The Saker • Unz Review • March 15, 2018
Assuming mankind finds a way not to destroy itself in the near future and assuming that there will still be historians in the 22nd or 23rd centuries, I bet you that they will look at the AngloZionist Empire and see the four following characteristics as some of its core features: lies, willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and hysterics. To illustrate my point I will use the recent “Skripal nerve-gas assassination” story as it really encompasses all of these characteristics.
I won’t even bother debunking the official nonsense here as others have done a very good job of pointing out the idiocy of that narrative. If you are truly capable of believing that “Putin” (that is the current collective designator for the Evil Empire of Mordor threatening all of western civilization) would order the murder of a man whom a Russian military court sentenced to only 13 years in jail (as opposed to life or death) and who was subsequently released as part of a swap with the USA, you can stop reading right now and go back to watching TV. I personally have neither the energy nor the inclination to even discuss such a self-evidently absurd theory. No, what I do want to do is use this story as a perfect illustration of the kind of society we now all live in looked at from a moral point of view. I realize that we live in a largely value-free society where moral norms have been replaced by ideological orthodoxy, but that is just one more reason for me to write about what is taking place precisely focusing on the moral dimensions of current events.
Lies and the unapologetic denial of reality:
In a 2015 article entitled “A society of sexually frustrated Pinocchios” I wrote the following:
I see a direct cause and effect relationship between the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can’t prove that, of course, but here is my thesis: Almost from day one, the early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With “principles” such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all “for the greater glory of God” the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10 centuries or so and we end up with the modern “Gayropa” (as Europe is now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared ‘dead’ and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as “cultural”, but even objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political expediency and ideological imperatives.
I went on to quote George Orwell by reminding how he defined “doublethink” in his book 1984:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality“
and I concluded by saying that “The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality”.
This is exactly what we are observing; not only in the silly Skripal nerve-gas assassination story but also in all the rest of the Russophobic nonsense produced by the AngloZionist propaganda machine including the “Litvinenko polonium murder” and the “Yushchenko dioxin poisoning“. The fact that neither nerve-gas, nor polonium nor dioxin are in any way effective murder weapons does not matter in the least: a simple drive-by shooting, street-stabbing or, better, any “accident” is both easier to arrange and impossible to trace. Fancy assassination methods are used when access to the target is very hard or impossible (as was the case with Ibn al-Khattab, whose assassination the Russians were more than happy to take credit for; this might also have been the case with the death of Yasser Arafat). But the best way of murdering somebody is to simply make the body disappear, making any subsequent investigation almost impossible. Finally, you can always subcontract the assassination to somebody else like, for example, when the CIA tried and failed, to murder Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah by subcontracting his bombing to its local “Christian” allies, killing over 80 innocent people in the process. There is plenty of common crime in the UK and to get somebody to rob and stab Skripal would have probably been the easiest version. That’s assuming that the Russians had any reason to want him dead, which they self-evidently didn’t.
But here is the important thing: every single criminal or intelligence specialist in the West understands all of the above. But that does not stop the Ziomedia from publishing articles like this one “A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison” which also lists people poisoned by Russians:
The only possible conclusion from this list is this: there is some kind of secret lab in Russia where completely incompetent chemists try every poison known to man, not on rats or on mice, but on high profile AngloZionist-supported political activists, preferably before an important political event.
Right.
By the way, the gas allegedly used in the attack, “Novichok”, was manufactured in Uzbekistan and the cleanup of the factory producing it was made by, you guessed it, a US company. Just saying…
In any halfway honest and halfway educated society, those kind of articles should result in the idiot writing it being summarily fired for gross incompetence and the paper/journal posting it being discredited forever. But in our world, the clown who wrote that nonsense (Elias Groll, a Harvard graduate and – listen to this – a specialist of “cyberspace and its conflicts and controversies” (sic)) is a staff writer of the award-winning Foreign Policy magazine.
So what does it tell us, and future historians, when this kind of crap is written by a staff writer of an “award winning” media outlet? Does it not show that our society has now reached a stage in its decay (I can’t call that “development”) where lies become the norm? Not only are even grotesque and prima facie absurd lies accepted, they are expected (if only because they reinforce the current ideological Zeitgeist. The result? Our society is now packed with first, zombified ideological drones who actually believe any type of officially proclaimed of nonsense and, second, by cowards who lack the basic courage to denounce even that which they themselves know to be false.
Lies, however ridiculous and self-evidently stupid, have become the main ingredient of the modern political discourse. Everybody knows this and nobody cares. When challenged on this, the typical defense used is always the same: “you are the only person saying this – I sure never heard this before!”.
Willful ignorance as a universal cop-out
We all know the type. You tell somebody that his/her theory makes absolutely no sense or is not supported by facts and the reply you get is some vaguely worded refusal to engage in an disputation. Initially, you might be tempted to believe that, indeed, your interlocutor is not too bright and not too well read, but eventually you realize that there is something very different happening: the modern man actually makes a very determined effort not to be capable of logical thought and not to be informed of the basic facts of the case. And what is true for specific individuals is even more true of our society as a whole. Let’s take one simple example: Operation Gladio:
“Gladio” is really an open secret by now. Excellent books and videos have been written about this and even the BBC has made a two and a half hour long video about it. There is even an entire website dedicated to the story of this huge, continent-wide, terrorist organization specializing in false flag operations. That’s right: a NATO-run terrorist network in western Europe involved in false flag massacres like the infamous Bologna train station bombing. No, not the Soviet KGB backing the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades in Italy. No, the US and West European governments organizing, funding and operating a terrorist network directed at the people of Western, not Eastern, Europe. Yes, at their own people! In theory, everybody should know about this, the information is available everywhere, even on the hyper-politically correct Wikipedia. But, again, nobody cares.
The end of the Cold War was marked by a seemingly endless series of events which all provided a pretext for AngloZionist interventions (from the Markale massacres in Bosnia, to the Srebrenica “genocide”, to the Racak massacre in Kosovo, to the “best” and biggest one of them all, 9/11 of course). Yet almost nobody wondered if the same people or, at least, the same kind of people who committed all the Gladio crimes might be involved. Quite the opposite: each one of these events was accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign mindlessly endorsing and even promoting the official narrative, even when it self-evidently made no sense whatsoever (like 2 aircraft burning down 3 steel towers). As for Gladio, it was conveniently “forgotten”.
There is a simple principle in psychology, including, and especially in criminal psychology which I would like to prominently restate here:
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior
Every criminologist knows that and this is why criminal investigators place so much importance on the “modus operandi”, i.e. the particular way or method a suspect or a criminal chooses in the course of the execution of his/her crimes. That is also something which everybody knows. So let’s summarize this in a simple thesis:
Western regimes have a long and well-established track record of regularly executing bloody false-flag operations in pursuit of political objectives, especially those providing them with a pretext to justify an illegal military aggression.
Frankly, I submit that the thesis above is really established not only by a preponderance of evidence but beyond a reasonable doubt. Right?
Maybe. But that is also completely irrelevant because nobody gives a damn! Not the reporters who lie for a living nor, even less so, the brainwashed zombies who read their nonsense and take it seriously. The CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 600 times – who cares?! All we know is that the good folks at Langley would never, ever, kill a Russian in the UK, out of respect for international law, probably…
That willful ignorance easily defeats history, facts or logic.
Here is a simple question a journalist could ask: “would the type of people who had no problems blowing up an large train station, or bringing down three buildings in downtown New York, have any hesitation in using a goofy method to try kill a useless Russian ex-spy if that could justify further hostile actions against a country which they desperately need to demonize to justify and preserve the current AngloZionist world order?”. The answer I think is self-evident. The question shall therefore not be asked. Instead, soy-boys from Foreign Policy mag will tell us about how the Russians use exotic flowers to kill high visibility opponents whose death would serve no conceivable political goal.
Hypocrisy as a core attribute of the modern man
Willful ignorance is important, of course, but it is not enough. For one thing, being ignorant, while useful to dismiss a fact-based and/or logical argument, is not something useful to establish your moral superiority or the legality of your actions. Empire requires much more than just obedience from its subject: what is also absolutely indispensable is a very strong sense of superiority which can be relied upon when committing a hostile action against the other guy. And nothing is as solid a foundation for a sense of superiority than the unapologetic reliance on brazen hypocrisy. Let’s take a fresh example: the latest US threats to attack Syria (again).
Irrespective of the fact that the US themselves have certified Syria free of chemical weapons and irrespective of the fact that US officials are still saying that they have no evidence that the Syrian government was involved in any chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the US is now preparing to strike Syria again in “response” to future chemical attacks! Yes, you read that right. The AngloZionists are now announcing their false flags in advance! In fact, by the time this analysis is published the attack will probably already have occurred. The “best” part of this all is that Nikki Haley has now announced to the UN Security Council that the US will act without any UN Security Council approval. What the US is declaring is this: “we reserve the right to violate international law at any time and for any reason we deem sufficient”. In the very same statement, Nikki Haley also called the Syrian government an “outlaw regime”. This is not a joke, check it out for yourself. The reaction in “democratic” Europe: declaring that *Russia* (not the US) is a rogue state. QED.
This entire circus is only made possible by the fact that the western elites have all turned into “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (to use the wonderful words of Boris Johnson) and that absolutely nobody has the courage, or decency, to call all this what it really is: an obscene display of total hypocrisy and wholesale violation of all norms of international law. The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern “journalists are either unemployed or prostitutes” (he spoke about the French media – un journaliste français c’est soit une pute soit un chômeur – but this fully applies to all the western media). Except that I would extend it to the entire Western Establishment.
I would further argue that foreign aggression and hypocrisy have become the two essential pillars for the survival of the AngloZionist empire: the first one being an economic and political imperative, the 2nd one being the prerequisite for the public justification of the first one. But sometimes even that is not enough, especially when the lies are self-evidently absurd. Then the final, quasi-miraculous element is always brought in: hysterics.
Hysteria as the highest form of (pseudo-)liberalism
I don’t particularly care for the distinction usually made between liberals and conservatives, at least not unless the context and these terms is carefully and accurately defined. I certainly don’t place myself on that continuum nor do find it analytically helpful.
The theoretical meaning of these concepts is, however, quite different from what is mostly understood under these labels, especially when people use them to identify themselves. That is to say that while I am not at all sure that those who think of themselves as, say, liberals are in any way truly liberal, I do think that people who would identify themselves as “liberals” often (mostly?) share a number of characteristics, the foremost of which is a very strong propensity to function at, and engage in, an hysterical mode of discourse and action.
The Google definition of hysteria is “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people (…) whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization), selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior”. Is that not a perfect description of US politicians, especially the (putatively) “liberal” ones? Just think of the way US Democrats have capitalized on such (non-)issues as “Russian interference” (externally) or “gun control” (internally) and you will see that the so-called “liberals” never get off a high-emotional pitch. The best example of all, really, is their reaction to the election of Donald Trump instead of their cult-leader Hillary: it has been over a year since Trump has been elected and yet the liberal ziomedia and its consumers are still in full-blown hysteria mode (with “pussyhats”, “sky-screams” and all). In a conversation you can literally drown such a liberal with facts, statistics, expert testimonies, etc. and achieve absolutely no result whatsoever because the liberal lives in an ideological comfort zone which he/she is categorically unwilling and, in fact, unable, to abandon, even temporarily. This is what makes liberals such a *perfect* audience for false-flag operations: they simply won’t process the narrative presented to them in a logical manner but will immediately react to it in a strongly emotional manner, usually with the urge to immediately “do something”.
That “do something” is usually expressed in the application of violence (externally) and the imposition of bans/restrictions/regulations (internally). You can try to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Russians would ever want to do is to use a stupid method to try to kill a person who is of absolutely no interest to them, or to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Syrian government would ever do in the course of its successful liberation of its national territory from “good terrorists” would be to use chemical weapons of any kind – but you would never achieve anything: Trump must be impeached, the Russians sanctioned and the Syrians bombed, end of argument.
I am quite aware that there are a lot of self-described “conservatives” who have fully joined this chorus of hysterical liberals in all their demands, but these “conservatives” are not only acting out of character, they are simply caving in to the social pressure of the day, being the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” mentioned above. Again, I am not discussing real liberals or real conservatives here (regardless of what these terms really mean), I am talking about those who, for whatever reason, chose to place that label upon themselves even if they personally have only a very vague idea of what this label is supposed to mean.
So there we have it: an Empire built (and maintained) on lies, accepted on the basis ignorance, justified by hypocrisy and energized by hysterics. This is what the “Western world” stands for nowadays. And while there is definitely a vocal minority of “resisters” (from the Left and the Right – also two categories I don’t find analytically helpful – and from many other schools of political thought), the sad reality is that the vast majority of people around us accept this and see no reason to denounce it, never mind doing something about it. That is why “they” got away with 9/11 and why “they” will continue to get away with future false-flags because the people lied to, realize, at least on some level, that they are being lied to and yet they simply don’t care. Truly, the Orwellian slogans of 1984 “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” perfectly fit our world. However, when dealing with the proverbial Russian bear, there is one lesson of history which western leaders really should never forget and which they should also turn into a slogan: when dealing with a bear, hubris is suicidal.
By Yves Engler · March 15, 2018
Would it surprise you to learn the Canadian military spends millions on art and history?
Until April the Canadian War Museum is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” mission to support Ukraine’s armed forces.
Until April the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP) is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” mission to support Ukraine’s armed forces.
The purpose of CFAP is to “encourage artists to learn more about our men and women in uniform and to create works of art that document and explore Canada’s military history and experience.” The program pays for artists to spend 7-10 days in the field with troops to document their activities.
While CFAP began in 2001, there have been various iterations of the program over the past century. During World War I, for instance, Canada’s official war art program created almost 1,000 works of art. During WWII the head of the Army’s historical section, Colonel A. F. Duguid, initiated a war art program and over the years the Canadian forces have commissioned sketches of the Korean War, NATO missions, UN operations and the first Gulf War.
Today CFAP is run by the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and Heritage. With a 50-person staff, the Directorate also supports the Organization of Military Museums of Canada. The half-century old organization seeks “to preserve the military heritage of Canada by encouraging the establishment and operation of military museums.” Along with more than 60 Canadian Forces’ museums, the Directorate supports the Canadian War Museum.
DND’s Directorate of History and Heritage is “mandated to preserve and communicate Canada’s military history and foster pride in a Canadian military heritage.” They answer “1,000 questions of an historical nature” annually, helping high school students with assignments and academics navigate archival inquiries. The Directorate also works with the media. In the early 1990s, for instance, senior military historian Brereton Greenhous was a special advisor during production of the CBC film Dieppe 1942. Similarly, director of the historical section Charles Stacey vetted Canada At War, the first television miniseries to document Canada’s part in the Second World War, before the National Film Board produced program played on CBC.
The Directorate’s historians also help veterans exert political pressure. After a backlash to a Canadian War Museum exhibit that mentioned the WWII Allied Bomber Command targeting civilians, senior DND historian Serge Bernier was asked to write a report. Bernier concluded the exhibit was hurtful to the veterans.
The Directorate’s roots date back to the end of World War I when the Department of Militia and Defence established a historical section. In Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook writes, “it has been the official historians of the Department of National Defence who, for much of the 20th century, have controlled the academic writing on the two world wars.” But, official historians’ influence has extended far beyond the “Great Wars”. In 1919 the historical section published the first in a three-volume series titled “A history of the organization, development and services of the military and naval forces of Canada from the peace of Paris in 1763, to the present time.” Immediately after the Korean War official historians wrote two books on the subject and published another in 1966. (Academics all but failed to revisit Canada’s role in Korea until the late 1990s.)
The minister approves publication of Directorate books. On several occasions cabinet has discussed and recommended changes to their histories.
Official historians published a large share of the early books on Canadian militarism and greatly influenced academia. The Directorate was the “graduate school in military history”, notes DND historian William A. Douglas, until “university departments started producing postgraduates.” In the two decades after World War II individuals who worked in the military’s historical sections filled many academic posts in military history and associated fields. And they were often influential in their field. Head of the War Artist Program and deputy-director of the Historical Section at Canadian Army Headquarters in London, George Stanley led the history department at the Royal Military College after World War II. During his career Stanley was president of the Canadian Historical Association, a member of the Massey Commission Committee on Historic Sites and Monuments and chairman of the federal government’s Centennial Publications Committee.
At the military-run Royal Military College Stanley taught Jack Granatstein and Desmond Morton. These two individuals, who both worked in DND’s historical section, have published hundreds of books and articles on Canadian military history and foreign policy.
A military historian for two decades, Colonel Charles Stacey has had “more influence on how Canadians view their nation’s military history” than any other individual. Director of the army’s historical section for 14 years after WWII, he published a dozen books and in 2000 Granatstein wrote that Stacey’s “books continue to be read and to have great influence on military and foreign policy historians.”
Turns out the military wants to control what you think about them and are willing to spend your tax dollars to do it.
By Rick Sterling | Consortium News | January 1, 2017
The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.
The new law mandates the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to create a Global Engagement Center “to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.” The law directs the Center to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to “coordinate with allied nations.”
The legislation was initiated in March 2016, as the demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia was already underway and was enacted amid the allegations of “Russian hacking” around the U.S. presidential election and the mainstream media’s furor over supposedly “fake news.” Defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton voiced strong support for the bill: “It’s imperative that leaders in both the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our democracy, and innocent lives.”
The new law is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least because it merges a new McCarthyism about purported dissemination of Russian “propaganda” on the Internet with a new Orwellianism by creating a kind of Ministry of Truth – or Global Engagement Center – to protect the American people from “foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
As part of the effort to detect and defeat these unwanted narratives, the law authorizes the Center to: “Facilitate the use of a wide range of technologies and techniques by sharing expertise among Federal departments and agencies, seeking expertise from external sources, and implementing best practices.” (This section is an apparent reference to proposals that Google, Facebook and other technology companies find ways to block or brand certain Internet sites as purveyors of “Russian propaganda” or “fake news.”)
Justifying this new bureaucracy, the bill’s sponsors argued that the existing agencies for “strategic communications” and “public diplomacy” were not enough, that the information threat required “a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power.”
The law also is rife with irony since the U.S. government and related agencies are among the world’s biggest purveyors of propaganda and disinformation – or what you might call evidence-free claims, such as the recent accusations of Russia hacking into Democratic emails to “influence” the U.S. election.
Despite these accusations — leaked by the Obama administration and embraced as true by the mainstream U.S. news media — there is little or no public evidence to support the charges. There is also a contradictory analysis by veteran U.S. intelligence professionals as well as statements by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and an associate, former British Ambassador Craig Murray, that the Russians were not the source of the leaks. Yet, the mainstream U.S. media has virtually ignored this counter-evidence, appearing eager to collaborate with the new “Global Engagement Center” even before it is officially formed.
Of course, there is a long history of U.S. disinformation and propaganda. Former CIA agents Philip Agee and John Stockwell documented how it was done decades ago, secretly planting “black propaganda” and covertly funding media outlets to influence events around the world, with much of the fake news blowing back into the American media.
In more recent decades, the U.S. government has adopted an Internet-era version of that formula with an emphasis on having the State Department or the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy supply, train and pay “activists” and “citizen journalists” to create and distribute propaganda and false stories via “social media” and via contacts with the mainstream media. The U.S. government’s strategy also seeks to undermine and discredit journalists who challenge this orthodoxy. The new legislation escalates this information war by tossing another $160 million into the pot.
Propaganda and Disinformation on Syria
Syria is a good case study in the modern application of information warfare. In her memoir Hard Choices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that the U.S. provided “support for (Syrian) civilian opposition groups, including satellite-linked computers, telephones, cameras, and training for more than a thousand activists, students and independent journalists.”
Indeed, a huge amount of money has gone to “activists” and “civil society” groups in Syria and other countries that have been targeted for “regime change.” A lot of the money also goes to parent organizations that are based in the United States and Europe, so these efforts do not only support on-the-ground efforts to undermine the targeted countries, but perhaps even more importantly, the money influences and manipulates public opinion in the West.
In North America, representatives from the Syrian “Local Coordination Committees” (LCC) were frequent guests on popular media programs such as “DemocracyNow.” The message was clear: there is a “revolution” in Syria against a “brutal regime” personified in Bashar al-Assad. It was not mentioned that the “Local Coordination Committees” have been primarily funded by the West, specifically the Office for Syrian Opposition Support, which was founded by the U.S. State Department and the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
More recently, news and analysis about Syria has been conveyed through the filter of the White Helmets, also known as Syrian Civil Defense. In the Western news media, the White Helmets are described as neutral, non-partisan, civilian volunteers courageously carrying out rescue work in the war zone. In fact, the group is none of the above. It was initiated by the U.S. and U.K. using a British military contractor and Brooklyn-based marketing company.
While they may have performed some genuine rescue operations, the White Helmets are primarily a media organization with a political goal: to promote NATO intervention in Syria. (The manipulation of public opinion using the White Helmets and promoted by the New York Times and Avaaz petition for a “No Fly Zone” in Syria is documented here.)
The White Helmets hoax continues to be widely believed and receives uncritical promotion though it has increasingly been exposed at alternative media outlets as the creation of a “shady PR firm.” During critical times in the conflict in Aleppo, White Helmet individuals have been used as the source for important news stories despite a track record of deception.
Recent Propaganda: Blatant Lies?
As the armed groups in east Aleppo recently lost ground and then collapsed, Western governments and allied media went into a frenzy of accusations against Syria and Russia based on reports from sources connected with the armed opposition. CNN host Wolf Blitzer described Aleppo as “falling” in a “slaughter of these women and children” while CNN host Jake Tapper referred to “genocide by another name.”
The Daily Beast published the claims of the Aleppo Siege Media Center under the title “Doomsday is held in Aleppo” and amid accusations that the Syrian army was executing civilians, burning them alive and “20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped.” These sensational claims were widely broadcast without verification. However, this “news” on CNN and throughout Western media came from highly biased sources and many of the claims – lacking anything approaching independent corroboration – could be accurately described as propaganda and disinformation.
Ironically, some of the supposedly “Russian propaganda” sites, such as RT, have provided first-hand on-the-ground reporting from the war zones with verifiable information that contradicts the Western narrative and thus has received almost no attention in the U.S. news media. For instance, some of these non-Western outlets have shown videos of popular celebrations over the “liberation of Aleppo.”
There has been further corroboration of these realities from peace activists, such as Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research who published a photo essay of his eyewitness observations in Aleppo including the happiness of civilians from east Aleppo reaching the government-controlled areas of west Aleppo, finally freed from areas that had been controlled by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and its jihadist allies in Ahrar al-Sham.
Dr. Nabil Antaki, a medical doctor from Aleppo, described the liberation of Aleppo in an interview titled “Aleppo is Celebrating, Free from Terrorists, the Western Media Misinformed.” The first Christmas celebrations in Aleppo in four years are shown here, replete with marching band members in Santa Claus outfits. Journalist Vanessa Beeley has published testimonies of civilians from east Aleppo. The happiness of civilians at their liberation is clear.
Whether or not you wish to accept these depictions of the reality in Aleppo, at a minimum, they reflect another side of the story that you have been denied while being persistently force-fed the version favored by the U.S. State Department. The goal of the new Global Engagement Center to counter “foreign propaganda” is to ensure that you never get to hear this alternative narrative to the Western propaganda line.
Even much earlier, contrary to the Western mythology of rebel “liberated zones,” there was strong evidence that the armed groups were never popular in Aleppo. American journalist James Foley described the situation in 2012 like this:
“Aleppo, a city of about 3 million people, was once the financial heart of Syria. As it continues to deteriorate, many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition — one that is hampered by infighting and a lack of structure, and deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups. The rebels in Aleppo are predominantly from the countryside, further alienating them from the urban crowd that once lived here peacefully, in relative economic comfort and with little interference from the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad.”
On Nov. 22, 2012, Foley was kidnapped in northwestern Syria and held by Islamic State terrorists before his beheading in August 2014.
The Overall Narrative on Syria
Analysis of the Syrian conflict boils down to two competing narratives. One narrative is that the conflict is a fight for freedom and democracy against a brutal regime, a storyline promoted in the West and the Gulf states, which have been fueling the conflict from the start. This narrative is also favored by some self-styled “anti-imperialists” who want a “Syrian revolution.”
The other narrative is that the conflict is essentially a war of aggression against a sovereign state, with the aggressors including NATO countries, Gulf monarchies, Israel and Jordan. Domination of the Western media by these powerful interests is so thorough that one almost never gets access to this second narrative, which is essentially banned from not only the mainstream but also much of the liberal and progressive media.
For example, listeners and viewers of the generally progressive TV and radio program “DemocracyNow!” have rarely if ever heard the second narrative described in any detail. Instead, the program frequently broadcasts the statements of Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and others associated with the U.S. position. Rarely do you hear the viewpoint of the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Syrian Foreign Minister or analysts inside Syria and around the world who have written about and follow events there closely.
“DemocracyNow!” also has done repeated interviews with proponents of the “Syrian revolution” while ignoring analysts who call the conflict a war of aggression sponsored by the West and the Gulf monarchies. This blackout of the second narrative continues despite the fact that many prominent international figures see it as such. For example, the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua and former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto, has said, “What the U.S. government is doing in Syria is tantamount to a war of aggression, which, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the worst possible crime a State can commit against another State.”
In many areas of politics, “DemocracyNow!” is excellent and challenges mainstream media. However in this area, coverage of the Syrian conflict, the broadcast is biased, one-sided and echoes the news and analysis of mainstream Western corporate media, showing the extent of control over foreign policy news that already exists in the United States and Europe.
Suppressing and Censoring Challenges
Despite the widespread censorship of alternative analyses on Syria and other foreign hotspots that already exists in the West, the U.S. government’s new “Global Engagement Center” will seek to ensure that the censorship is even more complete with its goal to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation.” We can expect even more aggressive and better-financed assaults on the few voices daring to challenge the West’s “group thinks” – smear campaigns that are already quite extensive.
In an article titled “Controlling the Narrative on Syria”, Louis Allday describes the criticisms and attacks on journalists Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal for straying from the “approved” Western narrative on Syria. Some of the bullying and abuse has come from precisely those people, such as Robin Yassin-Kassab, who have been frequent guests in liberal Western media.
Reporters who have returned from Syria with accounts that challenge the propaganda themes that have permeated the Western media also have come under attack. For instance, Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett recently returned to North America after being in Syria and Aleppo, conveying a very different image and critical of the West’s biased media coverage. Bartlett appeared at a United Nations press conference and then did numerous interviews across the country during a speaking tour. During the course of her talks and presentation, Bartlett criticized the White Helmets and questioned whether it was true that Al Quds Hospital in opposition-held East Aleppo was attacked and destroyed as claimed.
Bartlett’s recounting of this information made her a target of Snopes, which has been a mostly useful website exposing urban legends and false rumors but has come under criticism itself for some internal challenges and has been inconsistent in its investigations. In one report entitled “White Helmet Hearsay,” Snopes’ writer Bethania Palmer says claims the White Helmets are “linked to terrorists” is “unproven,” but she overlooks numerous videos, photos, and other reports showing White Helmet members celebrating a Nusra/Al Qaeda battle victory, picking up the bodies of civilians executed by a Nusra executioner, and having a member who alternatively appears as a rebel/terrorist fighter with a weapon and later wearing a White Helmet uniform. The “fact check” barely scrapes the surface of public evidence.
The same writer did another shallow “investigation” titled “victim blaming” regarding Bartlett’s critique of White Helmet videos and what happened at the Al Quds Hospital in Aleppo. Bartlett suggests that some White Helmet videos may be fabricated and may feature the same child at different times, i.e., photographs that appear to show the same girl being rescued by White Helmet workers at different places and times. While it is uncertain whether this is the same girl, the similarity is clear.
The Snopes writer goes on to criticize Bartlett for her comments about the reported bombing of Al Quds Hospital in east Aleppo in April 2016. A statement at the website of Doctors Without Borders says the building was “destroyed and reduced to rubble,” but this was clearly false since photos show the building with unclear damage. Five months later, the September 2016 report by Doctors Without Borders says the top two floors of the building were destroyed and the ground floor Emergency Room damaged yet they re-opened in two weeks.
The many inconsistencies and contradictions in the statements of Doctors Without Borders resulted in an open letter to them. In their last report, Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials, MSF) acknowledges that “MSF staff did not directly witness the attack and has not visited Al Quds Hospital since 2014.”
Bartlett referenced satellite images taken before and after the reported attack on the hospital. The images do not show severe damage and it is unclear whether or not there is any damage to the roof, the basis for Bartlett’s statement. In the past week, independent journalists have visited the scene of Al Quds Hospital and report that that the top floors of the building are still there and damage is unclear.
The Snopes’ investigation criticizing Bartlett was superficial and ignored the broader issues of accuracy and integrity in the Western media’s depiction of the Syrian conflict. Instead the article appeared to be an effort to discredit the eyewitness observations and analysis of a journalist who dared challenge the mainstream narrative.
U.S. propaganda and disinformation on Syria has been extremely effective in misleading much of the American population. Thus, most Americans are unaware how many billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on yet another “regime change” project. The propaganda campaign – having learned from the successful demonizations of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and other targeted leaders – has been so masterful regarding Syria that many liberal and progressive news outlets were pulled in. It has been left to RT and some Internet outlets to challenge the U.S. government and the mainstream media.
But the U.S. government’s near total control of the message doesn’t appear to be enough. Apparently even a few voices of dissent are a few voices too many.
The enactment of HR5181, “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation,” suggests that the ruling powers seek to escalate suppression of news and analyses that run counter to the official narrative. Backed by a new infusion of $160 million, the plan is to further squelch skeptical voices with operation for “countering” and “refuting” what the U.S. government deems to be propaganda and disinformation.
As part of the $160 million package, funds can be used to hire or reward “civil society groups, media content providers, nongovernmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies, or academic institutions.”
Among the tasks that these private entities can be hired to perform is to identify and investigate both print and online sources of news that are deemed to be distributing “disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda directed at the United States and its allies and partners.”
In other words, we are about to see an escalation of the information war.
Rick Sterling is an independent investigative journalist. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached at rsterling1@gmail.com
By Craig Murray | March 14, 2018
As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.
In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)
Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry
Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin. Given Dr Black’s publication, it is plain that claim cannot be true.
The world’s international chemical weapons experts share Dr Black’s opinion. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a UN body based in the Hague. In 2013 this was the report of its Scientific Advisory Board, which included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative:
[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to “Novichoks”. The name “Novichok” is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of “Novichoks”. (OPCW, 2013)
OPCW: Report of the Scientific Advisory Board on developments in science and technology for the Third Review Conference 27 March 2013
Indeed the OPCW was so sceptical of the viability of “novichoks” that it decided – with US and UK agreement – not to add them nor their alleged precursors to its banned list. In short, the scientific community broadly accepts Mirzayanov was working on “novichoks” but doubts he succeeded.
Given that the OPCW has taken the view the evidence for the existence of “Novichoks” is dubious, if the UK actually has a sample of one it is extremely important the UK presents that sample to the OPCW. Indeed the UK has a binding treaty obligation to present that sample to OPCW. Russa has – unreported by the corporate media – entered a demand at the OPCW that Britain submit a sample of the Salisbury material for international analysis.
Yet Britain refuses to submit it to the OPCW.
Why?
A second part of May’s accusation is that “Novichoks” could only be made in certain military installations. But that is also demonstrably untrue. If they exist at all, Novichoks were allegedly designed to be able to be made at bench level in any commercial chemical facility – that was a major point of them. The only real evidence for the existence of Novichoks was the testimony of the ex-Soviet scientist Mizayanov. And this is what Mirzayanov actually wrote.
One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides.
Vil S. Mirzayanov, “Dismantling the Soviet/Russian Chemical Weapons Complex: An Insider’s View,” in Amy E. Smithson, Dr. Vil S. Mirzayanov, Gen Roland Lajoie, and Michael Krepon, Chemical Weapons Disarmament in Russia: Problems and Prospects, Stimson Report No. 17, October 1995, p. 21.
It is a scientific impossibility for Porton Down to have been able to test for novichoks, without possessing some to develop the tests. As Dr Black has revealed Porton Down had never seen any Russian novichok, they cannot have a test for it unless they synthesised some themselves to develop the tests. And if they can synthesise it, so can many others, not just the Russians.
And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.
To summarise:
1) Porton Down has acknowledged in publications it has never seen any Russian “novichoks”. The UK government has absolutely no “fingerprint” information that can safely attribute this substance to Russia.
2) Until now, neither Porton Down nor the world’s experts at the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were convinced “Novichoks” even exist.
3) The UK is refusing to provide a sample to the OPCW.
4) “Novichoks” were specifically designed to be able to be manufactured from common ingredients on any scientific bench. The Americans dismantled and studied the facility that allegedly developed them. It is completely untrue only the Russians could make them, if anybody can.
5) The “Novichok” programme was in Uzbekistan not in Russia. Its legacy was inherited by the Americans during their alliance with Karimov, not by the Russians.
With a great many thanks to sources who cannot be named at this moment.
OffGuardian | March 12, 2018
Theresa May has just semi-officially pronounced the Skripal case a Russian state-sponsored hit. No evidence was presented for this conclusion of course, but we are getting used to that now. Belief is the new evidence. And in this case we do seem to have belief in large quantities.
Russia now effectively is being called upon to prove its innocence by tomorrow (Tuesday) or face Theresa’s wrath.
We’ll see how that goes over.
Of course there’s the immensely handy fact the “nerve agent” allegedly used is “Russian” too. Novichok no less, a Soviet-era toxin from the 1980s, described on Wikipedia as “the most deadly nerve toxin ever made.”
Though it wasn’t only produced in Russia, but in Uzbekistan.
And by the way the US has been “helping” Uzbekistan clean up its chemical weapons sites since 1991.
And of course Russia had destroyed all its chemical weapon stockpiles by 2017.
But the US still hasn’t (see MoA link above).
Still, so, as far as the state machine is concerned the alleged use of Novichok about clinches it for Putin. He dunnit. Verdict pronounced, let’s hurry on to the sentencing. What will it be? More sanctions? A Skripal Act to rival Magnitsky’s? Moving UK troops closer to Russia’s borders? Driving Russian money out of London? Messing with the World Cup?
While the UK establishment shoots its wad fantasising about all these glorious possibilities, let’s take a quick reality check.
Russia has absolutely nothing to gain from initiating the poisoning of Skripal, and even less to gain from leaving a calling card made of Novichok.
This is so obviously true even spokespeople for the UK establishment admit it openly, for example Andrew Wood, former UK ambassador to Moscow, is quoted in the Guardian saying
it’s very hard to see what profit they can get from this
Though of course this hasn’t stopped the same people who admit this to be true also claiming to be absolutely sure Russia did it.
Absent sane motives they have had to invent insane ones instead. Russia are just crazy, bent on vengeance, spoiling for a fight. Their blatant and self-destructive action, says Wood:
advertises the fact that they are vindictive and dedicated to pursuing revenge.
Reliably deluded and fact-defying Luke Harding adds his own pulp spy-thriller spin:
The use of novichok in Salisbury not surprising but remarkable. Developed by Soviet Union in 70s and 80s, and more deadly than VX nerve agent. A brutal calling card that would inevitably be discovered. Conclusion: Putin and FSB wanted this row now
— Luke Harding (@lukeharding1968) March 12, 2018
You see? Russia must have done it (even though they had no motive), so they must be driven by crazy notions of revenge or wanting a “row” that defy self-interest.
That’s logic.
The obvious consideration – if they had no motive maybe they didn’t do it has no place in this mad little universe.
This is simply gaslighting.
Motive is a first consideration in solving any crime. Absence of motive is also a primary argument for innocence. Cui bono? is a legal as well as a rational question. But it’s one the Western powers do not want anyone asking in this case.
Because the answer is obvious.
The timing of the alleged poisoning – the day before a prime mover in promoting UK Russophobia, Bill Browder, was due to testify at the Parliamentary Inquiry into alleged Russian “fake news”, and two weeks before the Russian election – is enough of itself to make the UK and its security agencies prime suspects.
Will be testifying tomorrow at the British Parliament on Russia’s use of fake news and propaganda at 10:30am U.K. time. Lots of examples from the Magnitsky case to educate lawmakers on Putin’s modus operandi https://t.co/lsI9tMXLJ2
— Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) March 5, 2018
And who can deny this tragic event is being fully exploited by the state machine? In just the last three days the poisoning of these two people in still murky circumstances has been used to
In contrast, what has Russia or Russia’s narrative gained from this?
Absolutely nothing.
To bring a small amount of balance and sanity to the current situation we’re going to be reminding readers of some of the mysterious and possibly politically motivated deaths that have occurred in the UK. Unlike the Skripal and Litvinenko cases the media never claimed any of them were “state-sponsored murder”, because the only state they could possibly have been pinned on was our own.
British government lacking evidence of Russian guilt reverses the burden of proof
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | March 12, 2018
After a week of speculation and allegations British Prime Minister Theresa May has finally spoken about the murder attempt on the former British spy Sergey Skripal, which has left both him and his daughter critically ill.
This how the Guardian reports her statement:
Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at Porton Down, our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so, Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations, and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations, the government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal….
Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others…
Should there be no credible response, we will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom……
This attempted murder using a weapons-grade nerve agent in a British town was not just a crime against the Skripals.
“It was an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom, putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk. And we will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil. I commend this statement to the House….
The first thing to say about this statement is that it is essentially an admission that the British authorities have not been able to identify any suspects who might have carried out the attack on Skripal.
No person or persons have been identified as suspects in the case, and the only conclusion one can draw from Theresa May’s statement is that the British authorities either do not have the names of any suspects, or are uncertain about any names they do have..
I say this because if the British authorities did suspect any person or persons of carrying out the attack, Theresa May would presumably not be publicly speculating about whether this person or these persons might or might not have acted on the Russian government’s instructions.
The second thing to say about this statement is that the Russian attribution the British government is making is entirely based upon a scientific assessment that the nerve agent used in the attack was one of the agents developed by the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the so-called Novichok programme.
On the face of it this seems an uncertain basis upon which to attribute responsibility.
Details of the Novichok programme were disclosed by the Russians to the West decades ago, and the properties of the nerve agents developed as part of this programme are well known. That presumably is why it was possible to assess that the nerve agent used in the attack on Skripal was one of the nerve agents developed as part of this programme.
Given that this is so, it is not obvious how it is possible to say that because the nerve agent used was of a type which was originally developed in Russia as part of the Novichok programme, that must mean that the Russian government or Russians were definitely responsible for the attack.
That seems to me a little like saying that because sarin was originally developed decades ago in Germany, that means that any chemical weapons attack which uses sarin is attributable to Germany.
The danger involved in using the supposed origin of a poison to identify the perpetrator is in fact shown by what happened in the Litvinenko case.
At the time of the murder in 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko Britain was awash with claims that the polonium with which he was poisoned was extremely expensive, was only made in Russia, and had been positively traced back to Russia. These claims were widely treated as providing the proof that the Russian authorities were responsible for Litvinenko’s murder.
In the event, the public inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder, after hearing from a range of scientific witnesses, concluded that all the claims which had for a decade been made about polonium were untrue: it is not expensive, it is not produced only in Russia, and it is scientifically impossible to trace the point of origin of any polonium sample, whether to Russia or to anywhere else.
The Judge who headed the inquiry could not conceal his disappointment, making the extraordinary statement in his inquiry report that though it could not be proved that the polonium had come from Russia, it nonetheless might have done so.
The result was that with the polonium evidence – the evidence which supposedly “proved” Russian state involvement – having collapsed, the Judge could only say that the Russian authorities were “probably” involved, and could only do so by speculating at length about possible but in fact unlikely connections between the Russian authorities and the two men who were Litvinenko’s likely murderers spiced up with further speculations about the possible motives the Russians might have had for wanting Litvinenko dead (see my detailed discussion of the Litvinenko inquiry here).
It is therefore alarming to see Theresa May in the Skripal case in effect doing the same thing as the Judge did in the Litvinenko inquiry: gingering up a case against the Russian authorities which is nowhere near proved by making general assertions about Russian conduct which have no direct bearing on the case itself.
How else to explain such comments as her comment about “Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations, and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations” and her utterly gratuitous reference to Crimea in another part of her statement?
That the British authorities actually know very little about the attack on Skripal, and are perfectly aware that the case they are making against Russia is nowhere near proved, is shown by the bizarre way they are now approaching Russia.
Instead of sharing with the Russians their conclusions about the nerve agent that was used to poison Skripal, and asking the Russians for their cooperation in a case where the victim was a former Russian citizen and where the nerve agent used is of a type that was developed in Russia, the British government has instead given the Russian authorities an ultimatum, saying that they must prove their innocence by tomorrow or the British government will assume they are guilty.
I say that because that is what these words in Theresa May’s statement amount to:
Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others…
Should there be no credible response, we will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom……
That this is a way of proving guilt by reversing the burden of the proof – something which is both wrong and absurd in a criminal investigation in a modern European country – ought to be obvious.
What this ultimatum in fact actually shows is that the British government is determined to declare the Russian government guilty, but cannot prove its case, so it has to use an ultimatum to provide proof of guilt which ‘proof’ is however actually a sham.
The Russians have in fact previously offered their cooperation to solve the case.
Perhaps that offer is also a sham. However if the British authorities really were serious about finding out the truth of what happened or – better still – were really intent on making a case that could stand up in a court of law, they would accept this offer.
If it turned out that the Russian offer was a sham then in that case – but not before – the British government would be entitled to make public inferences from it.
Where does all this leave the case?
I do not know how Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia came to be poisoned. I have a completely open mind about that and about who may have been responsible. At this very early stage in the investigation when few facts are known so should everyone else.
The fact that the nerve agent used to poison Skripal apparently has a Russian origin – which is not the same as saying that it was made in Russia – is suggestive and important, but without much more knowledge about the other facts of the case it is impossible to say what weight should be placed on it.
I would refer again to the mistaken way the polonium evidence was initially assessed in the Litvinenko case (see above) and the way that mistaken assessment came to distort the whole conduct of that case.
Which brings me directly to the problem.
Now that the British government right at the beginning of the investigation has publicly declared that the attack on Skripal originated in Russia, with all the indications being that the British government will say tomorrow that the Russian authorities were directly responsible, the future conduct of the investigation has been irredeemably prejudiced.
It is now all but impossible for the British courts and the British police – who are ultimately officials of the British state – to come to any conclusion other than the one the British government has now publicly made for them.
The result is that what might be other promising lines of enquiry in the case will not now be followed up.
Again the lesson of the Litvinenko case is instructive. Having predetermined Russian guilt on the strength of an assessment of the polonium evidence which turned out to be wrong, it became impossible for the British authorities to draw back, so that the Judge who headed the inquiry into Litvinenko’s death came to the inquiry with his mind made up.
The result was that when the polonium evidence collapsed it was impossible for him to change his mind, so that instead of doing so he hunted around for other ‘evidence’ in order to find a way to make a verdict of Russian guilt, which he came to the inquiry already believing in.
Once upon a time the dangers of rushing prematurely to conclusions about guilt or innocence in a case were well understood in Britain.
Prior to a change in the law in 1981, which effectively abolished the sub judice rule, the sort of speculations that were made in 2006 in the Litvinenko case, and which are being made in the Skripal case today, would have been impossible.
Certainly it is inconceivable that the British government before 1981 would have publicly interfered in a case in the way that Theresa May has just done.
The fact that the British government is now doing so is in some respects even more concerning than the fact and manner of the attack on Skripal.
By D. E. Steil | Aletho News | March 13, 2018
I – Introduction – Merkel to continue leadership that has thus far been a colossal failure in numerous instances
Tomorrow Angela Merkel is expected to be elected in the Bundestag to a fourth term as Germany’s federal chancellor, a position she has continuously held for over a dozen years. Below is an analysis of the current political situation in Germany, which has been dominated by the ongoing migration crisis. This report contains details about specific events during the past few years, especially in 2015, which led to a crisis condition. Sufficient background information plus thirty links are contained for the reader to understand important developments in a proper context. The impact of certain flawed elements of German society, its media organizations, the political party landscape, the judicial structure, and popular sentiment, which, through their interactions, contribute to an ongoing erosion of community and increasing strife, are highlighted with specific examples. Some of the facts included here are being presented for the first time in English, though most people in Germany have also been completely unaware of them. The report is subdivided into 18 different sections to delineate various interrelated themes and facilitate legibility.
Often a contemporary joke, not unlike a political cartoon drawing, succinctly encapsulates poignant realities and may elicit mirth. Have you heard the latest one, about a particular type of dog encountering a rare bird?
Question: What type of creature do you get when you cross-breed a poodle on a leash with a parrot in a birdcage?
Answer: A German Supporter of Merkel, even if only implicitly. (Cumulatively, that’s a majority of adult Germans).
On Sunday, March 4, 2018, it was announced that a majority of nearly two thirds of the voting members of Germany’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gave permission for its party leaders to proceed with a coalition agreement they had negotiated a few weeks ago with party representatives of the Christian Democratic Union (SDU), headed by Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), headed by Horst Seehoferfor more for than ten years until his resignation earlier today, after which he moves to Berlin to take on the position of Minister of the Interior. This means that Germany will finally form a majority government nearly half a year after federal elections were held last September. These three parties had already constituted the previous coalition government for four years, though with a more substantial majority of seats than is the case now. Based on the parameters of the new coalition agreement, which party leaders of CDU and CSU have already ratified without a popular vote of its registered party members, one thing is certain: Societal destabilization – triggered in the summer of 2015 by a historically unprecedented influx of illegal migration to Germany upon Merkel’s open-ended invitation, which has not been rescinded so that it continues at a rate of a few hundred newcomers on a daily basis – will be significantly exacerbated.
The previous Merkel coalition government has been a colossal failure, not only regarding the all-important migration crisis but also in its dealing with the euro currency crisis, the lingering European banking crisis, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, the governmental spying scandal, the Ukrainian government coup, the diesel emission fraud scandal, a breakdown in diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia, the supply and preparedness scandal in the German military, increasing impoverishment of many among the older generation (Altersarmut) receiving meager pensions, critical urban housing shortages brought on by a combination of negligent planning, speculative foreign investment in urban real estate, and demand by migrants from eastern Europe and beyond, who have chosen to live in high density population centers, which have resulted in skyrocketing property and rental prices. No matter what the critical issues have been, actual solutions were not provided; the specific situations remain unresolved, they were either made worse or deferred. For instance, to highlight that general affluence is purely a myth, it was recently announced by a European statistical agency that the acute risk of becoming poor due to unemployment was over 70% in Germany, significantly higher than in any of the 28 countries of the EU. Though Germany’s labor agency claims a low unemployment rate, such figures are artificial, as they are known to be in the US too. It is remarkable that Merkel still remains sufficiently popular with a substantial portion of the population so that rival politicians have not dared to oust her from office, even though it must be evident by now that she actually dislikes her country – and its flag – to such an extent that she is allowing the gradual deterioration of social cohesion to progress, yet the population appears to oblivious. Like sheep or cattle, millions of people are eagerly or just blindly following her into the abyss.
II – Forced immigration and social stratification are unfair to citizens because they induce alienation and conflict
For many centuries societies built fortified walls around their settlements to keep out unwanted invaders. Even today dwellers build fences or walls, with gates, around their homes, and it is a common feature of entrance doors to come with locks. Social progress brought on the concept of the nation state, which was based on basic commonalities and affinities of the people they represented, same language, related ethnicities or a common heritage such as religious beliefs. Until recently external borders in European countries had border crossings or checkpoints, as continues to be the case in most countries in the world. Maintaining open borders was subjected to negotiated treaties and agreements among countries with a similar social structure and political values, premised on external borders continuing to be subject to rigid controls. This system worked rather well until 2015, in which year the system broke down, through malicious subterfuge and ultimately, the egregious and illegal decision by Merkel, as will be explained below, with the complicity of party colleagues and the media. Millions of foreign people (with different ethnicities, different languages, different customs, different religions, from economically underdeveloped societies) have been resettled, purportedly temporarily, but in reality with the repeatedly professed intent to somehow permanently “integrate” them into the indigenous population. From many decades of social experiments already conducted elsewhere, it should be understood what the consequences of such a large-scale resettlement effort will likely be.
It must be noted that this new German “experiment”, which is preordained to fail calamitously – as have previous German social experiments last century that were attempted under some flavor of “Humanism”, as described by Yuval Noah Harari – is in clear violation of the preamble and spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949:
The parties to this treaty… are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.
This acknowledges the very basic right of a society or country to maintain and preserve such cultural commonalities. Contrary to what the treaty stipulates, the common heritage and civilization of the German people, who are being invaded, is not being safeguarded at all but being intentionally destroyed over time through the demographic effects that will ensue. Though such basic societal aspects have been instinctively understood for centuries, it has been established beyond dispute by Robert D. Putnam, a social researcher at Harvard University, that mixing newcomers into a society results in mutual distrust. A sense of social cohesion gets replaced by increasing stratification, conflict, societal corrosion. This must certainly be evident to anyone who has ever visited such cities as New York, London, and Paris, among the larger centers where such phenomena are constantly on display. The migration processes leading to these phenomena came about by enacting certain laws that allowed such migration to occur.
What forces or impulses led to the drafting, introducing, and lobbying for such legislation is equally well documented but is rarely discussed in the popular media, if at all. Triggered by their paranoia, Jewish elites living in the galut, sought to become more visibly inconspicuous in their respective environments. They were concerned about their safety from collective historical experiences of expulsion, of which there had been many. Rarely reflecting honestly exactly what about their conduct or behavior might have prompted such animosities, they reflexively blamed their host population, which limited the remedies they would consider. By altering the ethnic and racial make-up of modern western societies in North America and Western Europe, their fear factor is decreased because they can more easily blend in with the indigenous population with whom they share more similarities, genetically and culturally, than, say, migrants who have come from sub-Saharan Africa or East Asiatic regions. With regard to the US situation in Europe, this has been very well documented by psychology researcher Kevin MacDonald (Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review). With regard to the situation in Sweden, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who had moved from Wisconsin to Israel to Stockholm, has been rather candid about acknowledging this too, in videos that went viral a few years ago. With regard to the situation in Germany, Jewish leaders have played a significant role too, most explicitly in May 2015, through psychological coercion (guilt-tripping), as is documented farther below in Section IX.
III – A combination of lacking freedom of speech and tight media control effectively enhances social conformity
The legislative period prior to last September’s parliamentary election had been a disaster for the common people in Germany, though the powerful television and print media, who shape the cognitive framework of the majority of the population, have been very successful in covering up this fact, through distorted reporting, lies of omission, and other tricks that generate a result that is known under the generic term “fake news”. In Germany critical intellectuals refer to them as the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). The degree of uniformity they display when reporting on the critical issues concerning the country has been even tighter in Germany than what has been in evidence by the US media in its nearly universal support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election season and thereafter. The German media, which lack the healthy and thriving alternative Internet media landscape evident in the US, tend to be even more ideologically driven than the US corporate media. Unlike in the US, German journalists do not make a pretense of being unbiased, for they see it as their duty to project a selective and slanted interpretation of actual events or developments (Deutungshoheit) and incidentally also function as a type of thought police (Gedankenpolizei) by vilifying those whose views might stray too far from permitted opinion. In Germany, as nearly everywhere else, freedom to publicly express any opinion is not constitutionally guaranteed, as is the case in the US. Under the fuzzy pretext of cherishing human “dignity” as a paramount value, certain paragraphs in the German penal code forbid anybody to publicly insult or disparage others too strongly (Beleidigung), which in the US might be an actionable civil matter under libel and slander laws. Criminalizing such kinds of opinion fosters superficial politeness, lest some influencial individual, whose feelings were allegedly hurt, files a criminal complaint to investigate the matter. An incidental effect is that powerful crooks and liars are less likely to be strongly criticized. In the absence of freedoms of speech that Americans take for granted, the level of social conformity and acquiescence, to whatever standards of thought the media set, increases. The higher one’s social standing, correlating strongly with educational level, the farther down one could fall upon stepping out of line with an unpopular opinion, due to an effect known as public shaming, that can be achieved through negative media reinforcement. This leads to the paradoxical situation, witnessed in US towns with top universities, namely that very well educated people often publicly project themselves as ignoramuses by professing opinions on social issues that they ought to know are contrived. Such attitudes are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance they develop as a consequence of political correctness overload, as they learn what they dare not mention openly. In Germany and Sweden the traditional media have been very effective in maintaining this behavioral control mechanism while incrementally yet constantly narrowing the scope of opinions that will avoid possible ostracism.
IV – Manipulating public perceptions by obfuscating basic facts and lying with false and misleading terminology
As was revealed late 2014 in a book by a former journalist, turned to whistleblower, Udo Ulfkotte, formerly employed by Germany’s preferred newspaper read by top level decision makers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prominent and influential journalists in Germany are “bought” (Gekaufte Journalisten) to serve special interest groups and also collaborate with the CIA, which tells them what to write. Though this admission is hardly shocking, given the power of the press, it is nonetheless helpful for prior presumptions to have been confirmed by a person, who was part of this practice, to then come clean and publicly apologize for his own involvement before his death, last year. A concrete example from the German media’s methods of “perception management” – the contemporary term for what used to be referred to as “thought control” or “mind control” or simply “brainwashing” – has been the persistent use of the word Flüchtlinge (i.e. refugees, more precisely “those who are fleeing”) when referring to the assortment of migrants who have arrived overland in Bavaria by way of Austria and other countries farther south before that, either from Africa or the Middle East. According to Germany’s own basic law, as well as international treaties and agreements, by the time the migrants arrive at Germany’s border they have relinquished any possible refugee status that may have obtained elsewhere, based on strict criteria. Therefore, they have no legal right whatsoever to apply for – much less receive – asylum in Germany. An orderly procedure to deal with their presence would involve refusing them entry or immediately deporting them if they had already crossed the border. Repeatedly using this particular word and its derivations in that manner, for instance “refugee crisis” (Migrationskrise), is simply a bold lie and a tacit insult at least to Austria, because the implication, if the word were used correctly, would have to be that these migrants had all incurred individual political persecution by the Austrian government, from which jurisdiction they were compelled to taking flight, as it were. Yet both Austria and Sweden had actually taken in a higher percentage of alien migrants, relative to their respective populations, than has Germany. Using this term also entails a degree of arrogance because it tacitly suggests some moral superiority or high-minded benevolence on the part of Germany for providing refuge to those economic migrants who have come so far. On a psychological level, this makes those people who are perpetually burdened by self-hatred and unearned guilt, to feel a little better. In practice, this misleading term has also been used by the media to even pertain to those migrants whose asylum requests were rejected, and whose continued residency is simply “tolerated” (geduldet) by the local governments instead of being deported.
V – Falsely invoking “humanitarian” reasons as a pretense for a historically unprecedented and criminal decision
As Europeans have witnessed, the established legal premises and procedures for dealing with a mass influx into Germany, by migrants who are not members of the European Union (EU), had been unilaterally abandoned by Merkel in early September 2015, with no prior consultations with members of her own government. This unilateral action constituted a major crime. It was done under a false guise simply by invoking the magic word “humanitarian”, a useful lie that somehow causes people’s brains to lock up, causing any rational or critical thinking to be automatically aborted by the population. Practice has shown that it is possible to trick a people into accepting the most reprehensible acts, including waging war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, so long as these crimes are summarily packaged as somehow being humanitarian. The assertion “We had to destroy the village [Ben Tre] to save it” from the era of the Vietnam war is an example of such a purportedly humanitarian gesture, as was the US bombing campaign against Serbia a few decades thereafter. However, Merkel did not just accept a few trains filled with migrants coming from Hungary through Vienna as a special exception, she subsequently went on to publicly invite any and all migrants to come to Germany and receive an enthusiastic public welcome (Willkommenskultur). They were primarily young males, of whom many had previously been ‘Islamist’ mercenaries driven out by the Syrian troops. This was likely the most ominous and stupid decision yet made this century, which has led to a completely novel situation, unprecedented in human history. As will be explained in detail below in Section IX, there is plenty of evidence that this was definitely not an ad hoc response to an unforeseen emergency situation, as the media have deceptively portrayed it to have been, but the consequence of an orchestrated destabilization campaign, one of the various modes of asymmetric warfare, planned months ahead of time, which not only high officials but even the general public had been warned about, months before, as being imminent unless appropriate counter-measures would be adopted. Though even the alternative media have neglected to do so, due to a lack of information, it is possible, within a contextual chronology of events in the first half of 2015, to trace back the origin of Merkel’s commitment to break the laws on a grand scale – also to have the Bavarian minister to go along with it – and thereby permanently alter the future demographics of the population within Germany, possibly even in other countries. Her determination to betray her country and its population was triggered by listening to a fateful speech given in early May 2015 north of Munich, at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.
VI – The symbiosis between the authoritarian and elite “leftist” Green Party and Merkel’s shifting policy positions
Nowadays a substantial proportion of German journalists sympathize with the Green Party, which during its inception a few decades ago primarily promoted their desired legalization of pederasty (for which they have apologized only decades later) and the banning of nuclear power generation plants, which is in the process of being implemented. They were very supportive of so-called “humanitarian bombings” in the Balkans, solar and wind power, and more recently, taking cues from the Obama regime, have been obsessed with advocating or promoting divisive cultural Marxist issues (gender identity, homosexual marriage, ethnic multiculturalism through unchecked mass migration, political correctness, global warming alarmism, open borders, self-hatred, abolishing national sovereignty, opposing free speech, and fighting vocally against “the right”). The Green Party is most popular among school teachers and petty bureaucrats, who enjoy special privileges in German society, students and people who got university degrees in sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, and pedagogy. Given the fact that they are German, those seven political parties that were elected to the Bundestag last September have an authoritarian bent, but the Green Party is the most authoritarian of them all, which is not surprising since their roots lie in the doctrinaire “New Left” movement that derived from the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Their leading functionaries are the most eager to dictate what the behavior of everybody else ought to be, yet are most zealous in filing criminal complaints because they felt personally insulted by some criticism or crude remark. Most memorable is their proposal, a few years ago, to force cafeterias to serve veggie burgers at least once a week because eating beef consumed more resources. Since they do not object to economic neo-liberalism, they have become an important pillar of contemporary “One World” Globalism of open borders. Accordingly, their support among those who might consider themselves “working class” laborers in the industrial and service sectors is miniscule.
As one might expect, a party with such a dubious pedigree as the Green Party is characterized by hypocrisy and internal contradictions. For instance, while its leadership professes to be strongly “anti-fascist”, representatives have no problems with Germany maintaining close relations with such quintessentially fascist regimes that are currently in power in Israel, Ukraine, Turkey, and China. Though the word “Green” refers to environmentalism, the consequences of their advocacy has harmed the environment. The Green Party strongholds are primarily in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which is headed by a Green Party member. The mayors of the university towns of Tübingen and Freiburg are from the Green Party. Only in two of nearly three hundred voting districts did the Green Party exceed a vote of 20% – in Freiburg, with their strongest showing at 21.2%, and in one of the central districts in Berlin. The mayor of the capital city, Stuttgart, is also from the Green Party. Stuttgart happens to be a bastion of the automotive industry. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes cars, Porsche, manufacturer of sporty vehicles, both have their headquarters, respective museums, and some manufacturing facilities in Stuttgart, as does Bosch, the largest automotive supplier. In part due to its topography, Stuttgart residents continue to suffer some of Germany’s worst air pollution. In their zeal to limit carbon dioxide emissions, as if they were toxic, the Green Party has wound up promoting diesel vehicles simply because they are slightly more efficient than gasoline engines, while ignoring the far more serious health effects of carbon particulate matter and harmful nitrogen oxides coming from diesel combustion, as if people were not already aware of this fact from the serious incidences of smog experienced in Tokyo and Los Angeles forty years ago. Suddenly, however, anyone who drives a diesel car is a sucker (one third of registered cars in Germany have diesel motors), since a few days ago Germany’s top administrative court ruled that city administrators are permitted to ban diesel cars due to their obligation to curtail excessive air pollution, at least two thirds of which is caused by diesel vehicles. Thirdly, in a most incredible exercise in self-deception, self-righteous adherents of the German Green Party tout the coexistence of radical feminism with misogynist practices of men from Asian and African societies because “it’s part of their culture”. Though such antithetical concepts are not subject to debate, some people are beginning to wonder, resulting in a loss of support for this party, which used to have a much stronger following a decade ago. Since the professed desire by politicians for unspecified cultural integration is a delusion, the only way to synthesize such opposing concepts is to support the creation of parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften), essentially ghettos, or “no-go” zones where police do not venture into. From a class analysis perspective, elitists do not regard such a development as a problem because they have the resources to live in more affluent enclaves and send their children to private schools, while the less financially endowed sectors of society are left to deal with reduced employment and housing opportunities, high crime, and other manifestations of social ferment.
In the federal election last September (with over 76% participation rate) the Green Party received less than nine percent of the total vote. That was less than those who voted for the Left Party (proponents of the traditional economic Marxism; their legacy comes from the near-totalitarian East German society, though they now also support unconstrained mass migration) as well as those who voted for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which appeals mainly to managers, bankers, physicians, entrepreneurs, attorneys, affluent and wealthy individuals. It would be fair to say that the majority of tax dodgers and evaders have a strong political affinity toward the FDP. Generally, this party is the least authoritarian of the seven parties.
What is important to understand is that during the course of more than a dozen years as Germany’s chancellor, Merkel has continuously drifted toward adopting positions that have been traditionally dear to the Green Party. Thereby, she has effectively become the Green Party’s “secret” leader, or top ally. So as not to be eclipsed by her shifting, the Green party has advocated more extremist and self-destructive positions. These views were not necessarily shared by the vast majority of the population but passively tolerated. In principle, most Green Party voters can be considered to be Merkel supporters because they take pride in her having gravitated toward their side. If they had been too far apart the Green Party would not have been willing to engage in lengthy coalition talks after the election to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership. The same could be said of the FDP, which joined with the Green Party to engage in these negotiations, which ultimately failed. Those who voted for the FDP did so in the hopes of influencing certain liberal economic policies and were comfortable in having some of these accents being implemented under a Merkel leadership.
VI – The new leader of the Free Democratic Party missed a rare opportunity to oust Merkel on election night
A few hours after the September election results became evident, the SPD announced that they would not join another coalition under Merkel. At that point the relatively new leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, could have easily announced that, almost likewise, while the FDP was not opposed to joining a coalition with her party, he would only entertain this prospect under a different personal leadership, that is, not with Merkel. Such a firm statement would have surely led to Merkel’s inevitable resignation, arising from internal pressure. Four years earlier the FDP had missed the 5% threshold to remain in the Bundestag and had re-emerged that evening with over 10% of votes. Had Lindner not been so cautious (some might say spineless), Merkel could have been ousted from her domineering role on election night because the only realistic alternative would have forced her into a minority government, which is not uncommon in Nordic and western European countries. Such a constellation requires hard work – true leadership – by patching together temporary coalitions, depending what the specific issues happen to be. However, Merkel is apparently too lazy, clumsy, and vain to pursue such an endeavor. Moreover, she is too obsessed with wanting to maintain full control and has ruled out leading a minority government.
VII – Social Democratic Party leaders obsessed with preferring Israeli interests to those concerns of its core voters
As Merkel’s junior partner in the past government, the SPD received only slightly more than one fifth of the popular vote last September. Due to this collapse in popularity, compared to their standing only a decade ago, the leader until a few weeks ago, Martin Schulz, said on election night that the reason for not intending to enter into another coalition with Merkel’s Union parties (one, CSU, representing Bavaria, the other, CDU, everywhere else) was a need to re-group and regain a distinct profile, which could better be cultivated in the opposition. Yet, just as Merkel was completely detached from reality after more than a decade as chancellor, beholden to Globalists, media elites, and corporate executives, so also was Martin Schulz, a top-level EU commissar from Brussels, and former alcoholic, who may have never awakened from what appeared to be a perpetual utopian delirium. If an outsider might think that Merkel was completely nuts, this guy seemed to be a certified lunatic. For a person wanting to become the next German chancellor, his particular hobby-horse issues were rather peculiar and definitely contrary to the interests of the party’s core clientele:
– Abolishing nation states and their associated sovereignty within the EU; consequently Germany would merely be yet another region among many others with a centralized (Soviet totalitarian style) Europe;
– A longstanding position that “for me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”, which he basically reiterated in the only – bland and stale – election debate with Merkel last year;
– After negotiation agreements for a coalition of Green Party and FDP with Merkel had broken down, he expropriated an ongoing Green Party obsession, namely to permit endless chain migration from the MENA region, specifically those related to migrants whose asylum requests had been rejected in Germany and had received temporary (subsidiary) protection but were technically subject to forced repatriation in the very near future. Some politicians associated with Merkel’s alliance parties were already demanding these deportations occur without any further delay yet Schulz and his colleagues demanded that these individuals, subject to deportation, should be allowed instead to bring their family members to Germany too, and so on, which would mean they would all be allowed to remain in Germany forever.
Interestingly, for weeks earlier this year the German media regularly reported that reaching an agreement on the issue of allowing family members of these migrants subject to deportation to join them in Germany, thus completely nullifying the prospect of implementing these repatriations back to their home countries, was a contentious issue and appeared to be the major stumbling block toward achieving a comprehensive agreement, yet never were the SPD functionaries ever called upon to provide a cogent rationale for insisting so staunchly on such a counterproductive demand that was clearly not in the interest of the German people, since, as was shown earlier in this report, enticing and accommodating even more people from foreign cultures, who will likely never assimilate, is not only an unnecessary drain on the budget and a strain on public infrastructure, especially housing, it results in higher crime rates and distrust between newcomers and the indigenous population. Social cohesion, such as it exists, is replaced by increasing stratification, conflict and corrosion. Obviously this conspicuous failure by the media to elicit an explanation by the SPD – and the Green Party before that – to justify their stance was because the true reason would have been a huge embarrassment, another taboo theme that dare not be publicly explained. The best that these supporters of unrestrained migration could deliver was an unconvincing cliché reference to this being the moral or “Christian” thing to do, as if though these cynical politicians were suddenly pretending to be virtuous and benevolent spokespersons for the Catholic and Protestant religious establishments, both of which have become so mentally corrupted that they now indulge in and propagate a most pernicious form of pathological altruism.
Their rationale for enhancing societal destabilization is not rooted in any religious epiphany but derives from the fact that the SPD has jumped onto the bandwagon to please Israeli and Jewish interests, specifically merging or synthesizing the long term goals of the Israeli Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, to enable Zionist expansion by destroying its Arab neighbor countries, the desired implementation of which served as the inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade towers to provoke US led wars on Israel’s behalf, with the intended realization of an expanded Coudenhove-Kalergi “Plan” – or vision – published in 1925, according to which the indigenous European populations would universally intermarry with Black Africans and transform themselves over time to a new type of mixed race, to be ruled over by a spiritual nobility of Jews. By destroying Syria and causing a depopulation of its inhabitants, Israel could eventually take over more of this territory with only slight resistance at an opportune moment, while at the same time resettling much of the population in Europe would cause its desired destabilization and weakening, ultimately destroying its culture. While it is understandable that supporting such a fantastical endeavor must sound wonderful to Zionist Jews, the eagerness with which European leaders would want to actively facilitate such a development is quite appalling, an indicator of a treasonous or mentally deranged frame of mind.
VIII – Merkel concedes to adopt even more extremist positions on migration to maintain power in a new coalition
The result of the negotiations on allowing family members of those individuals subject to deportation from Germany to join them and resettle in Germany, presumptively in perpetuity, was a rather fuzzy formulation with numerous contingencies and loopholes, so that all parties then claimed their own public stance had prevailed while the other side had conceded. In reality, the SPD had prevailed on this issue, so the door will soon be open to additional mass migration, along with generous financing for it, though it is impossible to foresee just how significant it will turn out to be in the longer term. This concession by Merkel, with the CDU giving up the finance ministry to the SPD, while the SPD gives up the economics ministry to the CDU, was characterized by a political cartoon on the cover of Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine as a big sellout – a huge exaggeration that was surely intended to sway the vote by the SPD party to endorse the coalition deal. With regard to a second dispute during the negotiations, very dear to a majority of the population, namely modifying the medical insurance scheme in such a manner that the dual track structure (the privileged few, affluent people and public bureaucrats, get preferred treatment while everybody else gets regular treatment) would eventually be abolished and transformed to a more equitable construct, the SPD simply caved in; they accepted that a commission would be formed to study the issue – everyone familiar with government knows what that means. The message is clear: Health insurance issues, of concern to the general public, are subsidiary to debased elites of a party preceded by the adjective “Social” in a quest to placate Israel, while parties whose names are preceded by the adjective “Christian” endorse an accelerated tendency for the society to become more Islamic. Applied Orwellian terminology has been on full display. In reality, of course, not just Merkel but the German political leadership despises the common population, even if they are of the same ethnicity. In general, to put it abstractly, the government would prefer its people to die as soon as possible upon having served their usefulness as laborers and consumers, to avoid paying them pensions from public funds upon their retirement. This attitude explains why the German government raised the retirement age to 67 a few years ago and why in Europe only Germany, along with Bulgaria, still permits billboard advertising for cigarettes, which tend to target young women, who still have a higher statistical life expectancy. It is surely just a matter of time until the pharmaceutical opium epidemic will also hit Germany, so that various people may be compelled to prematurely end their misery pursuant to maintaining their dignity. A few days after the agreement was reached and subjected to SPD party member votes, Schulz resigned his position after he came under criticism. He now has no functionary role in the SPD.
IX – A chronology of key milestones that led to the mass invasion of migrants and Islamic jihadists into Europe
In order to contradict the common misconception that the unpleasant invasion of Germany through mass migration came as a sudden surprise and could not possibly have been anticipated in the scope that occurred, so that authorities would have been unprepared to avert it in any case, a few informative milestones preceding this ominous development are presented below, with attendant commentary or analysis:
In October 2010 a widely discussed book, by an SPD member and high official of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarazin, with the provocative title “Germany Abolishes Itself” (Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab), led to him being reviled by the media and forced to resign his position. He predicted and warned about the emerging problems of migration and development of parallel societies from foreign cultures and their detrimental effects on social cohesion. Heavily footnoted and rationally argued, his thesis was hard to contradict, so instead of engaging with the issues raised, the media vilified him personally as a “racist”, misrepresented his assertions, or constructed straw-man allegations that were easy to refute.
In October 2014 public concern about creeping societal transformation in Germany due to “Islamic” radicalization, of larger segments of the migrant population and their descendents, a reality already in evidence in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, and Malmö, among others, led to weekly Monday evening protest marches through Dresden, by a patriotic group under the name PEGIDA, to express their dissatisfaction about such an ominous trend also taking hold in Germany. Without addressing their published points of concern, the thousands of marchers were summarily denounced by the media as “Nazis” or “xenophobes” or “radical right-wingers”.
In early January 2015, just a few days after a shooting attack in the offices of a Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris, a Bavarian offshoot of PEGIDA announced plans to demonstrate in Munich. In response, the city government and local media demanded a huge public turnout for a counter-demonstration. This constituted a spectacular 180° reversal, a true display of extreme hypocrisy, according to the double standard principle of Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: Just a few days before top politicians from all over, including Merkel, had congregated to march in a staged parade in Paris (“We are Charlie”) to express solidarity for the right of a publication to criticize Islam – including depicting the mythical prophet Mohammad as a cartoon character – yet a planned march in Munich, in which people also wished to express dissatisfaction with creeping Islamic tendencies in the Occident, not unlike Charlie Hebdo had projected, was characterized as evil. Other German cities, including Cologne, also saw mass demonstrations that month, counteracting the feared popular acclaim of an emerging PEGIDA movement by supporting what they were against. Professing the desire to welcome any and all refugees from anywhere came more as a reactionary response to the PEGIDA challenge, which the German media had vilified as Neo-Nazi, than as an expression of wanting to be invaded by migrants, but expressing a derivative sentiment by being against a group that was against something (anti-anti) was hardly a compelling inspiration to motivate people to march out in the cold weather. Some of the huge and professionally done banners being carried should have made it obvious to onlookers that some group with deep pockets was operating behind the scenes to pay for this. By this time “Refugees Welcome” signs displayed by protesters were becoming ubiquitous. Images of these types of demonstrations were later leveraged or amplified by spreading them on the Internet. Credulous individuals were made to feel they had a duty to recite these slogans to prove they were “tolerant”, while impoverished individuals around the world who saw such images may have easily gotten the impression they would be loved if they migrated over to Germany. It is unclear how many people were actually paid by non-governmental organizations to show up. In any case, Germans tend to be extremely easy to manipulate into being politically correct simply by guilt-tripping and using a few trigger words. For many years a most infantile and therefore very effective slogan, “Fight Against the Right” (Kampf gegen Rechts), had been cultivated, initially by the SPD led government to target narrow groups, before Merkel rose to power, but expanded in scope thereafter, so all that was necessary to incite the population against some group was merely for the media or some politician to assert (no evidence needed) that this or that organization met this loose criterion of being “Right”. As was demonstrated more than sixty years ago by the famous conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, there is a tendency by a large segment of any society to knowingly contort their publicly expressed opinion to conform to some imagined norm. However, this phenomenon of submissive conformity is much more strongly in evidence amid Germans than in other European societies, though perhaps not quite as much as in some East Asian cultures. This serious behavioral weakness was basically a major factor that contributed to the strong support that Adolf Hitler enjoyed in the 1930s, and it appears that Germans have not learned enough from history. The social conditioning is being deployed by propagandists to have the German public reflexively repeating nonsensical slogans or lies, like a parrot, against their own interest. Of course, the specific ideological content being promoted now is different from what was prevalent eighty years ago, but this is secondary. What matters most is whatever sentiment is being established and reinforced as the standard for others to conform to. Though it may be a conjectural proposition, it seems very plausible that the Green Party “leftist” who blindly parrots the media cues today, if transformed back through time into a propaganda setting that prevailed eight decades ago, would have analogously wanted to conform to what was popular back then.
In mid February 2015 British and Italian media reported that the terror militia organization ISIS (organized and operated by Israel; financed and ideologically trained by Saudi Arabia to embrace Wahhabism, a puritanical flavor of Sunni Islam; and supplied with offensive weaponry by the US), which was operating mainly within Syria and Libya, would be sending half a million migrants to Europe as part of a psychological warfare effort to create chaos and would embed its own fighters, who would pose as migrants. From the Daily Mail:
ISIS threatens to send 500,000 migrants to Europe as a ‘psychological weapon’
“… letters from jihadists show plans to hide terrorists among refugees”
In early March 2015, an explicit threat was made by the Greek defense and foreign ministries in the wake of ongoing disputes between the Greek government versus the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (the Troika). However, this Troika constellation was a fancy way of providing cover to publicly conceal the heart of the conflict, which was between the Greek government and Deutsche Bank, which had speculated on Greek bond price developments and was on the verge of losing significant money, possibly leading to bankruptcy, if Greece would be unable to make good on their debt. Due to options bets by other banks, additional financial institutions would also be adversely impacted. Greece was put under painful austerity supervision to make binding commitments in return for being lent more money, which they in turn would pay back to Deutsche Bank for the Greek bonds they held. Throughout this dispute the German finance minister in particular was regarded to have behaved very arrogantly toward Greece. From the Telegraph:
Greece’s defence minister threatens to send migrants including jihadists to Western Europe
“Greece will unleash a ‘wave of millions of economic migrants’ and jihadists on Europe unless the eurozone backs down on austerity demands, the country’s defence and foreign ministers have threatened.”
The most convenient way for migrants to pass into central Europe was through Greece, past Salonika, then farther to the north toward Macedonia. It appears that Germany didn’t take the threat so seriously. It is obvious that government ministers making threats of this nature must at least have already known that they were in a position to follow through, which implies a degree of prior cooperation with non-governmental organizations and Turkey to facilitate such a “wave of millions of economic migrants”. In other words, the basic organizational structure to follow through was already in place by then. With regard to the mention of “jihadists” joining in with the migrants, this term may sound abstract but one must have surely been aware of what type of people were being referred to. Mainly mercenaries, their occupation as rag-tag fighters entailed such activities as riding around the back of Japanese pickup trucks and indiscriminately spraying high caliber ammunition from belts through the smoking hot barrels of heavy machine guns mounted to them on tripods, operating shoulder-held missile launchers aimed at tanks, feeding mortars or grenade launchers whose explosives landed inside villages, shooting assault rifles with high capacity banana clips in urban combat scenarios, occasionally singing religious songs of jihad, engaging in the massacres of sickly village elders, learning how to make improvised bombs at a “workshop” in the desert, gang raping teenage girls and young women, stealing archeological artifacts and selling them to middlemen, occasionally decapitating their conquered enemies with a sharpened blade, stacking their heads atop a wall for public display to show off how tough they are and send the message “don’t mess with us”. As these murderous jihadists were being dislodged from their occupational positions by the Syrian army attempting to slowly regain territorial control, they could either fight to their deaths or drop their weapons and make a getaway to some other region far away, mingle with other members of a displaced population, likely they would be unwelcome in Turkey where they might be found out, maybe trim their beards and get a haircut, head out farther away for new adventures, toward central Europe to re-group with comrades already living there; rumor had it that Sweden and Germany were being overly generous – “refugees welcome” and all that, no questions asked – free housing with running water.
On a rainy weekend in early May 2015 the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, born in Haifa during the 1950s, gave a prepared speech at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich to commemorate its liberation by US forces 70 years earlier, just a few days before Germany’s surrender. In attendance were chancellor Merkel and Bavarian minister Seehofer sitting next to each other. His speech featured vituperative comments against the PEGIDA movement, along with the usual well-known complaints one would imagine at such an event, including references to their standard atrocity narrative. One of the key passages was the following, in which He doth commanded:
“Germany has foisted so much disaster upon the world. It stands so deeply indebted to so many countries – we are the last country that can afford to reject refugees and those who are persecuted!”
This particular passage was subsequently amplified by the newspaper Die Welt, as follows: “Germany Must Not be Allowed to Reject Any Refugees”. The event was significant inasmuch as Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp and because Merkel had previously not attended such a commemoration elsewhere that year. There was virtually no coverage in the US media, and the aforementioned cryptic command pertaining to the orchestrated deluge of migrants, including jihadists, was not cited by any of the two English language publications that reported on the event through the Internet. In writing about the ceremony, The Times of Israel cited the following assertion made by Merkel later that day in her weekly podcast message:
“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we [sic] perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably”.
If the translation is correct, then Merkel has apparently accepted the dubious concept of collective and inherited guilt that may be transferred to subsequent generations of Germans and imposes an unearned burden upon them. The faulty logic seems to be: Because a few of Germany’s ancestors ran concentration camps more than seven decades ago, that now obliges Germany’s current generation to now accept and pamper militant jihadists and impoverished migrants, as well as their eventual descendents, for life. Such a proposition is irrational and unacceptable and should be firmly rejected rather than embracing it. This date was surely one of the most significant milestones in the ongoing mass migration crisis. The causality between Schuster’s commands that day and Merkel and Seehofer’s utter disregard for the law from September 2015 onward right until this day, is beyond question because Merkel herself had cited the rationale of Germany’s past as a justifications for not controlling the country’s border crossings and repeatedly refusing to set an upper limit on the number of migrants that Germany would be willing to take in annually. It is for this stubborn stance that her fiercest critics have characterized her as a traitor of the people (Volksverräter). By contrast, Seeohofer repeatedly postured publicly about the need to set a limit, thereby consenting to ignoring the laws, but it soon became apparent that he was just puffing hot air (Dampfplauderer). For this his Bavarian CSU party lost much support in the election, and as a consequence he will not be heading the party in this year’s regional election in Bavaria. Instead, he will be the minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Merkel’s new coalition government.
Early June 2015, a month after Merkel seems to have made a private commitment to never automatically reject any migrants coming to Germany, contrary to what the law stipulates, she hosted the G7 Summit in southern Bavaria at the base of the Alps. Like an obedient poodle, Merkel is eager to please her nominal Globalist masters, in this case Obama, who in reality was himself just a puppet figurehead. As a reward for her obsequiousness she got countless puff pieces in the media that stroked her ego. The media put her on a pedestal and crafted a light personality cult, so how could she ever even think about disappointing their increasing expectations? Though Merkel has no children, the German media have referred to her as “Mommy” (Mutti) to concoct the impression that she cared so much about the German people, which is contradictory to reality. She had invited numerous leaders of African countries to also make an appearance at the summit conference the next day. (Might they have been encouraged to empty their jails and send the freed prisoners north, to board flimsy boats to Europe and then be accepted by Germany?) A few days later the annual Bilderberg meeting took place only a few miles away in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, where the migrant issue was one of numerous agenda items. The impending “Operation Deluge”, as one might call it, must certainly have been a topic of private conversation by insiders, according to their Chatham House rules.
By early September 2015 the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, California, had registered – and was operating – a German language web site in India. The web site specialized in providing encouragement and organizational tips on how to smuggle migrants into Germany inside the personal vehicles of Germans coming back from vacations, particularly from Italy. A professionally produced video on their web site presented such illegal activities as morally heroic. Another video featured a Black African in the back seat of a car, asserting that all borders should be open (one world) and that anybody had a human right to go anywhere they wanted. On September 2, 2015 a little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose parents were trying to get to Canada, was found drowned and washed ashore at a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body appeared on the front pages of nearly all major newspapers because this mishap provided them a perfect opportunity to sentimentalize the developing migration crisis while detracting from the fact that it was being actively orchestrated by various organizations behind the scenes. Normally publishing such pictures of corpses would be considered in bad taste and therefore newspapers would refrain from publishing them. The fact that nearly every newspaper published some version of him, shot from all angles by the same Turkish photographer, including even one of his face visible with open eye, cannot be a mere coincidence and points toward prior coordination. The media exploited this mishap in order to soften up the public into viewing the entire migration phenomenon in an emotional manner. By focusing on the dead toddler they were able to detract from the mass exodus of murderous jihadists escaping toward Europe from their eroding military positions before the Syrian army closed in on them. A couple of days later, on September 4, a group of migrants had set out from the Budapest train station to walk toward Austria on the highway because train traffic between Budapest and Vienna had been discontinued. The migrants could have sought refugee status in Hungary or in other countries along the way before that but were determined to reach Germany instead because international organizations working behind the scenes had steered them in that direction. Operating on a Friday night in the immediate emotional wake of the images of Alan Kurdi, Merkel arranged to have numerous trains filled with migrants to come to Munich directly from Hungary through Vienna. From September 5 onward, the deluge was unstoppable. A detailed chronology of what happened during those two days is available at Zeit Online:
The Night Germany Lost Control – “What happened on September 4, 2015? What intentions, failures and misunderstandings led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany?”
Though the hordes of migrants – at least four fifth of which were young men traveling alone – began arriving at Munich’s main train station on Saturday morning, even though the public could not possibly have known or anticipated just 12 hours earlier that Merkel would be illegally arranging a mass transfer of many thousands of migrants in the middle of the night, there “just happened to be” a huge “spontaneous” welcoming crowd of do-gooders already in place, with banners and stuffed animals available for the few children – which the photographers and cameramen focused on, to convey a selectively distorted impression to the public. The sentiment being conveyed was something to the effect of: “Hey look, we’re such wonderful people”. (In Munich over 17% voted for the Green Party last September to make it the city’s second strongest party.) Anybody who would want to deny that this whole episode in Munich was not a meticulously orchestrated ambush operation must surely be a hard-core coincidence theorist! It would have been interesting to know which organization was primarily involved in the welcoming ceremony and how much per hour these mysterious do-gooders (mobs on demand) were getting paid, but local media know not to report on such details in case they bothered to inquire. Those working at the top level of this sophisticated transfer operation from Syria to Munich must have been amused by Merkel’s subservient compliance. Hundreds of Covert Islamic Jihadist Escapees Receive Enthusiastic Welcome at Munich Train Station might have been an appropriate headline to present.
X – Speculation about a possible Nobel Peace Prize award to create the perception that Merkel acted honorably
One must wonder whether the planners had promised to use their influence to propose Merkel for getting the Nobel Peace Prize just a month later. In any case, in following up after the floodgates had already been open for a few weeks, the media in Germany and elsewhere reinforced the notion that her fateful decision had been the bold and correct thing to do by suggesting that she was the favorite to win this prize. Only hours before the official award announcement, the Telegraph wrote:
Speculation is mounting that Angela Merkel will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her handling of the European refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine…
The German Chancellor has emerged as the firm favourite for the 2015 peace prize, the winner of which will be announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday.
Mrs Merkel was the favourite in late betting on Thursday night…
Over the years the Norwegian Nobel Committee had come under criticism and ridicule for having made dubious choices by having conferred this prestigious award to assorted war criminals. In an attempt to recover from their reputation it would have been folly to announce that yet another public criminal would be publicly honored.
XI – Efforts by other European countries to curtail steady migration flow as Merkel prolongs her open invitation
Many of the jihadists continued onward toward Copenhagen, from where they took a train across the water to Malmö in Sweden. Early January 2016 Swedish authorities were compelled to implement border controls for traffic coming from Denmark for the first time in over sixty years to stem the migration flow. Since Merkel had been publicly encouraging anyone in need to come to Germany, which in turn created new waves of migration, including from poor regions in the Balkans, it was up to other leaders to finally take the initiative to curtail this flow. On February 24, 2016 the Austrian foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, now chancellor, arranged a high-level conference in Vienna. He invited 18 leaders, including interior and foreign ministers, from six countries: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The purpose was to coordinate border management between these countries. Explicitly not invited were Merkel or representatives from Greece, clearly a diplomatic snub to the two countries most responsible for having encouraged this mess. Merkel expressed disappointment that the migration flow would be curtailed.
XII – Extreme displays of arrogance by Merkel and EU Commissars trying to force other countries to accept migrants
The height of German arrogance nowadays, coming from Merkel and president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, began soon thereafter, when they and other top EU bureaucrats repeatedly demanded that countries in Eastern Europe be required to take in substantial numbers of these migrants, which she had invited in and accepted illegally, even though neither the migrants wanted to resettle in these countries nor did these countries want to accept them. Media constantly and deceptively use the word “integrate”, as if though it were possible for these mainly Islamic migrants to ever be fully integrated into these respective Slavic societies, or, for that matter also Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Merkel says these countries need to take in “their fair share” and “show solidarity”, which really means they are now being coerced to be complicit in her illegal activity and sheer stupidity. The leaders of these European continue to refuse this outrageous demand. The Austrian chancellor, Kurz, took their side in December 2017, shortly after he took office. The matter has been deferred for a few more months. In July 2018 Austria will have the European rotating presidency until the end of the year, so Kurz will host numerous high-level European conferences. If Merkel and Juncker continue their arrogant stance to force illegal migration onto all the other countries too through a redistribution scheme, future conflict will be assured. Not only will Merkel then likely be reviled all over Europe, as she already is in Greece and Russia, by extension Germans in general may be strongly disliked too when they go abroad.
XIII – Emerging signs of public animosity to Merkel now countered by Antifa goons on her behalf in Hamburg
In a few days Merkel is expected to be reelected to become the chancellor for a fourth four-year term. Any leader heading a state after so many years in office has basically lost contact with the public. Merkel may enjoy ongoing popularity among most Germans, but many strongly dislike her. During the election campaign last year she was frequently jeered loudly at public squares where she appeared and called a traitor. Only a few days prior to the election, during the Oktoberfest, she was jeered so loudly at Munich’s main square that her speech could no longer be heard, despite heavy amplification through loudspeakers. Some demonstrators had even brought along plastic horns, vuvuzelas, used to make noise during soccer matches in South Africa, Brazil, and Iberia. Videos with audio of this public square rejection of Merkel went viral. Some leaders whose terms are not constitutionally limited may convince themselves of their own indispensability and usually do not know when to quit or ignore warning signals, as appears to be the case with Merkel, who has received numerous polite but explicit hints in the European media during the past six months, that her time is up. History has repeatedly shown the possible consequences of such stubbornness. Leaders wound up being ousted through parliamentary intrigue to force their resignation, perhaps they were sent into exile, but sometimes this process of removal occurred violently. In contemporary times, mobs of common people no longer oust their rulers by force but instead provide the collective message of popular resentment. While such messages have already been expressed, they do not represent the majority mood, yet the dynamics of political trends are hard to predict. Long suppressed sentiments tend to erupt suddenly, without warning, like some surprise volcanic eruptions or urban riots. There will then be a tendency for such expressions to be suppressed, in hopes of counteracting the likelihood of spreading.
An interesting example of how public resentment can spread almost like wildfire was demonstrated a few weeks ago in Hamburg. In late January Uta Ogilvies, a Mom who was fed up with Merkel during the ongoing coalition negotiations at the time, walked in the center of Hamburg one evening alone, holding a simple sign saying “Merkel Must Go” (Merkel muss weg). This is the stationary equivalent of a group of demonstrators parading and chanting “hay-hay, hoe-hoe, whatever it is has got to go”. Exactly one week later there were about sixty demonstrators who had come out to support her. One week after that the number had doubled to 120, she claims. Then the hooded Antifa affiliated agitators started to show up. They found out where she lives, and somebody threw paint through her window at home into her kid’s room. Last week, Hamburg’s newspaper reported 350 demonstrators showing up to protest against Merkel, with roughly a thousand counter-demonstrators. Understanding that the event is potentially volatile, the police have been showing up in force too, including with armored water cannons. Counter-demonstrators have been able to mobilizing in the usual way, by crying “wolf”, claiming that opponents of Merkel are “right-wingers” or worse. Yesterday a city official attempted to intimidate those wanting to demonstrate against Merkel by asserting that they should be aware of their commonality with right wing extremists. These developments underscore that Merkel is no longer considered as “conservative” but has become the new darling of the “left”. More importantly, it shows that Merkel now has lumpen thugs of black clad street fighters who will reliably come out to counter those who would openly support her resignation. Hitler had his notorious Brown-Shirts (Braunhemden), derived from Mussolini’s Black-Shirts, and now Merkel has her Antifa Black-Hoods. Nobody can predict with any certainty how rapidly or severely future conflict will escalate. The still localized phenomenon of hooded goon squads could spread from Hamburg to other cities.
XIV – New waves of mass migration by organized transfers of Africans on ships directly to Hamburg easily possible
Other things could be happening in Hamburg this year too. Some experts have warned that there are millions of migrants in Africa, but only a small portion of them, almost exclusively young males, manage to arrive in Italy, either a few dozen by inflatable raft or a few hundred at a time by wooden boat, yet it is not difficult to imagine a new scenario, especially in light of Italian general elections on March 4, 2018, the results of which makes it more likely that the Italian navy will no longer graciously accept these African migrants and will send them back instead of processing them in Italy and then distributing them. Of the more than a hundred cruise liners owned or operated by one or the other Israeli mogul, at some point an overhaul or refurbishing is necessary at the dry dock. Hamburg and other shipyards in northern Germany have dry docks. In the summer of 1980 Fidel Castro opened his jails and freed all he prisoners, who took boats to southern Florida. Officials in some African countries would be glad to release their violent male prisoners if a Big Sugar Daddy would guarantee their transfer out of the country. Packed tightly, a big multi-level cruise liner could transport between ten to twenty thousand people, they could be filled up and embark from such places as Lagos, Monrovia, and Dakar. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, the ships have quietly arrived in the port of Hamburg, and thousands of young African males have arrived on land and are hungry, truly a humanitarian crisis, some will surely need medical care. They all apply for asylum because they have been unfairly “persecuted”, they will claim. Having arrived by ship from Africa, they cannot be sent back, as would have to be the case if they had come to Bavaria from Austria and Merkel decided to follow the law. Hamburgers are so open and welcoming; they are used to seeing African sailors roaming about town. Roughly half of Hamburgers voted either for the Green Party or the SPD or the Left Party; all of these parties want not just more migrants, but the newly arrived young African men must then also be allowed to bring their entire families and clans, ad infinitum, and if citizens should object then Merkel’s Black-Hoods will mobilize to show up. That such a scenario has not yet occurred is not so much because nobody would dare to make it happen, but more likely because simply threatening to do so – words like blackmail or extortion come to mind – can achieve other benefits to those who have the connections to organize such an operation.
XV – None of Germany’s seven Bundestag parties offer the winning mix of positions on economic and social issues
Of the seven political parties represented in Germany’s current parliament (Bundestag), all but two of them have either accepted or embraced continued mass migration into Germany of impoverished individuals. The FDP would like to see selective migration of qualified people with useful skills according to the Canadian model. Only Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new party, rejects migration from outside Europe due to issues of cultural incompatibility. US President Donald Trump recently reflected this position when he reportedly complained that so many immigrants are coming from “shithole” countries instead of from advanced countries like Norway. After many decades of social engineering and economic policy experiments, it has been empirically proven that maintaining a viable and affluent social state for the benefit of public well-being is incompatible with mass immigration, though so many people whose perspective is ideologically driven are in denial about this. Furthermore, the economic neo-liberalism flavor of capitalism being pursued today (Chicago School, Milton Friedman) ever since it was initially adopted under Margaret Thatcher, then implemented in numerous other countries, results in high levels of wealth inequality, which is also a destabilizing force in the long run. With rampant speculation in an expanded financial sector at the expense of taxpayers after bailouts and decreasing disposable income of an increasingly greater part of the population, due to low wages or higher unemployment in conjunction with inflated rental and real estate prices, declining economic wellbeing for the broad public becomes inevitable. Though the Left Party rejects the adverse excesses of economic neo-liberalism and advocates the type of social market capitalism that was successful in Germany under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, but also in Scandinavia, yet was abandoned by the SPD under Chancellor Schroeder, on the other hand the Left Party completely neutralizes and discredits itself by embracing open borders and unlimited migration because the former policy cannot work if you also entertain the latter. Only one prominent and increasingly popular politician from the Left Party, who regularly appears on the political talk show circuit, seems to have understood this. For having strayed from the self-contradictory Left Party position, Sahra Wagenknecht, was punished at a Left Party Congress in 2016 by receiving a creamy pie shoved in her face by a fellow “leftist”, yet an attempt to dethrone her from leadership ranks has failed.
Additionally, an important prerequisite for democracy to work well is for the population to be both well educated and well informed, in an environment that respects free speech that allows a variety of opinions and ideas, so they are encouraged to participate in the process and make well-informed decisions when voting, as opposed to having their perceptions and perspectives manipulated by carefully crafted lies. Most importantly, the legal framework must be sophisticated to enhance fairness and discourage as well as punish corruption. However, none of the parties in Germany even state these basic ideals as worthwhile to pursue and attain. Any party exclusively pursuing such goals has the potential to achieve an absolute majority because a society based on such basic premises is one that most citizens would want to be a part of. Since the AfD is still new and ridiculed in the press as an opportunistic one-trick pony capitalizing on public resentment of Merkel’s open border policy, it has not yet developed a full spectrum of policy advocacy, so it could attain the first-mover advantage by embracing sensible positions because it would not entail back-tracking or having to reverse themselves, as other parties would have to do. At least theoretically, they could become Germany’s strongest party in four years, as they already are in Saxony.
XVI – Numerous significant flaws in Germany’s antiquated and corrupted judicial system impede basic fairness
To highlight one key element of a well functioning society, cited above, that is not so well known about, even within Germany, namely its judicial system, it needs to pointed out that important criteria by which to evaluate such a system are how well it is structured with regard to its laws and its procedural rules, as well as how accessible it is for the general public, as opposed to just affluent individuals and corporations. The German system fails on all these aspects. It should be understood and acknowledged that it is extremely flawed – primitive and inherently (structurally) corrupt, a complete sham. It lacks the most elementary elements that are taken for granted in the US legal system. Its inadequacies prevent the functioning of reliable justice and a fair society. For instance, to be specific by citing at least ten structural peculiarities: This antiquated and byzantine system has numerous different court venues (Criminal, Administrative, Labor, Family, Commerce, Social, Youth, Agriculture, etc.) with differing procedural regulation, judicial proceedings are not recorded, there is no jury, class action suits are not permitted, appellate levels require representation by attorneys, whose mandatory fees are strictly regulated, pro bono public representation is uncommon, contingency fees are a novelty and uncommon, court fees are excessive and a severe impediment to seeking redress, requests for waivers of fees and legal representation when bringing a complaint in civil cases are subject to a much higher standard (hard evidence of favorable outcome, to be decided by – and routinely rejected – by the same judge who would then take the case) than they are elsewhere in Europe (showing that a suit is neither malicious nor frivolous), and especially incomprehensible, a first level appellate judge may decree that his or her decision may not be subject to a higher level appeal, and any attempt at circumventing such a stipulation is practically impossible; if a dispute is not considered potentially relevant or instructive for a wide domain of other people that could be potentially affected but simply too specific or individual, then accepting an appeal can be ignored. These flaws make it very easy for judges to deviate from other norms that should be followed, without taking accountability for failing to follow guidelines. Basic rules of deductive logical reasoning need not be followed because truth or evidence are deemed subjective, exculpatory evidence can be ignored if the judges decide not to take note of it in the record. Even the basic constitutional guarantee, to have relevant arguments heard and addressed, is routinely ignored if a judge did not deem it relevant.
Though these numerous flaws are known among practicing attorneys, who themselves are often frustrated by the corrupt system they have chosen to operate in, they have an interest in allowing things to remain as they are. Since public calls for comprehensive judicial reform of this system come not even from the academic realm, it is fair to conclude that this must be another of various German taboos, such as advocating for free speech. Within this wider judicial milieu of judges, attorneys, and law professors there exists a conspiracy of silence to not rock the boat, for which, if they had a conscience, they ought to be ashamed of for doing nothing and thus perpetuating a very flawed system. In order to make the point, that if even in a very high profile case, subject to coverage by international reporters, a panel of judges fails to provide justice and conducts a show trial instead, transparent foe all to see, one can safely assume that such a corrupt practice is completely routine in such cases that enjoy no public scrutiny at all, highlighting a specific instance from the John Demjanjuk trial, that took place in Munich over the course of a few years, is very instructive.
XVII – The Demjanjuk show trial and its shameful perversion of justice proves needs for reforms that remain taboo
John Demjanjuk has been falsely accused in a show trial in Israel for allegedly having been “Ivan the Terible” at the Treblinka concentration camp and was sentenced to death in 1988, but this verdict was overturned five years later after new evidence cast reasonable doubt on his culpability. This did not deter zealous prosecutors with an axe to grind, so in the summer of 2009 he was deported from Cleveland to Munich to stand trial for allegedly having been accessory to murder in Sobibor on nearly 28 thousand counts. These charges were based on testimony of dubious credibility and purported evidence, an ID card that was deemed to have most likely been forged. Demjanjuk had denied having been a guard in Sobibor and his presence there was never proved. Essentially, the court required proof of a negative proposition, which is a logical impossibility unless one can prove an alternative proposition that is mutually exclusive of the first. This is the principle of being guilty as charged by default unless and until one can prove innocence, a violation of basic principles in US jurisprudence. Aside from that, alone the charge that he was present at Sobibor automatically entailed the presumption, without any need for this to be proved, that he was an accessory to so many murders. Cited in Wikipedia:
An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk’s trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically “Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you’ll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.
Leaving aside the question of whether Demjanjuk had been in Sobibor or not and assuming for the sake of argument that he had been there, though in this case he would have been a prisoner too, though functioning involuntarily as a guard with a weapon, the prosecution basically reasoned that it was incumbent on him to flee. On March 16, 2010 the court heard expert testimony from Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Institute for Contemporary History, as was widely reported at the time in the international media covering the trial, including from Cleveland, Demjanjuks’ former home. A particular finding presented orally in court by Pohl was essentially of an exculpatory nature:
Pohl said that some Trawniki men did successfully escape, but conceded that if they had fled with their weapons and were recaptured, they faced certain execution.
As Pohl had asserted this, the defense attorney submitted a motion to the court to have that particular passage by Pohl be submitted into the record. It was close to lunchtime so the chief judge said that the court would adjourn and announce the decision after the recess. After the recess the full court denied the motion to take official note of that evidence, so it was not included in the record. Thus, anybody following the proceedings knew what the court itself refused to acknowledge.
More than a year later Demjanjuk was sentenced anyway. His appeal was pending when he died. From Wikipedia:
Christiaan F. Rüter, Professor of Law and expert on NS trials in Germany, who researched the subject at the University of Amsterdam for 40 years, expressed reservations against the commencement of proceedings stating that to him “it is a complete mystery, how anyone who knows the German jurisdiction up to now, would be able to assume that Demjanjuk could be sentenced based on the given evidence.
It was understood by everyone that the facts and evidence were irrelevant to the court. So much for the concept of “human dignity” if authorities determine that somebody does not deserve it for reasons of political expediency. This set an important precedent and sent the signal to judges that they will surely get away with perversion of justice (Rechsbeugung), which is technically a criminal offense in Germany, though a judge will virtually never gets indicted for it, much less prosecuted and convicted. Nobody who was initially hoping to enjoy some kind of hateful revenge could have been placated by the verdict since it was evident that the proceedings were a complete farce. From Wikipedia:
Yoram Sheftel, the lawyer who represented Demjanjuk during the Israel trial in the 1980s, criticized the German court for conducting a show trial. “There was a shameful farce here”, he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.” “Nothing has changed since then”, he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”
Months ago one of the high profile leaders of the AfD party was accused of having asserted in an e-mail to somebody that the German legal system was corrupt, which she subsequently denied she had written, though she did not deny the system was corrupt. When looking at the slick web site of the AfD, it is apparent that the party takes absolutely no position on the need to reform Germany’s legal system. The issue remains outside the bounds of legitimate criticism or discussion.
XVIII – Summary – Germany has not yet matured to engender trust; Merkel’s legacy will incur infamy and shame
It should be evident from the serious shortcomings within its society, alluded to above, that, as a whole, Germany has not matured sufficiently for its neighboring countries to feel comfortable if it were no longer under supervision through its ongoing de facto occupation. Its leadership has failed to live up to the ambitious desire to become a model nation, and a majority of its citizens have been led astray. It is up to Germans themselves to continue on their self-destructive path or otherwise attain the sophistication that engenders lasting trust and respect from peers and adversaries alike. Surely, once the younger generations recognize the long-term societal damage that will have been caused by and blamed on Merkel’s decisions and policies – the adverse effects from which they may themselves be suffering and coping with – then they may covertly be ashamed for the rest of their lives because the disaster unfolded while they could have actively insinuated themselves to challenge these policies rather than being indifferent or passively acquiescent. In recognizing this situation and taking a pivotal turn away from the current course, before it is too late, Germans may still avert future disaster if they change course under a new leadership.
RT | March 12, 2018
A spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry called the hearing at the British parliament on the Skripal case a “circus show.”
“The conclusion is obvious: this is another information and political campaign, based on provocation,” said Maria Zakharova, commenting on the words of Theresa May.
Zakharova’s comments come after May said earlier on Monday that the “attempted murder” of Skripal was either “a direct act by the Russian State against our country, or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others.”
May said that the Russian ambassador to the UK has been summoned to the Foreign Office, and that he must explain which explanation is the correct one. The ambassador has until the end of Tuesday to respond, according to May.
If he does not give a “credible response,” the UK will conclude that the attack involved “unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom.” In that case, May said she will return to the House of Commons to outline retaliatory proposals.
“Before creating new fairy tales, let somebody in the kingdom tell us what was the result of the previous investigations into the Litvinenko, Berezovsky and Perepilichny cases,” Zakharova suggested.
Zakharova’s comments referenced three high-profile deaths which occurred in the UK and were blamed on Russia – despite zero evidence to this day.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov specifically addressed the case of Litvinenko on Friday, noting that the UK’s finger-pointing at Moscow runs parallel to what happened in that case.
“I want to remind people that Litvinenko’s death was also attributed to Russia, but hasn’t been investigated, because court proceedings, which were called ‘public,’ were, in fact, closed. They were carried out in a very strange way, and numerous facts, which emerged throughout the investigation, haven’t come into the public domain,” the minister said.
Litvinenko died in November 2006, after assassins allegedly slipped radioactive polonium 21 into his cup of tea at a London hotel. However, his own brother Maksim stated in 2016 that Britain had more reason to kill Litvinenko than Russia.
In the case of Boris Berezovsky, Putin’s critics have long speculated that the billionaire was murdered by pro-Putin hitmen in 2013. However, British police said in 2013 that there was no evidence of foul play relating to this death.
In addition, no evidence has ever been provided that Russia was behind the death of businessman Aleksandr Perepilichny, who collapsed and died in Surrey, UK, in 2012.
Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter have been in critical condition in hospital since March 4, when they were found unconscious on a bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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