Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems

Caitlin Johnstone

Medium

A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire.

George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded.

Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.

Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firmknown as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.

Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert “Iraq has WMD” Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.

Read more

The future of human governance begins with direct democracy - Part 2

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkreig

War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.

- Danny Sjursen, retired US Army officer, The Pence Prophecy: VP Predicts Perpetual War at the West Point Graduation

Whenever I mention direct democracy, a certain segment of the population always comes back with a very negative knee-jerk reaction. Since this response tends to center around several concerns, today's post will dig into them and explain how such pitfalls can be structurally addressed.

Minority Protection

The first thing that worries people is a fear there will be no protections for minority populations within such a system. Take the U.S. for example, where approximately 80% of the population lives in urban areas and only 20% in rural. If we moved to a system where direct popular vote played a meaningful role in deciding the majority of issues, rural populations would lose out every single time. It would end up being an oppressive system for people who live in less populated areas and would tear up the U.S. even faster than is happening now.

I definitely think this sort of thing is a problem, but people misunderstand what I mean when I discuss direct democracy. Fundamentally, I'm a firm believer that governance should be radically decentralized compared to what it is today. America is a great example of a good idea gone completely off the tracks.

Localism

While the founders envisioned a decentralized structure in which core politically entities known as states would decide most issues, we're now stuck with a centralized imperial system in which virtually all major decisions are made in Washington D.C. by gangs of hopelessly corrupt and compromised politicians. But it's even worse than that. Power hasn't merely been concentrated in D.C., but it's also become increasing concentrated within the capital itself in the hands of a reckless imperial presidency.

For example, the separations of powers outlined in the Constitution when it comes to war has been all but obliterated. Congress is supposed to declare war, yet the U.S. military is involved in conflicts all over the planet, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger without any such declaration.

To illustrate how insane all of this is, read the following from a Vice article published last year:

The U.S. is officially fighting wars in seven countries, including Libya and Niger, according to an unclassified White House report sent to Congress this week and obtained by the New York Times.

Known officially as the "Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States' Military Force and Related National Security Operations," the document is part of a new requirement outlined in the 2018 defense spending bill. The White House is already required to update Congress every six months on where the U.S. is using military force.

We've somehow gone from Congress must declare war, to the White House will update Congress every six months on how all the undeclared wars are going. This is madness.

The U.S. is currently drowning in an overly centralized and corrupt imperial government based in D.C. For direct democracy to truly function well, it should be based in local governance. I don't think it's a coincidence that the places currently using these tools most successfully, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, focus on localism.
Read more

 Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance – Part 1

The Next Economic Crisis, The Looming Post-Multipolar System And Hybrid War Forever

South Front

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called "globalization" which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many "emerging markets" created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating-and bursting-several financial "bubbles". 

Even today's US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial "black swan" event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal "firepower" on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply "more of the same." It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy. 

Read more

Will the US ever be held accountable for its war crimes?

Jean Perier
New Eastern Outlook

For more than a decade, the United States has been steadily increasing the scale of its illegal military operations across the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Eighteen years ago, the US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of ousting the Taliban who allegedly granted sanctuary to Al-Qaeda. According to a study released by Brown University, more than 140,000 Afghan militants and civilians have died in the fight.

Since December 2001, the United States has been conducting various operations in Somali, and even today the Pentagon carries out both air strikes and ground operations, accompanied by a constant toll of civilian lives.

Back in 2003, Washington launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMDs he didn't even have and to convert Iraq into a «democracy», plunging this country into a state of perpetual chaos guaranteeing that it will remain a Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic World for years to come.

Eight years ago, the US succeeded in destabilizing Libya, when US warplanes attacked the troops of Libya's most successful ruler to date - Muammar Gaddafi. Back then, Washington took every step to ensure his government would be ousted and and its key leaders murdered. The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. In 2016, Barack Obama said that Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

The seven years of war in Syria resulted in a death toll of half a million Syrian nationals. Here, American troops are stationed illegally to fight ISIS and "indigenous ground forces." The strange wording that Washington uses in its official rhetoric is no coincidence, since more than on one occasion US armed forces have opened fire on both Syrian government troops and civilians, with no official rationale ever being given to explain this brutality.

In Yemen, the United States has been backing Saudi Arabia's efforts to put an end to the Houthi rebellion for three years. Washington carries on supplying Saudi authorities with high-precision weapons, combat aircraft and intelligence. This war has already triggered the largest humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, with 20 million people finding themselves on the brink of starvation. 

Read more

Fallujah Forgotten

David Swanson

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up of some 300,000 to 435,000 people. It had a tradition of resisting foreign — including British — invasions. It suffered, as did all of Iraq, from the brutal sanctions imposed by the United States in the years leading up to the 2003 attack. During that attack, Fallujah saw crowded markets bombed. Upon the collapse of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, Fallujah established its own government, avoiding the looting and chaos seen elsewhere. In April, 2003, the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division moved into Fallujah and met no resistance.

Immediately the occupation began to produce the sort of problems seen by every occupation everywhere ever. People complained of Humvees speeding on the streets, of being humiliated at checkpoints, of women being treated inappropriately, of soldier urinating in the streets, and of soldiers standing on rooftops with binoculars in violation of residents’ privacy. Within days, the people of Fallujah wanted to be liberated from their “liberators.” So, the people tried nonviolent demonstrations. And the U.S. military fired on the protesters. But eventually, the occupiers agreed to be stationed outside the city, limit their patrols, and allow Fallujah a degree of self-governance beyond what the rest of Iraq was permitted. The result was a success: Fallujah was kept safer than the rest of Iraq by keeping the occupiers out of it.

That example, of course, needed to be crushed. The United States was claiming a moral obligation to liberate the hell out of Iraq to “maintain security” and “assist in transition to democracy.” Viceroy Paul Bremer decided to “clean out Fallujah.” In came the “coalition” troops, with their usual inability (mocked quite effectively in the Netflix Brad Pitt movie War Machine) to distinguish the people they were bestowing liberty and justice upon from the people they were killing. U.S. officials described the people they wanted to kill as “cancer,” and went about killing them with raids and firefights that killed a great many of the non-cancer people. How many people the United States was actually giving cancer to was unknown at the time.

Read more

Rogue State? – Britain Railing Against International Norms and Laws

truepublica.org.uk

Leaving aside Britain’s past, most particularly that of empire, the country is not just continually moving towards authoritarianism it is beginning to demonstrate all the early signs of a rogue state. These are strong words but the actual definition of a rogue state is – “a nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.” Examples such as the illegal invasion of Iraq, Syria and latterly Libya are very clear. Irrespective of the technicalities, they all broke the rules of International laws or norms. But other examples demonstrate how lawless Britain as a state really is.

Chagos

Here, an entire population were forcibly removed from their island homeland at British gunpoint to make way for a US Air Force nuclear base, the people were dumped destitute over a thousand miles away, their domestic animals gassed by the British army, their homes fired and then demolished. To achieve this, Britain maliciously threatened the Mauritian government into ceding the Chagos Islands as a condition of its Independence.

Recently, the International Court of Justice found that the British occupation of the Chagos Islands was unlawful by a majority of 13 to 1. Britain rejected this ruling.

Ex British ambassador Craig Murray wrote – “this represents a serious escalation in the UK’s rejection of multilateralism and international law and a move towards joining the US model of exceptionalism, standing outside the rule of international law. As such, it is arguably the most significant foreign policy development for generations. In the Iraq war, while Britain launched war without UN Security Council authority, it did so on a tenuous argument that it had Security Council authority from earlier resolutions. The UK was therefore not outright rejecting the international system. On Chagos it is now simply denying the authority of the International Court of Justice; this is utterly unprecedented.”

Read more

The Great Fraud of National Zionism

The Saker

[This article was written for the Unz Review] 

The Defining Event for the USA

 

There is no doubt that the 9/11 false flag (now even admitted (by direct implication) by NIST!) was a watershed, a seminal event in our history. While millions (or even billions) watched in horror as the twin towers burned, a small group of Mossad agents stood nearby and danced in overwhelming joy. Why exactly were these Israelis dancing? Surely there was more than just Schadenfreude in this spontaneous expression of euphoria?  Considering that these three dancing Israelis were just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, we can rest assured that there were many more folks dancing in joy that day, especially in Israel.

Why were these Mossad agents so blissful?  The answer is obvious: 9/11 put the following notions front and center of the concerns of most people in the USA:

• We are under attack and in grave, imminent, danger
• Islam wants to destroy our way of life
• Those who did 9/11 also want to destroy Israel
• We need to ask the Israelis to share their “expertise” in dealing with Islamic terrorism
• Draconian laws and new police powers need to be passed to protect us from mass murder
• If you are not with us, then you are with the terrorists

Almost a decade before 9/11, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama had explained to us that history itself was coming to an end while Samuel P. Huntington explained to us in 1996 that we were witnessing a “clash of civilizations.” This kind of “scholarly” research created the perfect political background to an already rather disquieting perception of the upcoming Year 2000. In 2001, when all hell broke loose, the general public was already well prepared for it (just like the AngloZionist elites who had already prepared the huge “Patriot Act” long before the Twin Towers came down).

9/11 was as much the culmination of a significant preparatory effort as it was the trigger for a decade or more of wars.

Still, all this immense effort into shaping the West’s perceptions was not good enough to hammer the sufficiently hysterical mindset into most people, in spite of the best efforts of the legacy Ziomedia to explain to us that Bin Laden decided that “we” were next in line for some kind of horrible (possibly nuclear) terrorist attack. Inside the USA the constant fear-mongering of the legacy Ziomedia did induce the suitable hysterical panic, while in the rest of the world things were not going quite as well. Especially not in Europe (which was vitally needed as a fig-leaf to pretend like the GWOT was not a US-Israeli thingie, but that there was a large “coalition of the willing” formed of the best and brightest countries out there). Something else, bigger and better, was needed and, sure enough, it was found: a mass exodus of poorly educated immigrants, the vast majority of them from Muslim countries.

While the (totally fictional and therefore totally unsuccessful) GWOT was petering out, the AngloZionists directed their stare at Libya and its leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had warned that unless Europe was willing to pay Libya to contain the many millions of African refugees, a major catastrophe would happen. He explained that “Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in“, “we don’t know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans” and “we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

The AngloZionists heard his message loud and clear and proceeded to immediately (and illegally!) overthrow and brutally murder Gaddafi (it is still unclear how many Israelis were dancing the day Col. Gaddafi was murdered).  Almost exactly a decade after 9/11 the Zionists finally had their “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” but this time the victim was the entire European continent.

Read more

John Pilger: ‘NATO is a US Invention Designed to Impose US Power on Europe’

Stop The War Coalition 

It has just been announced that Donald Trump will be attending the London NATO conference in December. What kind of role do you think NATO is likely to be discussing in a Trump led western alliance? 

I'm not sure Trump is leading the NATO alliance; one day he hates NATO, the next he thinks it's a good thing as long as it does what he wants. The Pentagon will play its usual dominant role; the generals and their allies in the national security establishment and Congress have been the political force in Washington since Barack Obama gave them the key. There will be pressure to build up forces on Russia's western flank (a Pentagon favourite) and to declare Iran a renewed enemy (a Trump/Pence favourite). Britain will sing from its anti-Russia playbook, especially if the current Defence Secretary (known among Tories as Private Pike) is still in the job. On foreign policy, the EU is so weak and deferential - Germany aside - it's impossible to say which American insanity will be adopted. 

NATO likes to present itself as a force for peace and stability in the world. What is your assessment of the strategic role of NATO during the Cold War? 

NATO was, is, an American invention designed to impose American power on Europe. The Alliance achieved this during the Cold War and successfully spread the illusion - long debunked in declassified files - that Russia was a threat to all we hold dear. Today, Nato exists as a provocateur to post-Soviet Russia, with its undeclared American goal of breaking up the Russian Federation. Some of the Europeans running NATO's war bureaucracy are as zealous as the Americans, such as the secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, a rabid propagandist. 

Read more

Studying the demise of historic civilizations

"Collapse may be a normal phenomenon for civilisations, regardless of their size and technological stage"

Luke Kemp
Attack The System


Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today, says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.

Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.

DEEP CIVILISATION

This article is part of a new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote.

That’s why the Deep Civilisation season will explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants.

So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations.


He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. However, their self-destruction is usually assisted.

The Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many ills including overexpansion, climatic change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. But it was also brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Vandals in 455.

Collapse is often quick and greatness provides no immunity. The Roman Empire covered 4.4 million sq km (1.9 million sq miles) in 390. Five years later, it had plummeted to 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles). By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.

Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?

Read more

The Integrity Initiative And The British Roots of The Deep State: How The Round Table Infiltrated America

Matthew J.L. Ehret
Sott.net 

With the near weekly revelations that the British Foreign Office, MI6, and GCHQ have been behind the long standing agenda to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump and undo the peaceful alliance between nationalist leaders in America, Russia, China and elsewhere, a new focus on the British hand in undermining the United States has become a serious thought for many citizens. In the first week of the new year, fuel was added to this fire when internal memos were leaked from the British-run Integrity Initiative featuring a startling account of the techniques deployed by the anti-Russian British operation to infiltrate American intelligence institutions, think tanks and media.

For those who may not know, the Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. The January 2019 leak, featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump's election, demonstrate that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up "clusters" of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.

The exposure of the British hand behind the scenes affords us a unique glimpse into the real historical forces undermining America's true constitutional tradition throughout the 20^th century, as Mueller/the Five Eyes/Integrity Initiative are not new phenomena but actually follow a modus operandi set down for already more than a century. One of the biggest obstacles to seeing this modus operandi run by the British Empire is located in the belief in a mythology which has become embedded in the global psyche for over half a century and which we should do our best to free ourselves of. 

Read more

Imperial Conquest: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Global Research

The following text  is background document in relation to Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation entitled: The Globalization of War, US-NATO Threat Directed against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The event is organized by Malaysia’s JUST Forum, IAIS Malaysia.

19 July 2018 (Thursday) 09:30am – 12:30pm

 

Jointly Organised by International Movement for a Just World (JUST) and IAIS Malaysia

Venue: IAIS Malaysia, Jalan Elmu, Off Jalan Universiti, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

***

The document below is Chapter I of Michel Chossudovsky’s Book entitled; The Globalization of War; America’s Long War against Humanity, Global Research Publishers, Montreal 2015.

The book was launched in Kuala Lumpur in 2015 by Tun Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia.

Introduction

The U.S. and its NATO allies have embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. This “war without borders” is intimately related to a worldwide process of economic restructuring, which has been conducive to the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.The U.S. weapons producers are the recipients of U.S. Department of Defense multibillion dollar procurement contracts for advanced weapons systems. In turn, “The Battle for Oil” in the Middle East and Central Asia directly serves the interests of the Anglo-American oil giants. The U.S. and its allies are “Beating the Drums of War” at the height of a worldwide economic depression.

The military deployment of U.S.-NATO forces coupled with “non-conventional warfare” – including covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”– is occurring simultaneously in several regions of the world.

Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. War has been provided with a humanitarian mandate under NATO’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). The victims of U.S. led wars are presented as the perpetrators of war. Civilians in Yugoslavia, Palestine, Ukraine, Libya, Syria and Iraq are responsible for their own deaths.

Meanwhile, the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker. The granting of the Nobel “peace prize” in 2009 to President Barack Obama has become an integral part of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine. It provides a human face to the invaders, it demonizes those who oppose U.S. military intervention.

The Nobel Committee says that President Obama has given the world “hope for a better future”. The prize is awarded for Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special impor- tance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

Read more

Vladimir Putin’s Basic Disagreement with The West

Eric Zeusse
The Saker Blog

Vladimir Putin’s basic view has been expressed so many times, in so many different contexts, and it’s always the same: that the only people who have a sovereign right to any land, are the people who live on that land — nobody who lives outside that land does. In other words, his basic view is a repudiation — a total rejection — of the very concept of empire: it’s a rejection of the right of foreigners to control any country, anywhere, anytime. Residence is determinative. According to Putin, the only justification that a country can ever have for invading another country is if and when that invasion is in direct and immediate response to that other country’s having invaded their land — purely defensive. Other than this, no invasion of any land by foreigners is acceptable.

The U.S. and its allies endorse empires — endorse conquest. This view was first extensively promoted during 1877-1902 by the founder of the Rhodes Trust, Cecil Rhodes, a self-avowed racist who passionately advocated that all “races” be subordinated to “the first race”: the British. However, he was willing that, if necessary, this empire would fly the U.S. flag instead of the English flag.

In more recent times, George Soros has championed this view, but giving different (non-racialist) words to it. Soros has stated his view of this important matter in mainly two places, and both times he has opposed national sovereignty and asserted instead “the people’s sovereignty” as being something that can justify a foreign invasion into a country by “the international community” in order to protect “the people’s sovereignty” there. He argues for a (what he claims would be) beneficent empire of “the international community,” which fights around the world ‘protecting’ “the people’s sovereignty,” wherever and whenever “the international community” decides that the local government is violating “the people’s sovereignty.”

That’s the basic difference between their views — Putin asserting no foreigner has any right to invade, versus Soros asserting that “the international community” has an obligation to invade (to protect “the people’s sovereignty” there), whenever and wherever it decides to invade and gives some ‘reason’ (truthful or not) ‘justifying’ this ‘protection’ of ‘the people’s sovereignty’, over that land.

Read more

More Countries Start Exploring Alternatives to the US World Order

Federico Pieraccini
Strategic Culture.org 

There are two countries that more than others show how the Western world order is undergoing a profound change. Japan and Turkey occupy two distinct and diverse geographical areas, yet they share many of the same strategic choices about their future. Their geopolitical trajectory is increasingly drifting away from Washington and moving closer to China, Russia, India and Iran. 

Both Japan and Turkey are two important states in the US’s strategy for controlling the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Both countries have economies that are competitive in comparison to their neighbors, and both often conveniently find themselves allied to countries within Washington’s orbit. Japan has a good relationship with South Korea, and Turkey (until a few years ago) had a privileged relationship with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Keeping in mind that the US aims to prolong and consolidate its regional dominance, Washington has always tried to have excellent relations with these two countries as a way of ensuring its constant presence in regional affairs.

Japan and Turkey have perfectly fulfilled America’s role for them in military, financial and economic terms. Ankara, for example, is a key part of NATO and offers military bases like the Incirlik Air Base, allowing for US military influence in the Middle East. Qatar, for example, is a satellite of Turkey, thanks to the shared religious bonds of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not by coincidence, one of the most important US air bases is located in Qatar, helping further lock in America’s regional presence. The goal, of course, is geopolitical, highlighting America’s ongoing confrontation with Iran, Russia and China. The United States tends to control certain geographical areas because of its military and economic power that is expressed directly or indirectly through compliant allies like Turkey and Japan. 

Read more

US Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of World’s Dictatorships

Rich Whitney
ICH

For decades, the American people have been repeatedly told by their government and corporate-run media that acts of war ordered by their president have been largely motivated by the need to counter acts of aggression or oppression by “evil dictators.” We were told we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator. We had to bomb Libya because Muammar Gaddafi was an evil dictator, bent on unleashing a “bloodbath” on his own people. Today, of course, we are told that we should support insurgents in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is an evil dictator, and we must repeatedly rattle our sabers at North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin because they, too, are evil dictators.

This is part of the larger, usually unquestioned mainstream corporate media narrative that the US leads the “Western democracies” in a global struggle to combat terrorism and totalitarianism and promote democracy.

I set out to answer a simple question: Is it true? Does the US government actually oppose dictatorships and champion democracy around the world, as we are repeatedly told? 

Read more

Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism

Resurgence Talks: Jeremy Leggett – The Solar Civilisation, Renaissance, and the New Despotism  from The Resurgence Trust on Vimeo.

See also:Global civilisation to descend into ‘hell on earth’ unless we choose a new paradigm

Ten Years On, Putin Told Them So

Finian Cunningham
ICH

You can hardly blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for enjoying a “told you so moment”. He lately reminded European leaders that their all-out spat with the United States is what happens when you are too deferential to American hegemonic ambitions.

This predicament is just what the Russian leader had warned against almost 10 years ago in a famous speech he delivered in Munich on growing global disorder.

Last week, during his nationally televised marathon Q and A with Russian citizens, Putin referred to the unprecedented trade tariffs that President Trump is slapping on European states.

Rightly, Putin said those penalties were effectively a form of economic sanctions imposed by Washington on its supposed allies.

Putin hinted that the Europeans were now getting a taste of the noxious medicine that has been doled out to Russia by Western powers which have inflicted sanctions on Moscow over dubious allegations concerning the nearly four-year-old Ukraine conflict.

The acrimonious fallout from Trump's de facto trade war with Europe, Canada and Japan was all-too apparent during the testy G7 summit held this weekend in Quebec.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decried American "illegal" trade measures, while French President Emmanuel Macron jettisoned his earlier "bromance" with Trump to declare that the group of Western industrialized countries plus Japan may reformat as the "G6" without the US, in order to counteract Washington's "hegemony".

Read more

NATO virus is spreading, aggressive & immune to any antibiotic of logic

RT

Like a geographical virus the spread of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has broken all natural boundaries. It is immune to any antibiotic of logic and poses a deadly threat to the health, peace and stability of the world.

For decades in the West, NATO was believed to have been a defensive response to the creation of the Warsaw Pact - despite the fact that it was formed long before the treaty, which has in turn been nearly 30 years dead. Nonetheless, like death and taxes, membership of NATO has been assumed to be one of life's few certainties with an increasing share of national wealth going to pay for it.

This might have gone on unquestioned but for the multiple East-West crises of the last few years and the bizarre inclusion of, brothers-in-arms and non-North Atlantic states, Colombia and Israel in recent NATO activity.

Almost overnight, interest in my long-quiescent No2NATO campaign has picked up as public opinion has switched on like a light to the fact that there is little that is defensive about NATO and even less that is North Atlantic.

Read more

De-Briefing Academics: Unpaid Intelligence Informants

Prof. James Petras
Global Research 

Introduction

Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at professional meetings.

In the course, of my activity I have discovered that many academics are frequently engage in what government officials dub ‘de-briefing’! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts over lunch at the Embassy with US government officials or in Washington with State Department officials.

US government officials look forward to these ‘debriefings”; the academic provided useful access to information which they otherwise could not obtain from paid, intelligence agents or local collaborators.

Not all academic informants are very well placed or competent investigators. However, many provide useful insights and information especially on leftist movements, parties and leaders who are real or potential anti-imperialist adversaries.

US empire builders whether engaged in political or military activities depend on information especially regarding who to back and who to subvert; who should receive diplomatic support and who to receive financial and to military resources.

De-briefed academics identify ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ adversaries, as well as personal and political vulnerabilities. Officials frequently exploit health problems or family needs to ‘turn’ leftists into imperial stool pigeons.

US officials are especially interested in academic gate-keepers who exclude ‘anti-imperialist’ critics, activists , politicians and government officials.

At times, US State Department officials claim to be sympathetic ‘progressives’ who oppose ‘Neanderthals’ in their institution, in order to elicit inside information from leftist academic informants.

Debriefing is a widespread practice and involves numerous academics from major universities and research centers, as well as non-governmental ‘activists’ and editors of academic journals and publications.

Academic participates in debriefing frequently do not publicize their reporting to the government. Most likely they share their reports with other academic informers. All claim they are merely sharing research and diffusing information for ‘science’ and to further ‘humane values’.

Academic informers always justify their collaboration as providing a clear and more balanced picture to ‘our’ policymakers, ignoring the predictable destructive outcomes likely to ensue.

Read more

The Warwongers

The Saker
Vineyard of The Saker

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Between the US strikes on Syria in April and the recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, we are in somewhat of a lull in the Empire’s search for a new war to start. The always helpful Israelis, in the person of the ineffable Bibi Netanyahu, are now beating the drums for, well, if not a war, then at least some kind of false flag or pretext to make the USA strike at Iran. And then there is the always bleeding Donbass (which I won’t address in today’s analysis). So let’s see where we stand and try to guesstimate where we might be heading. To be honest, trying to guess what ignorant warmongering psychopaths might do next is by definition a futile exercise, but since there are some not negligible signs that there are at least a few rational people still left in the US White House and/or Pentagon (as shown by the mostly “pretend strikes” on Syria last month), we can assume (hope) that some residual degree of sanity is still present. At the very least Americans in uniform have to ask themselves a very basic and yet fundamental question:

Do I want to die for Israel? Do I want to lose my job for Israel? How about my pension? Maybe just my stock options? Is it worth risking a major regional war for such a “wonderful” state? 

A lot depends on whether the US military leaders (and people!) will have the courage to ask themselves this question and, if they do, what their reply will be.

But, first, let’s begin with the good news:

The DPRK and ROK are in direct talks with each other. 

This is indeed a truly great development for at least two reasons. First, of course, the main and objective one: anything which lowers the risks of war on the Korean Peninsula is good. But there is a second reason which we should not discount: Trump can now take all the credit for this and claim that his (empty) threats are what brought the North Koreans to the negotiating table. I say – let him. In fact, I hope that they organize a parade for Trump somewhere in the USA, with confetti and millions of flags. Like for an astronaut. Let him feel triumphant, vindicated and very, very manly. MAGA, you know?!

Yeah, that will be sickening to the thinking (not to mention counter-factual), but if a little bit of intellectual nausea is the price to pay for peace, I say let’s do it. If Trump, Bolton, Haley and the rest of them can feel that they “kicked ass” and that their “invincible military” is what brought “Rocket Man” to “give up his nukes” (he never said any such thing, but never mind that) then I sincerely wish them a joyful and highly ego-pleasing celebration. Anything to stop them from looking for another war to start, at least for a now.
Now the bad news.

Read more

The Empire's Ship is Sinking

Comment: Short documentary from Abby Martin's Empire Files (2015). Worth another watch. Given what's happening today, nothing has changed other than the dangerous death throes of  of Empire. 

Have a look at this document mentioned in the video: Syria: UN Mission Report Confirms that “Opposition” Rebels Used Chemical Weapons against Civilians and Government Forces

Yet, here we are again trying to dupe the public into accepting an illegal bombing raid against Syria for nothing more than money and power. 

----------------- 

"I still think there is high potential for this manipulation of intelligence...I am very skeptical of the Intelligence Establishment and what it says." 

 --  Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

 TeleSUR English

"History has shown us that empires crumble when their thirst for power overtakes all other sensibilities. According to United States Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, America could stand on the precipice of such destruction. His insights form the foundation of the short documentary The Empire's Ship is Sinking, and it's a rarely-heard point of view from inside the heart of the beast.

Wilkerson knows of which he speaks. He flew over a thousand combat missions during the war in Vietnam. He later served as the National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and as Chief of Staff to General Colin Powell during the administration of President George W. Bush. He possesses intimate knowledge of the inner workings of war, and has witnessed first-hand how the propulsion of endless conflict continues to line the pockets of the very wealthy and decimate the existence of the lower classes worldwide.

Many key tenants of modern-day warfare are covered in the brief, yet wide-ranging interview that structures the film. From the more than 800 bases the United States military operates across the globe to the increased proliferation of weapons manufacturing, conflict means big business for the American elite. There seems to be no profitability in peace. The wealth created by these global skirmishes does not promote a more productive capitalistic society, because none of it falls downward in support of the lower classes. In some cases, as Colonel Wilkerson points out, foreign policy is based more on business considerations than humanitarian ones.

The issue is so complex and far-reaching that pinning the blame on a single culprit becomes muddied and elusive. In a way, we are all complicit. According to some reports, over 70% of retired military generals are recruited by the nation’s top weapons manufacturers as spokespeople and advisors. It falls on them to convincingly sell the need for continued conflict to the American people. In large part, the citizenry accepts these arguments without question or protest.

Wilkerson contends that such a path is unsustainable, and will surely spell doom for America's reputation, economic vitality and moral dominance in the world. The Empire's Ship is Sinking forces us to consider the corporate complex that drives America’s violent incursions across the globe." - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/empire-ship-sinking/