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Democracy kaput: Germans want peace with Russia, but their rulers only answer to Washington and Kiev

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | August 27, 2024

Since the beginning of the Ukraine Crisis in 2013/14, German governments, first under former chancellor Angela Merkel, then under her pathetic successor Olaf Scholz, have totally failed to help find a solution through compromise. This is no minor matter, and history won’t look kindly on Germany. Representing a traditionally significant if declining and now self-diminishing power in Europe, Berlin could have made a difference – quite conceivably one that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Yet things are what they are. Initially, under the thoroughly opportunistic yet usually intelligent Merkel, this German failure was mostly due to subservience to the US but practiced in Berlin’s then signature style of evasive shiftiness. Yes, Merkel helped Kiev sabotage the 2015 Minsk II agreement, which could have avoided large-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. But she did that on the sly and only admitted it retrospectively, when criticized for having been “soft” on Russia. “No, I wasn’t!” she, in essence retorted, “I did my part and lied like a street grifter!” What can one say? Ideas of personal dignity differ across cultures.

Under her successor, the merely opportunistic Scholz, Berlin’s approaches have reverted to a certain elementary simplicity. The so-called “Zeitenwende” (epochal turn) he announced two years ago with traditional German modesty means that his coalition government has obeyed Washington in an unprecedentedly self-harming manner. Accepting sabotage of vital infrastructure – Nord Stream – and the systematic demolishing of the German economy by America’s beggar-thy-vassal policy, Scholz has grinned submissively, while not just sacrificing national interests but taking a flamethrower to them.

At the same time – and with a certain consistency one may also observe in committed masochists – this government of death wish loyalty has also ruined Germany’s relationship with Russia with Teutonic furor and thoroughness. All to pander to a Ukrainian regime that now stands accused of blowing up Nord Stream. That accusation makes no sense. Kiev loves to do its worst, true. But it could not have done it without the US. And yet the accusation is the new party line handed down via the Wall Street Journal. It serves as yet another test of how much public humiliation Berlin will take. Answer: there’s no limit.

But Berlin is not Germany. A government so bizarrely out of touch with its own country and its interests is unlikely to represent its citizens well. For some of its members that is even a point of pride. Foreign minister and geometry expert Annalena “360 degrees” Baerbock has long declared that she doesn’t care what her voters want but only about what the Zelensky regime demands. Baerbock, then, must have been positively delighted by the results of a recent and solid opinion poll.

Conducted by the topnotch INSA pollster, the new poll proves that many Germans do not see foreign policy – especially with respect to Russia and Ukraine – the way their current, immensely unpopular and massively failing (as even the Economist admits) rulers do. Consider some highlights: Asked if they are in favor or against peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, 68% of respondents were in favor.

And 65% consider it a “good” or “very good” idea to offer Moscow a quid pro quo, in which Russia would agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, while the West would stop supplying Ukraine with weapons. It’s another matter that Moscow would be unlikely to accept such a deal; those times are over. But Germans outside the Berlin elite clearly prefer winding down the war in lieu of the forever-war scenario that NATO and EU officially promote.

A clear plurality of respondents, 46%, believe that their government has failed to engage in enough diplomacy to protect Germany from the risk of war. Only 26% feel that Berlin has done enough. Yet there is no duty more elementary for rulers than doing everything possible to protect citizens from the threat of war. They cannot always succeed. But those widely seen as not having tried hard enough lose their legitimacy. That much we have known, at the latest since English political philosopher and arch-realist Thomas Hobbes published his “Leviathan” in the seventeenth century.

Legitimacy may sound abstract. Let’s talk about elections then, especially as three important regional elections are coming up. In the länder (states) of Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, all in Germany’s East, the Berlin coalition parties are staring at serious, even devastating losses to be inflicted by two surging newcomers, the very rightwing AfD and the leftwing yet culturally conservative BSW, named after its leader Sarah Wagenknecht.

Could the decline of the coalition parties have something to do with their resolute detachment from many voters’ wishes and fears over foreign policy? Absolutely. Asked in the INSA poll if a party’s demanding or failing to demand peace negotiations for the Russia-Ukraine War is a decisive factor in casting their vote, 43% of respondents answered in the affirmative. The same share said “no.” But leaving almost half the electorate with a strong sense that you don’t care about what they care about – especially in matters of life and death, i.e. war and peace – is never a winning strategy.

It is true that the question focused specifically on an election at the federal level; that is, for Germany as a whole. Regional politics, you might be tempted to think, has different priorities. You’d be so wrong, though. For one thing, Germans love to use their many regional elections as a way to punish the federal government. Voters do not make a neat separation between voting locally and dishing out the pain centrally. On the contrary.

Second, the results of regional elections, therefore, constantly affect Berlin politics, at this point right into the sick heart of a coalition that is terminal already. Third, regional elections in what used to be East Germany before the West German takeover in 1990 are even more neuralgic, because as a rule, voters there tend to be especially skeptical about Berlin’s by now abject subservience to the US and self-defeating if neo-traditional Russophobia.

Germany’s current mainstream media, think tanks, and academic cadres – such as conformist historians Jan Behrends and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk – love to caricature, belittle, and patronize those Germans in the East of the country as in essence backward and brainwashed by Russians. (By the way, if you think that sounds weirdly familiar, that’s how Ukraine got its local civil war going in 2014.) Yet the Soviets/Russians haven’t had a say in eastern Germany for over a third of a century now. While Washington, of course, has maintained its propaganda grip. Maybe the proud domestic kulturträger (culture bearers) of NATO “value” Germany, and who love to look down on their eastern compatriots, should face their own lack of intellectual, political, and ethical independence instead. Where the fear of freedom cripples thought (while boosting careers), a little Kantian reliance on one’s own judgment might help.

In any case, belittling Germans in the East will make them only more determined, and rightly so, to vote their probably freer minds. And what freer minds in Germany see is a government that serves not their country but the US and Ukraine. That is a recipe for richly deserved defeat.

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

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Durov arrest shows ‘upside-down’ West – Serbian leader

RT | August 26, 2024

Charges against Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France show that the West has abandoned the values it championed just a few years ago, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said.

The 39-year-old Russian was detained by French authorities on Saturday, after arriving in Paris from Azerbaijan by private jet. Durov also has the passports of France, the UAE and St. Kitts and Nevis.

Speaking on a newscast on Monday evening, Vucic said that Durov’s case was “interesting” and compared him to the persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

“Back in 2018, when Russia put some mild legal pressure on him, some 26 groups from the West signed a petition to the Russian state to stop violating his freedom. Fast forward five or six years, and it’s perfectly normal [for them] to have him arrested and want to shut down Telegram in the West,” Vucic said.

“Everything has gone topsy-turvy, reality itself has been changed to fit their interests.”

France on Monday revealed the laundry list of preliminary charges against Durov, accusing the Telegram mogul of “facilitating” alleged illegal activities on his platform – ranging from drug dealing and money laundering to child pornography – by refusing to cooperate with French investigators going after an unnamed third party.

President Emmanuel Macron has defended the arrest, insisting that charges against Durov were “in no way a political decision.”

X owner Elon Musk, American journalist Tucker Carlson and Silicon Valley investor David Sacks have denounced Durov’s arrest as an attack on the freedom of speech.

Snowden, a whistleblower who revealed the extent of NSA spying on Americans and foreign leaders back in 2012, has accused France of holding Durov “hostage” in order to access private communications on Telegram.

Vucic brought up Durov’s situation in the context of the US and the EU criticizing Serbia for allegedly persecuting political opposition. According to the Serbian president, the EU routinely beats up and arrests protesters by the hundreds, while Belgrade is far more tolerant of outright riots.

“It’s all upside-down!” Vucic said. “When you allow the greatest of liberties, you’re a dictator. The fewer freedoms exist, the more they speak about them.”

August 27, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Why Ukraine is being blamed for Nord Stream

The ‘official’ investigation was always a sham

By Malcom Kyeyune | Unherd | August 21, 2024

To understand the truth about the Nord Stream pipeline, one needs to master a certain form of “Kremlinology”. Everything about it is designed to obfuscate, every strand shrouded in prevarication and deceit.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

“The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.”

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

August 25, 2024 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Iran dismisses ‘unreasonable’ joint statement by Australia, New Zealand

Press TV – August 21, 2024

Iran has dismissed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand calling on the Islamic Republic not to retaliate the recent crimes of Israel.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kana’ani said on Wednesday that such a move once again demonstrates the double standards these countries employ when it comes to fundamental human rights, international law, and regional developments.

Kana’ani said the “unreasonable request” in the joint statement undermines Iran’s inherent right to punish the attacker and deter future attacks.

The Iranian official was referring to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political bureau chief of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, in Tehran on July 31.

“In a situation where the United Nations Security Council, due to the unconditional support of the United States for the Zionist regime, could not even issue a statement condemning the terrorist act of the regime in assassinating Haniyeh … the unreasonable request of Australia and New Zealand means ignoring Iran’s inherent right to punish the aggressor and create deterrence against Israel’s adventures.”

In the joint statement, Australia and New Zealand expressed “grave concern about the prospect of further escalation across the region” and called on Iran to “refrain from further destabilizing actions in the Middle East, and cease its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel.”

Kana’ani said the statement is a real example of turning a blind eye to the facts and misleading global public opinion. He said the main source of threat to regional and international peace and security is the “racist Zionist regime,” which enjoys broad Western support.

He said the crimes of the Israeli regime in Palestine and the region are taking on new dimensions every day, and now the regional stability is under grave threat due to the criminal behavior of the Zionist regime, which violates the United Nations Charter and international law.

“The approach of Australia and New Zealand in selectively choosing international norms not only does not help reduce tensions in the region but also encourages the rogue Israeli regime and its destabilizing actions in the region.”

August 21, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Democratic Party platform lacks call for US arms embargo on Israel

Press TV – August 20, 2024

The US Democratic Party has unveiled its party platform ahead of the 2024 presidential race, laying out 92 pages of policy priorities with no mention of halting weapons sales to Israel amid the regime’s genocidal war in the besieged Gaza Strip.

The platform which was approved by delegates at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago a day earlier lacks a call for curbing arms sales to Israel despite a demand by pro-Palestinian demonstrators for an arms embargo on the occupying regime in the US city.

The platform, rather, announces that the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) reached with Israel under former President Barack Obama “is ironclad”. The memorandum which runs until 2028 gives Israel $3.8bn in US military aid each year.

The platform also lists examples of US President Joe Biden’s unwavering support for Israel’s war on Gaza, including the sending of arms shipments and providing a diplomatic shield for Israel at the United Nations during votes for a ceasefire.

The latest development comes a week after Biden’s administration approved more than $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel.

The new US military aid comes despite claims by Washington that it is supporting a ceasefire in Gaza where Israel has been waging a genocidal war since early October last year.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since then, the United States has supplied the Tel Aviv regime with more than 10,000 tons of military equipment and used its veto power against all United Nations Security Council resolutions that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The occupying regime has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since the start of the barbaric campaign of death, destruction and genocide. And more than 1.7 million people have been internally displaced.

August 20, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel’s creation and exploitation of Palestinian human shields

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | August 17, 2024

How many times have Israeli officials justified massacring Palestinian civilians because Hamas uses them as human shields? Israeli media has now reported the opposite – the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) using Palestinian civilians as human shields in areas slated for incursion. “It is better that they explode and not the soldiers,” an Israeli soldier was told by an IDF commander. According to testimonies given to Haaretz by soldiers, senior IDF staff are aware of the practice.

In Israeli narratives of Palestinian human shields, the context is completely stripped away. There is no mention of the fact that Gaza is blockaded, that people have no way out and that a densely populated strip of land is home to both civilians and the resistance movement, including their weapons. Israel using the term “human shields” to describe Hamas’s limitations in terms of resistance in Gaza is not only misleading, but also completely wrong. It is Israeli colonial violence that has created Palestinian human shields.

After creating Palestinian human shields, Israel found a way to use them. First, to build its narrative justifying each aggression against Gaza. In the genocide, Israel used Palestinian human shields to save the lives of soldiers tasked with killing Palestinians in Gaza.

While Israel’s colonial narrative deems Hamas a terror group, it is interesting to note how the Israeli media specified that the human shields used by the IDF “are not terror suspects”. The phrase itself speaks volumes about Israel’s genocidal intent and action in Gaza – every Palestinian is a target, not just Hamas. Palestinian civilians, Israeli media reported: “Are detained specifically to be sent into buildings and tunnels that troops believe may be booby-trapped.” Briefly, the IDF will explore any avenue to kill Palestinians in one way or another, and human shields make for convenient collateral damage for Israel, which doesn’t even need to justify its atrocities, not even in genocide, thanks to the impunity the international community bestowed upon the settler-colonial entity.

“These are just reports at this point,” US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel stated in reply to reporters’ questions about Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Yet the Haaretz report quotes Israeli soldiers confirming the IDF’s knowledge, which points to a practice legitimised by Israeli military officials.

Patel, however, found it pertinent to mention the Israeli propaganda, which states Hamas uses civilian infrastructure to operate from, as well as using civilians as human shields. “That is not hyperbole,” he added. There has never been greater hyperbole than Israel’s colonial narratives unless we are speaking about the US that disseminates hyperbole as truth.

Just a day prior to Haaretz’s report, Ynet News ran an article justifying Israel’s killing of civilians taking shelter in schools by blaming Hamas for using the premises and, therefore, civilians as human shields, quoting IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari. “Israel views civilian casualties as a tragedy, while Hamas sees them as a strategy,” Hagari stated.

Israel’s use of Palestinian human shields as part of its military strategy clearly contradicts Hagari’s words and Netanyahu’s narrative. The only tragedy for Israel is the exposure of its crimes. Although with allies such as the US, which constructs its own definitions of what constitutes truth and hyperbole, tragedy is quickly exploited for PR opportunities, while Palestinian civilians – human shields created by Israel – decay in the genocide the world has learnt to accept.

August 17, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran: E3 demands are public support for Israeli crimes

Al Mayadeen | August 13, 2024

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani responded to the E3’s (UK, France, Germany) statement on Tuesday, underscoring that Iran is “steadfast and resolute in exercising its right  to protect its national security and territorial integrity” and “does not seek permission from any external party.”

In a press statement, Kanaani added that the European Troika’s demand for Iran not to respond to the “Israel’s” and punish it, “a crude demand that lacks any political logic and contradicts international laws and resolutions.”

He emphasized that the European trio’s statement reflects a public endorsement of the Zionist entity’s crimes and regional terrorism. He added that “if the European Trio genuinely seeks to promote peace in the region, it must, at the very least, condemn the Zionist entity’s actions and its genocidal activities in Gaza.”

Kanaani also pointed out that “the indifference of Western countries towards the crimes of the Israeli entity and its ongoing genocide of the defenseless Palestinian people, and the failure to hold it accountable, has encouraged it to escalate its atrocities.”

He explained that “Germany, France, and Britain have not taken any measures to halt the Zionist entity’s ongoing brutal crimes, and international organizations have similarly failed to deter these actions,” stressing that “both the West and the Security Council must take decisive responsibility to stop the severe Israeli atrocities in Gaza.”

On Monday, the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement in which  they called on Iran and its allies, likely the Ansar Allah movement in Yemen and the Hezbollah Resistance movement in Lebanon, to refrain from taking any actions that would “further escalate regional tensions and jeopardize the opportunity to agree on a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

The statement held them responsible “for actions that jeopardize this opportunity for peace and stability” while disregarding the actions committed by “Israel”

August 13, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“An Intricate Fabric of Bad Actors Working Hand-in-Hand” – So is war Inevitable?

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 12, 2024

Walter Kirn, an American novelist and cultural critic, in his 2009 memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy, described how, after a sojourn at Oxford, he came to be a member of ‘the class that runs things’ – the one that “writes the headlines, and the stories under them”. It was the account of a middle-class kid from Minnesota trying desperately to fit into the élite world, and then to his surprise, realising that he didn’t want to fit in at all.

Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack and co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing ‘establishment liberalism’. His contrarian drift has made him more vocal about his distrust of élite institutions – as he wrote in 2022:

“For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way,”

Kirn’s politics, a friend of his suggested, was “old-school liberal,” underscoring that it was the other ‘so-called liberals’ who had changed: “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue; I wouldn’t call [Kirn] Conservative. I would just say he’s a free-thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic”, the friend said.

To understand Kirn’s contrarian turn – and to make sense of today’s form of American politics – it is necessary to understand one key term. It is not found in standard textbooks, but is central to the new playbook of power: the “whole of society”.

“The term was popularised roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for a governance ‘whole-of-society’ approach” – one that asserts that as actors – media, NGOs,corporations and philanthropist institutions – interact with public officials to play a critical role not just in setting the public agenda, but in enforcing public decisions.

Jacob Siegel has explained the historical development of the ‘whole of society’ approach during the Obama administration’s attempt to pivot in the ‘war on terror’ to what it called ‘CVE’ – countering violent extremism. The idea was to surveil the American people’s online behaviour in order to identify those who may, at some unspecified time in the future, ‘commit a crime’.

Inherent to the concept of the potential ‘violent extremist’ who has, as yet, committed no crime, is a weaponised vagueness: “A cloud of suspicion that hangs over anyone who challenges the prevailing ideological narratives”.

“What the various iterations of this whole-of-society approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association – their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results …”.

Aaron Kheriaty writes:

“More recently, the whole of society political machinery facilitated the overnight flip from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, with news media and party supporters turning on a dime when instructed to do so—democratic primary voters ‘be damned’. This happened not because of the personalities of the candidates involved, but on the orders of party leadership. The actual nominees are fungible, and entirely replaceable, functionaries, serving the interests of the ruling party … The party was delivered to her because she was selected by its leaders to act as its figurehead. That real achievement belongs not to Harris, but to the party-state”.

What has this to do with Geo-politics – and whether there will be war between Iran and Israel?

Well, quite a lot. It is not just western domestic politics that has been shaped by the Obama CVE totalising mechanics. The “party-state” machinery (Kheriaty’s term) for geo-politics has also been co-opted:

“To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts”, Kheriaty argues,“the party requires an endless supply of causes … that party officers use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation) – and victim groups supposedly in need of the party’s protection”.

“It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way”, Kirn underlines.

Just to be clear, the implication is that all geo-strategic critics of the party-state’s ideological alignment must be jointly and collectively treated as potentially dangerous extremists. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea therefore are bound together as presenting a single obnoxious extremism that stands in opposition to ‘Our Democracy’; versus ‘Our Free Speech’ and versus ‘Our Expert Consensus’.

So, if the move to war against one extremist (i.e. versus Iran) is ‘acclaimed’ by 58 standing ovations in the joint session of Congress last month, then further debate is unnecessary – any more than Kamala Harris’ nomination as Presidential candidate needs to be endorsed through primary voting:

Candidate Harris told hecklers on Wednesday, chanting about genocide in Gaza, ‘to pipe down’ – unless they “want Trump to win”. Tribal norms must not be challenged (even for genocide).

Sandra Parker, Chairwoman of the political advocacy arm for the three thousand members of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) was advising on correct talking points, the Times of Israel reports:

“The rise of Republican far right-wingers who spurn decades of (bi-partisan) pro-Israel orthodoxies, favouring isolationism and resurrecting anti-Jewish tropes is alarming pro-Israel evangelicals and their Jewish allies… The break with decades of assertive foreign policy was evident last year when Sen. Josh Hawley derided the “liberal empire” that he dismissively characterised as bipartisan “Neoconservatives on the right, and liberal globalists on the left: Together they make up what you might call the uniparty, the DC establishment that transcends all changing administrations””.

At the CUFI talking points conference, the fear of increased isolation on the Right was the issue:

“You’re going to see that adversaries will see the U.S. as in retreat” – should isolationists get the upper hand: Activists were advised to push back: Should lawmakers claim that NATO expansion is what triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Should anybody begin to make the argument that the reason the Russians have moved in on Ukraine – is because of NATO enlargement – can I just say that this is the age-old ‘blame America trope,’” the Chair advised the assembled delegates.

“They have the strain of isolationism that’s – ‘Let’s just do China and forget about Iran, forget about Russia, let’s just do one thing’ – but it doesn’t work that way,” said Boris Zilberman, director of policy and strategy for the CUFI Action Fund. Instead, he described “an intricate fabric of bad actors working hand in hand”.

So, to get to the bottom of this western mind-management in which appearance and reality are cut from the same cloth of hostile extremism: Iran, Russia and China are ‘cut from it’ likewise.

Plainly put, the import of this “behavioural-engineering enterprise (it no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish – or not desire what you don’t wish)” – is, as Kirn says: “everyone is in on the game”. “The corporate and state interests don’t believe you are wanting the right things—you might want Donald Trump— or, that you aren’t wanting the things you should want more” (such as seeing Putin removed).

If this ‘whole of society’ machinery is understood correctly in the wider world, then the likes of Iran or Hizbullah are forced to take note that war in the Middle East inevitably may bleed across into wider war against Russia – and have adverse ramifications for China, too.

That is not because it makes sense. It doesn’t. But it is because the ideological needs of ‘whole of society’ foreign-policy hinge on simplistic ‘moral’ narratives: Ones that express emotional attitudes, rather than argued propositions.

Netanyahu went to Washington to lay out the case for all-out war on Iran – a moral war of civilisation versus the Barbarians, he said. He was applauded for his stance. He returned to Israel and immediately provoked Hizbullah, Iran and Hamas in a way that dishonoured and humiliated both – knowing well that it would draw a riposte that would most likely lead to wider war.

Clearly Netanyahu, backed by a plurality of Israelis, wants an Armageddon (with full U.S. support, of course). He has the U.S., he thinks, exactly where he wants it. Netanyahu has only to escalate in one way or another – and Washington, he calculates (rightly or wrongly), will be compelled to follow.

Is this why Iran is taking its time? The calculus on an initial riposte to Israel is ‘one thing’, but how then might Netanyahu retaliate in Iran and Lebanon? That can be altogether an ‘other thing’. There have been hints of nuclear weapons being deployed (in both instances). There is however nothing solid, to this latter rumour.

Further, how might Israel respond towards Russia in Syria, or might the U.S. react through escalation in Ukraine? After all, Moscow has assisted Iran with its air defences (just as the West is assisting Ukraine against Russia).

Many imponderables. Yet, one thing is clear (as former Russian President Medvedev noted recently): “the knot is tightening” in the Middle East. Escalation is across all the fronts. War, Medvedev suggested, may be ‘the only way this knot will be cut’.

Iran must think that appeasing western pleas in the wake of the Israeli assassination of Iranian officials at their Damascus Consulate was a mistake. Netanyahu did not appreciate Iran’s moderation. He doubled-down on war, making it inevitable, sooner or later.

August 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Targeted Harassment’: Scott Ritter Blasts Raid on His Home as US Government ‘Fishing Expedition’

Sputnik – 08.08.2024

Former USMC intelligence officer Scott Ritter’s home was raided Wednesday over allegations he had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires anyone who acts on behalf of a foreign nation to register as such to the US government. However, individuals accused of such a violation are typically notified by letter, not a raid.

The recent raid carried out on the New York home of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was another chapter in the US government’s harassment campaign against him and his family, he told Sputnik.

“It’s a fishing expedition. It’s harassment,” Ritter told Radio Sputnik’s Critical Hour on Thursday, noting that the US government’s end goal is to discredit him in the eyes of the public as he continually works to shed light on US policy.

Within the more than two dozen boxes that were carried out of Ritter’s home were documents that substantiated his findings that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction, a key claim that encouraged the US to undertake its invasion of the Middle Eastern nation in 2003.

“This is the archive that backs up my allegations, my assertions that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, that the US policies … that accused Iraq of such were premised on a lie. It’s an archive that I was relying upon to write a book that’s in draft form right now, and they seized that archive,” Ritter told show hosts Dr. Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon, adding that the confiscation of those documents were out of the scope of the search warrant.

“This is not about FARA. It literally isn’t. This is targeted harassment. This is a frontal assault on free speech and free press.”

Touching on how the legal system has outlined that sharing a viewpoint with a foreign government does not equate the status of foreign agent, Ritter recalled he had told one of the agents on the scene that his “main premise is stopping a nuclear war” and less about throwing his support behind another government.

“My main premise is to, you know, support diplomacy over militarism, to promote dialogue instead of confrontation, you know, and to promote arms control instead of an arms race,” he said. “If this is a crime in America, then convict me and throw the key away. But it’s not.”

Having acted as a journalist for some 20 years now, Ritter has published works in numerous publications that include the Washington Post and the New York Times. Ritter told Nixon that he’s no different than any other journalist being paid for their work.

“But they’re trying to twist this into somehow saying that I am in the employ of the Russian government, and that I am acting on instructions from the Russian government. The good news is that nothing they seized will back up these assertions. The bad news is I don’t think it matters,” he said.

“They kept saying you’re trying to shape the opinion of the American people. You’re damn right I’m trying to shape the opinion of the American people. Everybody engaged in journalism is doing this. This is what you’re supposed to do to empower people with knowledge and information, fact-based knowledge and information so they can make their own decisions. The most dangerous thing in a democracy like America is a knowledgeable citizen, a citizen empowered with information to make an informed, you know, choice on election day, not dumb sheep being herded down the path.”

“This is harassment designed to silence me. It’s designed to intimidate me. And for everybody listening, understand this is a frontal assault on the Constitution of the United States,” Ritter stressed. “A frontal assault on free speech. A frontal assault on the free press.”

“Free speech isn’t free if when you execute your right to speak freely, you get raided by the FBI. And a free press cannot exist if, carrying out your journalistic duties, you are accused because of the position you take of, you know, working for an entity because these positions have to clash with the official policy objectives of the United States.”

Asked if the raid was tied to the June seizure of his passport or a recent event he attended in New York to discuss his latest work and efforts to encourage an ease of tension between the US and Russia, the former intelligence officer admitted “they’re all connected.”

Ritter detailed he had planned additional trips to Russia later this year that would help to gain information that would help “empower the American audience about, you know, the reality of Russia and the danger of American policy.”

“The United States government did not want any of these trips to happen. They seized my passport and now they’re just extending the harassment,” he said. “They fear what I’m doing, and they fear what we are doing and this is what happens when governments get afraid of their own citizens. Citizens who, again, I remind everybody, are simply executing their rights of free speech and, as a journalist, my participation in the free press.”

“I never want to be a foreign agent. I’m not acting as one and I don’t want to act as one. I will never represent another country. I represent America, only America,” he continued. “I believe in the potential of my country to be that which we, you know, purport to be, what we want to be, and I recognize that we’re not there and one of the reasons we’re not there is because of the policies of my government.”

“And, therefore, as an American citizen, it is my duty to speak out and shine a light on where I think my government is going wrong so that we, the people, can take corrective action and get the government back on track because the government serves us, we don’t serve the government.”

August 9, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

There Is Something Rotten in Washington

Scott Ritter is harassed by FBI for calling for peace while Israel’s Lobby overthrows elections

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 8, 2024

One thing you can say about the Administration of President Joe Biden is that nearly every week there is something new and exciting to discuss. Galloping dementia recently gifted us with Joe’s 11 minute abdication speech in which he announced that he would not be running for another term as president. He babbled about how he was taking the step in spite of his desire to continue. The president, who is 81 and recently best noted for his failing mental state causing him to fall down stairs, felt compelled to say that he believes that his record as president “merited a second term” but that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” He also claimed that “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” even though it is engaged in a military occupation and combat operations in Syria, bombing Yemen and conducting counterterrorism in Iraq as well as supporting logistically and with intelligence the large and growing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. He has pledged to Israel that he will “defend” it if attacked, presumably no matter what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinates or bombs to provoke a war against Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Joe ended up by celebrating the nomination of Kamala Harris as heir-designate to the Oval Office after disposing of the troublesome and assertive Donald Trump, who presumably is the one who will tear up the US Constitution and “destroy democracy” if given the chance to do so.

But that was two weeks ago. More recently the fun fair on the Potomac turned its guns on a major critic of the federal government’s policies, most notably exercising its proclivity to float a lot of lies to turn anyone who exercises his or her first amendment right to free speech into some kind of traitor who has to be silenced. Many would argue that if the Biden Administration has one major failure beyond losing control over the country’s southern border, it is failure to manage US Foreign Policy in such a fashion as to avoid initiating or expanding existing international conflicts so as to turn them into major wars. If one considers Ukraine and Gaza, both conflicts that could have easily been stopped or de-escalated if the State Department had stopped acting as a shill for Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu and had instead created disincentives to continuing the fighting, the case for US involvement as an antagonist is non-existent. The American people benefit in no way from either war and opinion polls make clear that there is considerable popular opposition to the carnage taking place along both fronts.

On August 7th, it was reported that Scott Ritter, who I consider a friend, had his house in New York State searched by FBI and police and twenty five boxes containing documents and electronic communications devices were reportedly taken away for examination in an “ongoing investigation.” Scott, a former Marine corps intelligence officer, has anti-war credentials that go way back to before the Iraq War when he, as a United Nations Weapon inspector, declared that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). WMD fear was being promoted in Washington as the reason for attacking and disarming Iraq. Scott was pilloried both by the mainstream media and by the Pentagon’s and White House’s mostly Jewish neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Scooter Libby) who were busy fabricating deliberately misleading information and disseminating it to encourage the George W. Bush administration to start the war, which it obligingly did. Scott nevertheless has continued to be an effective gadfly over war and peace issues ever since that time.

Ritter had earlier had a run-in with the Biden regime in June 2024 when he was at the airport in New York City preparing to fly to Istanbul on his way to St. Petersburg to attend the prestigious international Economic Forum that that city hosts annually. A team of three FBI agents accosted him as he was about to board his plane and they confiscated his passport under orders from the State Department. They would neither give him a receipt for the document nor did they produce a warrant. No reason was given for the action, and Scott has since that time been unable to get his passport back.

The passport confiscation and now the house search appear to be connected with what is referred to as a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 investigation. FARA came into being just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when it was feared that “agents” of the Italian and German governments were all too freely spreading their propaganda in the US. In particular, FARA mandates that the finances and relationships of the foreign affiliated organization be open to Department of the Justice inspection. It states that “any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or otherwise acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal.” Those who fail to disclose might be penalized by up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.

To be sure, the U.S. government has recently been aggressive in demanding FARA registration for other nations as well as for Americans working for foreign powers. There have been several prominent FARA cases in the news. Major Russian news agencies operating in the U.S. were compelled to register in 2017 because they were funded largely or in part by the Kremlin. Also, as part of their plea deals, the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn both conceded that they had failed to comply with FARA when working as consultants with foreign governments.

While the Department of Justice is now going after Scott Ritter using FARA presumably because he is an effective critic of Joe Biden’s wars, there are some indications that other elements in the US government security apparatus are going after others who have dared to oppose what the White House and Congress have been up to. On August 6th, while Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s former Congresswoman and National Guard officer Tulsi Gabbard described how she was being tracked by teams of government agents in surveilling her and her husband whenever she travels by air. Whistleblowing Air Marshals leaked how Gabbard had been singled out as a “domestic terror threat” under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program. Her boarding passes bear the SSSS notation which makes her subject to additional security searches and questioning. Her probable crime is opposing the war in Ukraine or, possibly, having recently published a book entitled “For Love of Country: Leave the Democratic Party Behind.”

While Attorney General Merrick Garland is active in pursuing individual Americans for possible FARA and “domestic terrorism” violations, he is strangely but predictably reluctant to go after the most corrupt foreign government’s US-domestic lobby which dwarfs all others in terms of illicit cash flow and political impact. It is a foreign government that receives billions of dollars a year in “aid” and other benefits from the United States taxpayer. Consider beyond that, the possibility that that government might take part of the money it receives and secretly recycle it to groups of American citizens in the United States that exist to maintain and increase that money flow while also otherwise serving other interests of the recipient country. That would mean that the United States is itself subsidizing the lobbies and groups that are inevitably working against its own interests. And it also means that those lobbyists though US citizens are acting as foreign agents, covertly giving priority to their attachment to a foreign country instead of to the nation in which they live.

I am, of course, referring to Israel. It does not require a brilliant observer to note how Israel and its allies inside the U.S. have become very skilled at milking the government in the United States at all levels for every bit of financial aid, trade concessions, military hardware and political cover that is possible to obtain. The flow of dollars, goods, and protection is never actually debated in any serious way and is often, in fact, negotiated directly by Congress or state legislatures directly with the Israeli lobbyists. This corruption and manipulation of the US governmental system by people who are basically foreign agents is something like a criminal enterprise and one can only imagine the screams of outrage coming from the New York Times if there were a similar arrangement with any other country.

Recent revelations suggest that Israel’s cheating involves subsidies that are paid covertly by Israeli government agencies to groups in the United States which in turn took direction from the Jewish state, often inter alia damaging genuine American interests. The Israeli Lobby also has been long noted for its interference in American elections, including spending large sums of money to oust politicians who complain about the Jewish state and its behavior. Progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush, a critic of Israel, was recently ousted after her opponent received $8 million and earlier this year Jamaal Bowman lost after a record $15 million went to support another “friendly to Israel” candidate.

Many of the groups receiving Israeli money failed to disclose the payments, which is a felony. At the same time, even the casual observer of government in Washington would inevitably note how Israel’s various friends and proxies, uniquely, have been de facto exempt from any regulation by the US government. The last serious attempt to register a major lobbying entity was made by John F. Kennedy, who sought to have the predecessor organization to today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) comply with FARA. Kennedy was killed before he could complete the process and some have linked his death to efforts to register the Israel lobby elements while also blocking Israeli attempts to illegally and secretly develop nuclear weapons.

If one is requiring all the Israeli proxies that together make up the Israel Lobby to register under FARA, you might start with AIPAC, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) but there will be many, many more before the work is done. And there is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which also has received funding and material aid directly from Israel. The fundamentalist Christian head cases that place Israel’s interests ahead of those of their own country finally need to have their bell rung.

One might well suggest that the Biden Administration stop harassing ordinary Americans who are exercising their free speech right to critique unnecessary wars and instead go after the Israel Lobby, which is a major contributing factor to why those wars are taking place at all. It would also be nice to end the hypocrisy that surrounds anything having to do with Israel in Washington. The country is no democracy, no ally, and it is a major league war criminal with possibly hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians as evidence of its genocidal inclinations. Several hundred Congressmen cheering war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu do not change that. Apart from anything else, that the United States is involved in sustaining and providing cover for the slaughter of thousands of innocents while also pursuing its own citizens who are saying “Thou shalt not!” is an abomination.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

August 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

US government ‘has declared war on me’ – Scott Ritter

RT | August 8, 2024

Former US Marine turned journalist Scott Ritter has accused the US government of committing an “act of intimidation” against him for his journalistic work after federal agents and state police executed a search warrant on his house in New York State on Wednesday.

In a video statement on his Telegram channel on Thursday, Ritter, who is also a former UN weapons inspector, said that the warrant was based upon suspicion that he had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The authorities appear to be “primarily concerned” about his “relationship” with RT and the news agency Sputnik, he added.

According to Ritter, the FBI agents accused him of working “on behalf of the Russian government” and receiving “directions” from the two Russian outlets while being compensated for his contributions.

Ritter stressed that he was not a foreign agent and pointed out that he gets compensation from “any journalistic entity” he provides content for.

Ritter also dismissed as “absurd in the extreme” the accusation that his articles and podcasts were “designed to manipulate the opinion of the American people on behalf of the Russian government.”

He called the raid “an act of intimidation by the US government designed to have a chilling effect” and to discourage him from further cooperation with the Russian-based media outlets, Ritter said.

”There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I will back down because I’m doing nothing wrong,” he stated, adding that he is “an American citizen, holding my government accountable and exercising the rights given to me by the Constitution.”

Ritter went on to say that the US government has “declared war” on him, on his ability to write, to speak, and to interact with the American people and the broader international audience.

”It’s not a war I plan on losing,” Ritter concluded.

Ritter is a former US Marine Corps major who served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s. He opposed the 2003 US invasion, insisting that Saddam Hussein’s government did not have weapons of mass destruction, as Washington claimed at the time.

According to the US Department of Justice, the US Foreign Agents Registration Act “requires certain agents” to disclose their relationship with “foreign principals,” thus “informing the public on the identity of persons engaging in political activities on behalf of foreign governments.”

Similar legislation adopted in Russia has been harshly criticized in the West, branded as “oppressive” and a “crackdown on opposition.”

August 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

London police chief attacks journalist’s equipment

RT | August 5, 2024

Britain’s top law enforcement official ripped out a reporter’s microphone after being asked a question about double standards in policing the immigration-related riots across the UK.

Sir Mark Rowley of the Metropolitan Police Service had just left a government meeting in Westminster about handling the unrest when journalists approached him on Monday.

“Are we going to end two-tier policing sir?” a Sky News reporter asked. Rowley responded by destroying his recording equipment and continuing to walk to his car. He took no questions from the press.

Sky News crime correspondent Martin Brunt described Rowley’s actions as a “petulant, childish even” response to a “perfectly legitimate” question.

“It was a storm in a teacup, but perception is everything,” Brunt said, adding that Rowley’s explanation that he had been in a hurry was “mitigation, not a defense.”

Though the Sky reporter could have pressed charges for assault, criminal damage, or misconduct in public office, he reportedly chose to give Rowley a pass.

Dozens of British towns and cities have seen protests and riots since last Monday, when a British teenager of Rwandan descent killed three children and injured ten others in a mass stabbing in Southport, near Liverpool. While the initial outrage was sparked by a rumor misidentifying the perpetrator as Muslim, demonstrations have since grown into a wider backlash against mass immigration, Islam, and the perception that UK authorities are more concerned with suppressing domestic dissent than tackling immigrant crime.

More than 150 people were arrested on Saturday for rioting in Liverpool, Manchester, Stoke, Leeds and other cities. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed that the rioters will “face the full force of the law.”

Whitehall’s crackdown has prompted Reform Party leader Nigel Farage to suggest that there was “the impression of two-tier policing,” in comparison to the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots related to the death of George Floyd in the US.

“There is no two-tier policing. There is policing without fear or favor, exactly as it should be,” Starmer responded. “So that is a non-issue.”

According to Starmer, a “standing army of specialist officers” will be deployed to deal with the riots. “This is not protest – it is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities,” he added.

The British government has also said it would “hold to account” social media companies that do not remove “disinformation.”

August 6, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

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