University faculty, I remember rich and pampered Stanford students occupying the university president’s office in a protest either against the Vietnam war or the name of the Stanford Football Team (Stanford Indians) and destroying the papers in the president’s files of his life’s work.  Despite the liberalism of the university president, the presstitutes regarded the protest justified and well intentioned.

The rioters and looters who rampaged through many of America’s major cities suffered no media condemnation, only support and encouragement.  This is because, unlike Trump, Antifa and Black Lives Matter are financed by and controlled by the Establishment and thus represent no threat.There is no FBI investigation or intended prosecution of any of the rioters who destroyed billions of dollars of property in America’s cities.

But the Trump supporters provoked into entering the Capitol are in for it says the Establishment figure Trump, in yet another of his mistakes, put in charge of the FBI.

It is difficult to defend Trump when he consistently puts in charge of his security agencies and Department of Justice members of the Establishment who hate his guts.

The FBI did nothing about the real rioters that did billions of dollars of damage to private businesses, but FBI Director Christopher Wray vowed Thursday to “hold accountable those who participated in yesterday’s siege of the Capitol after a pro-Trump mob overtook the building, forcing evacuations.” As these may have been FBI instigators, Wray might be talking about his own employees.  https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/533165-fbi-director-we-will-hold-accountable-those-who-participated-in

Here is Trump’s FBI appointee describing the people who elected the man who appointed him:

“The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol building yesterday showed a blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly administration of the democratic process,” Wray said in a statement.

“As we’ve said consistently, we do not tolerate violent agitators and extremists who use the guise of First Amendment-protected activity to incite violence and wreak havoc,” he continued. “Such behavior betrays the values of our democracy. Make no mistake: With our partners, we will hold accountable those who participated in yesterday’s siege of the Capitol.”

Wray announced that the bureau “has deployed our full investigative resources” and is working with law enforcement partners “to aggressively pursue those involved in criminal activity” on Wednesday.

“Our agents and analysts have been hard at work through the night gathering evidence, sharing intelligence, and working with federal prosecutors to bring charges,” he said.

He requested the public send in any information about Wednesday’s events to the FBI, noting “We are determined to find those responsible and ensure justice is served.”

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/533165-fbi-director-we-will-hold-accountable-those-who-participated-in

Notice that Wray, the Establishment’s servant, not the servant of the rule of law, aligns the First Amendment with “violent agitators and extremists” and thus discredits the First Amendment as a tool of insurrection.

Everyone who was not at the US Capitol building on January 6, which is the entire world except the Trump supporters, has been brainwashed, by a corrupt, despicable collection of media whores serving an Establishment of Oligarchs, that Donald Trump intended an insurrection, but it was defeated.  By Whom?

It was Trump who called out the National Guard and who told his supporters to leave the Capitol and to go home.

What kind of people can present this as an insurrection that requires Trump’s removal from office and prosecution?  The answer is totally evil people who have not only the United States but the entire Western World in their clutches.

The Western World is dead.  It is now Mordor.

Trump appointees realize that, unless they add to his orchestrated embarrassment and setup for demonization and prosecution by themselves resigning, they are targeted for reprisals. Seeing permanent unemployment facing him, US Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger has resigned in response to Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis on Capitol Hill. “Other people named as likely to abandon the sinking Trump ship are National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and Deputy Chief of Staff Chris Liddell.” https://www.rt.com/usa/511769-white-house-officials-resign/

Everyone everywhere is participating in Trump’s destruction.  The English language Russian press loves embarrassing America.  The fun and games leaves the world in ignorance of the extraordinary consequences of what the stolen election and demonization of Trump and his supporters means.  The end of the Western World is a big event, and it will affect everyone.

I am so Happy for America

JANUARY 07, 2021 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon in LA- From A to Zion & The Right of Return

Finally it has achieved what its elite has pushed for.

America is a united country: its senate, congress and future president are guided by the same ‘progressive’ ideology that is also shared by its financial elite, cultural industry, academia and of course, the mainstream media.

America is institutionally united but Americans couldn’t be more divided.  

The United States has been a social testing ground for a while. But from now on until further notice, there is no established or institutional opposition to this groundbreaking experiment.

But I am optimistic, I would give it the necessary time. We may find out soon that all these so-called rebellious ‘reactionaries,’ ‘cowboys,’ ‘rednecks,’ and ‘deplorables’ actually like the new cultural and spiritual offering. They may be quick to adopt the revolutionary spirit. They might, for instance, agree to dump their delusional beliefs in gender being a binary matter. Give it four years or even eight, not one American will be able to recall what man or woman meant.  

Following the rapid dismantling of police forces, American thieves and burglars will also be quick to morph. Peacefully they will knock on your door. They will introduce themselves and explain the rationale behind their will to obtain some of your belongings.  You, on your privileged part, may save them the energy, by then you will also gather that whatever is precious to you better belong to the people. The shift will be so immense that reactionary 2nd amendment enthusiasts will voluntarily develop repulsion towards their own guns. They will find themselves delivering their lethal toys to their local scrapyard, they may even ask to witness their Colt 45 being melted.

It’s likely that sooner rather than later, we’ll be so used to being locked in our homes that we stop seeking any meaningful social engagement, let alone intimacy of a libidinal nature that may expose us to other people’s disgusting germs.

From the very first day of his presidency, I gathered that by the time Trump finishes his historical role, the United States will be reduced to a very small and insignificant country. This is not a bad thing. America is, by now, far less of a danger to world peace, let alone itself.

I am not going to be nostalgic for Trump, Kushner or Adelson. I never thought that Trump would clean the swamp and I didn’t understand why he believed he wasn’t part of it himself. Trump was and still is a very peculiar character. He was loved and admired by many. He was also hated by at least as many. People who love Trump (and there are many of them) know exactly what they like about him. People who are repulsed by the man and for understandable reasons, also know what they can’t tolerate about him. Trump is certainly an authentic ‘character,’ not something that can be said about any of his rivals. Trump was brilliant in drawing the lines of the battle that is inflicted on all of us. He clearly wasn’t very skillful or subtle in fighting or leading this battle, let alone winning it.  

Maybe no one is skillful, brave or sophisticated enough to lead such an impossible battle. It could be much simpler to identify the cultural and ideological elements that impose this war on us all of us. We should then uproot this culture and expose its envoys.  

Being ‘Chosen’ vs. Being ‘Ordinary’ in 2020s America

DECEMBER 07, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

America is divided and the rupture is so deep that Americans can’t even see across that which splits them in the middle. If there was a hope at one point that someone could unite the nation, this hope has faded away. In fact, the American mainstream media works relentlessly to sustain that cultural and even metaphysical separation. It is reasonable to determine that rather than delivering something that resembles news, the American media operates as propaganda outlets. Like in the Soviet Union, American mainstream media manufactures stories that sustain premeditated narratives.  The commitment to impartiality, truthfulness, honesty or any journalistic standard has been replaced with blind adherence to a ‘party line,’ an ‘ideology,’ a ‘worldview.’

 On one side of that dividing line we find the so-called ‘progressives’: ‘liberals’ and Identitarians who are largely associated with cities and the urban lifestyle. On the other side we find people who are conservative, nationalist and patriotic. More than often, they are slightly removed and even repulsed by urban culture.

 It doesn’t take a genius to gather that the progressive worldview is, in fact a celebration of choseness (exceptionalism). To be ‘progressive’ is to believe that someone else must be ‘reactionary.’ To be progressive is practically a severe form of self-love. As such, progressives and liberals do believe themselves to be on the right side of history and this belief legitimises their conduct, which often verges on hardcore authoritarianism. After all, ‘reason,’ progressives believe, is embedded in the core of their liberal perception.

 ‘Ordinary’ people, on the other hand, do not deny or refute reason. They just accept that reason is merely one aspect of the human existence. To be ‘ordinary’ is to acknowledge that ‘Being’ is prior to reason. Unlike the liberal and the progressive who adheres to the Cartesian Cogito, Ergo Sum; ‘I think therefore I am,’ the ‘ordinary’ accepts that you actually ‘think because you are’ (Heidegger). But it goes further: to be ‘ordinary’ is to accept that you actually ‘are where you do not think’ (Lacan).  To be ‘ordinary’ is to let the unconscious guide you to safety. To be ‘ordinary’, as such, is to accept that ‘Being’ proceeds rationality, to acknowledge that ‘Being in the World,’ transcends beyond reason and rationality. Thus, true existential understanding is when rationality comes to terms with its boundaries.  And ecstasies, as the ultimate form of existential celebration is the instant in which the reason lets off its guards and the soul is finally free to explore its true nature.   

 While the ‘chosen’ sees oneself as the shiniest product of enlightenment, the ‘ordinary’ is often unimpressed by the enlightenment and its ‘achievements.’  For the ‘ordinary’, family values, the church, the commitment to the soil and even ‘love’ as a thing in itself do not beg for rational ‘explanations’ or analytical explorations. The ‘ordinary’ does not see oneself as the ruler of the universe. The ‘ordinary’ is instead a humble visitor: he or she embraces the climate and accepts its changes. The ordinary people also seem slightly less fearful of ‘global pandemics.’ They are often made of combatant fabric and like soldiers they accept that temporality is inherent to existence.

People may oppose and mock Donald Trump for understandable reasons, but no one can deny the fact that Trump contributed more than anyone else to emphasise this sharp and unbridgeable divide between the ‘chosen’ and the ‘ordinary.’

 Trump appeared on the world’s political stage when it seemed as if the liberal agenda had prevailed. Trump’s presidential victory in 2016 revealed that half of the American people weren’t sure about the plan to ‘revise’ the ‘World Order’. Four years later, the battle zone is fully transparent. On November 3, 2020 Trump and the Republican Party were destined to disappear electorally. Many pollsters promised us a Biden/Democratic ‘landslide victory.’ This didn’t happen. The Democratic party lost seats in the house. The Republicans gained them. And if this is not bad enough, Trump increased his raw vote tally considerably, growing stronger within diverse community segments that are traditionally associated with the Democratic party. Judging by the election results, many people actually prefer to be ‘ordinary.’   

 A legal battle is taking place at the moment over issues to do with the integrity of the November election. The American Progressive media pretends that this battle isn’t taking place. While Trump’s legal team fights in the swing states not one American liberal mainstream outlet is brave enough to admit that half of America has drifted away to alternative outlets. In just a matter of days those outlets increased their ratings significantly. The ‘ordinary’ doesn’t buy into the ‘chosen’ narrative. He and she actually prefer an ordinary tale.

 And yet, it is important to grasp the role of Trump in all of this. How did this real estate tycoon emerge to become the voice of America’s Working Class? How is it possible that the Democratic Party, once upon a time the voice of working America, has become the mercenary force of Wall Street and Silicon Valley while the Republicans are now the voice of the Ordinary people and working Americans? Trump provides an answer. 

 Peculiarly enough, Trump is that which Bernie and Corbyn pretended to be but never were. Trump, himself, an exemplary ‘chosen’ character has become the favorite of the ‘ordinary.’ Trump’s communication is existentially driven. The man has managed to excite tens of millions of voters shaking his behindto the music of YMCA. As opposed to the rationalist enlightened ‘chosen’ who searches for the reasoning that connects words to meanings, the ‘ordinary’, reacts to the deafening silence between the words. Trump is a master of that deafening silence. He knows how to articulate his massage in between words. I assume Trump has never read Lacan, but he understands very well the role of the unconscious: you ARE where you do not think. You are your guts.

  That which progressives and liberals hate about Trump is exactly what more than 74 million American voters love about the man. Liberals and progressives see Trump as a reckless, failed businessman with a trail of bankruptcies and (pandemic) deaths behind him. Yet, for his admirers, these facts make Trump into an Übermensch, a resilient human hero who prevails against all odds. Like some military figures such as MacArthur, Patton, Sharon and historical state leaders such as Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, Trump, throughout his entire adult life, has been willing to risk everything to win a battle or fulfil a dream. Like the above historical figures, Trump manages to drive his troops into ecstasy yet, unlike many of them, Trump didn’t start a single war. ‘Ordinary’ people appreciate this fact as it is often them who send their sons and daughters to fight and die in the so-called ‘American wars.’

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After Trump the flood:

December 08, 2020

by Ghassan and Intibah Kadi for the Saker Blog

Whether there was indeed voter fraud and rigging, and I personally believe there was and at a huge scale, it seems that, by hook or by crook, Joe Biden will become the next President of the United States of America; and we should prepare ourselves for this, regardless of our political points of view and inclinations.

The presence of Biden in the Whitehouse will definitely change course on a number of issues, both domestically within the USA and overseas, but the objective of this article is to shed a bit of light on what is likely to happen to the current pro-Biden camp and the diverse array of supporters who have helped elevate him to this position.

In more ways than one, I have always seen in Syria a microcosm of world politics and conflicts. Long before the enemies of Syria decided to launch their attack in March 2011, the masterminds of the conspiracy put the most unlikely allies together, only united by their hatred of Syria. Back then I called them the ‘Anti-Syrian Cocktail’. Those allies each had their own agenda regarding Syria and had nothing in common other than their desire to remove President Bashar Al-Assad from office. Among the issues they disagreed on was his replacement, how to share the spoils, not to mention the alternative political system to install, Syria’s future position in the region, international alliances, and so forth.

With a whole array of enemies, Trump inadvertently caused a rounding up of a very loosely-united anti-Trump-cocktail; only united by their hatred of him. So, let’s face it and acknowledge it; they will never let him win the November 2020 elections. Though only united by their hatred of Trump, there are too many of them, they are powerful; extremely powerful, and they are very determined to get rid of him by any means possible, legal, illegal, using tactics like bribery, intimidation, threats, thuggery, and they have no one to fear because, collectively they have given each other impunity, covering each other’s backs and producing a culture where criticizing them is taboo. Crucially, the ‘law’ and the media are on their side.

With the exception of the Clintons and Bidens perhaps, the other Democrats have their traditional political opposition to Trump, even when they see and know he is making good decisions. This is the golden rule of political duopoly. But the Clintons and the Bidens have personal dirt on them and even blood on their hands that they want to keep the lid on in order to avoid prosecution and possibly even jail. They are likely to remain united after a Trump loss, but the same cannot be said about other odd couples.

Most of the other November 2020 Biden supporters are destined to be on a collision course, and they will soon enough realize that their differences are much stronger than what united them and that they were taken for fools. None will be disappointed more than the so-called ‘Progressives’.

The definition of the term progressive has morphed quite significantly over the last decade or so. Currently, it seems to include any one who stands up against Trump; and this is the primordial cause of the confusion and reason for future conflict between them. In reality, what defines the term ‘progressive’ in any existing progressive movement can be totally different from that of another movement; and the difference is not necessarily marginal. Being ‘progressive’ in the 21^st Century implies the presence of a very specific agenda or slogan that may or may not be compatible with other ‘progressive’ agendas.

Take the Assange supporters for example. The moment they wake up from their deep slumber, they will realize that the man they supported to become President is actually the leader of the political party that has put Assange in jail for exposing his party’s dirt. I hope that Trump pulls the rug from underneath their feet and pardons Assange before the 20th of January 2021. But will this show the Assange supporters who is who? Not necessarily because if they wanted to open up their eyes and see, they would have seen from day one that Assange’s biggest enemy is none but Hillary Clinton and that she is the one responsible for his demise; not Trump.

But the Assange supporters did not play a major role in the elections; at least not directly, and at least not as much as their closest ‘progressives’; the peace activists.

The Democrats and their cohorts have portrayed Trump as a warmonger. When peace activists eventually see that Biden will have to serve his warlord masters and start new wars across the globe, they will have to think again. He is already touting hiring well known hawks in key positions in his forthcoming cabinet and team of advisors, with his Defense Secretary reportedly selected.

When it comes to street power however, none has been more powerful and effective as the combination of BLM and the environmentalists.

BLM activists have just fallen a tad short of blaming Trump for an American five-century long history of racism. But how much do BLM activists really care about Climate Change and specifically about Greta-type environmental vision of how the world should run? Moreover, most environmentalists, if not all of them, are anti-vaxxers. When they see that Biden is the trump card for the vaccine empire, they may wish they didn’t take to the streets to unseat the Trump card they had in the Whitehouse. If there is/was one person standing up against the malevolent “Gates vaccine”, it has to be Trump, and the single-issue anti-vaxxers are against Trump. Try to make sense of this.

This is not to forget and ignore that the Climate Change activists will soon find out, the hard way, that Biden will not come clean on the zero-emission promise; not only because he doesn’t want to, not only because he goes to bed with the petro-dollar lobby, but also because he does not have the alternative technology to replace fossil fuel with.

In and out and in between the BLM and Climate Change activists, what do the Climate Change activists have in common ideologically with BLM and at what stage will they break ranks and decide to go against one another? What will happen after either one of them accuses the other, rightfully I must say, that they have been used as pawns by the ‘Deep State’?

And who said that the BLM has more in common with the LBGTI community and activists than it does with the gun lobby? Sections of the BLM likely also love guns.

And speaking of Greta, for how much longer will she able to keep up the fallacy that her agenda and those of her friends Soros and the World Economic Forum (WEF), and its members that include Monsanto, are actually compatible?

And for the right or wrong reasons, who is to guarantee that the tens of millions of Trump supporters are going to sit and accept that the election win of Biden is legitimate and that they have to swallow it? Will this cause social strife, violence on the streets, even worse perhaps civil war and much more? We don’t know. What we do know is that a controversy about election results should have been dealt with in total transparency in order to put all concerns to rest. But this is not happening, and it is not going to happen because a decision has been made against Trump dictating that he must lose.

But the after-Trump-effect is not necessarily going to affect only America. Right-wing politics, including the extreme version of it, have been on the rise in the world, and especially in Western Europe. And if the Neo-Nazis look threatening because their ideology is based on a very dark chapter in human history, what do we really know is on the agenda of the forces that have combined the very diverse elements of the anti-Trump cocktail in order to serve its objective(s)? What is it really that they want?

Hitler was at least clear about his mission statement. He wanted an Aryan Third Reich to rule the world for a thousand years. The rest of the world did not have to wonder and ponder about his intentions. He sent a very clear message to rest of the world, a message clear enough to unite the West with the Bolsheviks against him.

But today, we have an invisible driving force that has managed to put together an array of the most unlikely partners in order to fight a common cause. Do we not at least ask the question ‘why?’

In the case of Syria, the answer to the ‘why’ question was to topple Assad, albeit without having a plan that went further, at least as a united coalition. It would have been impossible for the plotters and planners to each disclose what they had in mind. In reality, they did not have any plan at all other than replacing him with a void. Fast-forward; the get-rid-of-Trump plan is very similar; get rid of him without having a plan so as to ensure all participants are pleased and appeased, because the plan seems to also be based on replacing Trump with chaos and anarchy.

The irony here is that the anti-Trump-cocktail is not only comprised of his political opponents, mainstream media, social media, but also includes government agencies such as the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI and even some American Republicans.

Briefly put, Trump has been chosen to lose, but after him, the flood is imminent. The current allies who lobbied against him will very shortly come to the realization that they are no longer united, and some will even turn into enemies fighting over the spoils of the win.

In more ways than one, they will harvest the fruit of the seeds they planted, and they will rightfully deserve all consequences. A Biden win is the most befitting ‘punishment’ of the anti-Trump cocktail.

Apart from the hapless American populace, the biggest loser of this all is the international stature of America as the leader of the so-called Democratic Free World. In a fitting blowback for these pernicious actors, Trump would have proven without a shadow of doubt, that the Deep State is so deep and powerful, powerful enough to mobilize its own enemies to serve it. At that point, to quote the rhetoric of the “Great Reset” agenda, but again, as blowback, things will never be the same again for these dangerous characters.

Iranians: The people the West are allowed to assassinate

November 30, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri and crossposted with PressTV

(Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections.
He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV
and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a
daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported
from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and
lsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored
Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin
Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.)

The recent assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – and the total silence regarding any sanctions on those who illegally played judge, jury, invader and executioner – reminds us how very unique Iranians are: Iranians are the people whom Westerners feel they are legitimately allowed to assassinate.

The citizens of which other country get so shamefully and shockingly assassinated by Westerners with such regularity in the 21st century?

We can’t compare the assassinations of Iranians with allegations (which did arise amid a once in a half-century Russophobia campaign in the West) that Russia poisoned a convicted double agent inside the United Kingdom. Not only did Western countries issue actual condemnations, unlike with the illegal murder of Fakhrizadeh, but they even expelled over 150 Russian diplomats.

The largest point to make clear is regarding why Iranians get this extraordinary (inhumane) treatment. It’s important for journalists to answer the short-term question of, “Why Fakhrizadeh?”, but we must also answer the long-term question of “Why Iran?”

The reality is that the average Westerners doesn’t even know how they got to this point. The Iranian hostage crisis was long ago, Israel is the belligerent one which keeps invading (and losing), the US is the belligerent one which keeps invading (and losing) – the refusal to allow Iran to defend itself is something which the average Westerner mostly doesn’t agree with and which they definitely cannot explain. That is to say: the reason is political – but Westerners are atrocious politicians, atrociously cynical about politics and atrociously misinformed about politics and socioeconomics due to their ever-more obvious censorship, propaganda and self-censorship.

There are several answers to “Why Iran?” Firstly, Iranians are an “expendable” people:

For a few centuries Westerners have regarded Iranians (as well as many others) as people who own things of value (natural resources), but who can produce nothing of value. Value is derived from supporting not just Westernism, but a Westernism which is totally unleavened – Westerners might say “contaminated” – with any non-Western ideas. Those who work for systems which do not conform to Western desires – no matter how great the democratic legitimacy of these systems -can be assassinated at will, in Western eyes. This is why the killing of a Qasem Soleimani or Fakhrizadeh does not merit consequences, unlike the assassination of a French general or a Japanese scientist.

Secondly, Iranians are a “ignorable” people:

Even though Iranians are so very expendable, they must also be ignored in the 21st century. The problem is: Iran keeps attracting well-wishers and like-minded people. Iran has allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon due to centuries-old cultural ties, but Iran also has allies in places like China and Venezuela precisely because Iran can talk about more than just religion.

Lastly, because Iranians refuse to be expendable and because they do things which are worthy of meritorious recognition, Iranians are thus an “assassinatable” people:

Iranians are assassinated because they show to the Muslim world and beyond that resistance to Western imperialism is not only possible, but that it produces far, far greater domestic success than continuing to ape Western nations.

Iran is not so special – they are merely the last one standing. Israel assassinated Egyptian and Iraqi nuclear scientists in the 1960s and 1970s, but these two countries either decided to collaborate with Israel or were too culturally divided to resist invasion by Israel’s ally and/or master. Iran is extraordinary in the 2020 context because they have rejected cooperation with Western imperialism, something which is always obscured by Western leftists and their fake-leftist media, and – history since 1917 proves – this means the West must assassinate you.

The West became a superpower by violence, not by merit, persuasion or mutually-beneficial cooperation, of course.

As long as Iran keeps earning meritorious recognition, assassinations (acts of war) will continue

This theory of Iran as the “assassinatable people” does not include the recent lie of Al-Qaeda’s #2 being assassinated in Tehran. This allegedly occurred in August but was not reported by The New York Times until just two weeks before the murder of Fakhrizadeh. Obviously, this was false propaganda designed to pave the way for the acceptance of brutally assassinating more Iranians, like Fakhrizadeh, in the minds of Westerners. It is guilt by association, no matter the historical record and the anti-terror fighting facts on the ground.

We must remember that so very much Western fake news is designed not to sway the world, nor logical people, but to plant false consciousness in their own citizens. Many Americans were shocked at the totalitarian brutality in the assassination of Soleimani – many Americans even publicly protested in Soleimani’s favor, something unthinkable in the 1980s or after 9/11. Considering how absurd it is – that Iran would peacefully host the #2 of the group which Soleimani and Iran fought for so very long (and The Times even admitted this contradiction in its (anonymous, as always) “scoop), the alleged death in Iran of that seemingly endless funeral procession of “Al-Qaeda #2s” should be disregarded. This is how 21st century Western propaganda works – it has no real political motivation/indoctrination, but only a motivation of furthering belligerent attitudes: it is designed to fuel panic and suspicion among Western citizens, which then grants their militaries approval for more war.

Israel is being blamed for the murder of Fakhrizadeh, but of course the US had to approve it. However, an Iranian reprisal against Israel or the US would definitely not trigger a large-scale war, for two obvious reasons: Iran does not want one, and because the West has absolutely zero chance of defeating Iran in a large-scale war. The proof of this truth is that Iran retaliated by firing on American forces occupying Iraqi soil after the murder of Soleimani, and there was no war with the US. The US simply lied about the damage, precisely because there is no way Western forces could hold a fraction of Iranian territory that they can in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What a major, immediate Iranian retaliation would achieve would only be to give fuel for decades of Western propaganda that Iran is a belligerent nation, even though Iran is clearly this exceptional victim of exceptional belligerence. But this false narrative is being domestically exposed in the West with each assassination.

The reality is that Fakhrizadeh’s death is something which must ultimately be bitterly swallowed by Iranians, because I doubt that Fakhrizadeh himself would want the country to go to war over his own assassination. Just as the “next man up” doctrine was successfully applied after Soleimani, so it will be applied for the martyr Fakhrizadeh, which is precisely why this physics teacher taught – for the good of the community, not the good of the individual. That’s a rather anti-Western notion, but a very successful one: Despite having just 80 million people Iran is regularly among the top 5 nations in the world in producing total STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) graduates, thanks to selfless humanists and patriots like Fakhrizadeh.

That staggering achievement of modestly-sized Iran will go totally unexplained in the West, of course, and such wilful ignorance can only but continue to neuter the West’s understanding of Iran. There is no invasion of Iran possible, and there is no stopping the nation’s nuclear energy project – there is only the West’s attempted implosion of Iran’s meritorious and successful culture, which would then result in the posting of US troops in Iran.

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh is designed to inflame tensions and entrap Iran into war – this plan will not work, yet again. It’s being said that the murder is a way by Israel to “salt the earth” and prevent a restoration of the JCPOA, but it’s clear the West views Iranians as exceptional from other humans on earth: Iranians should believe that people can be assassinated on their streets without a word of condemnation, but also that Europeans are on the cusp of doing fair business with Iranians in Iran?

Maybe Joe Biden will actually win the US election, and maybe he has also had a change of heart and truly does not want to support foreign interventions and invasions after so many decades of doing precisely that? But what’s known for certain is that many Westerners only want war, and not with just Iran.

Iran is actually just like Palestine – totally assassinatable by Israel and other Westerners. But while they can take Palestinians’ land they cannot take Iranian culture and intelligence – the teaching of physics, as well as anti-imperialist thought, continues in Iran.

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The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’

In this file photo, Joe Biden speaks during a press conference at The Queen in Wilmington, Delaware on November 16, 2020. (AFP photo)

(Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.)

Monday, 23 November 2020 6:50 AM  [ Last Update: Monday, 23 November 2020 7:01 AM ]

By Ramin Mazaheri

For four years The New York Times editorial page has been unreadable because into every column – no matter the subject – an anti-Trump diatribe was inserted. For the world’s many billions who think there actually are issues other than the president of the United States, their obsession was incredibly tedious.

It reminded me of how the World Socialist Web Site ends every column with a reminder that the only solution – no matter the subject – is Trotskyist revolution. At least they keep that at the bottom, so you can avoid it if you want.

The difference between the two is that one is openly opposed to neoliberalism and neo-imperialism, while the other censors any discussion of these enormously crucial and socially-devastating concepts.

Joe Biden recently made waves for snapping at a reporter asking a difficult question, and it reminded us of how very coddled he was during the presidential campaign. But a possible change from Sleepy Joe to Cranky Joe may or may not be a problem – that depends on if his apparent election win survives the judicial oversight of the vote, something which is supported by 46% of America (per a poll by The Economist) but 0% of their mainstream media.

The bigger potential issue – and it’s a global one, because foreign journalists often ape the US, in what Iranians have called for 75 years “Westoxification” (being intoxicated by Westernism) – is what the US media actually evolves into post-Trump (if he loses).

In one of the many positive unintended consequences of Donald Trump, the US media went from the slavish sucking up to power during the Dubya Bush era of “wars without bodybags”, to “everybody loves Obama (even though in 2012 he beat Mitt Romney just 51% to 47%), to rediscovering that the press is not actually merely the public relations team of the government.

If Biden wins, will the US mainstream media quickly revert to sucking up to power? Will it be still only softball questions for President Biden?

Or does four years of decent reporting – sadly combined with a concurrent journalistic era of hysterical fear-mongering, Russophobia, urging hatred of one’s differently-voting neighbour and a moral outrage which rested upon a wilful ignorance regarding what Trump supporters really believe – actually have an impact?

The question reminded of an ancient Chinese aphorism: “The murder of a ruler by his minister, or of a father by his son, is not the result of events of one morning or one evening.”

The radicalisation of fake-leftists into faker fake-leftists? Or will the US truly reform its imperialist ways?

The larger point of that aphorism is that actions have consequences, and that if we allow things to go too far down the wrong road an unjust ruler gets murdered, or a country becomes as incredibly internally divided as the US now is.

Journalists are supposed to be combative and even provocative, but the problem here is entirely with the never-stated ideology of Bidenism. (Please note that is entirely different from me writing: the problem is with the rabidity of the never-Trumper ideology.)

Because actions have consequences, we should grasp that Bidenism is not just a “return to (the 2015) normal” but also includes a vindictive, ever-more flaming evangelical insistence that US-led Westernism (neoliberalism and neo-imperialism) is the one true religion, which Donald Trump was heretically and treasonously wrong to even partially call into question.

Who are these unreadable new and old columnists of The New York Times? I can tell you what they are not: they are not journalists who openly denounce imperialism, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the oppression of the Wall Street high finance class or the other key ideas which differentiate leftism from centrism and rightism.

No, the loudest Bidenites are people who are upset that Trump is now trying to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq; are upset that Trump did not bomb Syria; could not care less about the famine in Yemen; and who would not have expressed outrage at all for the assassination of Iranian anti-terror hero Qasem Soleimani if Barack Obama had killed him.

The idea that Biden’s foreign policy is going to be less belligerent than Trump’s is something based only on hope and not on the past four years (nor Biden’s 47 years in public service). Just look at how Bidenites are preparing to deal with Trumpers and ask yourself: is the neo-imperial hegemon really going to treat foreigners – especially Muslims in oil-rich areas – better than their very own neighbors?

Bidenites essentially want to criminalise working for Trumpism, censor Trumpist analyses, and make Trump the very first president to ever be prosecuted (what happened to the outrage of Trump’s calls to prosecute “crooked Hillary”?). These are all “radical” in the very worst sense of the word. The obstacle in implementing such radical policies is that Trumpism won at every level on November 3rd except the presidency, in a total concretisation and not repudiation of Trumpism, whether one likes that or not; the problem is that Bidenites at this time in 2016 were, incredibly, already talking publicly about impeaching the then-president-elect Trump, gutting their credibility.

These do not seem like the people who are going to herald a new era of tolerance for non-American ideas because they can’t even tolerate half of America’s ideas. Bidenism may turn out to be “Western universal values” on steroids because Bidenites realise there truly is a threat to the 2015 status quo, which they are obviously hell-bent on suppressing.

These do not seem like the people who are going to become more tolerant of those who do not accept America’s fake-leftist and divisive identity politics, which are entirely based around one thing: distracting from opposition to and the discussion of both neo-imperialism and neoliberalism.

Like Obama, will Biden get a Nobel Peace Prize for his election campaign?

Many of us are old enough to have seen the failure of this idea, currently held by many non-Americans, that the switching from a Republican to a Democrat will herald an entirely new era free from American belligerence.

The younger class may not remember the intense hatred Democrats had for George W. Bush, but the proof of it is in that shocking, totally unmerited Nobel. In 2013 Obama would be credibly quoted as saying, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

If things really do change for the better if Biden wins, journalists will have to have changed as well. Of course, we cannot expect their publishers and editors to allow them to be towards Biden but a fraction of how oppositional they were with Trump, but the younger generation of reporters have now been weaned on journalistic ideas which may prove hard for neoliberal and neo-imperialist forces to rein in.

However, the problem of their essential fake-leftism – of Bidenism – remains, no?

And this is a problem for journalists worldwide, who often read the US mainstream media and are so proud that they can understand a foreign language so well that they may fail to realise they are also imbibing Biden’s latent, never-stated neoliberalism and neo-imperialism; they are so happy Trump is gone they forget the corruption and anti-“universal values” stances which got him elected in the first place. 

The worry is that instead of a genuine move away from American rightism, journalists in the US and abroad only imbibe a key hallmark of Bidenism: intolerance for dissent and the refusal to engage in dispassionate conversation about vital societal issues. The worry is that they become accepting of Bidenism’s flaming insistence that Western liberalism is the only acceptable form of human society worldwide – this is all adds up to the “unradical radicalism” of Bidenism.

Journalists must be skeptical, but they must be accurate – refusing to report on the reality of American Trumpism is as bad as those Americans whose family relations who have become frozen because of their inability to tolerate their relative’s right to vote as they wish.

That’s an American problem, but the idea that Bidenism is actually an anti-imperial and anti-neoliberal movement, or that it will continue Trump’s relative drawdown of American forces worldwide – that’s something you’ve never actually heard from Bidenites.

Think you will (if Biden wins)?

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It is not about Trump or Biden

NOVEMBER 22, 2020BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad

It is about Urban vs. Rural

It is about Globalist vs. Nationalist

It is about Cosmopolitans vs. Patriots

It is about Tribal vs. Universal

It is not about Democrats or Republicans 

It is about Identitarians vs. Americans

It is about the ‘as a’ people vs. Authenticity 

It is about a ‘Great Reset’ vs. longing for greatness

It is about Jerusalem vs. Athens

It is really about the ‘last days of the Weimar Republic’ all over again. 

Throughout its history, capitalism has been using different tactics to suppress opposition. 

At one stage it was the fantasy of an inevitable revolution. It is indeed the threat of that rebellious spirit which contributed to the evolvement of the welfare state, yet the promised revolution never materialized. 

 It doesn’t take a genius to gather that in historical perspective, those senses of freedom, productivity and hope which became Western emblems during the post-World War II era, had very little to do with our humanist desires and whims. Our ‘freedom’ was manufactured to titillate the poor human fellows behind the Iron Wall. The Cold War which threatened to wipe out civilization was just the means towards capitalist growth. Accordingly, it would be right to argue that we owe our post-war sense of ‘freedom’ to the USSR and Stalin. The more oppressive communism was, the more liberal the West pretended to be. Once the Soviet bloc evaporated, there was no need to sustain our ‘freedom.’ There was no one to ‘titillate’ with Coca Cola and McDonalds. A new Battle Zone was required to divert the masses’ attention from their true eternal oppressors.

Once again it was the so-called ‘Left’ that provided the goods. Instead of the old Left mantra that called to unite us into a proletarian angry fist regardless of our race, skin color, gender or ethnicity, the ‘New Left’ introduced a completely new hymn. Against the most basic Left universal ethos, the New Left taught us to think and speak ‘as a’: ‘as women,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as trans,’ ‘as a Jew,’ ‘as a Latino,’ ‘as a Black.’ We practically learned to fight each other instead of uniting into one people. Instead of eliminating differences, we built new ghetto walls emphasizing and celebrating every possible dividing line (White/Black, male/female, heterosexual/LGBTQ etc.). Instead of identifying Wall Street, MSM propaganda and the technology giants as our fierce global enemy, these actually became the catalysts and cash suppliers in a war we, the people, foolishly declared upon ourselves.

In this new ‘Left’ Identitarian amalgam, every ‘as a’ voice is welcome except the White one. Is it because anyone really believes that ‘White people’ are categorically or collectively bad? I doubt it. It is simply because the so-called ‘White’ was picked to play the ‘role’ of the Soviet bloc. The ‘White’ has become the new imaginary ‘evil.’ 

As things stand no one in America can unite the nation: neither Biden nor the DNC can introduce a harmonious solution as the above are actually extensions of the problem. Biden and the DNC are inherently tied to Wall Street, Soros, the MSM and technology giants that formulated and sustain this tragic battle. Trump and the GOP of course, cannot do much either, because in the eyes of his many opponents Trump himself is the core of this entire disaster.  He is clearly ‘too white’ on top of being a ‘man’ and if this is not enough, he is also an abrasive narcissist. 

What we see in America is practically the Weimar Republic all over again.

The public is losing its trust in the democratic process and democratic institutions. Poverty and public unrest is spiking. The national press and media are becoming more and more detached from larger segments of the population. Amidst all of this, Wall Street is booming. The two sides of this divide cannot tolerate each other. They are removed demographically, spiritually, culturally and intellectually.  Democracy is becoming a nostalgic notion in the USA and this shouldn’t take us by a big surprise as democracy and freedom are not and never have been prime capitalist goals or values. Democracy and liberty were the means, not the goal. They were there to serve mammonism.* But not anymore; back in November 2016 Wall Street gathered that democracy is in the way. The City of London came to the same conclusion after the Brexit referendum.

If America wants to save itself, it may have to grasp its conditions first. It better transcend itself beyond the fake battle between Trump and Biden or between the Democrats and the GOP. America should figure out who is pushing it into the abyss of civil war.  America should figure out who works so hard and successfully, so far, to split it and every other Western country in the middle.

If Orwell’s 1984 carries any prophetic merit, it is easy to figure out who is taking care of the Big Brother’s role. What you may want to do next is figure out who is/what is the current Immanuel Goldstein? Who controls the opposition?    

* Mammonism the obsessive pursuit of material wealth and possessions.

The Fascist neo-left and the Trump Factor

Source

November 21, 2020

by Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog

Nearly three weeks after the American elections, Americans and the world in general, are still none-the-wiser; not knowing who really won and if the votes have all been legitimate or otherwise.

And the man who is supposedly trying to make America respectable again, yes, Joe Biden, started his ‘tenure’ ironically by presenting his own disrespect by breaking the law and declaring himself as ‘president elect’ and establishing an illegal entity in the name of the ‘Office of President-Elect’.

There are serious accusations that allege that dead people have voted, that boxes of late illegal ballots (all voting for Biden) suddenly appeared from no-where, that the Dominion machines have been deliberately rigged in a manner that favoured Biden, that ballot observers from the Trump camp were not allowed to scrutineer, and much more.

Whilst all of the above points are considered allegations from the legal point of view, the Democrat camp should not be concerned at all if it has nothing to hide. If anything, if it is serious about restoring America’s respect in the eyes of the world, it should encourage transparency and investigations that prove without a single speck of doubt that they are all false. But that same camp that refused the legitimate results of a Trump win four years ago and then fabricated stories like Russiagate and others, is now urging the whole world to believe that the alleged Biden win is legitimate and that there was no interference.

Apart from allegations, what each of us knows for fact is that the media, especially social media, especially Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in restricting and censoring posts and comments that favour Trump. At the same time, they implemented a blackout relating to the serious allegations of corruption about Biden and his family. If this is not interference in the election results, then what is?

Given the reach and power of social media, and given that most people are not interested in fact-finding, Facebook and Twitter have been engaged in a deliberate campaign of choosing what they allowed to be published and preventing others based only and only on their political views vis-à-vis the American elections.

Once the dust settles one way or the other, if there is any justice left in this world, social media personnel who have forged and implemented those policies must face trial.

What is most ironic about this whole new world that is everything but brave, is that the filthy rich and corrupt are cloaking themselves with the attire of the Left. There is really nothing left of the original Left in today’s Left.

Many, if not most of today’s ”Lefties” are inclined towards the current version of the political Left without really discerning that much has changed since the days of Castro and Guevara.

Today’s Left does not represent the working class.

Today’s Left is not concerned with achieving social justice.

Today’s Left is not concerned with ending capitalism and feudalism.

Today’s Neo-Left, is the consortium of globalists who own sweat shops in developing countries. They are the war-mongers, the arms dealers, the foot soldiers of thought police and they insist that your six-year-old children and grandchildren must learn about subjects like gender fluidity instead of learning history.

The devolution of the former political Left has been taking place for at least three decades, since the collapse of the USSR perhaps and the emergence of the so-called ‘New World Order’. But the 2016 Trump election has fast-tracked the process. George Soros who has an axe to grind with Communism became overnight the principle benefactor of most post-USSR Left movements. For better or for worse, it was as if he wanted to make sure that he contained the Left in a manner that deviates it from its original ideology. But he is not alone, and he is probably not doing this only and only because of political conviction. His ‘bigger’ partners, whether he is aware of their presence or not, have got a much bigger fish to fry; the fish of global control.

But is globalism what it appears to mean or is it a new form of hegemony? Let us not get into this herein. This will be the subject of the next article. Enough to say that what seems to surface from the actions and agendas of globalists is that they are adamant about destroying Western values; including democracy.

When my wife and I were in Russia on the 70^th Anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany, we were in total awe watching the Eternal Regiment on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg. Men and women proudly, silently and dignifiedly marching carrying photos of family members who perished fighting the Nazi malice. What was most amazing was seeing young boys and girls giving flowers to the elderly as a mark of respect. This is because students in Russia study history. The young generations must never take for granted the privileges they have. If they do not understand and respect the sacrifices of their forebears, they will never be able to realize what their own obligations are for today and the future. Many Americans do not know what the 4^th of July stands for any more than they know how many States there are in the Union. Children growing up in the West have no idea, no idea at all, how and why they live in affluent countries with public services and government-financed welfare.

And when the million man/woman march was over many hours after it started, we could not see a single empty drink can dumped on the street, not even cigarette butts. And then we remembered that a few days earlier when we were in Moscow admiring among other things, the subway/metro stations, we did not witness any evidence of vandalism or graffiti either on the carriages or in the stations.

A far cry from what we see in the West, because to be proud of who one is has become taboo in the West; courtesy the neo-Left and their henchmen.

Personally, I used to feel concerned of what the armed Right-wing Evangelicals might do if they have it their way. But despite their heavy public display of weapons, I didn’t see any evidence to show that they have taken to the streets for the purpose destroying shops and looting. In saying this, and I am not saying that the pro-Trump militias are incapable of perpetrating organized violence, but recently thus far they haven’t. If anything, with all the BLM-associated violence and the attacks Trump supporters have recently faced, the armed conservatives have thus far displayed a huge degree of self-control and abidance by the rules of the law. They argue that their presence is to protect private and public property, and evidence seems to stack up in their favour.

On the other hand, and despite the bias of mainstream media, videos have emerged showing BLM supporters not only looting, but also terrorizing those who disagree with them and refuse to put their fist up in show of support.

Today’s Neo-Left activists are the ones using Nazi tactics; not the other way around. They are the controlled opposition and the foot soldiers of the thought-police; and these are undeniable facts. If anything, the Trump factor has enhanced their exposure.

And if you resurrect Guevara and catapult him into today’s political world without giving him a crash refresher course, he would not know which side of the political divide is which. If anything, he may think that it is the other way around.

In the event of a Biden win that Trump’s supporters may see as unfair, they may be driven to become violent, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have seen serious and concerning rowdy violent behaviour from the Left that makes me now feel that I am more fearful of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion than I am from the armed Evangelicals.

When the late and great Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech, he did not dream of a day when angry mobs would use the excuse of human rights in order to loot and pillage, gang attack supporters of their political opponents, and break the law and Constitution.

And when John Lennon sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, he was hoping that one day political leaders would take heed and start putting their hearts before what they can achieve militarily.

Among other things, the thing with Trump is that he is/was not a politician. What drove him from being a profiteering tycoon to a man who wants to end American wars in the world is not something I can explain or understand. Clearly though, even if he is merely running America as a corporation, he must realize that it is not in America’s interests to be constantly engaged in expensive wars that do not have any benefit for America itself. If this is pragmatism from a profit-and-loss business perspective, then I don’t have any problems with this. I want to see American troops pulling out of conflict regions in the world. They have no business in Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and my beloved Syria to name a few places.

The thing about Trump is that he is not even a typical die-hard Republican. The archetypal Republicans are not a bunch of ‘nice guys’ either. How can anyone forget the legacy of the GOP? How can we forget George W Bush’s war on Iraq and his lies about the alleged Iraqi WMD’s? And what about his gang of infamous neo-cons; Perle, and Wolfowitz; not to forget Cheney, McCain, and many more from the gung-ho Republican Right that invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killed at least a million civilians and only ended up creating more problems than the ones they claimed they needed to resolve?

Whether Trump wins or loses the legal battle against what looks like a huge body of evidence of electoral fraud at different levels, between now and January the 20^th 2021, unlike what the social media brainwashers want people to think and believe, he is not a ‘presidential candidate’, he remains to be the President of the United States of America and he remains to be the Commander in Chief.

To this effect, in as much as the POTUS is domestically building up a huge legal case against the alleged win of Biden, he equally seems to be preparing for the worst-case scenario on international matters. He is working on the contingencies of losing by seemingly making serious efforts into ending wars and the presence of American troops overseas. May he be successful doing this if he is true to his word.

But Mr. President, if you really want to clean up the slate as much as possible in case you lose the legal battle against the corrupt who serve the Deep State, you must then remember that partial withdrawals do not end wars. A drawdown is not a withdrawal. Stand by your promise and let history festoon you as the man who ended all of America’s wars overseas. For even if you leave one soldier, yes Mr. President, one single American soldier on the soil of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other place on earth where his presence is not legitimately requested by the people of that land, then you will be remembered in history as the man who faked withdrawals of American troops; and you despise fake actions Mr. President, don’t you?

Last but not least Mr. President, you must at least stop the oil theft from Syria, repeal the Caesar Act, and pardon Assange.

Assange Mr. President is the victim of your enemies. His ‘crime’ was to expose the dirty works of Hillary. How can you not drop all charges against him?

And Mr. President, should you win the legal battle and prove that your opponents have cheated the public, you MUST then clean up the swamp with an iron fist and a high pressure hose. Zuckerberg, the Clintons, the Bidens, CNN, as well as officials that helped fabricate stories about you. The whole gamut of filthy lying manipulators must face justice and the next four years will be a case of now or never.

The electoral issues are something for the American legal system to decide; provided that the system continues to have the power to reach a decision that is lawful and not dictated by the party machine of the Democrats, their cohorts and henchmen with Facebook, Twitter and Google being on the top of the list.

Martin Luther King Jr. would now be saying I’m having a nightmare, I am having a nightmare because in the name of social justice, in my name, protestors are attacked, shops are looted and elections are getting rigged.

The failings of the Neo-Left do not mean that the neo-Right, Trumpism, is always or even necessarily sometimes right by default. What is pertinent is that the choice between the former and traditional Right and Left has now morphed into a choice of discerning right from wrong, and it is the Neo-Left activists who are behaving like Fascists, courtesy the Trump factor.

Biden Transition Team Says First Amendment is Flawed Because It Permits “Hate Speech”

Source

from Paul Craig Roberts

I told you this would happen. No one is to be allowed to speak against the official explanations: https://www.rt.com/usa/506751-biden-propagandist-anti-free-speech/

Biden’s transition team defines truth as hate speech. Truth is what the Democrat left, military/security complex, and presstitutes don’t want spoken or written.

“All speech is not equal,” declared Biden transition leader Richard Stengal, a former presstitute for MSNBC.

“Truth” is reserved for what serves the anti-white leftwing of the Democrat Party, the allied military/security complex and global elite. This means that no Trump supporter  speaks the truth and his/her hate speech must be silenced. Keith Olbermann’s demand for the arrest of President Trump and Tucker Carlson of Fox News is the beginning. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/keith-olbermann-calls-for-the-arrests-of-trump-and-tucker-carlson

The vote theft is the opening gun of a civil war in which white Americans will have to fight or be relegated to third class citizens. The 14th amendment is also dead. Trump Deplorables are no longer equal under the law.  They are denied free speech, but all others have free speech to denounce white America more harshly than Nazis are reported to have denounced Jews. Antifa and Black Lives Matter have begun the Kristallnachts. Those who tell the truth are losing the protection of the US Constitution.  Only liars are protected.

The obviously stolen election is a coup against democracy and America. If the American legal system fails to stand up to a stolen election, unless white Americans submit to third class status, violence is our future.

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2)

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

November 15, 2020

by Ramin Mazaheri and cross-posted with PressTV

For months the United States’ corporate-dominated media has terrified everyone with promises of right-wing militias taking to the streets, but here’s the thing: the pressures currently being put on 70 million Trump supporters is exponentially raising the possibility of that actually occurring, not reducing it.

It is ghastly illuminating to see just how quickly – and with such disregard for modern human rights – both the elite and the highly partisan citizens of the United States are attacking those who refuse to fall at the feet of Joe Biden, and even before all the votes are counted in a very narrow and highly-disputed election.

It is not an exaggeration, as I will list them below, but the tactics being used to push Biden into office are akin to wartime, yet the US is most emphatically not at war – all this derangement is over merely trying to vote as equals. I am not reporting from 1917 USSR, or 1949 China, or 1959 Cuba, or 1979 Iran – there are no foreign armed forces meddling in a revolution/civil war.

“Bidenism” is most emphatically not a revolutionary force. It is openly and proudly the exact opposite: a return to the “normalcy” embodied in the 2015 status quo. Nor is the US at civil war, but it seems some never-trumpets are actually hell-bent on starting one rather than do what every nation does: rely on a calm judicial review when there is a contested and very narrow vote. There is simply no other way out for the US than to follow normal democratic procedures, even if their electoral process is routinely called the worst among the Western core democracies by Harvard think-tanks.

(The US goes one step too far, as usual – other nations at least wait until the votes are actually mostly counted until a candidate declares victory, unlike Donald Trump and Joe Biden.)

If this does turn out to be the “Biden presidential(-elect) era” the world can easily grasp what a terrible, very Trumpian start it is. Americans, I think, cannot.

It’s just very unclear what Americans in 2020 truly believe in anymore?

We know that many American elite don’t truly believe in free press or free speech:

Part 1 of this article, “CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line” discussed how one of the nation’s top news anchors threatened lesser-privileged journalists with blacklisting if they don’t side with Biden immediately. His intimidation went uncommented upon/tacitly condoned by his top colleagues, when his pathetic careerism amid social instability should cost him at least some of his privileges.

Censorship is one way to prevent dissenting journalism, but informal censorship is another: The US doesn’t need formal government censors when their own journalists enforce such obvious suppression informally.

The goal of censorship is conformity. The US media which is corporate dominated – from the (fake) left New York Times to right-wing Fox News – is producing coverage which seemingly exclusively conforms to the false idea that it’s good journalism to exclude the massive number of Americans who feel the vote was not “fair and free”.

Since this troubled election began that number includes a stunning 70% of Republicans, per recent polls, but also independents and leftists. Since the election I interviewed both the Party for Socialism & Liberation and the Socialist Alternative Party (you have never heard of them because of the duopoly which strangles American elections) and both of them said the same thing: this is a terribly antiquated system in America, but in any democracy you count all the votes and litigate any contentious problems.

We know that many Americans don’t believe in the right to an attorney:

The anti-Trump and totally mainstream PAC/think tank The Republican Project has been lauded from the (fake) left to the far-right Washington Post for successfully harassing Trump’s Pennsylvania election lawyers into abandoning their client. The tactics used were not rhetorical and moral but mere intimidation, harassment and doxxing (releasing private information about people into public).

Trump is appalling, but does he not even deserve a lawyer?

Do people who associate with Trump, such as his lawyers, deserve such treatment? How far does this go – that’s the question those engaged in a witch-hunt are too fanatical to ask themselves.

Trump’s legal grievance is obviously supported by too large a democratic minority to ignore without causing lasting damage to the integrity of the American system.

By denying the right to an attorney these rabid anti-Trumpers do not technically betray the letter of their 1776 Revolution, that anti-imperialist event, but they certainly do seem to betray the spirit. It seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of the 6th amendment (ratified in 1791), which guarantees a lawyer in all criminal prosecutions, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th amendment (ratified in 1868).

Congratulations to rabid anti-Trumpers for being so very progressive that they have made it to just past the slavery era?

1868 is a good place mark for the mentality of US Democrats, who remain obsessed with race and totally untouched by any of the anti-imperialist and class-based analyses which began to prevail worldwide since 1917.

We know that some American lawmakers don’t believe in open elections:

Earlier this month I reported on the blacklist of Iranian media by the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America, so we shouldn’t have expected much from this fake-leftist faction openly committed to working within the Democratic Party.

But many Americans were shocked that DSA’s most powerful member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actually doubled down when a tweet of hers suggested that lists should be compiled of pro-Trumpers who have committed no crime other than supporting not her party.

When top elected officials vaguely threaten citizens with “the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years” and their behaviour is just working for a democratically-elected candidate, what else is this but massively undemocratic intimidation? That would makes free elections in the future impossible.

AOC is seemingly advocating for a one-party state, without knowing it, perhaps, but incompetence is no excuse. It’s certainly another sign of the widespread hysteria of rabid anti-Trumpers.

Directly after AOC’s call sprang up the “Trump Accountability Project”, headed by former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, which is seemingly looking to blacklist all those that worked for the (possibly) outgoing administration. Would Mr. Sevugan approve of a “Biden Accountability Project” in 2024 for Biden’s staff? Or is that a superfluous question because Democrats are preordained to rule in an unbroken, 1,000-year dynasty?

Why would anybody of merit want to go into public service anymore if they are just going to get blacklisted for doing so?

All the above: This is all wartime-era stuff.

And Chicago, where I am currently based, has been boarded up like it was wartime since the election. (And in August/September. And in May/June.)

It’s as if America can’t help but inexorably draw itself to conflict, because this is all totally self-imposed. This is not the 1960s – there is no peace movement here anymore.

America is acting like what it is: half-full of rabid imperialists

Of course, “neo-imperialism” means colonising your own nation for an international 1%, as the European Union – that supremely US-guided project; that project which is more American than even America – proves.

Of course America is in a state of xenophobia (hostility or fear towards different cultures or strangers) and witch-hunting: this is exactly what the Democratic Party has normalised via their failed Russophobia campaign since 2016.

Did they think they could just turn that off?

Many current Biden supporters failed to stand up against this phony campaign designed to deflect from the Democrats 2016 election failures (2020 saw an even bigger “Blue Wave” failure, but isn’t this anti-Trump supporter hysteria deflecting attention from that for now?), and the most vociferous of them are now aiming their pitchforks at the people who dared to vote differently. The problem is that there are so very many of such persons.

We should add that for four years on US social media this hate mongering has to be multiplied by millions, maybe even billions of time-wasting, venomous posts and spiteful “likes” about veritable political nonsense. It’s practically a justification for state-sponsored censorship, because what kind of society can be healthy towards their neighbors, much less foreigners, when there have these been daily witch-hunts in the phony online world?!

So these lists can go on and on, but our tolerance of such intimidation should not.

(And, yes, before Russophobia there was Islamophobia, and before that it was socialism-phobia, Blackphobia, Indianphobia, etc.)

What’s going on in America is that the most Trump-hating Democrats are acting exactly like what they are: not fascists, as is so often alleged of the other side in Western discourse, but imperialists, which is so rarely discussed in Western discourse.

Like Jake Tapper, they are not just careerists who aspire to outdo everyone in extremism in order to rule from atop the pyramid, they also want to believe they also have the moral high ground despite that. It is arrogance combined with a lust for power and a hysterical, unreasoning rage which comes from we know not where?

Half of the US is so hysterical about being doubted that they can’t recognise themselves in the mirror, but many of those they have colonised, blockaded, sanctioned, brutalised and impoverished sure can.

It’s absolutely appalling and the solution is not simply, “Say that Biden is the president.”

Any nation which has a culture willing to go to such lengths to get others to accept their view – rather than relying on reasoned, secure reflection and some sort of litigation or vetting process – is deeply messed up.

But, as the US proved with their murderous meddling in Iran’s 2009 election: many in the US don’t just not care about anyone’s else’s rules, judges or systems of conflict resolution – the 2020 election proves that many Americans don’t even care about their own.

They are the law-giver and the life-taker and the president-maker, because they say so. Better side with “they”, or else.

*************************************************************

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2)

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2)

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden walks out of The Queen theater on November 05, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. (AFP photo)

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.

November 05, 2020

(Part 1)

By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog and cross-posted with Press TV

It’s Day 3 of the US Election Debacle and – as we’re still mid-debacle – it’s very possible that Donald Trump will be the only conservative casualty, because it’s already certain the US election was an undeniable disaster for Democrats.

The Democrats had everything on their side in 2020: the mainstream media, the Deep State, the (self-professed) moral high ground, more campaign money than ever, a hysterically-motivated base – and yet if Trump does end up winning Democrats will have nothing to show for all that.

That should be stunning news. Here is the roundup of the non-presidential elections:

Republicans now hold 60% of state legislatures (where the most far-reaching policies are decided in this extremely decentralised, pioneer-influenced system), half of all state governorships, they’ll almost certainly keep a majority in the Senate, they shockingly reduced the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, conservatives just got a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court, and at the local judicial level Americans judges are already so conservative that it’s infamously said that they “never see corruption”.

(In the United States “corruption”, much like “propaganda”, is something only found in other countries, of course.)

So if Democratic leadership (dominated by the Clintonista faction) is not corrupt than they surely are incompetent, no? Despite every cultural, political and financial advantage – truly an unprecedented situation – they might walk away with only decapitating the figurehead of Trumpism.

It’s a second consecutive enormous failure by whoever is planning Democratic Party strategy – they now have two black eyes, even if they oust Trump. That’s good news for the Sandernista faction, but their blacklist of Iranian media shows how fake-leftist they really are.

The American commentariat is admitting the major Democratic defeat, but it’s being currently obscured by the presidential vote debacle, which is turning out like we all expected: judges will decide and not voters.

The US, it must be remembered, has always been a lawyer-dominated system. That is what “rule of law” really means in the West: domination by aristocratic lawyers, as opposed to worker domination, God domination, vanguard party domination, elders domination and all the other available options. The outsider Trump threatened this domination, and thus the US political elite seemingly did all they could to ensure that the presidential vote would be disputed in order to ensure control by this societal sector which they came from, control and rewrite at will.

Kill a snake’s head and the snake dies, but 70+ million Trump voters are not snakes but humans

Putting aside the uncertain fate of Trump himself, the 2020 election results already objectively insist that main failure of Democrats was due to their insistence that Trumpism was merely a cult of personality.

This allowed them to not seriously evaluate the true democratic electability of their policies, personalities, principles and job performance: they refused to admit that Trump incarnated actual political ideas and that he genuinely reflected authentic some cultural ideas and trends. By failing to understand that Trumpism was a democratic force which must be accounted for, the electoral reckoning was emphatically anti-Democratic Paty in spite of their unprecedented advantages.

The Democrats chose to rely on sensationalistic fear-mongering: Trumpism was based on White supremacy; White militias are about to shoot up Main Street.

Oh really? I think they failed to understand that both of these hysterical assertions were always going to be easily provable no later than November 4, 2020:

So Trump’s increased 2020 vote totals in Black and Latino communities – they are White supremacists too? Of course not – there is something deeper than what Democrats claim. Since election day American cities are mostly ghost towns – maybe 1,000 anti-Trumpers marched in Chicago, even smaller numbers of pro-Trumpers rallied at voting booths, but the mainstream media warned for months that semi-automatic fire was actually going to be seen beyond the governmentally-abandoned African-American ghetto for the first time ever… so where is it?

This was always absurd, stupid, lazy, hysterical thinking, and it was exactly like what they did in France to their Yellow Vests, whom I covered more than probably any other reporter working in either English or French: accusing these movements of White supremacism and anti-Semitism was always a way to discredit and ultimately suppress the political analyses of the lower classes, and especially of those whom Americans descriptively call “White Trash”.

But Trump supporters are not all White nor does their poverty or lack of a vastly overrated college degree make them human “trash”; French Arabs supported the Yellow Vests as much as any other Frenchman. Sadly, this is all something the corporate media cannot allow to be said openly, so there is widespread misunderstanding.

We must ask why that is?

The answer lies in the domination of democratic structures in the West by their 1%. The backbone of the Western system is not lower-middle class mullahs, nor cobblers-turned-parlimentarians in Cuba, nor a communist party whose acceptance rate is on par with the American “Ivy League” of universities – the backbone of the Western system is exactly like shah-era Iran: a tiny coterie of a few dozen rich families, and then a small percentage of the population who are handed some of the wealth and stability produced by the toil of the nation’s masses in exchange for defending the few dozen gangster families.

And the backbone is also something else, which like “propaganda” and “corruption”, is never discussed in the US mainstream: duopoly. But this is the subject for Part Two – let’s wrap up the reality of Trumpism’s victory even amid a possible defeat by Trump.

Many of the newly-elected Republicans are widely called “Trumpian” – this does not mean they are parading around with gilt-framed pictures of The Donald but that they have adopted many of his policies, such as anti-globalisation, anti-censorship, economic patriotism, sovereignty and – crucially for the world – a reluctance for more endless imperialist wars.

The adjective “Trumpian” does imply negative policies: a hard line on immigration, a sinful and useless arrogance that America is the greatest country in the history of mankind (that is a direct quote – you hear it all the time in public over here) and a Red Scare-like hysteria against the socialist-inspired ideas of a strong central government and economic redistribution.

(What’s so telling about the US is that the word “socialism” is never uttered by their alleged left wing – even the Bernie Sanders-linked Democratic Socialists of America are so timid and so propagandised that they absurdly and incorrectly added the adjective “Democratic” in front of socialism. “Socialism” in the United States is a word only heard when hysterically screamed by the right-wing, and it is hysterically screamed by them all the time, I can report.)

But the election confirms that Trumpism is an ideology and not merely a one-time cult of personality.

Trump the man is unpleasant (to be polite) but that personal judgment is far, far less relevant than the cultural-political ideas it is now clear that he – for better or for worse – genuinely reflected and clearly fostered. My point here is not to condone nor condemn these cultural-political ideas – I am merely saying: there are genuine ideas here which are authentically championed by a very large part of the US public. It is bad journalism to ignore this and scream “White supremacism!”.

But the US media and chattering class is another huge election night loser along with the Democratic Party – both were totally wrong about a non-existent “Blue Wave” and the denial of Trump’s grassroots appeal.

Their only hope is Trump loses and they keep chattering uselessly about that to deflect attention from that submerged part of the iceberg which they got all wrong journalistically. All I can say as a journalist is: you get it wrong, you get demoted – you lose your twice-weekly editorial sport, you no longer are on the editorial board, etc. Back to the street for you. At least ideally.

Will there be consequences for getting it wrong for the failed Democratic elite or the US mainstream media? They have merited such reproachful dismissiveness that I’ll direct towards them only what I think is the laziest journalistic phrase: It remains to be seen.

Part Two will address how Trumpism related to the world’s most powerful and longest-running duopoly.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir

www.presstv.co.uk

www.presstv.tv

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• Russia says US election system has ‘obvious shortcomings’
• The House always wins: US elections leave status quo unaffected, except for Trump

South Africa – The State/Ruling Class as predator and citizens as prey

Protea cynaroides, the king protea, is a flowering plant. It is a distinctive member of Protea, having the largest flower head in the genus. The species is also known as giant protea, honeypot, or king sugar bush. It is widely distributed in the southwestern and southern parts of South Africa in the fynbos region.

November 02, 2020

by a South African writer for the Saker Blog

What is the The ‘Why’ of this writing?  Because, for the US, some of you may be the proverbial ‘white South Africans’ now.

We can assume that BLM, Antifa, and similar groupings, particularly in the US, are inventions by factions of the ruling class elites. Initially, it looked perhaps as simple as a garden variety color revolution, to divert attention from the collapsing economy and a possible unprecedented human catastrophe that will follow after the election. The initial plan involved shifting public attention to divisive racial issues, sometimes created for the cause specifically, like institutional racism. It put working people at each other’s throats while concealing the vicious class war that is behind the shield of a fake social justice movement. Now, seemingly, they are just breaking everything down and are intent on changing the United States into some kind of imagined utopia, that perhaps they cannot even define.

Well, it is almost as if these movements were trained in South Africa for this specific purpose. We have certainly seen the same and similar tactics over our past 25+ years under the ‘benevolent rule’ of a bunch of violent pretend Marxists.

A few, I Told You So’s from South Africa :

(No, this is not schadenfreude. I took the idea from one of Andre Vltchek’s (RIP)  last writings:) Now West should sit on its backside, shut up and listen to “the others”

At first glance, it would seem that I’m shooting myself in the foot by posting this piece of Andre Vltchek where he analyses the white supremacy of the west. What he is describing, is exactly the same attitude that the west took when it finally killed South Africa with sanctions and supported low-level war over basically the whole of the south of the African continent. The ‘know better exceptional cadre’ did their harm, although internally in the country the crimes and unfairness of an apartheid regime were already being attended to. We already knew separate development would not make it as a policy. But the west knows best and they will sanction and finagle in the background. Perhaps you do not know of the finagling. Gold for Play was the deal with the neo-Chiefs. You give us gold, we can make you play in the new South Africa.

Of course, in South Africa, the white minority is “the others”, which is not exactly what Vltchek intended. That is what makes the situation different and is why so many do not get their heads wrapped around the South African issue.

You know who else ‘told you so’. Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, from Ilana Mercer told you so. But hey, you cannot possibly take lessons from a White South African author and a Jewess to boot, can you? (Yes, yes, I know the word Jewess causes upheaval. Female Jew sounds even worse).

I told you that the race issue is fake. Don’t you hear this around you? Institutional Racism, they say. Are you an institutional racist? Compared with South Africa during the apartheid era, you have no institutional racism. Sneaky underhanded hidden cruel racism yes, but not institutionalized as we had it, and now have it on steroids and written in the law, against the minority whites in South Africa.

I told you that the current ruling classes are fake Marxists. You only have to read Ramin Mazaheri on this site to understand what fake Marxists are. A sorry lot of BLM’s and co in the US are all fake Marxists, as is the sorry lot of ANC cadres that are pretending to lead South Africa but only leaves wrack and ruin in their wake.

I told you that they are killing whites for being white. What are your Antifas and BLM’s doing now? Are they not wanting you to apologize and shamed for simply being born white?

I told you that they are visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children. Reparations for slavery ringing any bells?

I told you that, in the case of South Africa specifically there was no genocide of black South Africans by Boers – ever – yet, the white South Africans are still portrayed as vicious racists. Like Vlchec says: listen to “the others”, and in South Africa, the whites are “the others”

I told you that they are capturing the state and stealing everything that is nailed down and not nailed down. The corollary with the US is the burning of good buildings and real estate and the creation of opportunity zones so that the ruling elites can pick up those areas for pennies. At least in the US, they want to pay a bit for this real estate. In South Africa, they want to take it without compensation.

I told you that there are racist laws on the books, created to suppress whites. BEE. The corollary in the US is taking a knee, subjecting yourself to a standard, set for you, perhaps not a sane standard, as a solidarity movement for the fake Marxists.

And the old canard, said in an accusatory tone: ‘If you are not happy, why don’t you just go back where you came from?’ I told you that no, the whites cannot just leave. Can you just up and leave your country now? Do you have the right of return to your initial European country? Do you even have ancestry left there? I’m sure not. The first pilgrims arrived in the US in 1620. The first rounding of the Cape of Storms or Cape of Good Hope and the first European to reach the Cape was the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. The first arrivals to build a victualing station at the Cape of Good Hope was in 1652. No, we are not Europeans, we are white Africans with a distinct and unique language and civilization.

I told you that the white supremacists are trying to ride on the situation to prove their own point. The corollary in the US is hiding their white supremacy under a moral equivalency, i.e., if they are so bad, we must be so good.

So without much more ado, let’s look at a few still hot incidents in South Africa. I have no doubt that you will soon see similes or corollaries come down the pike in your US neck of the woods.

There was a straw that broke the camel’s back of the white South African population. There is no more reasoning left, for this population. This straw was the brutal murder, and some are now calling it an assassination, of young farmer Brendin Horner in a farming area called Senekal. Some ‘guilty’ was found and brought to court but were they really the ‘guilty’?

We are not a people that protest out in the streets. It is not a thing for us. I told you in one of the previous pieces of a worker’s strike, which was the first mainly white worker’s strike that I saw in all my life. We don’t do these things: we discuss, we talk, we make recommendations, we write, we make speeches, we give proposals, we lobby government, but evidently pushed too far, we too will protest. So, when the first court case started, the farmers protested outside of the court. Some violence took place, a police vehicle was overturned, and eventually fire put to it. It was speeding toward peaceful (truly peaceful, not BLM style peaceful) protesting farmers, and dropping some kind of tear gas is what we understand.  For this incident, some farmers were arrested and charged with terrorism. Can you believe it?. Mayhem is not our way – and we don’t burn things in protest as we know the incredible danger of fire in rural farming areas.

It soon became clear why a police vehicle was overturned. As I understand now detailed reporting implicates fully the local police and the police Chiefs in a local stock theft syndicate and Brendin Horner investigated this. Was it a ‘normal violent farm killing’, or was it an assassination? Some heads of police departments suddenly had plenty new livestock. The police and the stock thieves worked together in a livestock theft ring to, of course, steal their new livestock from whitey.

This story is very much abbreviated and much more complicated with counter-protests by the Economic Freedom Fighters but what is clear is that this is the straw that broke the camel’s back after + 25 years of ANC government and white minority suppression on every level of society.

The white community evidently is not allowed to protest and the farmers were soon brutally punished for their protests. The cry went out, in public, this is not a secret, we know who it is, we know which party he leads as he bellowed: Burn Them! Burn their lands! Soon the farms were burning in a terrible scorched earth policy. Sure, that was written off to a little municipal protest. Yes sure, why did you then not burn down the municipal building?

The towns so far hit by these acts of terrorism are Hoopstad, Hertzogville, Boshof, and Dealesville, food basket farming country, but the fear is that this might only be the beginning of an organized onslaught. An excess of 100,000 hectares of farmland has been destroyed at the time of this report, with millions in damage. But there were other victims. Some farmers, hearing the terrible cries of their animals and livestock as the animals were burning to death, and not able to withstand or face this, simply shot themselves.

Is there a corollary with the knee on the neck killing of George Floyd in the US? The corollary is that it was a straw that started the unrest in the US. This killing of Brendin Horner is the straw that broke any supportive feelings of the white minority community in South Africa toward Nelson Mandela’s ‘rainbow nation’.

During Covid lockdown, the government was just too kind and distributed food parcels. Evidently, the whites don’t eat, because no food parcel reached any white person really. The distribution trucks drove past even if the community stood waiting for them.  If a whitey got hold of a distributed food parcel, this was grabbed out of their hands and basically confiscated. The whites were also physically blocked from reaching distribution points. Yes, food parcels were handed to black communities only. Was this only incompetence? I wish it was. What the smaller farmers then did, was to start a food supply protest and only supply the white community with fresh food. And now, after their farms are burnt, there is no food to protest with. The white community is now supporting the white community. What do you think is going to happen when hunger truly sets in among those who burnt the farms?  Planting time is over.  So, they arrested 17, but let me ask the question again. Were those the real perpetrators, or are the perpetrators the high government officials on State level that bellow: Burn them, Burn their lands?

Whites evidently don’t need to work or earn a wage these days. There is a staff reduction at a large company, Barloworld. (Covid related). Do you know who is being reduced? Whites. There is no secret here as it is a formal policy.

Willie Venter, deputy general secretary of the Metal & Engineering Industry at Solidarity said “We are extremely disappointed with the unfair way in which Barloworld handled the process. The fact that they have now laid off more workers on the basis of skin colour further aggravates the already malicious undertones of the consultation process,”

“We cannot allow the state’s ideologies to become the norm within the private sector. Race played a pertinent role in the retrenchment criteria of Barloworld, and that cannot be tolerated.”

This case is now in court and the judge admitted: “We already have systemic and institutionalized racism against the small white community in South Africa, with discrimination on the basis of skin color in each and every facet of South African society. Barloworld is taking the lead in this systemic racism by taking advantage of these institutional racist laws to implement retrenchments based on race – the white race that is. But why? What is the goal? Black Supremacy? Black Monopoly Capital? Hatred?”

The straw that broke the camel’s back is now beginning to take its toll. There is no way out now. Civil war or a new homeland. We are a peaceful people without a real hunger for war. The last time we went to war, we whipped British butt, until they put our women and children in concentration camps. More violence for the sake of violence will be flowing from these events in the short term. The Murder of a white person is actively encouraged by state sources, the more brutal, the better.   Theft from a white person is encouraged by state sources. This is not a secret any longer.

Movements toward ethnic homelands are now attracting real attention and are strengthening. There are a few of these and perhaps they will now all coalesce.

I can hear the comments. Why not deal through the BRICS? Who do you think gets selected for BRICS delegates? Nobody gives a damn.

Afriforum has made what seems to be some progress in their #theworldmustknow outreach.

“The civil rights organization AfriForum has just received confirmation that the organization is now officially registered with the United Nations (UN) as a nongovernmental organization with special consultative status. This status offers AfriForum various opportunities and privileges to continue its work on a much larger scale in the UN’s conference rooms. The breakthrough was made despite the South African government working actively for many years to deprive AfriForum of these opportunities.”

I speak for my group but it must be understood that the other groups in South Africa are under similar stress. The fact that I don’t speak for them, does not mean that I do not recognize the overall situation of despair. When a state becomes the perpetrator and loses sight of its main purpose of protection and well-being of its citizens, those very self-same citizens become the target of such a state. In a fruitless belief that one is not the target of your own government, because you are not told why the country is suffering, it is easy (but also pathologically resentful) to seek and place blame on the whites and as it were, burn them, because conceptually they must be at fault.  It is even worse when the State gives a false representation of why the country is suffering and in the case of South Africa, this ‘why’ question is answered by a small phrase:  It Is That Whiteness!

Now seemingly the Chinese have decided to close down their wallet as the graft and corruption of State Officials of the neo-ruling class are open and in your face. State looting became even more evident during the procurement of the necessities for Covid. The looting was so evident, that those clever ministers and high government officials of the day are asking for amnesty for their looting, I kid you not. ‘Sorry for the stealing of governmental Covid resources which was for the people, we will never do it again’, of course, they do not return one penny, and decades of opportunity for rebuilding has been lost in South Africa. Is it any wonder that seemingly the Chinese have closed the purse?

But hey! The ruling South African government did not miss a beat and simply turned around and accepted a 4+billion dollar IMF loan. How very deeply corrupt can one actually be, pleading amnesty for wholesale government graft and corruption on one hand (even before charged) but quickly sell yourself to the IMF on the other hand, as long as the good times and the big money roll?.

What do you want me to say? ‘I told you so’ is getting so old.

Pretend Marxist Neo-Chiefs Practice Destructive Capitalism, or

Dispossession of land on the basis of race – a State Enrichment and Control Strategy in the South African Context

Now that the money bag mechanisms of the dead empire of the west are again rewarding those that are killing and targeting their own people, do you really think I’m saying “I told you so” in a manner of schadenfreude? No, but it would be good if you recognize that we have a joint enemy. (But please please, do not send Pompeo to help, or anyone else really! The IMF was enough. We will be enjoying further deprivations resulting from the west’s Great Reset Plan. But, if you happen to have a country lying empty somewhere, let us know.)

This link has the story and a book review on sheer graft. What makes it sad, is that this graft even breaks apart the natural resources of a once very beautiful country.

William Saunderson-Meyer writes on a new book by Rehana Rossouw on David Mabuza’s Mpumalanga 

Usually, at the end of an article about South Africa, I try to find something good: a piece of music, a local color story, a description of culture .. just something upbeat because the story invariably is sad. Sorry to disappoint this time. Today I leave you with the hashtag, #theworldmustknow, and with a young King Protea.  This one will grow up and open up to be as big as a dinner plate.