A poster on a closed shop shows an Israeli milk carton and Arabic in red reads: “boycott,” during a general strike, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Tuesday, May 18, 2021. Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories are on strike in a rare collective action against Israel’s policies, as the war, now in its second week, showed no signs of abating. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — This month, City University of New York’s (CUNY) law school faculty unanimously passed a resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, joining a chorus of American universities advocating for Palestinian rights. Harvard University’s Crimson newspaper endorsed the movement earlier this year, with 50 of the school’s faculty members supporting the decision. And in March, the Middle East Studies Association also voted to endorse the BDS movement.
As college campuses across the U.S. grow in their support for Palestine, their administrations – many still having relations with major Israeli universities complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine – appear less likely to agree. With that in mind, BDS activists urge supporters to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
HOW ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES ARE COMPLICIT
As illustrated by Visualizing Palestine, a data-driven project crafting graphics on the Palestine-Israel issue, several notable Israeli universities assist the state in maintaining its oppression of Palestinians. Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Ariel University, Haifa University, Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the Technion Institute of Technology all contribute to ongoing colonial violence.
Credit | VisualizingImpact
Credit | VisualizingImpact
For instance, Tel Aviv University invites weapon manufacturers like Elbit Systems to its annual Technology Employment Fair and invites students to Elbit Systems events for the purpose of recruitment. The school has also played a role in establishing the Israeli army’s military doctrines and ethical codes and training students to provide legal defense through its army reserve program. The school’s Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine is currently keeping 63 Palestinian corpses in a medical lab freezer as part of Israel’s policy of withholding bodies to use as bargaining chips in future negotiations.
Technion also works with arms developers, partnering with Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems on research projects. Technion, Ben-Gurion, and Bar-Ilan all participated in building a humanoid robot with funding provided by the Israeli and U.S. defense departments. Bar-Ilan and Technion also collaborate with the Israeli military to develop equipment used in executing home demolitions.
Hebrew University coordinates with the Israeli police in harassing and surveilling nearby Palestinian communities. Haifa University hosts a program training students on how to become “digital advocates for Israel.” And Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion, and Haifa University offered benefits and scholarships to students who participated in the military assault on Gaza in 2014.
These universities are deeply entwined in Israel’s apartheid, making their American partners also indirectly complicit.
AMERICAN ACADEMIA AND ISRAELI APARTHEID
Despite growing calls from student activists for their schools to support the BDS movement, American universities continue to collaborate with Israel.
“The university is putting itself at risk of importing the racist policies of the Israeli state into university campuses because of the collaboration that’s required,” Nasreen Abd Elal, information designer at Visualizing Palestine, told MintPress News. Abd Elal was referring to Columbia University’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, which was launched in 2020. She was involved in the student campaign against it at Columbia.
Columbia isn’t the only American school linked to complicit Israeli universities, though. Many of the U.S.’ leading universities coordinate with Israeli institutions. The following schools have study-abroadexchange programs or research partnerships with Tel Aviv University, in addition to Columbia and CUNY:
Technion and Cornell partnered together to create the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in 2011. Washington University of St. Louis partners with Technion through its McDonnell International Scholars Academy. The University of Illinois partners with both Tel Aviv and Hebrew University through its research center, Discovery Partners Institute. In 2019 Ariel University, which is located in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, announced a partnership with Florida Atlantic University.
Many of these academic institutions are also heavily invested in Israeli companies, including Columbia, Tufts, UNC, and Urbana-Champaign. Harvard grabbed headlines in April when its newspaper endorsed the BDS movement, but the school maintains investments in several companies listed on the UN’s database of companies involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise. These include Bookings Holdings, Expedia, General Mills, and Motorola.
BGN Technologies, Ben-Gurion’s technology transfer company, established its Advanced Technologies Park. The park’s tenants include American firms dbMotion and Oracle. BGN Technologies also works with American entities the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nexant, Delek US, Duquesne Light Company, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, and the MITRE Corporation, through its joint consortium related to developing cyber protection infrastructure.
And the Cleveland Clinic Foundation entered into an academic cooperation agreement with the Hebrew University in 2017.
SUPPRESSING PALESTINIAN ACADEMIC FREEDOM
BDS resolutions in academia aren’t passing at a record or even significant rate, but Abd Elal says the administrative reaction to those that have passed demonstrates the movement is working:
The instinctual response of administrators tends to come out swinging in opposition saying, “We’ll never commit to divestment.“ But the fact they feel obliged to respond is provoking that confrontation. Students and faculty are seeing how the university will throw out the democratic mandate because of their interest in maintaining good relationships with their investors.”
Abd Elal added that these campaigns have managed to garner a groundswell of support, and that, in itself, is powerful. “There have been significant strides made in building solidarity on campus and getting people to commit to not going to these institutions and putting pressure on the administration to end [the agreements],” she said.
The call for an academic boycott goes beyond the institutional level, however. “The Israeli state and occupation marginalize Palestinian students and universities and restrict access of international scholars and students to Palestinian universities, which is a significant threat to academic freedom,” Abd Elal said.
In February, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) published new instructions on foreign entry into the West Bank. These guidelines included a swath of new restrictions for individuals wishing to learn or work at Palestinian universities. Foreign lecturers must hold a doctorate and can only teach in certain fields. COGAT will permit only 150 foreign students at Palestinian universities each year and can limit the fields of study open to them.
As detailed above, many American universities have academic agreements with Israeli universities. Yet promoting a free exchange of ideas between Israeli and American academics tends to ignore the crippling hold Israel has on Palestinian education.
Abd Elal explained that Visualizing Palestine’s graphic wasn’t meant to just describe how Israeli universities are complicit in apartheid, but also how the Israeli state has an interest in suppressing Palestinian academic freedom. “The occupation really cuts off Palestinians from the academic community,” she said. “So for that reason, the academic boycott is a key way of standing in solidarity with our academic peers.”
Feature photo | Nasser Nasser | AP
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Gulf News.
My old boss Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute in the 1970s, had a set speech that he would give at public meetings. He said that back in high school in Los Angeles, his teachers would say what most liberals were saying in the 1940s and 50s: “Wars never solved anything.” It was as if they never changed anything – and therefore shouldn’t be fought.
Herman disagreed, and made lists of all sorts of things that wars had solved in world history, or at least changed. He was right, and of course that is the aim of both sides in today’s New Cold War confrontation in Ukraine.
The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides – the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.
The active military force and aggression since 1991 has been the United States. Rejecting mutual disarmament of the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, there was no “peace dividend.” Instead, the U.S. policy executed by the Clinton and subsequent administrations to wage a new military expansion via NATO has paid a 30-year dividend in the form of shifting the foreign policy of Western Europe and other American allies out of their domestic political sphere into their own U.S.-oriented “national security” blob (the word for special interests that must not be named). NATO has become Europe’s foreign-policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.
The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime was aimed at (and has succeeded in forcing a showdown in response the fear by U.S. interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade and investment with China and Russia.
To understand just what U.S. aims and interests are threatened, it is necessary to understand U.S. politics and “the blob,” that is, the government central planning that cannot be explained by looking at ostensibly democratic politics. This is not the politics of U.S. senators and representatives representing their congressional voting districts or states.
America’s three oligarchies in control of U.S. foreign policy
It is more realistic to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the military-industrial complex, the oil and gas (and mining) complex, and the banking and real estate complex than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives do not represent their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major political campaign contributors. A Venn diagram would show that in today’s post-Citizens United world, U.S. politicians represent their campaign contributors, not voters. And these contributors fall basically into three main blocs.
Three main oligarchic groups that have bought control of the Senate and Congress to put their own policy makers in the State Department and Defense Department. First is the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) – arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, have broadly diversified their factories and employment in nearly every state, and especially in the Congressional districts where key Congressional committee heads are elected. Their economic base is monopoly rent, obtained above all from their arms sales to NATO, to Near Eastern oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus. Stocks for these companies soared immediately upon news of the Russian attack, leading a two-day stock-market surge as investors recognized that war in a world of cost-plus “Pentagon capitalism” (as Seymour Melman described it) will provide a guaranteed national-security umbrella for monopoly profits for war industries. Senators and Congressional representatives from California and Washington traditionally have represented the MIC, along with the solid pro-military South. The past week’s military escalation promises soaring arms sales to NATO and other U.S. allies, enriching the actual constituents of these politicians. Germany quickly agreed to raise is arms spending to over 2% of GDP.
The second major oligarchic bloc is the rent-extracting oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM), riding America’s special tax favoritism granted to companies emptying natural resources out of the ground and putting them mostly into the atmosphere, oceans and water supply. Like the banking and real estate sector seeking to maximize economic rent and maximizing capital gains for housing and other assets,, the aim of this OGAM sector is to maximize the price of its energy and raw materials so as to maximize its natural-resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major U.S. priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline threatened to link the Western European and Russian economies more tightly together.
If oil, gas and mining operations are not situated in every U.S. voting district, at least their investors are. Senators from Texas and other Western oil-producing and mining states are the leading OGAM lobbyists, and the State Department has a heavy oil-sector influence providing a national-security umbrella for the sector’s special tax breaks. The ancillary political aim is to ignore and reject environmental drives to replace oil, gas and coal with alternative sources of energy. The Biden administration accordingly has backed the expansion of offshore drilling, supported the Canadian pipeline to the world’s dirtiest petroleum source in the Athabasca tar sands, and celebrated the revival of U.S. fracking.
The foreign-policy extension is to prevent foreign countries not leaving control of their oil, gas and mining to U.S. OGAM companies from competing in world markets with U.S. suppliers. Isolating Russia (and Iran) from Western markets will reduce the supply of oil and gas, pushing up prices and corporate profits accordingly.
The third major oligarchic group is the symbiotic Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which is the modern finance-capitalist successor to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents. With most housing in today’s world having become owner-occupied (although with sharply rising rates of absentee landlordship since the post-2008 wave of Obama Evictions), land rent is paid largely to the banking sector in the form of mortgage interest and debt amortization (on rising debt/equity ratios as bank lending inflates housing prices). About 80 percent of U.S. and British bank loans are to the real estate sector, inflating land prices to create capital gains – which are effectively tax-exempt for absentee owners.
This Wall Street-centered banking and real estate bloc is even more broadly based on a district-by-district basis than the MIC. Its New York senator from Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, heads the Senate, long supported by Delaware’s former Senator from the credit-card industry Joe Biden, and Connecticut’s senators from the insurance sector centered in that state. Domestically, the aim of this sector is to maximize land rent and the “capital’ gains resulting from rising land rent. Internationally, the FIRE sector’s aim is to privatize foreign economies (above all to secure the privilege of credit creation in U.S. hands), so as to turn government infrastructure and public utilities into rent-seeking monopolies to provide basic services (such as health care, education, transportation, communications and information technology) at maximum prices instead of at subsidized prices to reduce the cost of living and doing business. And Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (viz. the Rockefeller-dominated Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).
The FIRE, MIC and OGAM sectors are the three rentier sectors that dominate today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. Their mutual fortunes have soared as MIC and OGAM stocks have increased. And moves to exclude Russia from the Western financial system (and partially now from SWIFT), coupled with the adverse effects of isolating European economies from Russian energy, promise to spur an inflow into dollarized financial securities
As mentioned at the outset, it is more helpful to view U.S. economic and foreign policy in terms of the complexes based on these three rentier sectors than in terms of the political policy of Republicans and Democrats. The key senators and congressional representatives are not representing their states and districts as much as the economic and financial interests of their major donors. That is why neither manufacturing nor agriculture play the dominant role in U.S. foreign policy today. The convergence of the policy aims of America’s three dominant rentier groups overwhelms the interests of labor and even of industrial capital beyond the MIC. That convergence is the defining characteristic of today’s post-industrial finance capitalism. It is basically a reversion to economic rent-seeking, which is independent of the politics of labor and industrial capital.
The dynamic that needs to be traced today is why this oligarchic blob has found its interest in prodding Russia into what Russia evidently viewed as a do-or-die stance to resist the increasingly violent attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, along with the broader Western threats against Russia.
The rentier “blob’s” expected consequences of the New Cold War
As President Biden explained, the current U.S.-orchestrated military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”) is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S. troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S. suppliers.
U.S. officials first tried to stop construction of the pipeline from being completed. Firms aiding in its construction were sanctioned, but finally Russia itself completed the pipeline. U.S. pressure then turned on the traditionally pliant German politicians, claiming that Germany and the rest of Europe faced a National Security threat from Russia turning off the gas, presumably to extract some political or economic concessions. No specific Russian demands could be thought up, and so their nature was left obscure and blob-like. Germany refused to authorize Nord Stream 2 from officially going into operation.
A major aim of today’s New Cold War is to monopolize the market for U.S. shipments of liquified natural gas (LNG). Already under Donald Trump’s administration, Angela Merkel was bullied into promising to spend $1 billion building new port facilities for U.S. tanker ships to unload natural gas for German use. The Democratic election victory in November 2020, followed by Ms. Merkel’s retirement from Germany’s political scene, led to cancellation of this port investment, leaving Germany really without much alternative to importing Russian gas to heat its homes, power its electric utilities, and to provide raw material for its fertilizer industry and hence the maintenance of its farm productivity.
So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices, above all to the detriment of Germany. In addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. oil companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy. That looms as the third time in a century that the United States has defeated Germany – each time increasing its control over a German economy increasingly dependent on the United States for imports and policy leadership, with NATO being the effective check against any domestic nationalist resistance.
Higher gasoline, heating and other energy prices also will hurt U.S. consumers and those of other nations (especially Global South energy-deficit economies) and leave less of the U.S. family budget for spending on domestic goods and services. This could squeeze marginalized homeowners and investors, leading to further concentration of absentee ownership of housing and commercial property in the United States, along with buyouts of distressed real estate owners in other countries faced with soaring heating and energy costs. But that is deemed collateral damage by the post-industrial blob.
Food prices also will rise, headed by wheat. (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.) This will squeeze many Near Eastern and Global South food-deficit countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.
Russian raw-materials exports may be blocked by Russia in response to the currency and SWIFT sanctions. This threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel and aluminum (the production of which consumes much electricity as its major cost – which will make that metal more expensive). If China decides to see itself as the next nation being threatened and joins Russia in a common protest against the U.S. trade and financial warfare, the Western economies are in for a serious shock.
The long-term dream of U.S. New Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its Yeltsin/Harvard Boys managerial kleptocracy, with oligarchs seeking to cash in their privatizations in Western stock markets. OGAM still dreams of buying majority control of Yukos and Gazprom. Wall Street would love to recreate a Russian stock market boom. And MIC investors are happily anticipating the prospect of selling more weapons to help bring all this about.
Russia’s intentions to benefit from America’s unintended consequences
What does Russia want? Most immediately, to remove the neo-Nazi anti-Russian core that the Maidan massacre and coup put in place in 2014. Ukraine is to be neutralized, which to Russia means basically pro-Russian, dominated by Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. The aim is to prevent Ukraine from becoming a staging ground of U.S.-orchestrated anti-Russian moves a la Chechnya and Georgia.
Russia’s longer-term aim is to pry Europe away from NATO and U.S. dominance – and in the process, create with China a new multipolar world order centered on an economically integrated Eurasia. The aim is to dissolve NATO altogether, and then to promote the broad disarmament and denuclearization policies that Russia has been pushing for. Not only will this cut back foreign purchases of U.S. arms, but it may end up leading to sanctions against future U.S. military adventurism. That would leave America with less ability to fund its military operations as de-dollarization accelerates.
Now that it should be obvious to any informed observer that (1) NATO’s purpose is aggression, not defense, and (2) there is no further territory for it to conquer from the remains of the old Soviet Union, what does Europe get out of continued membership? It is obvious that Russia never again will invade Europe. It has nothing to gain – and had nothing to gain by fighting Ukraine, except to roll back NATO’s proxy expansion into that country and the NATO-backed attacks on Novorossiya.
Will European nationalist leaders (the left is largely pro-US) ask why their countries should pay for U.S. arms that only put them in danger, pay higher prices for U.S. LNG and energy, pay more for grain and Russian-produced raw materials, all while losing the option of making export sales and profits on peaceful investment in Russia – and perhaps losing China as well?
The U.S. confiscation of Russian monetary reserves, following the recent theft of Afghanistan’s reserves (and England’s seizure of Venezuela’s gold stocks held there) threatens every country’s adherence to the Dollar Standard, and hence the dollar’s role as the vehicle for foreign-exchange savings by the world’s central banks. This will accelerate the international de-dollarization process already started by Russia and China relying on mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.
Over the longer term, Russia is likely to join China in forming an alternative to the U.S.-dominated IMF and World Bank. Russia’s announcement that it wants to arrest the Ukrainian Nazis and hold a war crimes trial seems to imply an alternative to the Hague court will be established following Russia’s military victory in Ukraine. Only a new international court could try war criminals extending from Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership all the way up to U.S. officials responsible for crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg laws.
Did the American blob actually think through the consequences of NATO’s war?
It is almost black humor to look at U.S. attempts to convince China that it should join the United States in denouncing Russia’s moves into Ukraine. The most enormous unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative.
Russia dreamed of creating a new world order, but it was U.S. adventurism that has driven the world into an entirely new order – one that looks to be dominated by China as the default winner now that the European economy is essentially torn apart and America is left with what it has grabbed from Russia and Afghanistan, but without the ability to gain future support.
And everything that I have written above may already be obsolete as Russia and the U.S. have gone on atomic alert. My only hope is that Putin and Biden can agree that if Russia hydrogen bombs Britain and Brussels, that there will be a devil’s (not gentleman’s) agreement not to bomb each other.
With such talk I’m brought back to my discussions with Herman Kahn 50 years ago. He became quite unpopular for writing Thinking about the Unthinkable, meaning atomic war. As he was parodied in Dr. Strangelove, he did indeed say that there would indeed be survivors. But he added that for himself, he hoped to be right under the atom bomb, because it was not a world in which he wanted to survive.
Israel bombed Damascus from Beirut, and from the Syrian Golan which it occupies, in the early hours of 9 February. Lieutenant Zulfiqar Fayez Mansour was martyred while defending his homeland within its internationally recognized borders. Five others were injured. This triad of war criminal bombings by Israel also resulted in the destruction of housing, businesses, and automobiles.An undisclosed number of incoming missiles were intercepted and downed by Syrian air defense systems.
We ask our western readers to consider their concerns were a foreign military to bomb their countries, and on a regular basis. We also point out to our US American compatriots that during our time of food insecurity, housing insecurity, and a runaway inflation beginning to imitate Weimar, our taxes continue to pay Israel to murder Syrians in their country, in the amounts of tens of billions of dollars ($146 billion, according to a 31 May 2021 report by USA Today).
The Israeli aerial bombs were dropped just before 0100, Damascene time; Israel again breached Lebanon’s airspace, flying over Beirut. The breaching of another country’s airspace is a war crime, as is the aggressive bombing of a country. The second round of bombing were surface-to-surface, fired from the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel since 1967.
We also note that UNSCR 497 (1981) states that the occupation of the Syrian Golan is in breach of International Law, and called for an urgent withdrawal by no later than 5 January 1982, “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” We further note, that unlike the colonialist UNSCR 2254 (2015), the bastion of peace and security has been steadfast in its NATO klansmenship: While the junta holds monthly anti-Syria hoax meetings on the implementation of 2254, it has not forced UNGA member Israel to withdrawal from the Syrian Golan.
NATO stenographer reporters engaged in pimping for the Military Industrial Complex, have chosen to ignore the most recent of Israel’s criminal and deadly aggressions; among the pimps ‘current’ reports are the claims that the Israel’s December bombings of the seaport of Lattakia were “rare.”
Syria reported on the Israel war criminal bombings around 0200, Damascene time.
NATO stenographers still ignoring Israel deadly bombing, 8 hrs later.
Apartment house bombed by Israel.
israel bombs damascus3
israel bombs damascus5
israel bombs damascus4
This is Lieutenant Zulfiqar Fayez Mansour. He was martyred by another war crime committed by Israel, while defending his country within its internationally recognized borders.
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Biden military illegals lost more Daesh terrorists in a Syrian prison run by SDF terrorists, on 20 January, when free ISIS terrorists blew up to vehicles outside the al Sina’a Prison in the Ghweranneighborhood of al Hasakah.
Again, Hasakah is in Syria, which is not part of the USA.
At this writing, the Syrian Arab News Agency has reported on chaos — including shootings inside and out, Biden regime military helicopters flying about, and the Obama-created SDF terrorists criminally-imposed curfews against the indigenous Syrian population — not casualties, nor the numbers of terrorists imprisoned by other terrorists who managed to escape.
Among uncorroborated reports, 22 SDF terrorists were killed in the fighting, & ISIS/Daesh terrorists took over a part of the prison that actually houses weapons and ammunition.
Syrian journalist, Rasha Hasan reported twenty escapees in the afternoon of 20 January; about twelve hours later, a leaked document from Iraqi Military Intelligence claimed that the intention of the vehicular detonations outside the occupied Syrian prison was to move 5,000 ISIS/Daesh takfiri into Iraq (of possibly pure coincidence, about twenty-four hours later, ISIS terrorists massacred eleven Iraqi soldiers in the Diyala governate, further to the south of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan.).
The Biden regime’s illegal forces have a long war criminal history of recycling ISIS savages from illegal prisons, from different regions of Syria, back and forth into Iraq — atrocities that are required to maintain the function of the Military Industrial Complex.
“Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as ‘the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).“ — fbi.gov
Particularly sadistic, is the fact that the Biden troops use the illicit al Yaarubiyah crossing — run by the SDF terrorists since 2013, before the Pentagon demanded a re-branding from the YPG name, in 2015, which was on the US terror list — to transport stolen Syrian oil, stolen Syrian grain, and ISIS takfiri, into the Autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
Separatist Kurds fantasy land.
Neocon’s neocon Paul “Wolfie” Wolfowitz visiting ‘Kurdistan Regional Government’ in 2004.
Though there has not been much reporting from NATO stenographers on the recent attack and escapes, all such sources have normalized the colonialist invasion and occupation by the US, of the prison of another country. We also hyperlink the Defense Onereport of 24 February 2021 which arrogantly announced western supremacy news that the “US-led anti-ISIS coalition is funding a dramatic expansion of a large detention facility in northeastern Syria…”.
This is a prison in the city of Philadelphia; can any westerner imagine it being occupied by the French military with the assistance of a gang of terrorists armed by France?
Now, further imagine that a third gang of terrorists/illegals in Philly car bombed the prison in the US, so that it looked like this, from a distance:
Excepting imperialists who lead the world in global genocide, is there a sane person who would consider this triad of war crimes and other atrocities as normal?
Updated information reports that thousands of ISIS terrorists were able to leave the Syrian prison under Biden regime and SDF occupation; let all westerners consider their reactions were this to be perpetrated against their homelands.
🔻 VIDEO || Mass escapes by the thousands in Ghweran prison in Hasaka, which is controlled by the US-backed SDF near the Iraqi-Syrian border, which includes senior leaders of the ISIS terrorist gangs of various nationalities. – Sabereen pic.twitter.com/LZWuQnDI4V
American military illegals continue to practice bombing war ‘games’ with its al Qaeda faction Maghaweir Thawra — and brag about them — in the Deir Ezzor and al Tanf desert areas of the Syrian Arab Republic, which is not in the United States, nor is it a US territory or satrap. The cost of each bombing practice by the war criminal American troops and the offshoot al Qaeda faction has not yet been worked through by this author. We do, however, note, that the continuing expenses are footed by the US taxpayer, besieged by inflation reaching Weimar levels, taxpayers teetering on homelessness, and suffering food insecurity, increased drug and alcohol addiction, and massive violent crimes in all US urban centers.
This map clearly shows that Syria is not part of the US. The distance between the two countries is 6,677 mi / 10,745 km.
Any country that militarily invades another country engages in war crimes, per the GenevaConventionsto which the US is signatory.
A recent contract involving the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) presented the American taxpayer with a bill over almost one-half billion dollars, paid to Lockheed Martin facilities. Since 9/11, Pentagon spending has surpassed fourteen trillion USD, The Military Industrial Complexcontinues to rake in the murderous profits, and continues to propagandize for that nasty thing described as American exceptionalism.
US strikes in Syria may be lawful if Syria consents to the use of force in their territory. If Syria does not consent, the strikes would violate international law, unless the US demonstrates that the strikes were taken in self-defense. — Sarah Knuckey, international lawyer and Professor at Columbia Law School
It matters not that US Americans go hungry. It matters not that there is no peace. What matters is that the various offshoots of the Dr Strangelove Pentagon invade, occupy, steal, and brag about their inherent right to genocide and mass looting of Syrian grains and oil — irrespective of which party’s unindicted war criminal POTUS sits in the White House.
Compare this glimpse of Philly, to the bragging tweets of Inherent War Criminal Resolve, below.
A glimpse of hunger, homelessness, and addiction in a previously healthy neighborhood of Philly, while American military spends billions training terrorists in Syria.
Though DAESH wascreated by the US — as was al Qaeda, freely admitted by H. Clinton — Syria did not invite the criminal American military into its homeland, yet here it is, flaunting its arrogant imperialist crimes of invasion, occupation, and arming terrorists.
Daesh remains an existential threat in Syria and it cannot be allowed to regenerate. Live fire exercises between @Coalition and our @MaghaweirThowra partners enhances interoperability & creates a strong & ready force to be ready when the need arises #StrongerTogetherhttps://t.co/Lo7LrIZ9zt
Though there is not one single, international definition of terrorism, both the US and the UN have similar definitions, that obviously the definition of all countries around the world:
“Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as ‘the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).“ — fbi.gov
What is really appalling is that a non-politician/non-diplomat — this author — must give a rudimentary lesson to both: UNSCR 1566 (2004) considers “criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government…to do or abstain from doing any act” as within the description of terrorism.
What US American, faced with the horrors of the fifteen days to flatten the COVID curve, now going into its third year, faces with homelessness, food insecurity, and increased violent criminal activities, would consider a foreign military arming terrorists, like these savage in the Levantine Republic, in Philly, or NYC, or Chicago?
American military has armed and continues to train these killers, in Syria.
Moderate terrorists with their moderate lethal weapons, courtesy of the US taxpayers & the American military illegals in Syria.
In May 2017, the FSA/al Qaeda offshoot Maghaweer al Thawra uploaded a video thanking the Trump administration for the millions of dollars worth of weapons these death squads planned to use to attack the Syrian Arab Army in Deir Ezzor and in al Tanf areas of the SAR. These degenerate psychopaths were later responsible for the martyrdom of General Issam Zahreddine, scant months later.
As the American taxpayer is under siege for almost three years and is busy idiotically fighting over the non-existent difference between war criminal Trump and war criminal Biden, they will likely continue to be oblivious to the increasing war crimes of the American military illegals in the Syrian Arab Republic.
Nonetheless, this US journalist will continue to report on the crimes against humanity perpetrated by her American military illegals in the Levantine Republic.
Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.
As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.
If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.
What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.
Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.
Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.
So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.
This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.
The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.
Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.
Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.
The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.
Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.
With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.
The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.
When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!
The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.
In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.
The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?
The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.
But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.
Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.
The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.
Some of the Lebanese intentionally skip the root causes and the nature of the crises in their country, and that it is not only a mere confrontation with, or a struggle against, the ‘Israeli’ occupation, aggression and threat, but it extends beyond that to become a complicated and multifaceted issue, and here comes the sinister role of the West, namely the USA.
It is worth mentioning, that when we say that, we do not mean the American people, but their administration, and the warmongering military industrial complex!
Many of the Lebanese, even consider Washington a friend of the country without providing any evidence that supports their argument, forgetting its fixed alignment and continuous support to their enemy!
Now if we make a very simple research we can easily spot the truth, the US administration has always been the number one military supplier and political sponsor of the ‘Israeli’ enemy.
Without the Western support, firstly and mainly Britain and France in the forties till the sixties, and the American support that followed after that and continued till now, ‘Israel’ would not have continued to exist, not only that, but the Arabs and the Arab world would have been saved from many of the miseries, massacres, destruction and havoc that the Western-backed ‘Israeli’ occupation has caused in many of its parts, starting with Palestine, extending to Syria, Egypt, Jordan and reaching to Lebanon. This comes on the direct level; but if we intend to enlist what conspiracies and aggressions the ‘Israelis’ planned and how much they indirectly caused destruction in the Arab world we need volumes to do that.
Coming back to Lebanon, the ‘Israeli’ occupation would not have been able to inflict all the damage it did without the US support.
Almost all of the invasions, major incursions, the ‘Israelis’ carried out in Lebanon, not only were given the green light from Washington but worse, they were supported with American military supplies and a veto power cover in the security council to spare ‘Israel’ any condemnation by the so-called international community.
Now Lebanon is in a major crisis, a structural one that poses an existential threat to the county and the people. What did Washington do and what is doing to help? Nothing is not the answer.
We would have loved that Washington does nothing and leave us as Lebanese alone to manage our affairs. Contrary, The US keeps meddling and negatively interfering. It is exercising its power and influence to block any possibility of help and rescue offers coming from other countries. Lebanon is not allowed by Americans to accept the generous offer by the Iranians that Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian has submitted this week to build and hand to Lebanon two power plants with a 2000 Megawatt capacity in Beirut and the South. The Iranians also offered to rebuild the destroyed Beirut Port. The real value of this very generous offer is the flexibility of the Iranians to accept any sort of payment whether through different loans or even by the Lebanese pound. This offer deeply reflects the genuine and sincere relation Iran has for Lebanon and its people.
Now the question that presents itself, would the Lebanese officials take a bold step and accept this offer or would they as the habit bow down to the American veto, and if they fell short to respect and maintain their country’s sovereignty would they demand from Washington to give the equal alternative.
This is a very simple exercise and experiment to both Lebanon and USA. The result would be very telling about who is blocking Lebanon from salvation and a way to know genuinely who are Lebanon and the Lebanese people’s real friends and who are their enemies.
In hundreds of films and TV shows, every single word and image has been closely scrutinized and signed off on by senior military figures, all in an effort to convince viewers into supporting deadly and grossly immoral campaigns around the world.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA — The (official) 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has come to a close, with the military beating a hasty and ignominious retreat. The puppet Afghan government NATO installed lasted fewer than two weeks on its own, with President Ashraf Ghani fleeing for the UAE, allegedly with around $169 million in cash.
If the occupation was so unpopular and weak, how was it able to last so long? The Afghanistan Papers — a trove of military documents leaked to The Washington Post — showed that high-ranking government officials knew that the war was unwinnable but were openly lying to the public about how it was going, all while NGOs and military contractors made billions.
But documents obtained by journalist Tom Secker under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with MintPress also show that Hollywood also played a significant role, knowingly collaborating with the Pentagon to produce pro-war propaganda about Afghanistan, ultimately helping to artificially buoy public opinion on the unwinnable campaign. This typically included giving the Pentagon direct editorial control over scripts and even removing any anti-war content or scenes that would show the military in a negative light. In exchange, the military offered its human resources, its bases as locations for filming, and its wide range of hi-tech vehicles to be used in movies. This quid pro quo effectively turned much of Hollywood, and the entertainment industry more generally, into cheerleaders for imperialism.
The military-industrial-media complex
Reading through the documents, what becomes clear is the sheer scale of the military’s involvement in the silver screen, and in pop culture more generally. For instance, between 2015 and 2017, the U.S. Army’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs West (OCPA-W) — based just outside of Hollywood, CA — was generally working on between 40 and 70 entertainment media projects at one time. The OCPA-W is one of three Army regional offices, the others being in Chicago and New York City. The Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, CIA and other government organizations all have similar agencies and programs aimed at manipulating their image in mass media.
The OCPA-W’s weekly summary of its affairs for the week of December 22, 2016, for example, notes that it is involved in 63 working projects; 15 in pre-production, 26 in production and 22 in post-production. According to research by Secker and Matthew Alford for their 2017 book “National Security Cinema,” the Department of Defense has supported at least 814 movies and 1,133 separate TV shows, the majority of those in recent years.
Afghanistan is generally far from American minds. This is by design: few at the top of American society want the public to be scrutinizing U.S. actions there. When the country is portrayed on American screens, the military works extremely hard to present the war in a way most conducive to its interests. Hollywood has been a willing collaborator in this. Below is a selection of case studies of movies about or featuring the war in Afghanistan and a discussion about how the U.S. military has had those movies sanitized before they ever met the public eye.
12 Strong (2018)
“12 Strong” is a jingoistic action film based on a true story about a small unit of 12 U.S. Special Forces who invaded Afghanistan immediately after the September 11 attacks, thus being the first American boots on the ground of a two-decade campaign that cost the lives of an estimated 176,000 Afghans, displacing almost 6 million more.
The film entails the elite group attempting to capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif before NATO forces arrive. The team, so they say, is outnumbered by “50,000 Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces,” as if the two were close allies. This is despite the fact that the Taliban immediately condemned the 9/11 attacks and that Western estimates put al-Qaeda’s global forces at the time at below 100 members. “If we don’t take that city, the World Trade Center is just the beginning,” says one of the heroes of the film, whose tagline is “twelve soldiers gave us a reason to hope.”
Documents show that the military was eager to help with such a nationalistic film, and matched what they called the production company’s “breathtaking” list of asks, including access to a number of military bases in New Mexico for shooting; army uniforms for actors; “target” vehicles they could blow up; the hire of a number of aircraft, including Chinook and Seahawk helicopters; and appropriate Soviet tanks for the enemy to use. They also aided the company in finding military extras to appear in minor roles.
Despite the movie’s strongly pro-war message, the OCPA-W, Air Force, and other military organizations still insisted on going through the script with a fine-toothed comb, removing even minor details it did not like. This included demanding that writers changed their plans to present the 12 soldiers as rugged men with full beards and tattoos. An email from OCPA read:
My other concern is that during the loadout sequences at Fort Campbell that occurred shortly after 9/11 our soldiers did not have full length beards and neck tattoos. That came later. I hope [REDACTED] guys are going to Shave for those sequences.
A few weeks later, the seemingly minor point had not been resolved. In a show of just how much control over creative direction the military had, the OCPA threatened to pull out of the movie, reminding the production company of the agreement they had signed up for:
The production company agrees to cast actors, extras, doubles, and stunt personnel portraying military men and women who conform to individual Military Service regulations governing age, height / weight, uniform, grooming, appearance, and conduct standards. DoD reserves the right to suspend support in the event that disagreement regarding the military aspects of their portrayals cannot be resolved in negotiation between the production company and DoD within the seventy-two hour cure-period. The DoD Project Officer will provide written guidance specific to each Military Service being portrayed.
U.S. Army.
(1) The depiction of Soldiers in the Continental United States prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks should be in accordance with U.S. Army Regulation 670-1, West and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia. Soldiers would meet height/weight standards, be clean shaven, with a well-groomed haircut and be wearing the Battle Dress Uniform (BDU). Load bearing equipment would be olive drab or the BDU pattern.
(2) The depiction of deployed Soldiers following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks would be in accordance with the tactical situation. Soldiers would still meet height/weight requirements (appear physically fit) with relaxed grooming standards for extended operations. The deployed Soldiers would be wearing the Desert Combat Dress Uniform (DCU) with olive drab or BDU pattern load bearing equipment.
The Department of Defense is well aware that the sort of assistance they offer (free equipment, filming locations, etc.) would be enormously expensive, if not impossible, to otherwise obtain. Therefore, they leverage their considerable influence into what amounts to control over every aspect of a movie or TV show they work on. This often even means jettisoning reality in favor of a relentlessly pro-war message.
Emails show that OCPA instructed the production company to change the minor criminal backstory of one of the 12 soldiers, despite the fact it was perfectly real. As one OCPA official wrote:
I told him our two biggest issues were the background story of Cpt [REDACTED]
being any FNG [“Fucking New Guy,” a derogatory military term for recruits] when he was actually a Team Leader for two years and the comment about Sergeant [REDACTED] having a choice between Jail and the Army.
According to the book the bar fight incident did happen, [REDACTED] attorney
was able to plea deal it down to a misdemeanor with a probation period. He
did lose his job as a school teacher and he started to work construction. I [sic]
period of time later, he decided to join the US Army.
Production quickly agreed to the changes, a few weeks later sending a new script for the OCPA and Air Force’s approval. “Here is a revised draft of Horse Soldiers,” they replied. “We changed [REDACTED]’s backstory per your suggestion. Please let me know if this works for you. [PERSON’s NAME REDACTED], would you send this draft to the appropriate Air Force personnel and let me know whom to follow up with?” (Cross referencing the documents with the book it is based on makes it clear that the sergeant in question is Sam Diller, one of the main characters in both book and movie).
None of the military’s demands appear to have caused much resistance from the company. Indeed, towards the end of filming, a senior member of the team even emailed the OCPA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to offer his profound gratitude for their services:
[The] Army and the entire team have been absolutely fantastic and helped us achieve an amazing air-to-air shoot this evening. They are the utmost professional highly trained crew. We know if it wasn’t for your great efforts to make this movie badass we would have never gotten such a team. We promise to make the Army proud, so THANK YOU!!!!!
“Lone Survivor” is the largely true story of a Navy SEAL team that was discovered and attacked by the Taliban while carrying out a special operation to assassinate the organization’s commander, Ahmad Shah. The SEALs suffered devastating losses, leaving only one man — Marcus Luttrell — to tell the story.
The plot of the film revolves around the squad being discovered by local goat herders and their supposedly heart-wrenching decision on whether to kill the shepherds to cover their tracks, or let them go, the assumption being that the old man and two children in question would immediately alert the Taliban to their whereabouts. The group decided to let their captives go, which almost immediately turned out to be a deadly mistake.
The story is based upon the book by Luttrell, who is now a Trump-loving media anchor on Glenn Beck’s conservative TV network “TheBlaze.” At times, Luttrell’s book reads like the manifesto of a white-nationalist mass-shooter, and is peppered throughout with his seething hatred of liberals. Luttrell is extremely regretful that he went along with the decision to let the Afghans go and did not stick to his gut feeling and insist they murder an old man and two children (all unarmed). “It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lamebrained decision I ever made in my life,” he wrote. “I’d turned into a fucking liberal, a half-assed, no-logic nitwit, all heart, no brain.” By way of explanation, he said that it was his certainty that the liberal media would betray the troops and side with the Taliban that made him release them, telling his fellow SEALs at the time:
Just so you all understand, their bodies will be found, the Taliban will use it to the max. They’ll get it in the papers, and the U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy. We will almost certainly be charged with murder.
Apologizing for not carrying out what amounts to a war crime, he writes:
That situation might look simple in Washington, where the human rights of terrorists are often given high priority. And I am certain liberal politicians would defend their position to the death. Because everyone knows liberals have never been wrong about anything. You can ask them. Anytime.
The book is a glorification of supposedly righteous violence against a subhuman opponent. As he explains:
“In the global war on terror, we have rules, and our opponents use them against us. We try to be reasonable; they will stop at nothing. They will stoop to any form of base warfare: torture, beheading, mutilation. Attacks on innocent civilians, women and children, car bombs, suicide bombers, anything the hell they can think of. They’re right up there with the monsters of history.
The original script stayed close to Luttrell’s interpretation of events. Needless to say, however, the military demanded major rewrites. In the finished version, the Navy SEAL commander simply decides to let the goat herders go, with no arguments about whether to kill them and hide their bodies and certainly no long soliloquies about the treachery of the liberal media, as happens in the book.
The military often claims that they aid the film industry merely to ensure depictions of themselves are more accurate. Yet reading through 131 pages of declassified emails between them and production company, Film 44, it is clear that this is not the case. Indeed, Philip Strub, the Department of Defense’s chief Hollywood liaison, made this explicit, writing in a now-declassified email:
While maximizing historical authenticity is our mandate, we share responsibility for the reputations of the four SEALs and to their families’ memories of them.
What also becomes apparent after reading the documents is the level of intimacy between the movie industry and the military, and the latter’s fastidious attention to detail, poring over every single word of dialogue to ensure each frame is as pro-war as the film can get. Strub and his associates even insisted minor touches, like visible tattoos on the SEALs, be written out of the script. They also demanded the deletion of a scene in which Luttrell and another SEAL have a conversation about Power Bars, taunting each other, with Luttrell shouting “blow me, fag,” then loudly farting. This was presumably in an effort to ensure members of the Navy SEALs did not come across as uncouth as Lutrell does in his own book.
“I just learned from Film 44 (Sarah and Braden) that they are ready to submit Pete’s latest rewrite to us. They say that they have used our notes as a kind of check-list, and addressed all of our concerns. You’ll be receiving the watermarked script via email very shortly,” Strub wrote in an email that suggests that every draft script needed to meet the military’s exacting standards. Strub is one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. The list of movies and TV shows for which he is (publicly) credited is staggering, surely more impressive than virtually any other director or producer in Hollywood. Yet his name is all but unknown to the public.
According to the documents, the military categorized their role in the movie into four parts: “script review and vetting,” “production department consulting,” talent training” and “on-set coaching.” In exchange for what amounts to total content control, the military provided “Lone Survivor’s” producers with the use of Kirtland Air Force Base in a rocky and sandy part of New Mexico that could easily pass for Afghanistan; the use of a multitude of expensive aircraft, including Black Hawk and Apache helicopters; and parachute jumpers and other general military personnel.
One reason for this continued involvement is obvious, and made explicit in the emails. “One of the criteria for DoD to support the movie is recruiting,” wrote an officer from U.S. Special Operations Command.
What is particularly noteworthy about this movie is that its entire premise — that if the SEALs chose not to kill the goat herders they would be found out — is demonstrably incorrect. Interviews with locals (including the man who hid and protected Luttrell, ensuring he was the lone survivor) establish that everybody in the area knew the SEALs were there, thanks to the elite unit’s own incompetence when it came to stealth. An enormous American helicopter landing in a remote part of rural Afghanistan was enough to raise suspicions among locals. If that was not enough, the SEAL team failed to dispose of evidence of their landing.
Unsurprisingly, Strub and his colleagues insisted this scene, which threatened to introduce a potential alternative reading of the movie — in which bungling Americans get caught, outmaneuvered, then slaughtered — was changed. This helped ensure the movie was as relentlessly pro-military as possible, despite the fact that it was telling the story of one of the deadliest U.S. military blunders of the entire war.
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
“Charlie Wilson’s War” tells the story of the eponymous Texas politician most famous for being the driving force behind Operation Cyclone — the CIA’s funding and training of the Afghan Mujahideen (an action that also turned the country into the world’s largest heroin producer).
The original script did not portray Wilson or his endeavors especially sympathetically, explicitly noting how he was supporting extremists like Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. One of these ultra-radicals was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal warlord widely accused of starting the trend of throwing acid in women’s faces. Throughout the original script, 9/11 is presented as a foreseeable consequence of the U.S.’s decision to empower these violent fanatics. Indeed, the original end scene took place at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, with Wilson hearing the deafening screech of an airliner hitting the building.
However, all this — al-Qaeda, Hekmatyar, and the 9/11 scene — was cut from the script after the CIA reviewed it. Instead, the finished film ends with Wilson receiving a medal for his services to freedom in Afghanistan. Also removed was a scene discussing the Sabra and Shatilla Massacres, where Israeli-backed forces slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian refugees.
Earlier versions of the script also portrayed the Soviets somewhat sympathetically, with one character noting that Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan included “forc[ing] them [Afghans] to learn to read and write.” This was also cut in favor of portraying Soviet soldiers as brutal and unthinking monsters slaughtering the local population.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016)
The comedy-drama — which stars Tina Fey, Margot Robbie and Martin Freeman as Western journalists covering the Afghan War — was something of a flop at the box office. Still, it managed to reduce losses significantly by filming at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico (just as “Lone Survivor” did) and using real U.S. Marines as extras. In exchange, producers handed over significant editorial control of the story to the military, which insisted on changing a scene where a U.S. military truck crashed into a crowd of civilians. In the final movie, there are no images of this, and the incident is referred to only in a 20-second news segment that describes it merely as “a fatal traffic accident involving a coalition truck.”
The crash was a real incident. In 2006, the truck plowed through Kabul during rush hour, killing at least three civilians and injuring many others. “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is based on American journalist Kim Barker’s memoir “The Taliban Shuffle.” The incident plays a major role in her book as the point where she finally understood how pointless and unwinnable the war was, how there was no accountability for the rich and powerful and no justice for the “have nots.” She described it and the following anti-U.S. riots as “a major breaking point in Afghanistan, the time when we first saw just how angry some Afghans were, just how ripe the country was for a Taliban comeback, just how leaderless Afghanistan really was.” Yet in the movie, the crash is mentioned only in passing, making the rioting Afghans appear irrationally angry and violent, a typical stereotype of Afghan War films.
Iron Man (2008)
The original “Iron Man” script was decidedly pacifist, with protagonist Tony Stark attempting to use his enormous manufacturing empire to battle against war profiteers and the military industrial complex. However, after the Pentagon got involved, with Philip Strub again acting as the military liaison, the tone of the movie was radically altered. Much of the fighting in the movie takes place in modern-day Afghanistan, with the U.S. military serving the role of the good guys. In this sense, the film’s stance on war was reversed.
In exchange, the production agreement notes that the military would allow the movie to be shot at Edwards Air Force Base, just north of Los Angeles; provide “approximately 150 extras at Edwards AFB to play military members from various services and Afghan nationals;” help produce around 100 uniforms; and provide the opportunity to use a range of expensive aircraft.
Tom Secker, when asked by MintPress to assess the U.S. film industry’s role in prolonging the Afghan war, responded:
Hollywood’s coverage of NATO’s war in Afghanistan has been notable by its absence, its silence, and its use of contextless microcosms which represent the war, rather than explore or explain it. “Iron Man” and “Lone Survivor” — two Pentagon-supported blockbusters — are both set during the U.S. occupation, but the scale of that occupation and the mess it was making of the country are ignored by both narratives, in favor of tightly-focused cinematic synecdoches which conveniently avoid the suffering of everyone involved.
Secker concluded:
In that sense, of course Hollywood has played a crucial role in perpetuating the war. They either failed to remind people that the war was still going on, or painted it in heroic, decontextualized colors that make it seem like a benevolent adventure halfway round the world, rather than the crushing, destructive geopolitical ratfuck it truly is.
A mediated war
It is not just big-budget Hollywood movies that the Pentagon works on, however. Practically every medium is used to spread a pro-war message. Declassified documents show that the Army flew Arnold Schwarzenegger to Afghanistan for the global-warming documentary TV series “Years of Living Dangerously.” This was, laughably, an effort to present the U.S. military — the single largest polluter in the world — as a force for good with regard to climate change, showing the former bodybuilder their supposed efforts to set up renewable energy systems across the Middle East.
Likewise, pop culture is full of strategically inserted pro-war messages. For instance, declassified documents show that the OCPA-W carefully placed uniformed service members in opportune spots in the audience of the game show “The Price is Right.” The military pays the National Football League millions of dollars to put troops on the field or fly aircraft over the stadium before big football games, turning the entire event into a recruitment drive. It also has a video-games team called “U.S. Army Esports,” helping to associate the military with fun in the minds of the children watching. They have also been accused of using the same grooming techniques pedophiles use, only to recruit children into joining the war machine.
Major General Frank Muth, head of Army recruiting & the Army eSports project, openly explains how their sinister strategy of having recruiters on Twitch—in a clandestine and subversive manner—groom teens into joining pic.twitter.com/rie8Xafy7l
Meanwhile, the music video for pop star Katy Perry’s song “Part of Me” was shot at Camp Pendleton Military Base in California, and shows Perry getting over a bad breakup by joining the Marines. The training process shows her finding herself again and growing as an individual. When Fox News asked Perry’s team if they had been paid by the military for the video, they refused to answer. The video currently has 887 million views on YouTube.
“The whole videography … is straight out of [Nazi film maker] Leni Riefenstahl: the same angled, heroizing upward shots, the same fetishization of physical power, of gleaming armaments, and of the rigor and mechanism of human beings cohering into living militarized units,” wrote feminist critic Naomi Wolf, who labeled the song “war propaganda.”
TV news is also filled with former high-ranking military officials who play the role of neutral expert while sticking, laser-like, to pro-war talking points, helping to give cable news coverage of the conflict a decidedly jingoistic bent.
What these documents ultimately underline is the deep interlocking connections between Hollywood and the national security state. Few Americans experience the war from close up. Even fewer realize that depictions of the conflict come heavily mediated through the military. In hundreds of films and TV shows, every single word and image has been closely scrutinized and signed off by senior military figures, all in the effort to convince viewers into supporting deadly and grossly immoral campaigns around the world. Long ago, the military realized the power of Hollywood. It is high time that Americans realized that, when watching movies and TV shows about war, all too often they are not seeing neutral works of art, but carefully constructed pieces of national security propaganda.
In a recent article published in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, Christorpher Layne, professor of international relations at the University of Texas, defends the thesis that a hegemonic war between the United States and China, if tensions escalate at the current pace, is not unlikely.
In his article The Return of Great-Power War, the author argues that the intensification of geopolitical competition between the two powers, despite the prevailing view in academic circles, would have explosive potential if we analyze the scenario in the light of history.
In this sense, the majority view argues that the economic interdependence between the two countries would be a factor in reducing the risk of an eventual conflict. As Professor Layne reminds us, if we return to history we would see similarities between the current situation and that which preceded the first great world war.
According to the professor, the current sour relations between the United States and China would remind us, in geopolitical terms, of the troubled relationship between the United Kingdom and Germany in the years before that war.
It is even worth emphasizing that in economic terms, as well as the United States and China, the United Kingdom and Germany maintained very close ties, and there was, therefore, also an interdependence between the two powers at the time.
Something, however, that the author may be mistaken is the idea that the so-called liberal international order led by the United States would be a factor in curbing Chinese pretensions and the so-called “revisionist powers” to destabilize the preservation of peace, maintained through the multilateral institutions created in the postwar period.
This would make sense in the idealized world of Atlanticist analysis, where the rise of new actors had never occurred, and American unipolar hegemony was undeniable.
The so-called liberal international order has been systematically dismantled by its own creators: the United States of America.
Long before Donald Trump was elected – after the September 11, 2001 attacks – the United States, in instituting the war on terror, practically tore apart the fantasy of liberal cosmopolitanism and assumed itself as an imperial power, arrogating itself with the right to intervene in any scenario and against anyone who posed a supposed, generic terrorist threat.
Little is said about this in Atlanticist circles, but the global instability that this irresponsible attitude generated was most likely one of the reasons why such revisionist actors took themselves seriously to project themselves autonomously into the interstate system.
In particular, Russia, which – being harassed by NATO’s enlargement towards its borders – since 2008, in the war in Georgia, has given a demonstration of warlike power that has not been seen for some time.
In fact, the concrete rise of emerging powers is the reason why – and contrary to what Professor Layne maintains – the United States would be undermining the multilateral institutions it once supported.
This attitude has led them to act in a truculent and imperial manner, even against their traditional and historical European allies, which denotes the dysfunctional character of the Trump administration for the United States’ own internal system, that is, the figure of Trump would have driven a radicalization of this new American strategy.
But paradoxically, while in rhetorical terms Donald Trump made this new strategy clearer, in practice his erratic figure became a serious factor in the internal destabilization of the American system, and thus his permanence became seen as a threat to the establishment of the United States.
Thus the election of Joe Biden would serve as a factor in the recomposition of the establishment in the face of a weakened hegemon who loses more and more global influence.
The moment is grave, and the lack of a concrete response to a vaccine, combined with the surprising resurgence of the virus in Europe, shed light on the depth of the crisis and the risk that silently haunts the minds of world leaders: the ghost of rebellions.
According to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, “Those who have spoken with Premier Giuseppe Conte describe him impressed by the images of street protests.
As the virus advances again over Italy, the government’s popularity drops sharply.
For historical and geographical reasons Europe is still considered the sounding board of the world, and social dissatisfaction on the continent with the new measures to contain the virus is visible among workers and small businesses, desperate with the ghost of unemployment and bankruptcy.
According to unsuspected IMF researchers Tahsin Saadi Sedik and Rui Xu, “in the years following the pandemics, the countries most affected saw an increase in social unrest. Based on this historical trend, the Covid-19 pandemic may pose a threat to the social fabric in many countries. When inequality is high, the pandemic can fuel social unrest”.
Such a situation could lead to another risk already witnessed along the so-called first wave: the increase of military escalation.
In recent times, one of Brazil’s greatest thinkers, UFRJ professor José Luís Fiori, has been defending the thesis that the current hegemonic power, the United States, when threatened by emerging powers, would have chosen to destroy the Bretton Woods system and go for an all-militaristic valley against its rivals.
What at first could be interpreted as a demonstration of weakness, or a proof that the hegemon would be in decline, in fact, according to Fiori, reinforces the hypothesis that every hegemonic power tends to expand uninterruptedly in order to remain in the leadership of the system, but when threatened, if necessary, it is capable of destroying the system it itself created in order to stay ahead.
Against this backdrop, and as has been happening in Europe, the internal pressure that the pandemic has generated in American society could most likely trigger a reaction from the new democratic government to the outside; that instead of being mere aggressive rhetoric – as has been happening with Trump – could result in some new theater of war, both in the Middle East and next door in Venezuela.
One thing is certain: the industrial-military complex is thirsting for a new war to call its own, and with the democrats back in power, everything gets easier.
The longer a solution to contain the virus takes, the more social dissatisfaction will spread due to the economic collapse generated by the delay.
As in other times when systemic impasses have occurred, it is not difficult to remember the escalation of interstate conflict at the beginning of the 20th century – with antagonistic protagonists the United Kingdom and Germany – which soon deepened into widespread systemic chaos; then descended into popular rebellions.
Hegemonic dispute, abrupt technological changes, precarious work; general and diffuse dissatisfaction: the pandemic is phosphorus.
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Fabio Reis Vianna, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is a bachelor of laws (LL.B), MA student in International Relations at the University of Évora (Portugal), writer and geopolitical analyst. He currently maintains a column on international politics at the centennial Brazilian newspaper Monitor Mercantil.
The United States has throughout its existence demonstrated all the features of ‘empire’, from the original settlers using the Papal Doctrine of Discovery (1542) through to the current propaganda of the global war and terror, now changing to defense doctrines against Russia and China. My new work, “Days of the Future Passed – Point of No Return” presents the broad outlines of what this represents to the international scene from inception through to today’s ongoing empirical adventures.
The two main constants have been economic influence and military influence. The two are highly integrated and always have been even from before Independence, through the conquest of much of North America, where sometimes the soldiers led the way, and sometimes the settlers led the way, but neither being far apart from the other. Today the economy of the US empire is highly dependent on the military mindset of the US supporting its economic adventures overseas, the bottom line being support for the global reserve currency, the fiat ‘petrodollar.’
Three other ideas enter into this picture. An additional military factor is the threat of nuclear war, an event only a hair trigger action away from ultimately ending all of our problems. The current increase in propaganda rhetoric against Russia and China makes a nuclear scenario unfortunately all too realistic. Added to this, climate change is affecting our chances at long term safety and overall survival, much of it caused by our consumer oriented economy based on fossil fuels – control of the latter being of paramount importance for the US dollar and thus the US military. Add to all that the current Covid-19 pandemic, and the empire appears to be slowly losing its grip on its desired hegemony, but not without threatening much of the rest of the world.
“Days of the Future Passed – Point of No Return” argues that we have passed some tipping points for which there will be no return to normal, within economics, the environment, and the military industrial complex. Ideas for solutions are easy, their implementation is not as the inertia of empire is not easily restrained or controlled.
Excerpt
2020 – Tipping Points
It may not be evident yet, but in another ten or twenty years, the year 2020 may also be looked on as a pivotal year in global interactions – geopolitical, environmental, and financial – all of which are highly interrelated.
Imagine the lowly teeter-totter, a playground piece not as common as it used to be. The teeter-totter is aptly named as many a child, and many an adult has stood above the bar that makes the plank teeter and totter, trying to maintain balance but also testing how far they can go before touching down on one side or the other. Now imagine that teeter-totter is poised on the edge of a cliff, where one side can touch down and avoid the unknown drop, and the other side obviously is the drop from which there is no recovery to equilibrium.
It is a simple metaphor, but it illustrates for several sectors of our lives, we have allowed ourselves to drop into the unknown.
The unknown is simply the future. This future is to be determined by a declining global economy becoming saturated with massive US money printing to prop up the banksters and corporate CEOs. It will be determined by the disregard domestically and in foreign affairs for the supposed ‘rule of law’ but more importantly international law and true justice for all people. The changes to our environment are at the moment relatively slow but are becoming irreversible under current trends. Finally, the massive military investments on a global scale for both nuclear and conventional weaponry threatens everyone with a very delicate balance of power.
….Under the Trump presidency, combined with the economic impact of the virus and actions to contain it (for better or worse, not a point of discussion here), the US has assuredly reached a point where its huge national debt can never be repaid. Combine this with the main source of income and wealth in the US no longer being production, but financialized services simply creating money at the stroke of a keyboard and the economy is surviving precariously on the whim of people servicing the US$.
Put simply, the US survives on the Federal Reserve Bank (a consortium of private banks) pumping money into the economy. With much of the economy based on debt, and interest rates kept necessarily low in order to service the debt, the strength of the US$ as a global reserve currency – the petrodollar – is jeopardized.
….This year there have been several accounts of how the climate/environment is showing signs of tipping into conditions where there can be no reversals to ‘normal’ without serious changes to our atmospheric inputs: Greenland’s ice sheet melts more than it accumulates in snowfall each year by a significant amount; the Amazon has reached the status where it can no longer regenerate itself after a series of droughts; the forest fires in Siberia, Australia, and California demonstrate the overall pattern of global warming; each succeeding month has set record new global highs.
….The main feature here is that the combination of China and Russia have created a multi-polar world whether the US is willing to admit it or not. Russian resources, defensive military achievements, and a renewed domestic scene under the direction of the much-vilified Vladimir Putin have combined with China’s increasing defensive measures in the Western Pacific, its Belt and Road initiative throughout Asia and extending elsewhere, and the economic power that China has achieved as the largest economy in the world (on purchasing power and domestic market basis).
Above all, both China and Russia have stated they no longer support the hegemony of the US$ as the global reserve currency. They cannot replace it themselves, but they can operate outside of it, and they can support alternate global systems such as a ‘basket’ of reserve currencies, and their own digital exchange systems. That is what truly scares the US as it sees its own debt problems trap it into hyperinflation while other countries start to shift away from supporting the US$. That could mean war, hybrid for sure, but it could also go kinetic.
– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and analyst who examines the world through a syncretic lens. His analysis of international and domestic geopolitical ideas and actions incorporates a lifetime of interest in current events, a desire to preserve and conserve our natural environment and stop the commodification of the environment. He has been active as a critical writer in opposition to the US empire and its militarization of most aspects of domestic and international affairs. Miles’ work has been published globally and has appeared on a variety of websites including Palestine Chronicle, Axis of Logic, Countercurrents, and Global Research. He has appeared on RT News and The Tyee concerning events in Palestine/Israel. This is his first book and effectively summarizes many years, indeed a lifetime, of interest in international geopolitical and environmental affairs. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
Some Muslim American groups have turned into agents of oppression, providing cover for harmful and destructive policies towards our communities
The King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California, is pictured on 23 May (AFP)237Shares
For many Muslims in the US, the news that we will not be plunged into fascism with a second term for President Trump has been met with relief.
However, as Muslim Americans begin to reconfigure their political advocacy, we cannot be complicit under a Biden presidency that remains true to the core principles of American neoliberalism and empire. Most importantly, we cannot go back to the Muslim American political subservience that we witnessed during the Obama years.Joe Biden, Emgage and the muzzling of Muslim America
Muslim communities around the world – whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine, Kashmir, Yemen, China or Myanmar – face many injustices today. And it is an unfortunate reality that the US is either directly responsible for, or has aided or prolonged, many of these injustices.
There has been a push in recent decades – and especially during the Obama years – to make Muslim Americans feel a sense of exceptionalism, and to view issues from “back home” as removed from our reality in the US. This is despite the interconnected nature of how Muslims around the world are treated – and how that structural violence also impacts us here.
From Obama to Trump
The Obama years were defined by the rise of a professional Muslim class that was made into agents of empire and oppression, providing cover or tacit approval to some of the most harmful and destructive policies towards our communities, including the ramping up of counter-violent extremism (CVE) policies using Muslim leaders and institutions. Many of these individuals or organisations positioned themselves as the “resistance” under Trump: we know they will, and already have, gone back to being the native informants for the neoliberal establishment.
The Muslim community in the US faces a crisis in terms of having a principled leadership that speaks truth to power
This means that Muslim Americans have a lot of work cut out for them. We have reached a crucial stage, in which a critical mass of fellow Muslims are pushing to sacrifice Muslims around the world and in the US in order to gain mainstream acceptance and access to certain corridors of power here.
Nowhere is this more evident than in how so many Muslim-American institutions and leaders are normalising Zionism, even as opposition to Zionism is gaining traction within the Jewish-American community. Muslim Americans may not be able to bring about a complete transformation in how the US conducts its affairs in the Muslim world – though they should at least try – but at the very least, they should not contribute to injustice.
Trump’s presidency was devastating for many people of colour and Muslims in the US. But it also provided political clarity about the US that was not possible under the veneer of the Obama-led liberal establishment. It spurred important, long-awaited conversations about the role of imperialism, neoliberalism and white supremacy in the US that had previously been obscured.
A new generation of Muslim Americans has become politically mature and much more critical than older generations, which are still reeling from the kind of respectability politics in which we have been forced to engage post-9/11. They are building their own institutions.
Nonetheless, there is a danger that the veering to the far right has left Obama and Biden appear to Muslims as more progressive than they actually are. While the Trump era has ignited more imaginative conversations elsewhere about reducing the military-industrial complex, ending wars, and defunding the police, it has also given establishment Muslims a portal to exercise restraint over developing these wants.
Going forward
The Muslim community in the US faces a crisis in terms of having a principled leadership that speaks truth to power.
Far too many organisations and leaders are more interested in having access to power than in representing our agenda. Consequently, we need to hold these leaders accountable.
Muslim Americans must advise those who claim to speak on their behalf, and hold them to account if they continue to cause harm to our causes. Lives are at stake when individuals or organisations enable the state’s violence against Black or brown bodies. Silence, or a desire not to “rock the boat” or alienate anyone, makes us complicit. There is no point to “unity” if our goals are not the same.
Former US President Barack Obama hosts an iftar dinner at the White House in 2014 (AFP)
The community must also put a check on American exceptionalism. Our lives here are not more important or more valuable than those of the victims of American imperialism. Furthermore, Muslims living amid some of the most disheartening conditions around the world have a great deal to teach us – we cannot simply adopt a colonial attitude and think we know best.
In addition, Muslim Americans need to understand that Islamophobia is not just restricted to a Muslim travel ban, or someone saying negative things about Muslims. Anti-Muslim racism is built into the fabric of a number of institutions in this country, and very much part of the neoliberal establishment.
The Muslim community must move beyond symbolism, and recognise when that is weaponised. What is the point, for example, of us getting excited over a political leader saying “inshallah” if he was actively campaigning for the immoral and illegal Iraq war and was bombing Muslim communities around the world?
The heart of Islam
Most importantly, we need to push our institutions towards meaningful representation and to hold the government accountable.
Muslim Americans need to ask themselves where they, their leaders and their institutions are standing
How many mainstream, national Muslim American organisations are talking about surveillance, entrapment, Guantanamo Bay, the military-industrial complex, or the ravages of capitalism? Are these not issues where Muslims should be at the forefront, providing leadership based on our religious values?
Situating ourselves with the most vulnerable and the oppressed has been the core of our faith and its teachings: it is the heart of Islam.
Muslim Americans need to ask themselves where they, their leaders and their institutions are standing. Are they looking up, trying to protect their interests, serving as tokens, or maintaining the pretence of influence – or are they with the people?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor in South Asian history at Lafayette College. Her PhD, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was on the social history of modern Kashmir.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow, BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation. He can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
In his Foreign Policy article of April 2020, Biden states that he will reverse Trump’s embarrassing foreign policy record by standing up to both China, Russia and other totalitarian nations which represent the three-fold plague of “authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberalism” and “once more have America lead the world”.
Biden went further promising to undo the harm Trump has done to NATO by re-enforcing the military body, extending its influence to the Pacific (which sounds a lot like the Esper/Pompeo doctrine for the Pacific), and even demanded that NATO go harder on Russia stating that “the Kremlin fears a strong NATO, the most effective political military alliance in modern history.”
Considering Biden’s nearly 45 year political record supporting every military intervention in American history, opposing de-segregation, eulogizing pro-KKK Senator Strom Thurmond, passing bills that incarcerated petty drug dealers for life on behalf of the cheap labor prison industrial complex and supported the rampant growth of both Wall Street, Big Pharma and the Big Tech run surveillance state, we should think twice before celebrating this man’s possible entry into the halls of the highest office in the USA.
Biden’s call for renewing the NATO alliance in opposition to Russia and China, his support for reversing Trump’s calls for military reduction in the Middle East and his support for extending NATO in the Pacific mixed with his lifelong track record, forces us to ask if Glen Greenwald was right when he quit the Intercept on November 1 saying:
“If Biden wins, that’s going to be the power structure: A democratic party fully united with neocons, Bush/Cheney operatives, CIA/FBI/NSA Wall Street and Silicon Valley: presenting itself as the only protection against fascism. And much of the left will continue marching behind it.”
As it turns out, Greenwald’s warning was absolutely on point, as the entire intelligence apparatus, Big Tech and mainstream media complex which worked desperately to oust President Trump for 4 years and is currently running a vast voting fraud operation as this is written has given its full backing to the narrative of “an inevitable of a Biden presidency”.
In a Nov. 11 article from Antiwar.com entitled Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Members Funded by the Arms Industry, journalist Dave DeCamp demonstrates that of the 23 members of Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team, over one third are directly tied to NATO and the Military Industrial Complex.
As facts continue to emerge of the corrupt deep state structure which totally dominates the geriatric hologram known as Joe Biden, it has become obvious that even the few positive remarks Biden made in support of renewing the START treaty with Russia carry little weight.
Ignoring the very real danger of a new civil war due to the fact that either result will be denied its legitimacy by half of the nation, the question must be asked: If Trump is replaced by a Biden Presidency on January 20th, then what will be the effects both on world stability and US-Russia-China relations?
It is good that Biden supports START’s renewal, but an increasing majority of the nations are opting for a multipolar alliance premised on the defense of national sovereignty, the right to use protectionism, and the construction of large scale megaprojects such as the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, advanced space exploration and North South Transportation Corridor.
The very protectionist measures which allowed the USA (and every nation of the world for that matter) to build up their industrial base and economic sovereignty are attacked directly by Biden who demands the “taking down of trade barriers and resisting dangerous global slide toward protectionism” (which he goes so far as to assert without evidence “caused the great depression” and “lead to World War II”).
Attacking Trump for being soft on China’s imperial Belt and Road Initiative which Biden states is only an “outsourcer of pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects”, Biden then asks: “who writes the rules that govern trade?” and answers: “the United States, not China, should be leading that effort.”
Beyond carbon reduction plans, and information technology investments (AI, 5G, Quantum Computing), there is very little in Biden’s “development outlook” that brings the USA into harmony with this multipolar consensus. His program to support cutting America’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 as outlined by the Green New Deal and Great Reset crowd at Davos might appear on the surface to be pro-infrastructure, professing to “create 10 million good new jobs”, but the reality on further inspection is very different.
The sorts of large scale BRI-oriented development projects now transforming more than half of the world which is increasingly operating under a completely different non-US dominated banking paradigm, are based on capital intensive heavy industry, the use of fossil fuels and also nuclear power.
Without these energy sources, then the New Silk Road and its’ sister projects could never work (much like Modi’s anti-BRI OSOWOG doppelganger has proven a total failure both scientifically and economically).
The sort of “green energy revolution” which the Davos technocrats running Biden want to impose onto the world might create short term jobs, but once the solar panels and windmills are built, the quality of energy available to nations stupid enough to walk into this cage will forever suffocate their capacity to sustain their populations and growth potential. In short, it is a green mirage obscuring a very ugly design.
In opposition to this depopulation agenda, Trump’s tendency support for space exploration, reviving protectionism to rebuild America’s lost manufacturing and his supporting large scale infrastructure programs in resolving conflict abroad (including his support for building rail in the Arctic, rail in Serbia and Kosovo, nuclear power in South Africa and Poland etc) is certainly synergistic with the multipolar system led by Russia and China and undeniably brings the USA into harmony with its own better traditions.
Additionally, Trump’s defunding of color revolutionary “civil society” groups in Hong Kong and Belarus won him many enemies from both sides of the pro-Soros isle while supporting the concept of national sovereignty which were major steps towards stability and trust-building with nations of the world who demand their sovereignty be respected as outlined in the UN Charter itself.
Compare this with Biden’s statement that we must “stand with Russian civil society which has bravely stood up time and again against President Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic authoritarian system” and Biden’s call to host “a global summit for democracy” featuring “civil society organizations from around the world that stand on the frontlines of democracy” including “the private sector, technology companies and social media giants.”
These are the same “Big tech, and media giants” that have given their full backing to the imposition of Biden into the Presidency which have also been used to overthrow nationally elected governments in color revolutionary regime change operations for decades. These the same networks that have suppressed all evidence of systemic vote fraud in the American elections of 2020 and are stoking the fires of a potential new civil war and regime change inside the republic itself.
Whatever the case may be, the coming weeks and months will feature fierce battles that will shape the outcome of world history.
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.
The massive psyops is ongoing. Everyone familiar with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) knew how this would imperatively play out. I chose to frame it as a think tank gaming exercise in my Banana Follies column. This is a live exercise. Yet no one knows exactly how it will end.
US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system, known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30 states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.
The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next. They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile, stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extorsionist (along with son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement, incapable of filling a parking lot in his rallies, and seconded by someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the first to drop out.
The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.
Welcome to the New Resistance
The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will have…consequences.
The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles worthy of the Succession saga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.
Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it, immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.
While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.
Yet what really matters is the letter of the law. State legislatures decide whose electors go to the Electoral College to appoint the President.
Here it is – Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: Each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct.”
So this has nothing to do with governors, not to mention the media. It’s up to GOP state legislatures to act accordingly. The drama may roll out for weeks. The first step of the Electoral College procedure takes place on December 14. The final determination will only happen in early January.
Meanwhile, talk of a New Resistance is spreading like wildfire.
Trumpism, with 71 million + votes, is firmly established as a mass movement. No one in the GOP commands this kind of popular appeal. By sidelining Trumpism, the GOP may be committing seppuku.
So what will Deplorables do?
The always indispensable Alastair Crooke hits the nail on the head in a powerful essay: Trump is the President of Red America. And depending on how the scripted (s)election tragicomedy develops next, the Deplorables are bound to become The Ungovernables.
Crooke references a crucial parallel evoked by historian Mike Vlahos, who showshow the current American saga mirrors Ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic, pitting the Roman elite against the Populares – which today are represented by Red (Trumpist) America:
“This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.”
So as much as the Dem machine had wanted it, Trump is not yet Imperator Caesar Augustus, whom the Greeks called Autokrator (autocrat), but was a de facto monarch. The American Augustus, Tiberius and most of all Caligula is still further on down the road. He will definitely be a benign, humanitarian imperialist.
In the meantime, what will imperial Big Capital do?
The West, and especially the American Rome, is on the edge of a double precipice: the worst economic depression ever, coupled with imminent, myriad, uncontrollable explosions of social rage.
So the Deep State is reasoning that with Biden – or, sooner rather than later, Supreme shakti and Commander-in-Chief Maa Durga Kamala – the path gets smoother towards the Davos Great Reset. After all, to reset the chess pieces, first the chessboard must be knocked over. This will be one step beyond Dark Winter – which not accidentally was evoked by teleprompter-reading Biden himself on the final presidential debate. The script gets ominously closer to the Rockefelller Foundation’s 2010 Lock Step.
Meanwhile, Plan B is kept in ready, steady, go mode: the lineaments of a global rampage, focused on “malign” Russia’s sphere of influence to satisfy a “revived” NATO and the military-industrial complex, which selected the now media-appointed President-Elect in the first place because he’s no more than a pliant cardboard figure.
Until January, when President-elect Joe Biden enters the White House, a complex and open judicial process on several hypotheses, during which Republicans line up behind President Donald Trump until the judicial process reaches a clear end in Biden’s favor, at which point republican and institutional climates are likely to escalate and pave the way for Biden to the White House, if Trump does not present On a military adventure aimed at turning the tables and imposing fait accompli paths restructuring the transition path before the end of his term, as you say his dismissal to the minister of defense under serious warnings of military adventures, or the dangers of dismantling and installing the security, military and judicial administration in a way that weakens the climate of presidential transition in a smooth way, in which institutions play a crucialrole.
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When we say what’s not surprising and what’s about Trump is likely to happen, then if Biden gets into the White House next January, things will be more like a miracle, especially since the election showed a wild, organized, armed white bloc lining up behind Trump’s confrontational project to make it to the Civil War, and to sacrifice the unity of the state. In contrast, the presence of organized and armed groups on the bank of an interview also facilitates the adventure of open armed conflict, some of which build calculations to spread chaos, especially in border areas, and in a number of states that live under racial tensions, and above all there is a vertical division in the business class between the oil camp and the anti-enterprise weapons openly espoused by Biden, and openly pro-Trump. The stated talk of some of the symbols of this class about the independence of states that make up these sectors is vital sources of income, in exchange for the bets of the technology, housing, alternative energy and pharmaceutical sectors on Biden’s projects and their stated grumbling about the savageness of Trump’s economic project, despite the surge in Trump’s customs protections, began to wither isolation on U.S. interests, such as the auto industry recession, despite a temporary surge that followed the steel and steel protection policy that Washington’s allies did notsurvive.
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In an article published today by President-elect Joe Biden, published in The Foreign Affairs Magazine in the March issue, in which he outlines his responsibilities as president if elected, it is possible to deduce what Biden, the yeast of American institutional political life, will do by accumulating his experience and presence during half a century of his position in Congress and his role as semi-permanent chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee before he became vice president under Barack Obama, and Biden, the son of George W. Bush, the son of the American foundation other than Trump, is aware of the fact that he is aware of the state of affairs. His first task is at least a long-term internal and external restoration, the essence of which is at home and needs to be breath-taking abroad, where a return to agreements and understandings is the basis, not the language of animosity that is presented in Biden’s review of policy platforms and not the road map; nuclear, despite the hostile language about Iran’s regional policies. All of this is an entry point for restoring alliance cohesion with Europe and restoring life to NATO, to reconfigure the U.S. economy and rebuild what Biden calls the Americanmodel.
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Biden lays down three pillars of foreign policy, all of which suggest the need to consume his first term in domestic construction, and the pillars are, the power of the model, namely, rebuilding a bright image of America after the wild image of Trump, and the second pillar is the rehabilitation of alliances, whether with its economic dimension with Europe, Japan, South Korea and others, or its political dimension under the title of the Free Democratic Bloc, or its military dimension by revitalizing NATO, and the third pillar it calls sitting at the top of the table. The essence of the reintroduction of the agreements that Trump withdrew from, from the strategic arms control agreement with Russia, the pollution control agreement known as the Paris Climate Agreement, the free trade agreements with China, and the nuclear understanding with Iran, and on these pillars Trump builds what he considers a reconsideration of diplomacy under the slogan “Be strong but smart”, where resorting to military force must be the last option, and within very narrow limits associated with a direct threat to U.S.security.
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Commitment to Israel’s security and superiority is part of Biden’s plan, but from a 4,000-word article that received only 4 words on conflict issues in the region, this brief sentence on commitment.
حتى كانون الثاني موعد دخول الرئيس المنتخب جو بايدن الى البيت الأبيض، مسار قضائيّ معقد ومفتوح على فرضيّات عدّة، يصطف خلالها الجمهوريون وراء الرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب لحين بلوغ المسار القضائيّ نهاية واضحة لصالح بايدن، يرجّح عندها تصاعد مناخات جمهورية ومؤسسيّة تمهّد لبايدن الطريق نحو البيت الأبيض، هذا إذا لم يقدم ترامب على مغامرة عسكريّة تهدف لقلب الطاولة وفرض مسارات أمر واقع تعيد هيكلة مسار المرحلة الانتقالية قبل نهاية ولايته، كما تقول إقالته لوزير الدفاع في ظل تحذيرات جدية من مغامرات عسكرية، أو مخاطر فك وتركيب الإدارة الأمنية والعسكرية والقضائيّة بصورة تضعف مناخ الانتقال الرئاسيّ بصورة سلسة تلعب المؤسسات دوراً حاسماً فيه.
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عندما نقول ما لم يحدث ما هو مفاجئ ويكون المعني هو ترامب، يصير الأرجح هو حدوث هذا المفاجئ، وبالتالي إذا قيّض لبايدن دخول البيت الأبيض في كانون الثاني المقبل، فستكون الأمور أقرب الى معجزة، خصوصاً أن الانتخابات أظهرت وجود كتلة بيضاء عنصرية متوحّشة منظمة ومسلّحة تصطف وراء مشروع ترامب التصادميّ وصولاً لاستسهالها للحرب الأهلية، وللتضحية بوحدة الدولة الفدرالية، وبالمقابل وجود جماعات منظمة ومسلّحة على ضفة مقابلة تستسهل المغامرة أيضاً بنزاع مسلح مفتوح، وبعضها يبني حسابات على تعميم الفوضى خصوصاً في المناطق الحدودية، وفي عدد من الولايات التي تعيش تحت وطأة الاحتقانات العنصرية، وفوق كل ذلك هناك انقسام عمودي في طبقة رجال الأعمال بين معسكر النفط والسلاح المعادي لمشاريع يتبناها بايدن علناً، والمؤيد لترامب علناً. والكلام المعلن من بعض رموز هذه الطبقة عن استقلال ولايات تشكل هذه القطاعات مصادر الدخل الحيوي فيها، مقابل رهانات قطاعات التكنولوجيا والإسكان والطاقة البديلة والأدوية على مشاريع بايدن وتذمّرها المعلن من توحش المشروع الاقتصادي لترامب، رغم الطفرة التي أحدثتها إجراءات الحماية الجمركية التي اعتمدها ترامب، وبدأت تذبل بارتداد العزلة على المصالح الأميركية كحال كساد صناعة السيارات رغم فورة مؤقتة أعقبت سياسة الحماية لصناعة الصلب والحديد التي لم ينج حلفاء واشنطن من تبعاتها.
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في مقال تنشره البناء اليوم للرئيس المنتخَب جو بايدن، سبق نشره في مجلة الفورين أفيرز في عدد آذار نيسان، يقدّم فيه مقاربته لمسؤولياته كرئيس في حال انتخابه، يمكن استخلاص ما سيفعله بايدن، الذي يشكل خميرة الحياة السياسية المؤسسيّة الأميركية بتراكم خبرته وحضوره خلال نصف قرن من موقعه في الكونغرس ودوره كرئيس شبه دائم للجنة الشؤون الخارجية قبل أن يصبح نائباً للرئيس في عهد باراك اوباما، وبايدن الشبيه بجورج بوش الأب إبن المؤسسة الأميركيّة بخلاف ترامب الطارئ عليها، يدرك كما تقول مقالته التفصيليّة إن مهمة ولايته الأولى على الأقل هي إعادة ترميم داخلي وخارجي طويلة النفس، جوهرها في الداخل وتحتاج التقاط الأنفاس في الخارج، حيث العودة للاتفاقات والتفاهمات هي الأساس، وليس لغة العداوات التي تحضر في استعراض بايدن لمنطلقات السياسات وليس لخريطة الطريق؛ فمع روسيا عودة لاتفاقيات الحد من التسلح، رغم تصويرها مصدراً رئيسياً للخطر، ومع الصين عودة للتنافس الاقتصادي تحت سقف اتفاقية المناخ واتفاقيات التجارة الحرة، رغم اللغة التحذيرية من خطر صعود الصين وخطتها للتوسع عالمياً، ومع إيران عودة للاتفاق النووي، رغم اللغة العدائية حول سياسات إيران الإقليمية. وكل هذا مدخل لاستعادة تماسك الحلف مع أوروبا وإعادة الحياة لحلف الناتو، للتفرغ لإعادة تكوين الاقتصاد الأميركي وإعادة بناء ما يسميه بايدن بالنموذج الأميركي.
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يضع بايدن ثلاث ركائز للسياسة الخارجية توحي جميعها بالحاجة لاستهلاك ولايته الأولى في البناء الداخلي، والركائز هي، قوة النموذج، أي اعادة بناء صورة مشرقة لأميركا بعد الصورة المتوحشة التي رسمها ترامب، والركيزة الثانية هي رد الاعتبار للتحالفات، سواء ببعدها الاقتصادي مع أوروبا واليابان وكوريا الجنوبية وسواها، أو ببعدها السياسي تحت عنوان الكتلة الديمقراطية الحرة، أو ببعدها العسكري عبر تنشيط حلف الناتو، والركيزة الثالثة يسميها الجلوس على رأس الطاولة، وجوهرها إعادة العمل بالاتفاقيات التي انسحب منها ترامب، من اتفاقية الحد من التسلح الاستراتيجي مع روسيا، واتفاقية الحد من التلوث المعروفة باتفاقية باريس للمناخ، واتفاقيات التجارة الحرة مع الصين، والتفاهم النووي مع إيران، وعلى هذه الركائز يبني ترامب ما يعتبره رد الاعتبار للدبلوماسية تحت شعار «كن قوياً ولكن كن ذكياً»، حيث اللجوء للقوة العسكرية يجب ان يكون آخر الخيارات، وفي حدود ضيقة جداً ترتبط بتهديد مباشر للأمن الأميركي.
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الالتزام بأمن «إسرائيل» وتفوقها جزء من خطة بايدن، لكن من مقال بـ 4000 كلمة وردت 4 كلمات فقط عن قضايا الصراع في المنطقة هي هذه الجملة المقتضبة حول الالتزام.
What we see playing out in front of the whole world is the final battle of Trump and his Enemies. The historic vote, the democratic process of the will of the American People, is a sideshow. Atop that election event, which was the largest and most egalitarian in modern U.S. history, is the existential struggle between Donald J. Trump, interloper and paradigm destroyer, and an array of the most powerful U.S. stakeholders, his avowed enemies.
As the legal combat rolls out to try save Trump’s election results, each state or city that Trump’s lawyers challenge in court is a citadel of Trump enemies, some unique, some sub rosa, most flying their colors as adversaries since he unleashed his candidacy for the Executive Power of the Presidency.
There are three key states that are headlining the legal contests—Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Additionally, North Carolina and Georgia present as conflict zones, too, the former holding for Trump, the latter leeching the lead to Biden. Peeling back the Repubs versus the Dems struggle for victory, we discover the enemies are not political foes. We discover the enemies are power foes. Trump came for their power and took the hilltop, the Oval Office. They have spent billions of dollars to dislodge him, to destroy him, to decimate his assets like the ninja blade missile fired at General Soleimani shredded the Iranian’s body.
Trump’s candidacy for a second term relies on winning in all these states. Examining the legal skirmishes in each case, he has little chance of achieving his needed goals. Meanwhile, his winning vote totals are being diminished by the hour as his enemies use century old “vote” manipulations to assure Biden’s victory.
What this is not is an ideological-political fight, though the campaign was overwhelmed with ideological munitions exploding at every level.
The struggle for dominance now underway is about pure power to command the domestic and foreign assets of the United States Government and to influence the corporate assets and human assets of the nation domestically and globally. Trump wants to focus on domestic economic and technological development and GDP growth while his Enemies want to use all the power they need to maintain global hegemony.
Trump took the Presidency in 2016, and with it, the Republican Party, the Conservative movement, and the Evangelical base. Recently, in this election, he expanded the Black, Gay and Hispanic component of the Republican voting base. This has held the Senate for the Republicans and increased the House seats, as well as gaining ground in State governors and State legislatures, critical in a year of Census that determines Congressional districts for the next decade.
Trump immobilized a potential nemesis, the MIC, with $2.5 Trillion in contracts for new weapons and munitions and R&D to pursue offensive and defensive systems that the Russians and Chinese already possess. That he also poured ice water on the Afghan War and the Syrian War, and is chilling the African secret special forces wars did not rattle the corporate pigs who live off defense budgets. But, he has agitated the officer corps that depends on small-scale conflicts that boost their careers with battle ribbons and commendations and keeps them climbing the ladder to ‘stars’ on their shoulders. Without wars, the future is very limited for officers. The careers of officers are pressurized by the Congressional mandate of “up or out”, which is a culling process of either you get promoted up or you are exited out of the active duty service. The best insurance of constant career advancement is perpetual wars, small and laden with proxies actually doing the fighting and dying. The US officer corps has lived on these regional wars for many decades. Trump threatens them by shutting the Presidential valves that sustain such ventures. Many officers have spoken out against Trump.
A brief tour of what was done early on and during the campaign to stop Trump from winning outright is necessary. This year, after three years of false accusations of being a stooge for Russia, colluding with Putin, the House impeached Trump for a phone call to Zelensky, President of Ukraine, fabricating a deal was proposed, quid pro quo, that would benefit Trump. Immediately disproved with the official transcript of said phone call, the country and Trump were nonetheless put through the agony of the one-party impeachment which was instantly killed in womb (Pelosi’s or Schiff’s, it was never established), but the demon was dead on arrival. It cost Trump prestige and some votes in the middle. Mud sticks and stains in politics. Bullshit does, also, and stinks for quite some time, too.
Then Covid hit the nation. Trump worked assiduously as President to use US influence and domestic resources to get PPEs, ventilators, swabs and tests, and hospitals ready for an onslaught of patients. He used national presidential powers to get corporations to manufacture ventilators. He coaxed the Big Pharma corporations to push out therapeutics and to design a mass manufacturing of vaccines. He broke the inertia in the Homeland Security, CDC and FDA and dissolved red tape and traditional foot-dragging to get emergency approvals of whatever looked promising to mitigate, moderate and stop the virus from harming or killing the infected. He created a national task force that incorporated all branches of the military to solve all logistical issues that arose and might arise as testing, therapeutics and vaccine would roll out in hot spots Dr. Birx determined and then into regions and states the epidemic modelers directed. Trump was far ahead of the curve on everything a President could do.
Most importantly, in the single decision that had to be made, to close the nation’s economy and get tens of millions of businesses to shut down while employees stayed safely at home as the virus swept around the country, he did it when the ‘scientists’ and ‘doctors’ advised him to. It was the death knell of his economic success and tore the foundation from his re-election campaign.
Trump would have been unstoppable in 2020 election if not for the shutdown. It cost millions of Americans their income, their jobs, their businesses and impacted their children who were subject to digital home schooling because all their schools were closed, K-12 and colleges and universities, too. The Covid deaths and fears would not have stopped him.
The collapse of the economy altered the Trump MAGA success. His re-election would have been an historic landslide and wipeout of the Dems, likely winning the House back, also. Certainly, he would have won 40 of the 50 states.
What Covid did was give the Dems a campaign issue that along with the 3+ years of demonization, the impeachment, the investigations, the Infowar, the sabotage and treachery by the Intel agencies and State Dept., all the legal cases against Trump allies by Muller, the prolonged agony of General Flynn made by a Federal DC judge, enabled by the Appeals Court, made the false charge that Trump did not listen to the doctors and scientists stick.
Trump never made a false move, never went against science. He pushed the envelope to get breakthroughs. He was ahead of the curve, and the economy coming back so swiftly and strongly proves he did everything correctly. He saved lives and saved the economy. But it cost him support at the ballot box. He was pilloried by MSM and Dems, and demagogued by the Biden campaign. All false charges. But they stuck.
The one thing that Trump could not do in the fight against Covid was direct and order 50 states to act in concert. The Federal system of states left governors in charge of the fate of their citizens, and many governors, Dems all of them, messed up, acted late, made the wrong decisions. Their failures were heaped on Trump by the Media and the very Dem governors who caused a large percentage of the deaths by the virus.
The facts are the facts. In New York, Governor Cuomo caused thousands of deaths in nursing homes. He did not use thousands of beds provided by Trump in the Javits Center and on the Naval hospital ship, all of which Cuomo had requested. He did not even use a 110-bed tent facility in Central Park provided for him by Samaritan’s Purse. Culpability in New York alone was criminal and accounted for 40% of US deaths by Covid. Trump, however, got covered with the mud from Cuomo’s mess.
The final poison arrow from Covid’s quiver was Trump got infected. He quickly proved his amazing genetic health and recovered, experimenting upon himself with emergency-approved (due to his prior swift actions) therapeutics. The entire ordeal (which also touched his wife, Melania and son, Baron) cost him two weeks of vital campaigning. The ironically named by him, China virus, had come to ruin his re-election as if Zhongnanhai had intended to inflict him with the novel Corona virus. Fate or karma had entered the campaign.
We can uncover his thinly veiled enemies as we look closely at the States ‘counting’ the votes. Perhaps, the verb ‘compiling’ the votes is best used because any freshman observer of what has traditionally and continually occurred where and when needed is not mere vote counting. We see the completion of vote counting of the opponents largest haul (in this case, Trump’s bastions) and then, calculating with simple arithmetic, addition and subtraction, as the long night (always), with delays (always) and the days or weeks needed to ‘find’ the votes needed to overcome his total in order to create victory for Biden. Compiling votes is what we see going on in these key states.
This compiling is an art form, a tradecraft, indeed, a tradecraft used by State Dept. and CIA to win victories for satraps the US wants to win or hold power in other countries’ elections. In parts of the U.S., in Democrat vales and burgs, it is learned with mother’s milk. Professionals handle the task. I have personally seen it in operation in Florida, in New Jersey and in California. When it comes time to “count the votes”, the pros appear. Some know their names. Whether the system of voting is machines, punch cards, ink fill-ins, magical things occur. This is the final step of stealing an election.
Worse awaited Trump as he roared around the nation, rallying his voters by the tens of thousands, some days doing five rallies. Enemies lurked among the 19,000 counties of the United States where the votes of 2020 would be tallied. Some enemies, no doubt, were ideological, political foes. Some were institutional, government employees who feared four years of coming reforms that might likely cost them their jobs. Others were sore losers and turncoat Republicans who lost in 2016. A few were billionaires, oligarchs of high tech, whose demi-god status in the Liberal Cult was defied by the upstart Trump who would never kneel before their billions and influence. A ground swell for breaking up some of the big tech corporations and regulating them seemed primed for his second term.
The oligarchs sent their money to pay for the work needed to stop Trump. They sent billions of dollars mostly for negative advertising and for social media memes picked up by MSM as themes of the day, all rancid attacks against Trump.
Proven social and political science: negative advertising works. It depresses voting turnout and suppresses votes for the target. It eats at the undecided and independents who otherwise would have voted for the target. Billions of dollars of negative ads stopped the Red Wave. Turnout was historic, and the Republicans gained ground, but the landslide Trump needed was stopped.
The oligarchs who control all social media, also leveraged their platform’s influence and impact worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to manipulate discourse, Internet search, government officials’ statements, tweets and re-tweets, advertising and digital content. Namely, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt were allied against Trump. Jeff Bezos, through his Washington Post, contributed the devastating suppression poll of a 17 pt. Biden lead in Wisconsin. Publicized nationally, that was a very powerful negative cast against the Trump campaign in the last days of the campaign. In addition, Bloomberg and George Soros injected hundreds of millions of dollars in the election in the swing states.
Nevada: Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader, operates a political machine in the state, openly hostile to Trump. The unionized casino employees, culinary workers union of 60,000, and thousands of illegals who worked construction, landscaping and low level jobs in Reno and Las Vegas, coalesced against Trump. Most all of these two groups are unemployed due to Covid shutdown, with thousands illegally voting, while many worked were paid Biden and Dem campaign volunteers.
Arizona: John McCain’s family, livid at the insults to John by Trump, were openly allied with NeverTrumpers like Jeff Flake and Mitt Romney, most importantly the Bush dynasty operatives all of whom hate Trump for his humiliating defeat of Jeff Bush campaigned against Trump. This hatred of Trump manifested into an irrational undermining of the campaign of Senator Martha McSally. One would think that Martha McSally as a combat A-10 Warthog pilot and group commander with years of active warfare experience would be a natural successor to the McCain Senate seat. However, her career as a combat pilot was a success that dwarfed the disastrous McCain career. So the McCains chose to work against her and Trump, especially when Trump backed her strongly. Arizona also has substantial illegals, useful to work and vote against Trump’s campaign because in a second term, they would likely be deported. Finally, Blue State émigrés from California have populated Maricopa County and voted against Trump as they would have in California. Their vote in Arizona made a difference.
Pennsylvania: The Philly Dem political machine is historic and perpetual. They cheat in local, state and federal elections and have for a century. Additionally, the Hillary Clinton-family machine is alive and well, ever ready to deliver votes when needed in the Commonwealth. Her father was from Scranton, she and her brothers and Bill had a political machine that could deliver to her most of the state except the Philadelphia region. She certainly activated her machine to work against Trump. Watch the grin on Ed Rendell’s face when Pennsylvania is stolen for Biden. He’s always been out front for the Clintons.
Georgia: There is a cadre of Black officials who projected the drumbeat of “Trump is a Racist”, the chanting led by the Atlanta mayor. Countering this propaganda, Trump had the personal endorsement of the greatest athlete Georgia ever produced, Herschel Walker, who has had a 37-year friendship with Trump and campaigned for Trump. Making these officials livid, too, was the relationship Trump had with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece, Dr. Alveda King. She testified endlessly that Trump was no racist. Nonetheless, the massive Black vote was tainted away from Trump, though he made larger than predicted inroads with Blacks in other venues.
North Carolina is now a state heavily influenced by Virginia’s shift to Blue. Sections of the state, where high tech industry abounds, are ideologically liberal and created enough barrier against Trump sweeping the state. Details haven’t emerged about how this state is now subject to delivery to Biden unless Trump’s margin can hold.
However, the elites, oligarchs, status quo stakeholders, criminal officials, the corrupted, deep state operatives, shadow government bureaucrats, influencers, neocons, and a sea of demented activists have waged a war to prevent a second term for Trump.
They sought Power and, apparently, will seize it soon.
Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”.
It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the waypost to a better future.
In economics, “externalities” are usually defined indifferently as the effects of a commercial or industrial process on a third party that are not costed into that process.
Here is what should be a familiar example. For decades, cigarette manufacturers made enormous profits by concealing scientific evidence that over time their product could prove lethal to customers. The firms profited by externalizing the costs associated with cigarettes – of death and disease – on to those buying their cigarettes and wider society. People gave Philip Morris and British American Tobacco their money as these companies made those smoking Marlboros and Lucky Strikes progressively unhealthier.
The externalized cost was paid – is still paid – by the customers themselves, by grieving families, by local and national health services, and by the taxpayer. Had the firms been required to pick up these various tabs, it would have proved entirely unprofitable to manufacture cigarettes.
Inherently Violent
Externalities are not incidental to the way capitalist economies run. They are integral to them. After all, it is a legal obligation on private companies to maximize profits for their shareholders – in addition, of course, to the personal incentive bosses have to enrich themselves, and each company’s need to avoid making themselves vulnerable to more profitable and predatory competitors in the marketplace.
Companies are therefore motivated to offload as many costs as possible on to others. As we shall see, externalities mean someone other than the company itself pays the true cost behind its profits, either because those others are too weak or ignorant to fight back or because the bill comes due further down the line. And for that reason, externalities – and capitalism – are inherently violent.
All this would be glaringly obvious if we didn’t live inside an ideological system – the ultimate echo chamber enforced by our corporate media – that is complicit either in hiding this violence or in normalizing it. When externalities are particularly onerous or harmful, as they invariably are in one way or another, it becomes necessary for a company to obscure the connection between cause and effect, between its accumulation of profit and the resulting accumulation of damage caused to a community, a distant country or the natural world – or all three.
That is why corporations – those that inflict the biggest and worst externalities – invest a great deal of time and money in aggressively managing public perceptions. They achieve this through a combination of public relations, advertising, media control, political lobbying and the capture of regulatory institutions. Much of the business of business is deception, either making the externalized harm invisible or gaining the public’s resigned acceptance that the harm is inevitable.
In that sense, capitalism produces a business model that is not only rapacious but psychopathic. Those who pursue profit have no choice but to inflict damage on wider society or the planet, and then cloak their deeply anti-social – even suicidal – actions.
Psychopathic Demands
A recent film that alludes to how this form of violence works was last year’s Dark Waters, concerning the long-running legal battle with DuPont over the chemicals it developed to make non-stick coatings for pots and pans. From the outset, DuPont’s research showed that these chemicals were highly dangerous and accumulated in the body. The science overwhelmingly suggested that exposed individuals would be at risk of developing cancerous tumors or producing children with birth defects.
There were huge profits to be made for DuPont from its chemical discovery so long as it could keep the research hidden. So that’s exactly what its executives did. They set aside basic morality and acted in concert with the psychopathic demands of the marketplace.
Not every day a Hollywood movie – Dark Waters, on DuPont's intentional, profit-driven poisoning of America (and the planet) – concludes that the system is rigged to protect corporations from being held accountable for their psychopathic criminality https://t.co/BMpJSinso9
DuPont produced pans that contaminated its customers’ food. Workers were exposed to a cocktail of lethal poisons in its factories. The company stored the toxic waste products in drums and then secretly disposed of them in landfills where they leached into the local water supply, killing cattle and producing an epidemic of disease among local residents. DuPont created a chemical that is now everywhere in our environment, risking the health of generations to come.
But a film like Dark Waters necessarily turned a case study in how capitalism commits violence by externalizing its costs into something less threatening, less revelatory. We hiss at DuPont’s executives as though they are the ugly sisters in a pantomime rather than ordinary people not unlike our parents, our siblings, our offspring, ourselves.
In truth, there is nothing exceptional about the DuPont story – apart from the company’s failure to keep its secret hidden from the public. And that exposure was anomalous, occurring only belatedly and against great odds.
An important message the film’s feelgood ending fails to deliver is that other corporations have learned from DuPont’s mistake – not the moral “mistake” of externalizing their costs, but the financial mistake of getting caught doing so. Corporate lobbyists have worked since to further capture regulatory authorities and to amend transparency and legal discovery laws to avoid any repetition, to ensure they are not held legally liable, as DuPont was, in the future.
Victims of Our Bombs
Unlike the DuPont case, most externalities are never exposed. Instead, they hide in plain sight. These externalities do not need to be concealed because they are either not perceived as externalities or because they are viewed as so unimportant as to be not worth factoring in.
The military-industrial complex – the one we were warned about more than half a century ago by President Dwight Eisenhower, a former US general – excels in these kinds of externalities. Its power derives from its ability to externalize its costs on to the victims of its bombs and its wars. These are people we know and care little about: they live far from us, they look and sound different to us, they are denied names and life stories like us. They are simply numbers, denoting them either as terrorists or, at best, unfortunate collateral damage.
The externalities of the west’s war industries are opaque to us. The chain of cause and effect is nowadays obscured as “humanitarian intervention”. And even when war’s externalities come knocking at our borders as refugees flee from the bloodshed, or from the nihilistic cults sucked into the power vacuums we leave behind, or from the wreckage of infrastructure our weapons cause, or from the environmental degradation and pollution we unleash, or from the economies ruined by our plunder of local resources, we still don’t recognize these externalities for what they are. Our politicians and media transform the victims of our wars and our resource grabs into, at best, economic migrants and, at worst, barbarians at the gate.
Exclusive footage of a beach landing at St Margaret's Bay, Kent. More illegal migrants hit the jackpot. pic.twitter.com/BqNaWaTIzU
If we are entirely ignorant of the externalities inflicted by capitalism on victims beyond our shores, we are gradually and very late in the day waking up to some of capitalism’s externalities much closer to home. Parts of the corporate media are finally admitting that which can no longer be plausibly denied, which is evident to our own senses.
For decades politicians and the corporate media managed to veil two things: that capitalism is an entirely unsustainable, profit-driven, endless consumption model; and that the environment is being gradually damaged in ways harmful to life. Each was obscured, as was the fact that the two are causally connected. The economic model is the primary cause of environmental damage.
People, especially the young, are slowly awakening from this enforced state of ignorance. The corporate media, even its most liberal elements, is not leading this process; it is responding to that awakening.
Last week the Guardian newspaper prominently ran two stories about externalities, even if it failed to frame them as such. One was about micro-plastics leaching from feeding bottles into babies, and the other about the toll air pollution is taking on the populations of major European cities.
The latter story, based on new research, specifically assessed the cost of air pollution in European cities – in terms of “premature death, hospital treatment, lost working days and other health costs” – at £150 billion a year. Most of this was caused by pollution from vehicles, the profitable product of the car industry. The researchers admitted that their figure was an under-estimate of air pollution’s true cost.
But, of course, even that underestimate was arrived at solely on the basis of metrics prioritized by capitalist ideology: the cost to the economy of death and disease, not the incalculable cost in lost and damaged human lives, and even less the damage to other species and the natural world. Another report last week alluded to one of those many additional costs, showing a steep rise in depression and anxiety caused by air pollution.
The other story, on baby bottles, is part of a much bigger story of how the plastics industry – whose products are derivatives of the fossil fuel industry – has long been filling our oceans and soil with plastics, both of the visible and invisible kind. Last week’s report revealed that the sterilization process in which bottles are heated in boiling water resulted in babies swallowing millions of micro-plastics each day. The study found that plastic food containers were shedding much higher loads of micro-plastics than expected.
These stories are snapshots of a much wider environmental catastrophe unfolding across the planet caused by profit-driven industrialized society. As well as heating up the climate, corporations are chopping down the forests that don’t burn down first, ridding the planet of its lungs; they are destroying natural habitats and soil quality, and they are rapidly killing off insect populations.
As should be obvious by now, the ecological destructiveness of capitalism is baked in: whether it's climate breakdown, pollution or the imminent extinction of most of the insect life on which wider life depends. Ignoring one doesn't make the others go away https://t.co/1pEojqcBiy
These industries’ externalities are, for the time being, impacting most severely on the natural world. But they will soon have more visible and dramatic effects that will be felt by our children and grandchildren. Neither of these constituencies currently has a say in how our capitalist “democracies” are being run.
Perception Managers
Capitalism isn’t only harming us, it’s double-billing us: taking first from our wallets and then depriving us of a future. We have now entered an era of deep cognitive dissonance.
Unlike a few years ago, many of us now understand that our futures are at grave risk from changes in our environment – the effect. But the task of today’s perception managers, like those of yesteryear, is to obscure the main cause – our economic system, capitalism.
The increasingly desperate effort to dissociate capitalism from the imminent environmental crisis – to break any perception of a causal link – was highlighted early this year. It emerged that counter-terrorism police in the UK had included Extinction Rebellion, the west’s main environmental protest group, on a list of extremist organizations. Under related “Prevent” regulations, teachers and government officials are already required by law to report anyone who they suspect of being “radicalized”.
In a guide explaining the purpose of the list, officials and teachers were told to identify anyone who speaks in “strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution”.
Why was Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent, civil disobedience group, included alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic jihadists? A whole page is dedicated to the threat posed by Extinction Rebellion. The guide explains that the organization’s activism is rooted in an “anti-establishment philosophy that seeks system change”. That is, environmental activism risks making apparent – especially to the young – the causal connection between the economic system and damage to the environment.
Once the story broke, the police hastily rowed back, claiming that Extinction Rebellion’s inclusion was a mistake. But more recently establishment efforts to decouple capitalism from its catastrophic externalities have grown more explicit.
Last month England’s department of education ordered schools not to use any materials in the curriculum that question the legitimacy of capitalism. Opposition to capitalism was described as an “extreme political stance” – opposition, let us remember, to an economic system whose relentless pursuit of growth and profit treats the destruction of the natural world as an uncosted externality.
Paradoxically, education officials equated the promotion of alternatives to capitalism as a threat to free speech, as well as an endorsement of illegal activity, and – inevitably – as evidence of antisemitism.
Suicidal Trajectory
These desperate and draconian measures to shore up an increasingly discredited system are not about to end. They will get much worse.
The establishment is not preparing to give up on capitalism – the ideology that enriched and empowered it – without a fight. The political and media class proved that with their relentless and unprecedented attacks on Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn over several years. And Corbyn was offering only a reformist, democratic socialist agenda.
The establishment has also demonstrated its determination to cling on to the status quo in its relentless and unprecedented attacks on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked away, seemingly indefinitely, for revealing the externalities – the victims – of the west’s war industries and the psychopathic behavior of those in power.
Efforts to end the suicidal trajectory of our current “free market” system will doubtless soon be equated with terrorism, as the Prevent strategy has already intimated. We should be ready.
There can be no escape from the death wish of capitalism without recognizing that death wish, and then demanding and working for wholesale change. Externalities may sound like innocuous jargon, but they and the economic system that requires them are killing us, our children and the planet.
The nightmare can end, but only if we wake up.
– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “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). Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia. They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can’t. But the illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more houses in Russia’s neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.
The fires burning at Russia’s borders in the Caucasus are an add-on to the disorder and conflict on its Western border in neighboring Belarus, where fuel is poured on daily by pyromaniacs at the head of the European Union acting surely in concert with Washington.
Yesterday we learned of the decision of the European Council to impose sanctions on President Lukashenko, a nearly unprecedented action when directed against the head of state of a sovereign nation. … It is easy enough to see that the real intent of the sanctions is to put pressure on the Kremlin, which is Lukashenko’s guarantor in power, to compound the several other measures being implemented simultaneously in the hope that Putin and his entourage will finally crack and submit to American global hegemony as Europe did long ago. … The anti-Russia full tilt ahead policy outlined above is going on against a background of the U.S. presidential electoral campaigns. The Democrats continue to try to depict Donald Trump as “Putin’s puppy,” as if the President has been kindly to his fellow autocrat while in office. Of course, under the dictates of the Democrat-controlled House and with the complicity of the anti-Russian staff in the State Department, in the Pentagon, American policy towards Russia over the entire period of Trump’s presidency has been one of never ending ratcheting up of military, informational, economic and other pressures in the hope that Vladimir Putin or his entourage would crack. Were it not for the nerves of steel of Mr. Putin and his close advisers, the irresponsible pressure policies outlined above could result in aggressive behavior and risk taking by Russia that would make the Cuban missile crisis look like child’s play.
The U.S. arms industry lobby, in form of the Atlantic Council, confirms the ‘western’ strategy Doctorow describes. It calls for ‘ramping up on Russia’ with even more sanctions:
Key to raising the costs to Russia is a more proactive transatlantic strategy for sanctions against the Russian economy and Putin’s power base, together with other steps to reduce Russian energy leverage and export revenue. A new NATO Russia policy should be pursued in tandem with the European Union (EU), which sets European sanctions policy and faces the same threats from Russian cyberattacks and disinformation. At a minimum, EU sanctions resulting from hostilities in Ukraine should be extended, like the Crimea sanctions, for one year rather than every six months. Better yet, allies and EU members should tighten sanctions further and extend them on an indefinite basis until Russia ends its aggression and takes concrete steps toward de-escalation.
It also wants Europe to pay for weapons in the Ukraine and Georgia:
A more dynamic NATO strategy for Russia should go hand in hand with a more proactive policy toward Ukraine and Georgia in the framework of an enhanced Black Sea strategy. The goal should be to boost both partners’ deterrence capacity and reduce Moscow’s ability to undermine their sovereignty even as NATO membership remains on the back burner for the time being.
As part of this expanded effort, European allies should do more to bolster Ukraine and Georgia’s ground, air, and naval capabilities, complementing the United States’ and Canada’s efforts that began in 2014.
The purpose of the whole campaign against Russia, explains the Atlantic Council author, is to subordinate it to U.S. demands:
Relations between the West and Moscow had begun to deteriorate even before Russia’s watershed invasion of Ukraine, driven principally by Moscow’s fear of the encroachment of Western values and their potential to undermine the Putin regime. With the possibility of a further sixteen years of Putin’s rule, most experts believe relations are likely to remain confrontational for years to come. They argue that the best the United States and its allies can do is manage this competition and discourage aggressive actions from Moscow. However, by pushing back against Russia more forcefully in the near and medium term, allies are more likely to eventually convince Moscow to return to compliance with the rules of the liberal international order and to mutually beneficial cooperation as envisaged under the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act.
The ‘rules of the liberal international order’ are of course whatever the U.S. claims they are. They may change at any moment and without notice to whatever new rules are the most convenient for U.S. foreign policy.
But as Doctorow said above, Putin and his advisors stay calm and ignore such trash despite all the hostility expressed against them.
One of Putin’s close advisors is of course Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In a wide ranging interview with Russian radio stations he recently touched on many of the issues Doctorow also mentions. With regards to U.S. strategy towards Russia Lavrov diagnoses:
Sergey Lavrov: […] You mentioned in one of your previous questions that no matter what we do, the West will try to hobble and restrain us, and undermine our efforts in the economy, politics, and technology. These are all elements of one approach.
Question: Their national security strategy states that they will do so.
Sergey Lavrov: Of course it does, but it is articulated in a way that decent people can still let go unnoticed, but it is being implemented in a manner that is nothing short of outrageous.
Question: You, too, can articulate things in a way that is different from what you would really like to say, correct?
Sergey Lavrov: It’s the other way round. I can use the language I’m not usually using to get the point across. However, they clearly want to throw us off balance, and not only by direct attacks on Russia in all possible and conceivable spheres by way of unscrupulous competition, illegitimate sanctions and the like, but also by unbalancing the situation near our borders, thus preventing us from focusing on creative activities. Nevertheless, regardless of the human instincts and the temptations to respond in the same vein, I’m convinced that we must abide by international law.
Russia does not accept the fidgety ‘rules of the liberal international order’. Russia sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often gets broken. But as Lavrov said elsewhere, one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.
Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it also has the capability to win a fight. At one point the interviewer even jokes about that:
Question: As we say, if you don’t listen to Lavrov, you will listen to [Defense Minister] Shoigu.
Sergey Lavrov: I did see a T-shirt with that on it. Yes, it’s about that.
Yes, it’s about that. Russia is militarily secure and the ‘west’ knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests.
As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?
Posted by b on October 17, 2020 at 16:31 UTC | Permalink
While the world’s attention is absorbed by tectonic shifts unfolding across America as “a perfect storm of civil war, and military coup threatens to undo both the elections and the very foundations of the republic itself, something very ominous has appeared “off of the radar” of most onlookers. This something is a financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic banks that threatens to unleash chaos upon the world. It is this collapse that underlies the desperate efforts being made by the neo-con drive for total war with Russia, China and other members of the growing Mutlipolar Alliance today.
In recent articles, I have mentioned that the Bank of England-led “solution” to this oncoming financial blowout of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble is being pushed under the cover of a “Great Global Reset” which is an ugly and desperate effort to use COVID-19 as a cover for the imposition of a new post-covid world order operating system. Since the new “rules” of this new system are very similar to the 1923 Bank of England “solution” to Germany’s economic chaos which eventually required a fascist governance mechanism to impose it onto the masses, I wish to take a deeper look at the causes and effects of Weimar Germany’s completely un-necessary collapse into hyperinflation and chaos during the period of 1919-1923.
In this essay, I will go further to examine how those same architects of hyperfinflation came close to establishing a global bankers’ dictatorship in 1933 and how that early attempt at a New World Order was fortunately derailed through a bold fight which has been written out of popular history books.
We will investigate in depth how a major war broke out within America led by anti-imperial patriots in opposition to the forces of Wall Street and London’s Deep State and we will examine how this clash of paradigms came to a head in 1943-1945.
This historical study is not being conducted for entertainment, nor should this be seen as a purely academic exercise, but is being created for the simple fact that the world is coming to a total systemic meltdown and unless certain suppressed facts of 20th century history are brought to light, then those forces who have destroyed our collective memory of what we once were will remain in the drivers seat as society is carried into a new age of fascism and world war.
Versailles and the Destruction of Germany
Britain had been the leading hand behind the orchestration of WWI and the destruction of the potential German-Russian-American-Ottoman alliance that had begun to take form by the late 19th century as foolish Kaiser Wilhelm discovered (though sadly too late) when he said: “the world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired for our annihilation… that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but surely created by Edward VII”.
Just as the British oligarchy managed the war, so too did they organize the reparations conference in France which, among other things, imposed impossible debt repayments upon a defeated Germany and created the League of Nations which was meant to become the instrument for a “post-nation state world order”. Lloyd George led the British delegation alongside his assistant Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Leo Amery, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord John Maynard Keynes who have a long term agenda to bring about a global dictatorship. All of these figures were members of the newly emerging Round Table Movement, that had taken full control of Britain by ousting Asquith in 1916, and which is at the heart of today’s “deep state”.
After the 1918 Armistice dismantled Germany’s army and navy, the once powerful nation was now forced to pay the impossible sum of 132 billion gold marks to the victors and had to give up territories representing 10% of its population (Alsace-Loraine, Ruhr, and North Silesia) which made up 15% of its arable land, 12% of its livestock, 74% of its iron ore, 63% of its zinc production, and 26% of its coal. Germany also had to give up 8000 locomotives, 225 000 railcars and all of its colonies. It was a field day of modern pillage.
Germany was left with very few options. Taxes were increased and imports were cut entirely while exports were increased. This policy (reminiscent of the IMF austerity techniques in use today) failed entirely as both fell 60%. Germany gave up half of its gold supply and still barely a dent was made in the debt payments. By June 1920 the decision was made to begin a new strategy: increase the printing press. Rather than the “miracle cure” which desperate monetarists foolishly believed it would be, this solution resulted in an asymptotic devaluation of the currency into hyperinflation. From June 1920 to October 1923 the money supply in circulation skyrocketed from 68.1 gold marks to 496.6 quintillion gold marks. In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923).
With the currency’s loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels. German director Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse (The Gambler) exposed the insanity of German population’s collapse into speculative insanity as those who had the means began betting against the German mark in order to protect themselves thus only helping to collapse the mark from within. This is very reminiscent of those Americans today short selling the US dollar rather than fighting for a systemic solution.
There was resistance.
The dark effects of Versailles were not unknown and Germany’s Nazi-stained destiny was anything but pre-determined. It is a provable fact often left out of history books that patriotic forces from Russia, America and Germany attempted courageously to change the tragic trajectory of hyperinflation and fascism which WOULD HAVE prevented the rise of Hitler and WWII had their efforts not been sabotaged.
From America itself, a new Presidential team under the leadership of William Harding quickly reversed the pro-League of Nations agenda of the rabidly anglophile President Woodrow Wilson. A leading US industrialist named Washington Baker Vanderclip who had led in the world’s largest trade agreement in history with Russia to the tune of $3 billion in 1920 had called Wilson “an autocrat at the inspiration of the British government.” Unlike Wilson, President Harding both supported the US-Russia trade deal and undermined the League of Nations by re-enforcing America’s sovereignty, declaring bi-lateral treaties with Russia, Hungary and Austria outside of the league’s control in 1921. The newly-formed British Roundtable Movement in America (set up as the Council on Foreign Relations) were not pleased.
Just as Harding was maneuvering to recognize the Soviet Union and establish an entente with Lenin, the great president ate some “bad oysters” and died on August 2, 1923. While no autopsy was ever conducted, his death brought a decade of Anglophile Wall Street control into America and ended all opposition to World Government from the Presidency. This period resulted in the speculation-driven bubble of the roaring 20s whose crash on black Friday in 1929 nearly unleashed a fascist hell in America.
The Russia-Germany Rapallo Treaty is De-Railed
After months of organizing, leading representatives of Russia and Germany agreed to an alternative solution to the Versailles Treaty which would have given new life to Germany’s patriots and established a powerful Russia-German friendship in Europe that would have upset other nefarious agendas.
Under the leadership of German Industrialist and Foreign Minster Walter Rathenau, and his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, the treaty was signed in Rapallo, Italy on April 16, 1922 premised upon the forgiveness of all war debts and a renouncement of all territorial claims from either side. The treaty said Russia and Germany would “co-operate in a spirit of mutual goodwill in meeting the economic needs of both countries.”
When Rathenau was assassinated by a terrorist cell called the Organization Consul on June 24, 1922 the success of the Rapallo Treaty lost its steam and the nation fell into a deeper wave of chaos and money printing. The Organization Consul had taken the lead in the murder of over 354 German political figures between 1919-1923, and when they were banned in 1922, the group merely changed its name and morphed into other German paramilitary groups (such as the Freikorps) becoming the military arm of the new National Socialist Party.
1923: City of London’s Solution is imposed
When the hyperinflationary blowout of Germany resulted in total un-governability of the state, a solution took the form of the Wall Street authored “Dawes Plan” which necessitated the use of a London-trained golem by the name of Hjalmar Schacht. First introduced as Currency Commissioner in November 1923 and soon President of the Reichsbank, Schacht’s first act was to visit Bank of England’s governor Montagu Norman in London who provided Schacht a blueprint for proceeding with Germany’s restructuring. Schacht returned to “solve” the crisis with the very same poison that caused it.
First announcing a new currency called the “rentenmark” set on a fixed value exchanging 1 trillion reichsmarks for 1 new rentenmark, Germans were robbed yet again. This new currency would operate under “new rules” never before seen in Germany’s history: Mass privatizations resulted in Anglo-American conglomerates purchasing state enterprises. IG Farben, Thyssen, Union Banking, Brown Brothers Harriman, Standard Oil, JP Morgan and Union Banking took control Germany’s finances, mining and industrial interests under the supervision of John Foster Dulles, Montagu Norman, Averill Harriman and other deep state actors. This was famously exposed in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremburg by Stanley Kramer.
Schacht next cut credit to industries, raised taxes and imposed mass austerity on “useless spending”. 390 000 civil servants were fired, unions and collective bargaining was destroyed and wages were slashed by 15%.
As one can imagine, this destruction of life after the hell of Versailles was intolerable and civil unrest began to boil over in ways that even the powerful London-Wall Street bankers (and their mercenaries) couldn’t control. An enforcer was needed unhindered by the republic’s democratic institutions to force Schacht’s economics onto the people. An up-and-coming rabble rousing failed painter who had made waves in a Beerhall Putsch on November 8, 1923 was perfect.
One Last Attempt to Save Germany
Though Hitler grew in power over the coming decade of Schachtian economics, one last republican effort was made to prevent Germany from plunging into a fascist hell in the form of the November 1932 election victory of General Kurt von Schleicher as Chancellor of Germany. Schleicher had been a co-architect of Rapallo alongside Rathenau a decade earlier and was a strong proponent of the Friedrich List Society’s program of public works and internal improvements promoted by industrialist Wilhelm Lautenbach. The Nazi party’s public support collapsed and it found itself bankrupt. Hitler had fallen into depression and was even contemplating suicide when “a legal coup” was unleashed by the Anglo-American elite resulting in Wall Street funds pouring into Nazi coffers.
By January 30, 1933 Hitler gained Chancellorship where he quickly took dictatorial powers under the “state of emergency” caused by the burning of the Reichstag in March 1933. By 1934 the Night of the Long Knives saw General Schleicher and hundreds of other German patriots assassinated and it was only a few years until the City of London-Wall Street Frankenstein monster stormed across the world.
How the 1929 Crash was Manufactured
While everyone knows that the 1929 market crash unleashed four years of hell in America which quickly spread across Europe under the great depression, not many people have realized that this was not inevitable, but rather a controlled blowout.
The bubbles of the 1920s were unleashed with the early death of President William Harding in 1923 and grew under the careful guidance of JP Morgan’s President Coolidge and financier Andrew Mellon (Treasury Secretary) who de-regulated the banks, imposed austerity onto the country, and cooked up a scheme for Broker loans allowing speculators to borrow 90% on their stock. Wall Street was deregulated, investments into the real economy were halted during the 1920s and insanity became the norm. In 1925 broker loans totalled $1.5 billion and grew to $2.6 billion in 1926 and hit $5.7 billion by the end of 1927. By 1928, the stock market was overvalued fourfold!
When the bubble was sufficiently inflated, a moment was decided upon to coordinate a mass “calling in” of the broker loans. Predictably, no one could pay them resulting in a collapse of the markets. Those “in the know” cleaned up with JP Morgan’s “preferred clients”, and other financial behemoths selling before the crash and then buying up the physical assets of America for pennies on the dollar. One notable person who made his fortune in this manner was Prescott Bush of Brown Brothers Harriman, who went onto bailout a bankrupt Nazi party in 1932. These financiers had a tight allegiance with the City of London and coordinated their operations through the private central banking system of America’s Federal Reserve and Bank of International Settlements.
The Living Hell that was the Great Depression
Throughout the Great depression, the population was pushed to its limits making America highly susceptible to fascism as unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, industrial capacity collapsed by 70%, and agricultural prices collapsed far below the cost of production accelerating foreclosures and suicide. Life savings were lost as 4000 banks failed.
This despair was replicated across Europe and Canada with eugenics-loving fascists gaining popularity across the board. England saw the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in 1932, English Canada had its own fascist solution with the Rhodes Scholar “Fabian Society” League of Social Reconstruction (which later took over the Liberal Party) calling for the “scientific management of society”. Time magazine had featured Il Duce over 6 times by 1932 and people were being told by that corporate fascism was the economic solution to all of America’s economic woes.
In the midst of the crisis, the City of London removed itself from the gold standard in 1931 which was a crippling blow to the USA, as it resulted in a flight of gold from America causing a deeper contraction of the money supply and thus inability to respond to the depression. British goods simultaneously swamped the USA crushing what little production was left.
It was in this atmosphere that one of the least understood battles unfolded in 1933.
1932: A Bankers’ Dictatorship is Attempted
In Germany, a surprise victory of Gen. Kurt Schleicher caused the defeat of the London-directed Nazi party in December 1932 threatening to break Germany free of Central Bank tyranny. A few weeks before Schleicher’s victory, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in America threatening to regulate the private banks and assert national sovereignty over finance.
Seeing their plans for global fascism slipping away, the City of London announced that a new global system controlled by Central Banks had to be created post haste. Their objective was to use the economic crisis as an excuse to remove from nation states any power over monetary policy, while enhancing the power of Independent Central Banks as enforcers of “balanced global budgets”. elaborate
In December 1932, an economic conference “to stabilize the world economy” was organized by the League of Nations under the guidance of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Bank of England. The BIS was set up as “the Central Bank of Central Banks” in 1930 in order to facilitate WWI debt repayments and was a vital instrument for funding Nazi Germany- long after WWII began. The London Economic Conference brought together 64 nations of the world under a controlled environment chaired by the British Prime Minister and opened by the King himself.
“The conference considers it to be essential, in order to provide an international gold standard with the necessary mechanism for satisfactory working, that independent Central Banks, with requisite powers and freedom to carry out an appropriate currency and credit policy, should be created in such developed countries as have not at present an adequate central banking institution” and that “the conference wish to reaffirm the great utility of close and continuous cooperation between Central Banks. The Bank of International Settlements should play an increasingly important part not only by improving contact, but also as an instrument for common action.”
Echoing the Bank of England’s modern fixation with “mathematical equilibrium”, the resolutions stated that the new global gold standard controlled by central banks was needed “to maintain a fundamental equilibrium in the balance of payments” of countries. The idea was to deprive nation states of their power to generate and direct credit for their own development.
FDR Torpedoes the London Conference
Chancellor Schleicher’s resistance to a bankers’ dictatorship was resolved by a “soft coup” ousting the patriotic leader in favor of Adolph Hitler (under the control of a Bank of England toy named Hjalmar Schacht) in January 1933 with Schleicher assassinated the following year. In America, an assassination attempt on Roosevelt was thwarted on February 15, 1933 when a woman knocked the gun out of the hand of an anarchist-freemason in Miami resulting in the death of Chicago’s Mayor Cermak.
Without FDR’s dead body, the London conference met an insurmountable barrier, as FDR refused to permit any American cooperation. Roosevelt recognized the necessity for a new international system, but he also knew that it had to be organized by sovereign nation states subservient to the general welfare of the people and not central banks dedicated to the welfare of the oligarchy. Before any international changes could occur, nation states castrated from the effects of the depression had to first recover economically in order to stay above the power of the financiers.
By May 1933, the London Conference crumbled when FDR complained that the conference’s inability to address the real issues of the crisis is “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy” and that fixation with short term stability were “old fetishes of so-called international bankers”. FDR continued “The United States seeks the kind of dollar which a generation hence will have the same purchasing and debt paying power as the dollar value we hope to attain in the near future. That objective means more to the good of other nations than a fixed ratio for a month or two. Exchange rate fixing is not the true answer.”
The British drafted an official statement saying “the American statement on stabilization rendered it entirely useless to continue the conference.”
FDR’s War on Wall Street
The new president laid down the gauntlet in his inaugural speech on March 4th saying: “The money-changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit”.
FDR declared a war on Wall Street on several levels, beginning with his support of the Pecorra Commission which sent thousands of bankers to prison, and exposed the criminal activities of the top tier of Wall Street’s power structure who manipulated the depression, buying political offices and pushing fascism. Ferdinand Pecorra who ran the commission called out the deep state when he said “this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the United States.”
Pecorra’s highly publicized success empowered FDR to impose sweeping regulation in the form of 1) Glass-Steagall bank separation, 2) bankruptcy re-organization and 3) the creation of the Security Exchange Commission to oversee Wall Street. Most importantly, FDR disempowered the London-controlled Federal Reserve by installing his own man as Chair (Industrialist Mariner Eccles) who forced it to obey national commands for the first time since 1913, while creating an “alternative” lending mechanism outside of Fed control called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which became the number one lender to infrastructure in America throughout the 1930s.
One of the most controversial policies for which FDR is demonized today was his abolishment of the gold standard. The gold standard itself constricted the money supply to a strict exchange of gold per paper dollar, thus preventing the construction of internal improvements needed to revive industrial capacity and put the millions of unemployed back to work for which no financial resources existed. It’s manipulation by international financiers made it a weapon of destruction rather than creation at this time. Since commodity prices had fallen lower than the costs of production, it was vital to increase the price of goods under a form of “controlled inflation” so that factories and farms could become solvent and unfortunately the gold standard held that back. FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.
FDR stated his political-economic philosophy in 1934: “the old fallacious notion of the bankers on the one side and the government on the other side, as being more or less equal and independent units, has passed away. Government by the necessity of things must be the leader, must be the judge, of the conflicting interests of all groups in the community, including bankers.”
The Real New Deal
Once liberated from the shackles of the central banks, FDR and his allies were able to start a genuine recovery by restoring confidence in banking. Within 31 days of his bank holiday, 75% of banks were operational and the FDIC was created to insure deposits. Four million people were given immediate work, and hundreds of libraries, schools and hospitals were built and staffed- All funded through the RFC. FDR’s first fireside chat was vital in rebuilding confidence in the government and banks, serving even today as a strong lesson in banking which central bankers don’t want you to learn about.
From 1933-1939, 45 000 infrastructure projects were built. The many “local” projects were governed, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative today, under a “grand design” which FDR termed the “Four Quarters” featuring zones of megaprojects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority area in the south east, the Columbia River Treaty zone on the northwest, the St Laurence Seaway zone on the North east, and Hoover Dam/Colorado zone on the Southwest. These projects were transformative in ways money could never measure as the Tennessee area’s literacy rose from 20% in 1932 to 80% in 1950, and racist backwater holes of the south became the bedrock for America’s aerospace industry due to the abundant and cheap hydropower. As I had already reported on the Saker, FDR was not a Keynesian (although it cannot be argued that hives of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians penetrating his administration certainly were).
Wall Street Sabotages the New Deal
Those who criticize the New Deal today ignore the fact that its failures have more to do with Wall Street sabotage than anything intrinsic to the program. For example, JP Morgan tool Lewis Douglass (U.S. Budget Director) forced the closure of the Civil Works Administration in 1934 resulting in the firing of all 4 million workers.
Wall Street did everything it could to choke the economy at every turn. In 1931, NY banks loans to the real economy amounted to $38.1 billion which dropped to only $20.3 billion by 1935. Where NY banks had 29% of their funds in US bonds and securities in 1929, this had risen to 58% which cut off the government from being able to issue productive credit to the real economy.
When, in 1937, FDR’s Treasury Secretary persuaded him to cancel public works to see if the economy “could stand on its own two feet”, Wall Street pulled credit out of the economy collapsing the Industrial production index from 110 to 85 erasing seven years’ worth of gain, while steel fell from 80% capacity back to depression levels of 19%. Two million jobs were lost and the Dow Jones lost 39% of its value. This was no different from kicking the crutches out from a patient in rehabilitation and it was not lost on anyone that those doing the kicking were openly supporting Fascism in Europe. Bush patriarch Prescott Bush, then representing Brown Brothers Harriman was found guilty for trading with the enemy in 1942!
Coup Attempt in America Thwarted
The bankers didn’t limit themselves to financial sabotage during this time, but also attempted a fascist military coup which was exposed by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his congressional testimony of November 20, 1934. Butler had testified that the plan was begun in the Summer of 1933 and organized by Wall Street financiers who tried to use him as a puppet dictator leading 500 000 American Legion members to storm the White House. As Butler spoke, those same financiers had just set up an anti-New Deal organization called the American Liberty League which fought to keep America out of the war in defense of an Anglo-Nazi fascist global government which they wished to partner with.
The American Liberty league only changed tune when it became evident that Hitler had become a disobedient Frankenstein monster who wasn’t content in a subservient position to Britain’s idea of a New World Order. In response to the Liberty League’s agenda, FDR said “some speak of a New World Order, but it is not new and it is not order”.
FDR’s Anti-Colonial Post-War Vision
One of the greatest living testimonies to FDR’s anti-colonial vision is contained in a little known 1946 book authored by his son Elliot Roosevelt who, as his father’s confidante and aide, was privy to some of the most sensitive meetings his father participated in throughout the war. Seeing the collapse of the post-war vision upon FDR’s April 12, 1945 death and the emergence of a pro-Churchill presidency under Harry Truman, who lost no time in dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan, ushering in a Soviet witch hunt at home and launching a Cold War abroad, Elliot authored ‘As He Saw It’ (1946) in order to create a living testimony to the potential that was lost upon his father’s passing.
As Elliot said of his motive to write his book:
“The decision to write this book was taken more recently and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision,… the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking… And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed… I am writing this, then, to you who agree with me that… the path he charted has been most grievously—and deliberately—forsaken.”
The Four Freedoms
Even before America had entered the war, the principles of international harmony which FDR enunciated in his January 6, 1941 Four Freedoms speech to the U.S. Congress served as the guiding light through every battle for the next 4.5 years. In this speech FDR said:
“In future days, which we seek to secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
“The first is the freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
“The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
“The third is the freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.
“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
“That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
“To that new order, we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
“Since the beginning of American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution–a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
“This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.”
Upon hearing these Freedoms outlined, American painter Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint four masterpieces that were displayed across America and conveyed the beauty of FDR’s spirit to all citizens.
FDR’s patriotic Vice President (and the man who SHOULD have been president in 1948) Henry Wallace outlined FDR’s vision in a passionate video address to the people in 1942 which should also be watched by all world citizens today:
Churchill vs FDR: The Clash of Two Paradigms
Elliot’s account of the 1941-1945 clash of paradigms between his father and Churchill are invaluable both for their ability to shed light into the true noble constitutional character of America personified in the person of Roosevelt but also in demonstrating the beautiful potential of a world that SHOULD HAVE BEEN had certain unnatural events not intervened to derail the evolution of our species into an age of win-win cooperation, creative reason and harmony.
In As He Saw It, Elliot documents a conversation he had with his father at the beginning of America’s entry into WWII, who made his anti-colonial intentions clear as day saying:
“I’m talking about another war, Elliott. I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!
“Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.
“One sentence, Elliott. Then I’m going to kick you out of here. I’m tired. This is the sentence: When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”
This clash came to a head during a major confrontation between FDR and Churchill during the January 24, 1943 Casablanca Conference in Morocco. At this event, Elliot documents how his father first confronted Churchill’s belief in the maintenance of the British Empire’s preferential trade agreements upon which it’s looting system was founded:
“Of course,” he [FDR] remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.”
He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.
“No artificial barriers,” Father pursued. “As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition.” His eye wandered innocently around the room.
Churchill shifted in his armchair. “The British Empire trade agreements” he began heavily, “are—”
Father broke in. “Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.”
Churchill’s neck reddened and he crouched forward. “Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England’s ministers.”
“You see,” said Father slowly, “it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.
“I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now—”
“Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?”
“Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation—by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.”
Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.
“You mentioned India,” he growled.
“Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”
“What about the Philippines?”
“I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they’ve gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down…”
“There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.”
“They’re artificial…”
“They’re the foundation of our greatness.”
“The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?”
It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men…
The following day, Elliot describes how the conversation continued between the two men with Churchill stating:
“Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that”—and his forefinger waved—”in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And”—his voice sank dramatically—”you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.”
Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.”
This story was delivered in full during an August 15 lecture by the author:
FDR’s Post-War Vision Destroyed
While FDR’s struggle did change the course of history, his early death during the first months of his fourth term resulted in a fascist perversion of his post-war vision.
Rather than see the IMF, World Bank or UN used as instruments for the internationalization of the New Deal principles to promote long term, low interest loans for the industrial development of former colonies, FDR’s allies were ousted from power over his dead body, and they were recaptured by the same forces who attempted to steer the world towards a Central Banking Dictatorship in 1933.
The American Liberty League spawned into various “patriotic” anti-communist organizations which took power with the FBI and McCarthyism under the fog of the Cold War. This is the structure that Eisenhower warned about when he called out “the Military Industrial Complex” in 1960 and which John Kennedy did battle with during his 900 days as president.
This is the structure which is out to destroy President Donald Trump and undo the November elections under a military coup and Civil War out of fear that a new FDR impulse is beginning to be revived in America which may align with the 21st Century international New Deal emerging from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Eurasian alliance. French Finance Minister Bruno LeMaire and Marc Carney have stated their fear that if the Green New Deal isn’t imposed by the west, then the New Silk Road and yuan will become the basis for the new world system.
The Bank of England-authored Green New Deal being pushed under the fog of COVID-19’s Great Green Global Reset which promise to impose draconian constraints on humanity’s carrying capacity in defense of saving nature from humanity have nothing to do with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and they have less to do with the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. These are merely central bankers’ wet dreams for depopulation and fascism “with a democratic face” which their 1923 and 1933 efforts failed to achieve and can only be imposed if people remain blind to their own recent history.
في الجزء السابق شرحنا عوامل الاضطراب السياسي التي تشهده الولايات المتحدة عشية الانتخابات المقبلة في تشرين الثاني/نوفمبر 2020. وحالة الاضطراب تتفاقم حيث التشنّج الذي يسود الفريقين المتنافسين ينذر بعواقب وخيمة قد تدمّر بنية النظام وحتى أسس الكيان الأميركي. قد يعتبر البعض أن هذا الكلام مبالَغ به، ولكن هذا ما نقرأه في العديد من المواقع الإلكترونية ومن آراء يبديها مسؤولون سابقون وباحثون مرموقون. والخطورة تكمن في السيناريوهات المرتقبة لليوم التالي بعد الانتخابات.
أعرب الرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب في أكثر من مناسبة كما أعرب مسؤولون في الحزب الديمقراطي عن عدم تقبّله (تقبّلهم!) لنتائج الانتخابات إذا أدت إلى هزيمته أو هزيمتهم! قد يكون هذا الكلام نوعاً من التهويل لشدّ عصب المناصرين، لكن هناك سيناريوات حقيقية فد تفرض نفسها ليلة الانتخاب وتتراوح في الحد الأدنى بين عدم اعلان من هو الفائز بسبب التأخير في فرز أصوات الناخبين الذين اختاروا الاقتراع عبر البريد وبين حد أقصى يرفض النتائج ويطعن بها في المحاكم الاتحادية ما يكرّس الفراغ في رأس الهرم. هذا من باب الواقع الذي يحظى بشبه إجماع عند مختلف المراقبين والمحلّلين عند الطرفين المتنافسين. فما هي السيناريوات الممكنة في هذه الحال؟
السيناريو الأول هو وجود فراغ في رأس الهرم السياسي. لم يلحظ الدستور الأميركي لآلية لفض نوع كهذا من النزاع لأن الآباء المؤسسين لم يعتقدوا في يوم من الأيام أن الجمهورية الفتية قد تصل إلى هذا المأزق. الدستور الأميركي حدّد آلية لانتقال الحكم في حال حدوث فراغ مفاجئ في رأس السلطة. فنائب الرئيس يتولّى زمام الأمور حتى نهاية الولايات وتقام عندئذ انتخابات. في حال حدوث فراغ في الرئاسة ونيابة الرئاسة يلحظ الدستور أن رئيس مجلس الممثلين يتولّى زمام الأمور. في حال شغور أو غياب ذلك يتولى رئيس مجلس الشيوخ الموقت (رئيس الأكثرية) لأن دستورياً نائب رئيس الجمهورية هو رئيس مجلس الشيوخ الذي يفصل في التصويت في حال تعادل الأصوات في أي ملف أو قضية مطروحة. وفي حال غياب وأو شغور ذلك المنصب يتولى وزير الخارجية المسؤولية وفي حال غياب وزير الخارجية وهناك سلّم من التراتبية بين الوزراء في تولّي المسؤولية في حال الشغور. لكن جميع تلك الإجراءات تفترض أن الكونغرس بغرفتيه أي مجلس الشيوخ ومجلس الممثلين قائم. لكن في الحالة التي ستحصل فإن إمكانية تولّي رئيس مجلس الممثلين، في هذه الحال نانسي بيلوسي، قد لا تحصل لأن الطعن أو الطعون في نتائج الانتخابات قد لا تنحصر في الرئاسة بل أيضاً في مجلس الممثلين ومجلس الشيوخ. حال التشنج التي وصلت إليه الولايات المتحدة تجعل من هذا الاحتمال إمكانية حقيقية. أي بمعنى آخر هناك احتمال حقيقي ومرتقب بأن يحصل الفراغ بسبب عدم حسم أو قبول نتائج الانتخابات.
في السيناريو الثاني، ينحصر التنازع فقط حول منصب الرئاسة ويتولّى عندئذ رئيس مجلس الممثلين الرئاسة الموقتة حتى تحسم المحكمة الدستورية العليا نتائج الانتخاب. المحكمة العليا هي مكوّنة اليوم من خمسة محافظين وأربعة ليبراليين في ميولهم الفكرية. ليسوا منتسبين إلى أي حزب لكن من الواضح أن الميل المحافظ يسيطر عموماً على قرارات وأحكام المحكمة. لكن حكمت المحكمة مؤخراً في قضية مثيرة للجدل حول المتحوّلين جنسياً لصالح الموقف الليبرالي ما أدهش الجميع. الصوت المرجّح كان صوت رئيس المحكمة الذي يُعرف عنه أنه محافظ. وهناك تساؤلات حول ذلك “التصويت” الذي يؤكّد على “استقلالية” القرار بينما البعض يعتبر أن ذلك التصويت هو لمنع الاتهام بالانحياز السياسي في فصل قضية الطعن في الانتخابات الرئاسية. إذاً، في مطلق الأحوال يعود إلى المحكمة الدستورية مسؤولية الفصل. لكن ليس هناك من ضمانة أن المتنافسين سيقبلون بالحكم ونعود عند ذلك الحين إلى السيناريو الأول.
السيناريو الثالث، وهو الأكثر خطورة، هو عدم تقبّل أي من الفريقين النتائج مهما كانت المرجعيات. ماذا في تلك الحال؟ هذا يعني أزمة دستورية، فأزمة نظام، وفي آخر المطاف أزمة كيان. في هذا السياق نشير إلى تحذير بول كريغ روبرتس، مساعد وزير الخزانة السابق في عهد رونالد ريغان، وهو اقتصادي معروف له مؤلفات عدّة وصاحب مدوّنة واسعة الانتشار. تحذير روبرتس واضح: الولايات المتحدة لديها شهران قبل أن تنهار بسبب الفراغ الذي سيحصل بسبب عدم قبول نتائج الانتخابات. كاتب آخر مات اهرهت يذهب أبعد من ذلك ويشير إلى سيناريوات حرب في عدد من مراكز الأبحاث حول احتمالات انقلاب عسكري ضد الرئيس الأميركي في حال رفض خروجه من البيت الأبيض.
مركز “مشروع التماسك الانتقاليّ” مركز أبحاث مستحدث (2019) وتموّله وفقاً للباحثة ويتني واب مجموعة مكوّنة من كلنتون، جورج سوروس، وعدد من رؤساء الشركات الكبرى كفايس بوك وميكروسوفت وغوغل ولينكدين واي باي على سبيل المثال. واجهة ذلك المركز روزا بروكس محاضرة في جامعة جورج تاون والعقيد لورانس ويلكرسون المدير السابق لكولن بأول عندما كان وزيراً للخارجية. أما المساهمون في البحوث لذلك المركز فيه ثلّة من كبار المحافظين الجدد كوليام كريستول ودافيد فروم. أنشئ المركز لمواجهة التحدّيات التي فرضتها الثورة التكنولوجية في التواصل وتأثيرها على المجتمعات. لكن بالفعل أنشئ لغرض واحد وهو لخلق مناخات ثورية ملوّنة ولتهيئة الأجواء لانقلاب عسكري ضد ترامب. وقد تمّت “تجربة” ذلك المشروع عبر نشاط أحد العاملين بها في حملة لإقصاء برني سندرز من الفوز في التسمية الترشيح عن الحزب الديمقراطي. المسؤول عن تلك الحملة الناجحة وفقاً لويتني واب هو ريد هوفمان. كما أن المموّلين الآخرين كاريك شميدت رئيس شركة غوغل وبيار اوميدفار رئيس شركة أي باي من المقرّبين جدّا لبيل وهيلاري كلنتون وكانوا أيضاً وراء الإطاحة ببرني سندرز لمصلحة جوزيف بايدن. والآن يستعدّون للإطاحة بدونالد ترامب.
ما يعزّز فرص ذلك المشروع هو العلاقة الوطيدة بين القيادات العسكرية العليا في البنتاغون ومجمع المؤسسات التابعة للمجمع العسكري الصناعي الأمني والمالي والمعلوماتي. تفيد دراسة أجريت مؤخراً ونشرته محطّة “روسيا اليوم” أن في فترة 2008-2018 تمّ توظيف 380 ضابطاً رفيع المستوى في شركات مقاولة في الدفاع، من بينهم 68 لواء و32 أميرالاً ونائب أميرال. ويضيف الباحث مات اهرهت أن عدداً من القيادات العاملة في الجيش الأميركي معروف بتشدّدهم تجاه الحروب ويعارضون بشكل واضح الرئيس الأميركي لقراراته بالانسحاب من أفغانستان والعراق وسورية. هذا ما دفع الرئيس الأميركي للتصريح الأخير له بحق المؤسسة العسكرية أن القيادة العسكرية تكرهه بينما القاعدة أي الجنود يحبّونه. ويعتبر أن مصلحة القيادات العسكرية هي فوق مصلحة البلاد ويصرّون على التورّط في حروب لا منفعة منها للولايات المتحدة سوى إثراء الشركات المقاولة التي تجني أرباحاً طائلة.
بالتوازي مع تهيئة الأجواء لإجراء انقلاب عسكري في حال استمر الرئيس الأميركي في البيت الأبيض هناك أيضاً خطر آخر يهدّد التماسك الداخلي الأميركي. لقد حذر مدير المكتب الاتحادي للتحقيقات (اف بي أي) في جلسة استماع في الكونغرس من تنامي الميليشيات المسلّحة من البيض والسود وأن الاحتكاكات قد تحصل في أي لحظة. في السياق نفسه عرضت محطة أي تي في البريطانية تقريراً مصوّراً للميليشيات السود التي تنتشر في العديد من المدن الأميركية.
ويعتبر العديد من المراقبين الأميركيين أن تصاعد أعمال الشغب والعنف أعمال مبرمجة هدفها تهيئة مناخ لفرض الأحكام العرفية وتبرير تدخل القوّات المسلّحة لفرض أمر واقع سياسي جديد. هذا ما يحذّر منها أيضاً بول كريغ روبرتس وآخرون خاصة أن التقارير تتكاثر حول محاضرات يلقيها ضبّاط كبار حول ضرورة إمساك الوضع.
سردنا هذه المعلومات وليست كلّها في ذلك الموضوع وفحوى تقارير حول المناخ السائد في الولايات المتحدة للتأكيد أن الخريف سيكون ساخناً للغاية وقديمتد إلى الربيع. ليس بمقدور أحد أن يتكهّن عما ستسفر عليه الأمور وإن كان بعض المحلّلين لا يخفون تشاؤمهم حول تماسك الولايات المتحدة. ليس في الأفق من يستطيع أن يعيد توحيد الولايات المتحدة في ظل أزمة اقتصادية بنيوية وحالة اجتماعية متفسّخة يسودها التعصّب والعنصرية. كما أن الطبقة السياسية في معظمها مرتبطة بالاوليغارشية المالية والمجمع العسكري الصناعي والأمني والمالي وبالتالي التغيير من الداخل قد يصبح مستعصياً. وانهيار الدولة يعني انهيار المجتمع. فالدولة أقوى من المجتمع في الولايات المتحدة وبالتالي المصير سيكون مجهولاً. الولايات المتحدة تدخل اليوم في حقبة لا استقرار بنيوياً قد ينسف مكانتها في العالم إن لم ينسف وجودها في الداخل.
*كاتب وباحث اقتصادي سياسي والأمين العام السابق للمؤتمر القومي العربي.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
