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Time for NATO to Retire?

Learning all the Wrong Lessons from Europe’s Bloc-Politics?

By Glenn Diesen | September 24, 2024

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently gave his farewell speech. The speech was intended to be a tribute to NATO and himself, instead it revealed why the outdated military bloc should retire.[1] The speech exposed an ideological and simplistic mindset in which conflicts occur because there are bad guys in the world, and security depends on the good guys arming themselves to the teeth and confronting the bad guys. Immersed with ideology to justify a hegemonic world order, there was zero recognition of the security competition in the international system. Our weapons are good, the weapons of our adversaries are bad. Dividing the world into good and evil is dangerous as war becomes the only path to peace, or as Stoltenberg argues about the Ukraine War: “weapons are the way to peace”.

How is security measured by NATO? Stoltenberg boasted that “we have strengthened our defences”, without assessing if this has resulted in heightened security. Stoltenberg celebrated that NATO went from “having zero to tens of thousands of combat-ready NATO soldiers on our Eastern flank”, without a word about how Russia will respond to NATO militarising its borders. Expansionism was presented as an objective of its own as “Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland and Sweden joined our Alliance. And Ukraine is closer to NATO than ever before”. Given that NATO expansionism triggered the war in Ukraine, how will the end of neutrality in Europe impact peace? The failed ambition towards the end of the Cold War was to transition away from confrontational bloc politics, zero-sum politics, and Cold War mentality. Yet, the advancement of a military bloc is now seemingly the sole measurement of success for NATO.

Peacetime alliances

The modern world order is based on a balance of power in which alliances are useful to the extent they balance the hegemonic ambitions of an expansionist power. After the Cold War, NATO itself became an instrument of expansionism and hegemony. NATO preserved US dominance in Europe and the military bloc had to search for a new purpose to justify its own existence. NATO transitioned from a status-quo power to a revisionist power as its continued relevance relied on expansionism and military interventionism. The buzz phrase of the 1990s was that NATO had to go “out of area or out of business”. Today, NATO is an organisation that justifies its existence by the need to counter the security challenges caused by its own existence.

Peacetime alliances are problematic as they rely on external adversaries to preserve internal solidarity, which creates incentives for radicalising the “us” versus “them” mentality. NATO struggled with a lack of purpose when peace broke out in the 1990s, although Stoltenberg could now celebrate the renewed purpose and unity of NATO as war had returned to Europe. Peacetime alliances also create entanglements as military alliances replace a state’s right to make war with a duty to make war.[2] Military alliances also encourage smaller states to maintain their historical grievances and embolden aggressive behaviour. For example, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, feels comfortable calling for breaking up the Russian Federation into many smaller states as the US stands behind it. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, peacetime military alliances embrace the people who pursue historical justice and vengeance. Whenever a NATO member state considers to return to diplomacy or recognise the security concerns of the adversary, the demand for “alliance solidarity” is used to prevent peace from breaking out.

The lesson from history is that security competition is mitigated with inclusive security arrangements that pursue security with other member states, as opposed to an exclusive alliance that pursues security against a non-member. After Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Europe’s first collective security institution was established, the Concert of Europe (1815-1914), in which the defeated state France was invited to have a seat at the table. This lesson was not followed after the First World War as peace was deemed to rely on perpetuating the weakness of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, which laid the foundations for the Second World War. However, after the Second World War, both Germany and France were brought into the same club to pursue security with each other rather than against each other.

The decision to abandon the agreements to form a pan-European security architecture after the Cold War functioned as a second Treaty of Versailles in which peace in Europe would rely on perpetuating the weakness of Russia. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defence, William Perry, recognised that NATO expansion was a betrayal of the post-Cold War peace, but his colleagues did not care as Russia was weak and kept getting weaker. George Kennan, the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, criticised the decision to expand NATO as a reversal back to confrontational bloc politics: “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom”.[3] In an interview with the New York Times, George Kennan outlined the folly and predicted the consequences of expansion:

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves… Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong”.[4]

The success of NATO is also measured by the ability to expand the bloc politics of Europe to the wider world. Stoltenberg applauded NATO for the “deepened relations with countries in the Indo Pacific”, which is evidently intended to contain and confront China. Bloc politics was equated to freedom as Stoltenberg argued NATO “must not make the same mistake with China” as “freedom is more important than free trade”. NATO’s lesson from Europe is seemingly not that zero-sum bloc politics was advanced at the expense of an inclusive European security architecture, rather it was that the West allowed itself to have any dependence on Russia at all. Is it possible that expanding militarised dividing lines closer to Russian borders was not a good recipe for security?

An Alternative Farewell Speech?

An alternative farewell speech should have been held by the former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating. Last year, Keating commented on the goal to make NATO go global. In Keating’s words: “NATO’s continued existence after and at the end of the Cold War has already denied peaceful unity in broader Europe”.[5] Keating was thus fiercely opposed to expanding the model of European bloc politics and Cold War mentality to Asia as “Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States”. Regarding the man of the hour, Jens Stoltenberg, Keating opined:

“Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen… Stoltenberg conducts himself as an American agent more than he performs as a leader and spokesperson for European security.”

[1] NATO – Opinion: Transcript – German Marshall Fund event, Reflections on a Challenging Decade: A Farewell Conversation with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, 19-Sep.-2024

[2] J.H. Herz, ‘Power politics and world organization’, The American Political Science Review, vol.36, no.6, 1942, p.1046-7.

[3] G.F., Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, The New York Times, 5 February 1997.

[4] T.L. Friedman, ‘Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X.’, The New York Times, 2 May 1998.

[5] P. Keating. ‘NATO’s provocative lurch eastward and the ‘supreme fool’ Jens Stoltenberg’, China Daily, 10 July 2023.

September 24, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

European Union morphs into NATO’s financial war machine

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 24, 2024

Two key posts – in foreign and defense policy – reveal the militarist and anti-Russia direction of the European Union.

Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission – which works as the executive branch of the European Union – announced her new team of commissioners for the next five years.

Taking over as foreign affairs minister for the 27-nation bloc is Kaja Kallas who is a staunch Russophobe and vigorous supporter of Ukraine. Kallas has called for more EU and NATO military funding for Ukraine to “defeat Russia” and the break up of the Russian Federation.

The former Estonian prime minister has led the movement to destroy Soviet Red Army monuments across the Baltic states. (This is while her investor husband continues to profit from doing business with Russia.)

Working closely alongside Kallas will be another rabid Russophobe, the former Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius, who is taking up a newly created EU post as defense commissioner. The creation of that post is an alarming sign of how the EU bloc has transitioned from a trade and political union to a military organization.

But what’s even more alarming is the assigning of such an anti-Russia hawk as Kubilius to oversee military policy.

At a time when relations between the EU and Russia have become so fraught with tensions, the European bloc is giving politicians from hostile Baltic states a driving seat to push relations even further towards conflict.

Indeed, the first announcement Kubilius made as the prospective new defense commissioner was that the European Union would likely be at war with Russia in the next six to eight years. That assessment is shared by Kaja Kallas.

Kubilius said the sole focus during his tenure is ramping up military spending by the EU nations to boost NATO and aid Ukraine. He said that he will be working closely with foreign policy chief Kallas to tap funds.

What this means is that the European Union is moving towards making it mandatory for national budgets to allocate more to military procurement. That’s a breakthrough for all the worst reasons.

Kubilius is reportedly aiming for a budget of €500 billion over the next five years to be spent on the military by the EU.

That increase would represent about half of the projected EU total budget.

His comments indicate the purpose of the massive redirection of finances – to boost NATO. Kubilius noted that “the European Union has instruments to get larger financing, which NATO doesn’t.”

That implies that under his formulation and compulsory directives from Brussels, the EU will make it mandatory for member states to spend more on the military.

NATO and the EU have overlapping membership with 23 members of the EU’s 27 also being part of the U.S.-led military alliance. Non-NATO members are Austria, Cyprus, Malta, and Ireland.

NATO states are expected to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP  on military. That amounts to about $380 billion for European members of NATO in 2024. That is a huge increase compared with what was spent by these members only a few years ago. But what the NATO planners want is more and more going forward. The problem is locking that expenditure in.

The trouble for NATO planners is the 2 percent figure is not mandatory. It is subject to national policy. While most members of NATO are hitting that target currently, there is no guarantee it will continue. Changes in national governments might result in spending slipping back to former levels of 1-1.5 percent of GDP as was the case before the proxy war in Ukraine blew up in 2022.

What the NATO hawks in the EU desire most is to lock in military spending year-on-year. NATO does not have the legal means to enforce such a commitment as mandatory on its members. But the EU can do it through its supranational powers as served by centralized directives from Brussels.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have upped their military spending to nearly 3 percent of GDP when Kallas and Kubilius were in office.

Moreover, Kubilius has previously proposed that all EU members devote an extraordinary, additional 0.25 percent of their GDP to make mandatory military donations to Ukraine to “ensure victory over Russia”, amounting to €100 billion a year.

This is an astounding transformation of the European Union. The organization has its roots in the 1950s as a loose trade federation of Western European nations – principally France and the Federal Republic of Germany – which proclaimed that lessons of the Second World War had been learned and would never be repeated because of commitments to good neighborliness and commercial partnership. In its earlier incarnations, the European bloc sought out friendly relations with the Soviet Union, primarily with energy trade being a cornerstone of cooperation.

Since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991, the EU has expanded in line with the expansion of NATO. Its powers have become evermore centralized and usurping national policy. A striking feature of both NATO and the EU is the hardening of Russophobic policy that has come with the leveraging of anti-Russia Baltic states. Historically, these states were virulent collaborators with Nazi Germany in its genocidal war against the Soviet Union. The Baltic states still harbor fascists who venerate the Third Reich. Hence, the destruction of Soviet-era war monuments and the rehabilitation of public displays commemorating Nazi collaborators.

NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the continuation of Western imperialist designs on subjugating Russian territory that was previously pursued by Nazi Germany.

The European Union has subverted its earlier ideals of pacifism and cooperation to become part of NATO’s war machine. Crucially, what the EU brings to the war machine is legalized enforced funding, even for nations that are not part of NATO.

Added to that is the EU is being directed by people who drool about war with Russia: Von der Leyen, the former German defense minister and descendant of Nazi ideologues, is aided and abetted by Kaja Kallas and Andrius Kubilius who cannot think of Russia without fantasizing about its “defeat”.

The Nazi specter is resurrected in NATO and its EU financial wing.

September 24, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

The Russia-China grains corridor will completely displace the US, Canada, Australia, and France

Inside China Business | August 31, 2024

Russia and China are developing a transnational grains corridor, connecting Russia’s enormous agricultural production to export markets in China, South Asia, and the Middle East. When complete, Russian production and shipments on this network will exceed 8 million tons per year. China is the world’s largest importer of wheat and grains, and in 2023 imported over 6 million tons of wheat from the United States, Canada, Australia, and France.

Large distribution hubs are being completed in China’s Northern and Central provinces, which will further transport Russian food exports within China, and on to other Asian countries.

The proposed BRICS grains exchange enjoys wide support across the bloc, and will accelerate the decoupling of Global South markets from the Western banking and trading systems, to the detriment of farmers in North America and Europe.

Resources and links:

The Sino-Russian Land Grain Corridor and China’s Quest for Food Security https://asiasociety.org/policy-instit…

BRICS countries back grain exchange idea, Russia says https://gulfbusiness.com/brics-countr…

Russia, China agree to build new grain hub on border https://www.world-grain.com/articles/…

Visual Capitalist, Visualizing the world’s largest consumer markets in 2030 https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-…

U.S. Dominance in Corn Exports on the Wane Due to Brazilian Competition https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/202…

The New Land Grain Corridor, website and infographics https://www.nlgc.ru/en/

Closing scene, Chinese rural area outside Guilin, Guangxi province

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Spain’s Disinfo Crackdown Censorship Trap, Sanchez Faces Backlash

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 23, 2024

Spain is yet another EU country that is coming up with legislative measures which officials say are necessary to combat “disinformation” both on social sites and in traditional media.

Such a plan, consisting of 31 points, has been approved by Spain’s Council of Ministers (the main government body), but the opposition is already rejecting it as a ploy to censor free speech.

“More transparency and accountability” is how Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez would like the measures, which will be debated in parliament, to be perceived.

The debate should be interesting, not least considering that the minority government has come up with the proposal supposedly to tackle disinformation – but in the wake of corruption allegations involving the prime minister’s wife.

The accusations leveled at Begona Gomez earlier in the year led to an inquiry, and now the government is determined to push new measures through the parliament that would stop “the spread of false news.”

And this in particular – and coincidentally? – applies to such news when they concern “public institutions and individuals.”

It seems pretty transparent what prompted all this, but that’s not what Sanchez says he has in mind when he talks about transparency: the prime minister frames the plan as needed to protect both accurate information, and democracy.

And not only that, but make that democracy “freer and cleaner” as the justice minister in the left-wing coalition government, Felix Bolanos, chose to put it. And he may or may not be the only one who knows what that is supposed to mean.

Meanwhile, the key opposition, right-wing People’s Party said it would vote against the proposal, as they believe the entire endeavor has to do with ushering in more censorship.

The plan which Bolanos stated should “restore confidence” in the media can also be read as putting some not-so-subtle pressure on them.

Amendments to the penal code are among the proposed provisions, but also a closer government look into media outlet’s finances – referred to as yet more transparency, this time around revenues.

Reports say that to achieve all this, the Spanish government wants to set up “a special commission to combat disinformation” and, speaking of revenues, another measure is to “restrict the operation of corporate advertising in the media.”

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Washington’s Ukraine Obsession is Going to Get Us All Killed!

By Ron Paul | September 23, 2024

Last week the world narrowly escaped likely nuclear destruction, as the Biden Administration considered Ukraine’s request to allow US missiles to strike deeply into Russian territory. Russian president Vladimir Putin warned, as the request was being considered, that because these missiles could not be launched without the active participation of the US military and NATO, Russia would consider itself in a state of war with both NATO and the US should they be launched. It was a Cuban Missile Crisis on a massive scale.

Thankfully, permission was reportedly not granted by Washington to hit deep inside Russia, but as we have seen throughout this war, a weapons system is often first denied and then eventually granted to Washington’s proxies in Kiev. We should not rest easy even if nuclear war has been temporarily averted.

Would missile strikes deep inside Russia win the war for Ukraine? Not even the Pentagon thinks so. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin himself said earlier this month that granting Ukraine permission to launch missiles into Russia would not be a “game-changer” in the two and a half year war.

Risking nuclear destruction for no tangible purpose? Have these people gone insane?

Even the “game-changers” have changed little in this war. How many times has the pro-war mainstream media told us a weapons system would be a “game-changer” for Ukraine? Remember Javelin missiles? Leopard tanks? HIMARS? And as each one of them fails to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor, the neocons and their friends in the media only demand more.

The fact is that Russia is winning the war despite hundreds of billions of dollars and the best weapons systems from the US and NATO countries. Each new shipment of increasingly sophisticated weapons does not produce battlefield victories for Ukraine. It only produces more dead Ukrainian soldiers and more profits for the weapons manufacturers.

Even the mainstream media – which has solidly supported the Ukraine war – has begun to report on Ukraine’s huge losses and hopeless situation. Yet as more and more start to wake up about the disastrous proxy war, Washington only knows one direction when it comes to war: forward. Just over a week ago the Pentagon announced another $250 million arms package for Ukraine. Nobody believes that is going to reverse the steady gains made by Russia on the battlefield, but it will generate more profits for the US arms manufacturers who are the real force behind our hyper-interventionist foreign policy.

The unlikely duo of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump, Jr., said it best in a recent editorial in The Hill : “We cannot get any closer to the brink than this. And for what? To ‘weaken Russia’? To control Ukraine’s minerals? No vital American interest is at stake. To risk nuclear conflict for the sake of the neoconservative fantasy of global ‘full-spectrum dominance’ is madness.”

They are right, it is madness to risk the future of our country and our children and grandchildren for wars that have nothing to do with us and serve no national interest of the United States. This is certainly true for the Ukraine war, and it is also true for the wars the US is supporting in the Middle East. When will the madness end? When the people speak up and demand a change.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Telegram Will Now Share Users’ IP Addresses and Phone Numbers With Governments in Response to Legal Requests

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | September 23, 2024

Telegram, the messaging app that once positioned itself as the rebel’s answer to Big Tech surveillance, has made a sharp U-turn on the “we protect your data at all costs” highway. On Monday, the company quietly updated its privacy policy to allow for the disclosure of user information—like those precious IP addresses and phone numbers—to law enforcement, but only, of course, if they present a valid legal request.

As we all know, no one has ever stretched the definition of “valid” to fit their agenda, right?

This revelation comes hot on the heels of a little incident back in August, when Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov found himself in handcuffs, detained by French authorities. What was the crime? Well, it appears Telegram was accused of playing hardball with French law enforcement, refusing to hand over data, leading to Durov’s arrest. It seems law enforcement didn’t take kindly to that level of noncompliance, especially after making 2,460 unanswered requests for information.

The Policy Flip-Flop

The new policy revision is a complete about-face from the one Telegram’s loyal fans were sold on. The old rules were crystal clear. Telegram might give up your details—your IP address and phone number—but only if you were a suspect in a terror case. The policy even reassured everyone that this kind of handover had never happened.

Not anymore.

Now, Telegram has widened the net. According to the newly revised policy, if you violate Telegram’s Terms of Service—you know, the thing no one ever reads—they may hand over your info if they get a “valid” order. The language is dripping with corporate hedging: “If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you’re a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities.”

Of course, Telegram is still committed to transparency—at least on paper. The company promises to disclose all such incidents in its quarterly transparency reports, which, conveniently, can be accessed via a dedicated bot.

Durov’s Declaration: Aimed at Who, Exactly?

Durov took to Telegram to tell users, “We have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world.”

He continued, “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.”
Durov further added, “These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won’t let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”

The French Connection

But what really forced Telegram’s hand? Let’s rewind to Durov’s August airport arrest, where things started to get clearer.

After allegedly over 2,400 ignored requests for data, French authorities had had enough. They brought in the National Gendarmerie to get to the bottom of Telegram’s refusal to cooperate.

Apparently, turning over data wasn’t an option until they started detaining CEOs.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

US deploying more troops to West Asia amid Israeli escalation of violence

Press TV – September 23, 2024

The US Department of Defense has decided to deploy more boots to West Asia amid the Israeli escalation of war in the region.

Additional US troops will be deployed to the Middle East in response to a sharp spike in violence between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon that has raised the risk of a greater regional war, the Pentagon spokesperson said on Monday.

Gen. Pat Ryder announced the new deployment without providing details on how many additional forces would be needed or what they would be tasked to do.

“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional US military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region. But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”

The United Nations has sounded the alarm, warning that the escalating violence between the Israeli regime forces and the Hezbollah resistance movement in Lebanon was catapulting the Middle East conflict “to another level”.

Prior to the latest escalation of violence, the Pentagon had announced that the approximately 40,000 US troops deployed in the region were “enough to protect Israel.”

In addition to tens of thousands of troops in the Middle East region, the Pentagon has warships, fighter jets, and air defense systems deployed to protect both its forces and the Israeli regime.

Ryder warned of the potential for the Israel-Hezbollah violence to escalate, calling for a diplomatic solution.

“Clearly there is the potential for these tit-for-tat operations between Israel and Hezbollah to escalate and to potentially spiral out of control into a wider regional war, which is why it’s so important that we resolve… the situation through diplomacy,” Ryder said.

Middle East tensions rose sharply after the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shakr in Beirut at the end of July, prompting the Pentagon to begin sending additional US troops to the region. The US military claimed the additional American troops would not be engaged by the Israeli forces for “offensive” operations against Hezbollah.

Pentagon’s announcement comes as fears of a broader regional war grow, with Israel striking hundreds of targets in Lebanon following Israel’s communication devices terror attacks which targeted Hezbollah cadre and civilians with exploding pagers earlier this week. The attacks killed 37 Lebanese and injured thousands more.

World powers have called on the Israeli regime and Hezbollah to pull back from the brink of an all-out war, with the focus of violence shifting sharply in recent days from Israel’s southern front with Gaza to its northern border with Lebanon.

Hezbollah, a powerful political and military force in Lebanon, has exchanged near-daily fire with the Israeli regime forces in support of the defenseless Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) and the Ansarallah-led government of Yemen stand alongside Hamas and Hezbollah, targeting US and Israeli positions in the region in an effort to oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The occupying zionist regime forces launched the genocidal war on helpless Palestinians trapped in Gaza almost a year ago in early October, which has claimed the lives of more than 41,400 people, most of them innocent women and children.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Will Israel “recklessly” seize the day? “Have the doors to a war without limits been opened?”

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 23, 2024

“After today [the day of the pager simultaneous explosions], there can be no talk about settlement and solutions”, writes Ibrahim Amine, Editor of Al-Akhbar, known for his close contacts with the Hizbullah leadership:

“In just one minute, the enemy succeeded in delivering its harshest blows to the body of the Islamic Resistance … [Furthermore] through yesterday’s operation, the enemy confirmed that it doesn’t want to abide by the rules of engagement. Have the doors to a war [then] been opened: a war without any limits, ceilings, or borders”?

“After today, it [i.e. the Israeli enemy] will make no distinction between a fighter operating on the front and an individual working in some distant office”, Amine noted.

For the last year, both Israel and Hizbullah have avoided major escalation by observing unwritten rules of engagement or ‘equations’ between the parties, such as not targeting civilians. That is now over.

In his first speech since the devices blew up on Tuesday and Wednesday, Sayed Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, conceded that his group had “endured a severe and cruel blow”. He accused Israel of breaking “all conventions and laws” and said that it would “face just retribution and a bitter reckoning”. But he did not describe how Hezbollah might retaliate; “nor did he discuss the time, nor manner, nor place” of it ocurring.

Nasrallah warned:

“The enemy declares as its official goal to return the settlers to the North. We accept the challenge: You will not be able to return to the North. In fact, we will displace more Israelis from their homes. We hope Israel enters Lebanon, we are waiting for their tanks day and night: We say, ‘welcome!’”.

There is some point to this remark. From the outset, Hizbullah was configured militarily more for all-out war with Israel, than the limited tit-for-tat, calibrated war – which never played best to Hizbullah’s strengths.

Clearly, a new phase of war has begun, and to underline this point, Israel began one of its heaviest strikes on Israel after Nasrallah’s speech on Thursday night. U.S. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin reportedly informed leaders of Congress that evening about his fear of an imminent Israeli offensive into Lebanon.

Nasrallah’s assessment of coming war is fully shared by at least some senior Israeli military commanders, albeit by no means all. Several profess the belief that war with Hizbullah could extend into a regional war – and lead to the collapse of Israel.

However … “You don’t do something like that, hit thousands of people, and think war is not coming”, said retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who leads the Israel Defence and Security Forum, a group of hawkish former military commanders. “Why didn’t we do it for 11 months? Because we were not willing to go to war yet. What’s happening now? Israel is ready for war”.

“There’s a lot of pressure from the society to go to war and win”, said Avivi, the retired general. “Unless Hezbollah tomorrow morning says, ‘OK, we got the message. We’re pulling out of south Lebanon’ – war is imminent”.

A poll in late August by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank, found that 67% of Jewish respondents thought Israel should intensify its response to Hizbullah. That includes 46% who believed that Israel should launch a deep offensive striking Lebanese infrastructure, and 21% who seek an intensified response that only strikes on Hezbollah’s infrastructure.

General Avivi’s remarks likely reflect an underlying reality that had become only too clear: Amos Hochstein, the U.S. Envoy, has failed to achieve any ‘diplomatic’ progress towards a Hizbullah withdrawal from the south of Lebanon. In parallel, U.S. officials, (according to the WSJ ) now concede that a Gaza ceasefire is ‘out of reach’ for Biden; and that, equally, Israel’s military attrition on southern Lebanon that had resulted in the displacement of 80% of its inhabitants had achieved nothing. Israel’s northern residents also remain displaced.

It seems, therefore, that Israel is set on a path to wider conflict. A taster has already been given: On 17 September, the Houthis fired a missile at a target close to Ben Gurion airport. The missile covered 1,300 miles in less than 12 min, which is to say, it flew at hypersonic speed, approaching Mach 9 – untouchable by air defences – and struck its target.

It is probable that we shall see more such hypersonic missiles flying – immune to air defences – should this war escalate, and Iran intervene.

What is paradoxical (as so often in conflict) is that the exploding pager operation seemingly was entirely fortuitous in terms of the timing. It was not planned specifically to move Israel to a new phase in the Lebanese conflict:

“High-level regional intelligence sources told Al-Monitor that the decision to carry out the operation was “forced” on Israel following an intelligence lapse … The Israeli military’s original plan was to explode the devices in the event of a full-blown war with Hezbollah in order to gain a strategic edge – but not to detonate them on Tuesday”, the sources added.

“However suspicions from at least two Hezbollah members caused the Israeli security establishment to agree to a premature execution of the plan. After a Hezbollah member in Lebanon suspected foul play with the pagers several days ago – that person was killed, the sources said … [and the plan was] ultimately executed. The subsequent decision to trigger the radios to explode was said to be driven by the expectation that after the pager detonations the radios would fall under suspicion”.

With the weather due to change within a few weeks, curtailing – or even halting – air operations, Israel was faced with having to choose between two alternative courses: Military action within weeks, or to wait until next Spring to exert more pressure on Hizbullah to shift its stance. The political future in Israel going into next year however, is extremely opaque. (Netayahu’s court appearances are due to resume in December).

The Hizbullah member’s unforeseen suspicions about the pagers ‘cast the die’ – taking us to a new level of war.

Unsurprisingly, the chatter in Israel is that the pager operation has resulted in a major blow to Hizbullah’s communication system that will cripple the movement’s military capability, offering Israel the ‘window’ to press home an invasion to establish a ‘buffer zone’ in southern Lebanon – one that might facilitate the return of Israeli residents to the north. Nasrallah promises the opposite: More Israelis will be displaced from their homes in northern Israel.

The notion that Hizbullah’s communications are crippled is wishful thinking that fails to distinguish between what may be called civil-society Hizbullah, and its military arm.

Hizbullah is a civil movement, as well as a military power. It is the Authority over a significant slice of Beirut and a country – a responsibility that requires the Movement to provide civil order and security. The pagers and radios were used primarily by its civil security forces (effectively a civil police managing security and order in Hizbullah-controlled parts of Lebanon), as well as used by its logistics and support branches. Since these personnel are not combat forces, they were not seen to require truly secure communications.

Even before the 2006 war, Hizbullah ended all cellphone and landline communications in favour of their own dedicated optic cable system and hand-courier messaging for the military cadres. In short, Hizbullah’s communications at the civil level took a major hit, but this will not unduly impact upon its military forces. For years, the Movement has operated on the basis that units could continue with combat, even in the event of a complete rupture of optic communications, or the loss of a HQ.

What comes next? Several scenarios are possible: The key is that Netanyahu is now back in “his comfort zone”. The talk about hostages has subsided, and the plans for the stealth, calibrated expulsion of the Palestinian population are unfolding under the supervision of ministers Ben Gvir, Smotrich and others on the Right. Defence Minister Gallant has even declared military ‘victory’ in Gaza.

And it seems that Gallant too, has bowed to the inevitable: Netanyahu, it would seem, has got his way – bypassing Gallant and senior IDF officers’ objections to escalation versus Hizbullah, without having to sack the popular Gallant as defence minister, and without having to take in the troublesome Gideon Saar into his government!

Defence Minister Gallant, IDF chief Halevi and other IDF officials all issued statements on Wednesday evening which appeared to suggest a full-on war with Hizbullah was brewing, hours after the wave of explosions of communications devices across Lebanon.

From Netanyahu’s perspective, the U.S. – however grudgingly – is committed to supporting Israel in this war, and in a wider war, should Iran enter the fray. The U.S. hints its support is not open-ended, but Netanyahu probably counts on its engagement inexorably ratchetting up as events unfold, pulling the U.S. further in. (The Israel-supporting power-structures would never countenance any abandonment of an Israel in danger, in any case).

Judging by the statements out of Israel, the consensus is that Hizbullah will retaliate, but in a way that is different from the way it has responded until now. Will it make do with a limited response? That is unclear. But anything it does do could lead to an exchange of blows that, in turn, will precipitate a large-scale war.

Senior officials in the IDF and in other parts of the security establishment warn openly against ‘reckless steps being planned by their government in the north’. On the one hand, these steps carry a very tangible danger of flaring up a general state of war, not only on the border with Lebanon, but in the entire region; and on the other hand, they do not promise a solution that will allow the residents of the north to return to their homes, or that the Gaza hostages will ever be released.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

What does Putin have to do with Israel’s attacks on Lebanon?

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | September 23, 2024

On September 17, Israel launched one of the largest and cruelest terrorist attacks in modern history. For Lebanon and Syria, the victim countries, 9/17 will now have a meaning akin to that of 9/11 in the US. That date will be remembered for a very long time, and beyond those two states, as the start of two waves of explosions, mostly affecting pagers on the first day and walkie-talkies the following day. There have been reports of other everyday objects, such as laptops and tablets as well as solar energy systems blowing up as well.

While some details are still murky, we already know that the attacks were devastating: According to an Amnesty International summary from September 20, more than 2,931 victims were injured and at least 37 were killed. Amnesty International tends to be cautious and conservative with its figures, and it is still too early for a full assessment of casualties and damage. It is certain that the final count will be worse.

Events are moving fast. The onslaught seems to have served to either provoke or start a larger war; UN General Secretary António Guterres quickly – and plausibly – suspected that 9/17 was meant as a preventive strike and prelude to a larger escalation. It has been followed by more and increasingly brutal bombings and massacres, in the manner that we know so well from the rogue state Israel. For now, it is already clear that after a horrific scene of mass terror in shops, streets, and homes, many of the victims of 9/17 have been injured severely, often leaving them with “life-changing injuries.”

An ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University Hospital in Beirut told us 60 to 70 percent of his patients “had to have at least one eye removed. [For] some of the patients, we had to remove both eyes. It kills me. In my past 25 years of practice, I’ve never removed as many eyes.”

Israel, the perpetrator regime, has done what it always does, namely release a barrage of lies. The first step, as so often, has been to boast of its crime without, however, officially admitting it. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a chief genocidaire in the Gaza slaughter, has spoken of a “new era” of war with Lebanon and extolled the “excellent achievements” of the Israeli intelligence services. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Get it, get it? By the way, that is a technique that Western propagandists just love to ascribe to Russia. Yet it’s as Israeli as (stolen) shakshuka and (authentically Zionist) ethnic cleansing. But that’s okay in the West. Because – Israel.

Israeli politicians, propagandists, and many cut-outs and useful idiots in the West claim that this was a legitimate intelligence operation to strike at Hezbollah, the resistance organization and political party based in Lebanon with which Israel is, in effect, at war. In reality, things are as clear as can be: Using civilian devices in this manner is a war crime.

Legally, two points are decisive as well as incontrovertible: First, Hezbollah is both a military and a civilian organization. Under International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which applies here without a doubt, only those Hezbollah members serving in a military capacity are combatants. All others are and remain civilians, who have and retain a right to protection – obviously also during armed conflict because (duh…) armed conflict is what IHL is all about. Amnesty International has found evidence that the exploding devices of 9/17 had indeed been distributed to members of Hezbollah’s civilian offices, too, as was perfectly expectable for the Israeli perpetrators.

Second, 9/17 was, in any case, fundamentally criminal because, as Amnesty International has explained, it was “indiscriminate […] according to” IHL as “those who planned and carried out these attacks could not verify who would be harmed when the devices exploded, or even if only fighters had been given them.” Indeed, booby-traps spread throughout a civilian population – yes, even while perhaps in immediate possession of a Hezbollah member – are “inherently indiscriminate,” as one expert has put it. That is also why booby-trapping things that are generally associated with civilian use – such as pagers, which are not, obviously, tanks or trenches – is explicitly forbidden by the 1996 Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps, and Other Devices, a United Nations treaty.

Against this background, Western Israel apologists have bent over backwards to spin 9/17. Indeed, this time they are doing overtime, not only downplaying and justifying brazen Israeli criminality as usual but also celebrating it as exemplary and clever (Ironically, dwelling on the stereotypical “cleverness” of Jews is a classic anti-Semitic prejudice, but let’s not dwell on that.) The Wall Street Journal editorial board has framed 9/17 as an example of Israel’s “remarkable” abilities. As if being bankrolled and protected by the US is a skill set. For the reliably warmongering British outlet The Telegraph, the attack was “audacious.” Interesting: how? Did the perpetrators show their face for an open fight? The Bild, a powerful, ultra-Zionist German yellow press outlet from the right-wing Springer group, admired the “almost movie-like spy thriller” behind the operation, that is, the criminal infiltration of civilian supply chains to plant explosives.

If you think that such comments are ever appropriate for a terror attack, try using them for the 9/11 assault on the US in 2001 instead of the 9/17 one on Lebanon and Syria now. See? Not funny, right?

Then there’s the more sophisticated and yet still completely misguided take. Writing for the Daily Mail, Mark Almond, not a stupid man, also felt he had to acknowledge how “spectacular” the “operation was on its own merits” and dwell on Israel’s “excelling” at this kind of “warfare.” That kind of “warfare” is criminal, and if Hezbollah had used it against Israel, Mark Almond would have found the correct word for it: terrorism. It is a principally wrong step to avoid facing or naming the true legal and ethical nature of an act of violence by focusing on how well it was executed, or, in Almond’s words, its “brutal ingeniousness.”

It’s also, frankly, immature. It’s what young bro’ish boys do, when they admire a war criminal such as Nazi Otto Skorzeny because his glider landing on Gran Sasso mountain to snatch washed-out Mussolini must have looked just so damn commando cool. But a world of Israeli genocide and mass murder forbids such infantilism. In a sadly fitting manner, and quite perversely, Almond has not one word for civilians, except Israeli ones.

Almond, however, does see a real downside to Israel’s “sophisticated” attack nevertheless: He fears that its perpetrators may have miscalculated this time and, in essence, bitten off more than they can chew, inviting a backlash he compares with what happened to Japan after its – by the way, non-terrorist – attack on Pearl Harbor. Again, not a thought about Israel’s victims.

What’s the worst that could happen, according to Almond’s unfortunately typical Western mind? That the Israeli terrorists get some pain in return for the suffering of their victims which he has painstakingly made sure not to even mention. Not a word, either, about Lebanon’s or Syria’s right not to be attacked by a terrorist rogue regime next door. Not a word about their sovereignty or their governments’ right and duty to protect their citizens. If this isn’t a racist bias, I don’t know what is.

And then, finally, it’s time for – you must see this coming by now – RUSSIA! Yes, Russia. Not that Almond has any factual reason to bring it up in this context. None at all. Strictly zero. But you see, when we talk about a horrific crime committed by, actually, Israel, but we can’t actually say that, then we talk about Russia. To be on the safe side, let’s add China, too. “How long before Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping,” Almond dramatically asks, “works out how to make millions of iPhones around the world burst into flames in the pockets of their foes?”

Holy Sigmund Freud! Displacement is a powerful force indeed. Yet here’s the thing: If Moscow or Beijing wanted to do the same horrible things Israel routinely does, they easily could. There’s no issue of “working out” here. What Almond can’t face is that they simply are not like that. Israel is like that, criminal to the core, completely spoiled by decades of US-sponsored impunity, and addicted to underhanded violence and lying. It’s Israel that he supports with the absurd propaganda trick of talking about Russia and China instead of the state that has actually committed the crime and set the precedent he wants to warn about. The West is delusional. Clinically speaking.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, War Crimes | , , | 3 Comments

At least 182 killed, 727 wounded in Israeli air raids across Lebanon

Press TV – September 23, 2024

The Israeli regime’s warplanes have conducted extensive airstrikes against towns and villages across Lebanon, killing at least 182 people.

The country’s health ministry announced the death toll on Monday, saying at least 727 others had also been wounded in the attacks that targeted the areas earlier in the day.

The casualties included “children, women, and emergency workers,” it added, noting that the numbers were provisional.

The country’s media outlets said the aircraft had bombed all the towns and villages lying on the southern border as well as their surroundings.

Israeli warplanes also reportedly targeted eastern Lebanese areas, including the Bekaa Valley.

Lebanese sources said the airstrikes had targeted a total of more than 40 areas in Lebanon during the attacks.

Israeli media outlets, meanwhile, alleged that the attacks had hit locations lying as far as 125 kilometers (77 miles) inside the Lebanese territory.

Israeli military spokesman Danieh Hagari said the the regime “will engage in [more] extensive and precise strikes” against Lebanon, adding that the attacks would “go on for the near future.”

The regime has markedly intensified its attacks against the country since October 7, when it launched a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement has responded with numerous strikes against the occupied Palestinian territories as means of both retaliating against the regime and displaying support for the war-hit Gazans.

On Sunday, the group staged its farthest-reaching strikes against the territories since October, firing scores of rockets against the Ramat David Airbase, 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of the city of Haifa, and the Rafael weapons manufacturing facility in the Zevulun area north of city.

It described the strike against the facility as its “initial response” to the regime’s detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkie radios that killed at least 39 people and wounded 3,000 others across Lebanon over Tuesday and Wednesday.

Also on Sunday, Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem said the movement was in a “new phase” in its battle against the regime.

“Threats will not stop us… We are ready to face all military possibilities,” he noted.

Qassem made the remarks while attending the funeral of Ibrahim Aqil, one of the group’s senior commanders.

Aqil had been martyred alongside 37 others, including three children and seven women, during an Israeli attack on a residential building in a southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Friday.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Victoria Nuland Counters Her Own State Propaganda

By James Wile | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024

Former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland gave an interview with exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar that was published to YouTube on September 3 and the conversation deserves more attention than it received. While an interview from three weeks ago might seem like old news, it contained an astonishing admission from Nuland that seemed to slip under the radar of many listeners.

The part of the conversation that received the most coverage was Nuland saying the United States government persuaded Ukraine to walk away from peace negotiations with Russia in the early weeks of their war. People who get their news from sources outside the corporate media were already aware the West had almost certainly talked Ukraine out of accepting a peace deal, but it was still shocking to see a former U.S. State official smile as she acknowledged that her government had acted as an obstacle to peace.

But there was another part of the interview that was equally damning and of greater relevance to the current threat of global war.

Almost an hour into the interview, Nuland was describing the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and said, “But it was also really interesting to see how bad the Russian military was. I mean in the United States it really completely dispelled this myth of this massive superpower military that could roll across Europe any time it felt like it.”

My eyes nearly popped out of my skull when I heard this statement. The fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on conquering a new Russian Empire has been a constant justification for American support for this proxy war. But according to Nuland, the United States government has known Russia is not powerful enough to “roll across Europe” since early 2022. Nuland said this as if she were merely adding an interesting factoid to her interview, unaware that she was contradicting years of propaganda designed to keep the West afraid that the Soviet Union could rise from the dead at any moment.

This fear of a new Russian Empire has not been a secondary point in the pro-war position. It has been the cornerstone on which the entire argument is built. If the world does not unite to resist this Russian aggression against Ukraine, then it will only be a matter of time until Russia does the same to the rest of Eastern Europe. Nations will fall under the thumb of Putin one by one until half of Europe finds itself once again living behind an iron curtain of tyranny.

This new domino theory of Russian ambition has been the subject of countless headlines, articles, and interviews meant to keep the faucet of American support for Ukraine open and running.

In April, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison claimed that Putin’s “goal is to recreate the Soviet Union so that means he will have to go into NATO countries.”

Headlines in 2022 included “Restoration of empire is the endgame for Russia’s Vladimir Putin,” and “Putin’s dark designs: Restore the pre-1917 Russian empire.”

You can even find articles from ten years ago associating Putin with “The rebuilding of ‘Soviet’ Russia.”

But in twenty seconds of an interview, Victoria Nuland revealed that for over two years the United States government has known Russia is not powerful enough to recreate the Russian Empire. So, any corporate media outlet or government mouthpiece who used this threat as a legitimate reason to continue funding the proxy war was either lying or being a useful idiot.

Antiwar voices have been arguing for years that the fear of Putin reconstituting an empire from Siberia to Central Europe is ridiculous, but Nuland is not some antiwar dove. She has been among the most hawkish voices in the United States when it comes to the situation in Eastern Europe.

Nuland, of course, would describe herself differently. According to her, Putin has overstated the part she played in Ukraine. Despite being an assistant secretary of State, she was “a nobody,” and Putin’s exaggeration of her role was a “bizarre act of desperation” that demonstrated his “own insecurity about losing Ukraine,” but there is no doubt her fingerprints can be found all over the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

The most infamous example is the phone call leaked in 2014 where Nuland can be heard talking openly about the United States meddling in the government of Ukraine. In the call, she said, “I don’t think Klitsch [Ukrainian politician Vitali Klitschko] should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” She was talking about who should be a part of a foreign government as casually as she would discuss which intern in her department should be considered for a permanent position. You do not need to be an expert in Ukrainian politics to be taken aback by such shamelessness.

Nuland has also called for the continuation of U.S. support for the war. In February 2024 she gave a speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies where she said, “With the sixty billion dollar supplemental that the administration has requested of Congress, we can ensure that Ukraine not only survives, but she thrives.” If she wants to ensure Ukraine continues to receive U.S. funding, she has no incentive to downplay the threat posed by the Russian military. This makes it even more unbelievable that she admitted the United States knows the threat of a new Russian Empire is nonexistent.

One of the U.S. regime’s chief actors has fact-checked her own regime’s propaganda. This would be like Colin Powell giving an interview in 2003 saying the United States knew that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

For readers who did not live through the deluge of propaganda leading up to the Iraq War, Colin Powell was the secretary of State under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He gave a speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 in which he used Hussien’s WMDs as justification for invading Iraq. The invasion uncovered no evidence of WMDs, but the threat of these weapons had been enough to get the U.S. government the invasion of Iraq that they were after.

If Powell had given an interview a few weeks later equivalent to Nuland’s, the entire pretext for war with Iraq would have evaporated.

It is difficult to believe a majority of the American public would have supported invading Iraq if Powell had made such an admission. Nuland’s concession should be equally impactful, but the world has continued moving forward as if the interview never happened. Kamala Harris and other war hawks continue to repeat the “myth” that Putin is going to march through Europe unless we stop him here and now.

Maybe Nuland’s shocking rebuttal of her own State Department’s propaganda was overshadowed by other stories. Maybe the corporate media was happy to keep the interview buried and out of the spotlight. One way or another, the American people need to wake up to the fact that the war in Ukraine is just another war sold on lies.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 3 Comments

Hillary Clinton’s Sordid History of Secrecy and Censorship

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | September 23, 2024

“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former President Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.

As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth—or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for fifteen years.

Last Monday evening, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda”—which she made no effort to define.

Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.” Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs. The U.S. denial of its role in the lab leak was perhaps the biggest deceit of the decade but Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a program that contributed to millions of deaths. But that wasn’t disinformation—that was public service.

In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?

After the New York Post shot down Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”). Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.” To save democracy, the government must suppress criticism of women.

Five years ago, at an NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights. Based on Harris’s prior comments, she will likely sharply increase repression of her critics on social media if she wins in November.

Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election. Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies…concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.” At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill was sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for an informative White House response.

Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.

When she was secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored seventeen FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed seventy-five years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal Judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers… or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits. Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.

Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former secretary of State. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.

Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that Nineteen Eighty-Four revealed the peril of critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin? Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them. Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark—well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.

Hillary was a key player in the Barack Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11. When she was secretary of State in 2012, she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.” But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.

Hillary’s vision of democracy permits only token interference by underlings. She believes that poohbahs like her have the right to rig elections to sanctify their power. In 2015, when she was running for the presidency, she condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” This is the bargain Hillary offered; voters didn’t have to identify themselves and she didn’t disclose what she did in office. Subsequent Democratic Party attacks on Voter ID were more successful, leading to sixty million ballots for Biden, millions of which were counted but not verified.

To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence.”

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.

Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission last year levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illegal surveillance of Trump campaign officials.

In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables”—the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016. But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens. Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclamation of the mainstream media and all decent folks—or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.

Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!” But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who expose their abuses, how in Hades can American freedom survive? How can we permit our rulers to selectively squelch citizens based on alleged hateful comments when, as historian Henry Adams pointed out a century ago, politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

Ambitious politicians never lack pious pretenses for destroying freedom. But will censorship by the Biden administration steal the 2024 election for Harris? Unfortunately, according to Hillary Clinton, you are not worthy of knowing the answer.

September 23, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | 1 Comment

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