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EU displays ‘height of hypocrisy’ – Russia

Samizdat | October 23, 2022

The European Union doesn’t have the right to accuse Moscow of committing war crimes in Ukraine because the bloc has spent years ignoring the suffering of civilians in Donbass, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said.

Russia’s statement came after EU’s main decision-making body, the European Council, condemned Moscow on Friday for “indiscriminate” missile and drone attacks on civilian targets in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine, adding that there was “growing evidence” of war crimes against Ukrainians.

In a response released on Saturday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova rebuffed the accusations as “the height of hypocrisy.”

The European Union has lost the moral right to speak about war crimes because, for eight years, it has turned a blind eye to the killing of civilians, women and children during the shelling of the Donbass by the regime in Kiev.

Zakharova further accused the European bloc of “covering up Kiev’s criminal actions.” She argued that, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, the EU has been “senselessly investing significant sums into prolonging the fighting.”

The spokeswoman also claimed that Ukrainian soldiers who receive Western training and weapons are targeting civilians.

Russia stepped up strikes on Ukraine this month, hitting many thermal power plants and power lines across the country, among other targets. President Vladimir Putin said the intensification was a retaliation against “terrorist attacks” on Russian soil, including a truck bombing that had recently damaged a strategic bridge connecting the Crimean Peninsula with Russia proper.

Kiev has not confirmed its involvement in the bridge attack, but several top officials and government agencies openly celebrated the bombing. President Vladimir Zelensky later accused Russia of killing civilians on purpose during its renewed strikes on Ukrainian territory.

October 23, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Historians reveal Israel’s use of poison against Palestinians

By Nasim Ahmed | MEMO | October 11, 2022

The details of Israel’s secret use of biological weapons and poison against Palestinians during the 1947/48 ethnic cleansing campaign has been revealed in a recent article by historians Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar. The 84-year-old Kedar is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the more well-known Morris is famed for his work as one of Israel’s “New Historians”. This group of Israeli scholars, including Professors Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, dismantled the occupation state’s official narrative about its creation in 1948 and the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis. However, unlike his fellow historians, Morris went on to become a rather controversial figure for adopting morally questionable positions in defence of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

“I find myself as convinced as ever that the Israelis played a major role in ridding the country of tens of thousands of Arabs during the 1948 war,” said Morris in an article in the Los Angeles Times about the controversy surrounding his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. “For unearthing that dark side of 1948,” Morris said that he was vilified by the “Zionist establishment.” He was accused of shattering the founding myths of the Israeli state and lending moral weight to the Palestinian cause. Morris rejected the claim as “untrue” and explained that he “was simply a historian seeking to describe what happened.”

Affirming his commitment to Zionism, however, Morris went on to defend Israel’s ethnic cleansing. “I also believe their [Israeli] actions were inevitable and made sense” said Morris before giving his justification for why Israel had to expel three quarters of the indigenous non-Jewish, Muslim and Christian Palestinians. “Had the belligerent Arab population inhabiting the areas destined for Jewish statehood not been uprooted, no Jewish state would have arisen, or it would have emerged so demographically and politically hobbled that it could not have survived. It was an ugly business. Such is history.”

Morris’s argument is typical of many Israelis who find themselves trapped between the truths about Israel’s creation and remaining committed to the Zionist cause. Some abandon the ideology which preserves a Jewish ethno-nationalist state in historic Palestine because of the moral dilemma it presents. Others continue to insist that the Zionist cause supersedes all moral and ethical considerations, even if that means justifying ethnic cleansing, racism and the crime of apartheid.

In light of his background, Morris’s take on Israel’s use of biological weapons and poison is all the more interesting. His article with Kedar – “‘Cast Thy Bread’: Israeli Biological Warfare during the 1948 War” – was published by Middle Eastern Studies. According to Haaretz, the article is a rarity because it was researched and published against the wishes of the Israeli security establishment, which has tried for years to block any embarrassing historical documents that expose war crimes against Arabs, such as murdering prisoners, ethnic cleansing and destroying villages. Moreover, the article is based on original documents stored in the Israel State Archive as well as other archives.

The article provides details of how scientists from the Scientific Corps, together with battlefield units, were involved in a systematic campaign to poison water wells and spread typhoid bacteria in Arab villages and cities as well as among the invading armies of Egypt and Jordan. The objective was to frighten the Arab-Palestinian population, to force them to leave and to weaken the Arab armies. It is claimed that the use of biological warfare was approved by the founder of the Israeli state and its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Among the examples of the use of poison discussed in the article is the deployment of typhoid germs sent in bottles to the southern front. Morris and Kedar shed light on the Israeli soldiers sent with the poison to Acre and the Galilee village of Ilabun. According to British, Arab and Red Cross documents, dozens of local residents of Acre were poisoned and became severely ill. An unknown number of them died.

The same method is also said to have been used in Gaza in May 1948, a week after Israel proclaimed its independence. Apparently two Jewish soldiers from a Special Forces unit posed as Arabs and infiltrated Gaza with tubes containing the typhoid germs. Their mission was to poison the local water supply to stop the advance of the Egyptian army. However, they were arrested and tortured, and then sentenced to death by an Egyptian military court in August 1948.

The use of biological weapons has been illegal for nearly a century, since the 1925 Geneva Protocol. This prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons in international armed conflicts. Although Israel, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea and Comoros have refused to commit to the protocol, 183 other states have done so.

While Israel has never publicly admitted to the use of chemical weapons it has been caught red-handed on several occasions. One such was the botched attempt to assassinate Palestinian political leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, on 25 September, 1997. The brazen attempt on the life of the then 41-year-old head of the Hamas Political Bureau sparked a diplomatic row which threatened to wreck the peace deal between Jordan and Israel. The crisis ended with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu making a number of humiliating concessions.

A six-member Mossad team arrived in Amman a week before the assassination using false Canadian passports. The plan was clear: kill the exiled Hamas leader using a lethal toxin without leaving any trace of the killers. The idea was that after the toxin had been administered covertly, Meshaal would go about the rest of his day as normal and then, when tiredness overcame him, he would take a nap, never to wake up again; he was expected to die within 48 hours. Two of the Mossad agents delivered the toxin as planned but were captured by Meshaal’s bodyguard while trying to flee from the scene.

Hours after the arrest of the agents, the Israelis hatched a plan to diffuse the situation. With the diplomatic consequence of his actions dawning on him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to conceal the botched assassination attempt from the rest of the world. He dispatched Mossad head Danni Yatom to plead with King Hussain of Jordan for the agents’ release. He failed to diffuse the situation and instead sparked a diplomatic crisis with the Hashemite Kingdom, which had normalised relations with the Zionist state three years earlier. The King had gone out on a limb to sign a peace treaty with Israel against the wishes of his people. Following pressure from the US and under the threat to the peace treaty, the Israelis delivered the antidote. Meshaal was saved with just hours to spare.

Nobody should be too surprised, therefore, at the fact that Israel used biological weapons against the Palestinians in 1948. The occupation state also has nuclear weapons, which it has never allowed to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or anyone else for that matter. In short, the state is a depository for weapons of mass destruction and has used them against Palestinian civilians.

Has Israel been sanctioned, invaded and occupied by the West as a result? Of course not. Yet again, the West’s hypocrisy on such matters has been exposed, this time by an unlikely duo: Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar.

October 11, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The EU prioritises the Abraham Accords

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | October 4, 2022

At the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, defined Israel’s security concerns as the motivating factor behind supporting the two-state paradigm, even as the US has been repeating that it does not envisage any resolution in the immediate future. With the Abraham Accords being the main driving force behind US-Israeli decisions, Lapid’s nod towards the failed international consensus holds no substance for the Palestinian people. In practice, Lapid’s words are no different from refuting the paradigm – the Israeli government’s colonial settlement expansion has determined the pace.

However, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, claimed encouragement at Lapid’s words. “This is also what we want to push for. We want the resumption of a political process that can lead to a two-state solution and a comprehensive regional peace,” Borrell stated at the EU-Israeli Association Council meeting on Monday.

The EU’s position statement regarding the meeting, however, indicates full agreement with the Abraham Accords, which are mentioned prior to the bloc’s adherence to the two-state compromise. Referencing the normalisation agreements, the EU’s statement partly reads, “In this regard, the EU will seek to encourage and build upon the recent establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries, with a view to enhancing the prospects to reach a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East Peace Process.” Giving prominence to the Abraham Accords in this way suggests that the EU was not as averse to the Trump administration’s politics as it sought to portray. Only US President Joe Biden made it easier for the EU to retain its two-state diplomacy, while overtly agreeing to policies which were previously ridiculed only because the US had Donald Trump as President.

Since the US is actively engaging with Arab countries through the normalisation framework and trying to get the Palestinian Authority on board as well, the Abraham Accords have gained more recognition in international circles. The EU, however, is clearly stating that it will be using the agreements to “enhance” the possibility of a resolution, knowing full well that the agreements only serve to solidify Israel’s diplomatic ties and, in return, bolster its impunity.

In his virtual address to the meeting yesterday, Lapid’s commitment to the two-state paradigm included an assertion that Jerusalem would remain Israel’s undivided capital, which goes against international resolutions. However, Lapid’s best card was the Israeli government’s economic concessions to the PA, spoken of without the context of Israel knowing it is facing a gradually changing Palestinian society which will not wait upon its leadership to determine the way forward to legitimate resistance against colonialism.

The EU’s press release describing the meeting states the intent to “build upon the momentum generated at the UN General Assembly” in terms of the so-called peace process. Yet, Palestinians know that the veneer of concern was nothing more than a bid to deflect criticism from the fact that the EU chose, yet again, to engage with a colonial entity which specialises in breaking international law and committing war crimes. With the Abraham Accords subtly taking centre stage, and with full agreement on behalf of the EU, it should at least be made clear that no independence and no Palestinian State can be reached, unless a radical change in politics is implemented.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Ukraine

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | October 4, 2022

As many people are beginning to realize but would rather not think about, the United States and Russia are moving perilously close to nuclear war. Russian President Putin has now openly pledged to defend Russian territory with “all the forces and means at our disposal.” U.S. President Biden has responded that Russia will suffer “catastrophic consequences” if it resorts to the use of nuclear weapons.

As Putin has correctly pointed out, it is the U.S. government that has established the precedent for the wartime use of nuclear weapons. That, of course, was the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

Let’s review the justification that U.S. officials cite for targeting those two cities with nuclear bombs.

U.S. officials, as well as many of their supporters in the mainstream press, have long maintained that the U.S. government was justified in nuking those two cities because, they say, it shortened the war. In the process, they say that the bombings saved thousands of American men whose lives would have been lost if it had become necessary to invade Japan.

That, however, is an invalid legal and moral justification for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, it’s a war crime for soldiers to target civilians in wartime. That’s precisely what U.S. officials did with their atomic bombing of those two cities. There is no difference between, say, what Lt. William Calley did in Vietnam when he killed innocent civilians and what U.S. officials did to the people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Moreover, soldiers die in war. That’s the nature of war. To target women, children, seniors, and other civilians as a way to save soldiers from dying in an invasion is totally illegitimate.

It is important to note that to this day U.S. officials and their acolytes in the mainstream press continue to defend their atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on that particular justification — that it shortened the war and, in the process, saved the lives of U.S. soldiers.

Given such, how can Biden threaten “catastrophic consequences” on Russia if Russia employs nuclear weapons in its war with Ukraine? What if Russia says that it is using nukes to shorten the war and thereby save the lives of Russian soldiers? In other words, what if Russia uses the exact same justification for using nuclear weapons in wartime that the U.S. used — and continues to use — for its use of nuclear weapons in Japan? What does Biden say: that we can do it but you can’t?

In fact, what if Russia, unlike the United States, limits its use of nuclear weapons to enemy troops rather than on innocent civilians? What does Biden say then — that the U.S. has the authority to nuke whoever it wants, including innocent civilians, but that Russia has no legitimate authority to use nuclear weapons against enemy troops?

Who would have ever thought that the war crime that President Truman committed in World War II would come back to haunt the United States some 75 years later? It might not do any good at this point, but among the best things Biden could do at this point is to openly and publicly acknowledge that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in fact, war crimes and then issue a genuine and contrite apology.

With its use of its old Cold War dinosaur NATO to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon bears responsibility for moving America and Russia perilously close to nuclear war, even if it happens by miscalculation or accident. The best thing President Biden could do at this point (in addition to apologizing for the U.S. war crimes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would be to immediately stop furnishing weaponry and other support to Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, bring all U.S. troops stationed overseas home and discharge them into the private sector, and abandon all foreign military bases, especially those in Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

In other words, the U.S. government should leave the world alone. It has done enough damage already, including moving America and the rest of the world perilously close to a nuclear holocaust.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Perfidious Putin!

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 4, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin has certainly been a naughty boy! The always unreliable and unofficial government-originating disinformation source The Hill is reporting that Moscow has spent the equivalent of $300,000,000 in an effort to “influence” world politics in its favor. The story relies on and follows a New York Times special report which again seeks to revive the claim that the Kremlin has been interfering effectively in American elections. Is it a coincidence that all the Russian bashing is surfacing right now before US elections at a time when the President Joe Biden Administration is agonizing over what it describes as sometimes “foreign supported” domestic extremists? I don’t think so.

The Hill report establishes the framework, claiming that “Russia has provided at least $300 million to political parties and political leaders since 2014 in a covert attempt to influence foreign politics, the US State Department alleges. Multiple news outlets reported that a cable released by the State Department reveals that Russia has likely spent at least hundreds of millions more on parties and officials who are sympathetic to Russia… According to the Associated Press… Russia used front organizations to send money to preferred causes or politicians. The organizations include think tanks in Europe and state-owned entities in Central America, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a press briefing on Tuesday that Russia’s election meddling is an ‘assault on sovereignty… It is an effort to chip away at the ability of people around the world to choose the government that they see best fit to represent them, to represent their interests, to represent their values.’”

And why is Russia behaving as it allegedly does? According to another State Department source who spoke to The Hill the Joe Biden Administration’s concern is not regarding any single country but the entire world as “we continue to face challenges against democratic societies.” Oddly enough, that Russia should be disinclined to waste its money and other resources on such a quixotic objective never appears to have occurred to the Department of State or to the editors at The Hill.

Typically, the State Department has shared information with select media but has refused to publicly release any parts of the cable which allegedly provide the intelligence-based evidence supporting the claims of Russian meddling. The Hill, perhaps inadvertently, reveals what the whole story really is about when it concludes its piece with “Intelligence assessments have determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in spreading disinformation online that was designed to help then-candidate Donald Trump over his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Russia also tried to help Trump in his reelection battle against President Biden in 2020.” So yes, it’s all about Moscow helping Trump against the Democratic candidates. Interestingly, however, most non-Democratic Party aligned sources have come to agree that it was the Democrats who were trying to damage Trump in 2016 through use of a fabricated dossier that sought to impugn his character and portray him as a Russian stooge. Far worse, they also used the national security apparatus to “get Trump.”

The Times adds more detail and serves inter alia as a puff piece for the Biden Administration’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Russia. It is based clearly on information provided by unnamed government sources and is largely devoid of any actual evidence, though it does cite some names of Russians to provide authenticity. This is a common trick used in the media and government, particularly by intelligence agencies, to make fabricated material look genuine. One giveaway that the reporting should be considered suspect occurs in the very first paragraph where it states that “Russia has covertly given at least $300 million to political parties, officials and politicians in more than two dozen countries since 2014, and plans to transfer hundreds of millions more, with the goal of exerting political influence and swaying elections.” If the New York Times is privy to Russian top-level planning, even via leaked information from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government sources, it would be surprising to learn that the US has that capability. If the National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly broken Russian secure communications to obtain such information, it would be a major security breach and a violation of the Espionage Act of 1918 for any American news outlet to suggest that, indicating pari passu that the report is bogus.

And then there is the question of context. The United States has been routinely doing what is now being blamed on Russia ever since the conclusion of the Second World War. And it does it on a scale much larger than a paltry $300 million. The effort to bring about regime change in Ukraine alone cost something like $5 billion. Meddling in foreign elections and politics is, in fact, a major function of the CIA. It is called “covert action” or referred to in the trade as “CA.” Covert action is defined in the National Security Act of 1947 as “[a]n activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly. 50 U.S.C. § 3093(e).”

Most CIA Stations and even the larger Bases overseas have covert action capabilities and their activity is frequently governed by the operating directives that are applied to every country where the Agency operates. In practice, covert action most often consists of recruiting, paying and directing journalists and other opinion-shapers to write stories and support narratives favorable to US interests. In some cases, depending on circumstances, the CA officers will either directly or indirectly fund groups and individuals who are opponents of the established government. If there is a major operation, like Ukraine, success comes when there is regime change.

And what is the value for money with CA operations? It is hard to say but the official intelligence budget for the US government is $84.1 billion with additional sums hidden in other government funding, to include the Pentagon and Homeland Security. The CIA gets a large chunk of that, and, as covert operations are costly, much of the money goes in support of those activities. So, we are talking about the US spending multiple billions of dollars in support of “actions” analogous to those that Putin is being accused of carrying out over the course of a decade in more than two dozen countries worldwide with $300 million! Good luck Vlad!

I might reasonably conclude by observing that the United States government effort to hoodwink the American public into believing a lot of nonsense about what is going on in the world might itself be described as a covert action. And it is particularly interesting in that it is self-funded by the US taxpayer. Never before in history has a free or at least somewhat free people funded its own destruction, but there is always a first for everything.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?

BY THOMAS HARRINGTON | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.

The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.

And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.

With his massive military build-up and heavy support of proxies in Latin America in the eighties, Ronald Reagan took the first steps toward recovering this lost elite prerogative.

But it was not until the administration of George Bush Sr. and the two conflicts mentioned above that, as he himself exultantly put it in the wake of his pitiless slaughter of some 100,000 poorly equipped Iraqis, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

Bush knew what he was talking about, and it wasn’t necessarily, or even primarily, military force or prowess.

What had largely limited Reagan to proxy wars during eight years in office were two things. The first was a citizenry that still had fresh memories of the debacle in Southeast Asia. The second, and arguably more important one was a press corps with on-the-ground familiarity with the reality of these conflicts that continued to challenge him on both their morality and strategic efficacy.

Bush and his team, which as you’ll remember included one Richard Cheney at Defense, made remedying this “problem” of war-hesitancy one of the central aims of his presidency. As Barbara Trent suggests in her remarkable The Panama Deception, experimenting with new media management techniques was not a strategic sideshow of the conflict, but rather its prime goal.

The Panama invasion was followed in quick succession by the Gulf War, where press coverage put heavy emphasis on the opinions of US military figures and their explanations of the technical genius of American-made military technology. In this way, the war was presented to Americans as a sort of exciting video game characterized by flashes of light in the night and precision attacks devoid of any bloodshed and death.

This process of desensitizing of the media, and from there, the American people to the horrendous human effects of war-making culminated in the revolting spectacle, on January 30th, 1991 of reporters chuckling along with General Norman Schwartzkopf as he joked while showing them videos of supposed “smart bombs” killing people like ants from the safety of 30,000 feet.

Having received no coordinated pushback from anyone with power about this degrading treatment of human life and the American people, they tripled down and went full Manichaean after September 11th.

Why not?

With Reagan’s repeal of the fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 never had the media been a) concentrated in so few hands b) so beholden to the government regulation for the continuance of the super-profitability generated through this consolidation c) debilitated by the internet-induced collapse of the newspaper business model and thus d) less obligated to the reflect take into account the concerns and interests of a broad spectrum of the American people.

It was now truly, as George Bush Jr said, a matter of “You’re either with us or against us,” us of course being the war-making government (including the Deep State) along with its slavishly loyal media mouthpieces. If like Susan Sontag—who whether you like her or not, was a very bright and highly accomplished thinker—you believed the maniacal presumptions of the US response to September 11th were flawed, and said so, you could in this new environment, expect to be the object of well-coordinated attacks on your character.

Never once did the administration call for restraint in such attacks, nor did any administration figures remind people of the importance of the supposedly American value of everyone’s right to be respectfully heard.

Seeing the exhaustion of the Bush brand after the Iraq debacle, the Deep State switched party allegiances in the run-up to the 2008 election. And it has stayed firmly on the side of the so-called “left” ever since, encouraging the use of Bush-Cheney-style government-media mobbing against those who might dare to question the motives of the sainted warmonger Obama, or, say, the “logic” of trying to reduce the problems of racism by promoting it through identity politics.

The efficiency of such mob-style takedown tactics was greatly enhanced by the dramatic expansion of social media platforms in the Obama and Trump years.

It is no exaggeration to say that a person born in 1990 or later has little if any understanding of what it means to disagree in detail and in good faith with someone whose political and/or social ideals are different than their own. Nor what it means to feel obligated to respond to the claims of others with careful factual refutations.

What they do know, because it’s mostly all that they have seen from their “betters,” is that to argue is to seek the destruction of one’s interlocutor, and failing that, to make sure his or her arguments are impeded from circulating freely in our shared civic spaces. The ever-increasing dialectical poverty of those who have been socialized and educated in this environment is evident to anyone who has served as a classroom instructor during the last quarter century.

A sanctuary for the weary 

While most people seemed to want to pretend that nothing new was happening, that the collaboration between media and government had always been this extreme, many of us did not. We had memories. And we knew the “field of thinkable thought” was dramatically smaller in 2005 than in 1978. And we knew it had become much, much smaller in 2018 than it was in 2005. In our search for answers we turned to media critics and scholars of media history. We also turned to the writings of journalist-activists with both interest and insight into these matters.

When it came to this last group, I found myself drawn principally to what might be termed leftist anti-imperialists. Reading them, I widened my understanding of how elites and their chosen “experts” manage information flows, and constantly seek to shrink the parameters of acceptable opinion on foreign policy issues.

Two years ago last March, however, my sense of intellectual kinship with this subset of thinkers suddenly became very strained. We were facing what I immediately recognized as the largest and most aggressive “perception management” campaign in recent times, and perhaps in the history of the world. One, moreover, that was utilizing all the techniques employed during the previous two to three decades to insure citizen allegiance to US war-making.

And yet in the face of it, almost all my go-to people on propaganda analysis had little or nothing to say. And when I sent contributions outlining my doubts about the congruity of the emergent Covid discourse to places that had generally welcomed my analyses of pro-war propaganda, suddenly there was hesitation on the other end.

And the passage of time cured nothing. Indeed, the only things these people said down the road; that is, if they addressed Covid at all, was to underscore the unprecedented severity of the situation (a very questionable assertion) and harp on Trump’s supposedly disastrous handling of it.

There was virtually no daylight between the opinions of these people and the feckless liberals they, as true-blue leftists, always claimed to disdain. And on it went, for the entire two years of the Covid panic.

A week or so ago, John Pilger, arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda, published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.

In it, he repeats all sorts of well-known ideas and concepts. There’s a reference to Leni Riefenstahl and how she believed the bourgeoisie are those most amenable to influence campaigns, a reminder of Julian Assange’s horrendous and undeserved fate, much deserved praise for Harold Pinter’s absolutely extraordinary if largely ignored Nobel acceptance speech, an intelligent discussion about how our media studiously refuses to tell us about anything that went on between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine between 1990 and February of this year.

The underlying thesis of the piece is that while emitting and constantly pushing elite-approved messages are key elements of propaganda, so too is the strategic disappearance of essential historical realities and truths.

All good stuff. Indeed, all themes that I have written about with frequency and conviction over the years.

Toward the end piece Pilger asks the following rhetorical question:

When will real journalists stand up?

And a few lines later, after providing us with a list of where to find the few outlets and journalists that do know what they are doing when it comes to the elite’s informational misdirection plays, he adds:

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.

The same can be said of most all of the outlets (Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter ) who portray themselves as being wise to the wiles of elite-sponsored influence operations.

Who, the question thus occurs to me, is actually living in a “a deep bath of righteousness” that impedes the ability to access the truths that lie beyond the “official version” of our past and present?

Who is failing to respond to the presence of fascistic tendencies in our midst?

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was John and his merry band of crack propaganda dissectors.

Is it that hard for them to see the shadow of fascism in the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid?

Is it really difficult for them to see the presence of the same dark forces in the US government’s insouciant abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation?

Are they not troubled by the fact that the experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not do that? Or that this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public?

Does this count as a major “propaganda problem” worth looking into?

Do they care about the millions of people who lost their jobs over these lies, and of course the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds?

As long-time mavens of foreign policy, have they looked into the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world?

Being the great sleuths of information-hiding that they are, did it raise any suspicions in them when Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years?

And being the good progressives they are, did the enormous upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception trouble them?

Did it light any suspicions that all this hullabaloo might not just be about health?

Have they organized support groups and action plans for the billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking that was foisted upon them, and who, in all likelihood will never recover the years of developmental progress lost to this program of senseless cruelty?

I could go on.

As far as I can tell, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “NO!”

I am truly grateful for all that John Pilger and his companions in the leftist propaganda dissection cadres have taught me over the years. But as Ortega y Gasset said, a public intellectual is only as good as his ability to remain at the “height of his times.”

Sadly, this group of otherwise talented individuals has failed this test, badly, over the last two-plus years. As much as it may pain them to hear this, they have shown themselves to be much more like the “clerics” that Julien Benda rightly castigated in 1927 after they lost their moral bearings and their critical acuity before the massive propaganda onslaught used to promote the senseless slaughters of World War I.

Why these professional uncoverers of camouflaged realities of our times suddenly decided to unsee what was happening before their eyes is a job for future historians.

But if I had to hazard a guess today, I’d say that it had a lot to do with all the usual human things like fear of losing friends and prestige or being seen by ideological enforcers on their side as going over to the enemy. All of which is fine and understandable.

But if that is the case, isn’t it too much to publicly admit now that you missed the boat on this important story?

And if you can’t manage that, could you at least have the sense to stop issuing sermons on topics like “how propaganda works” for a good long while?

Thomas Harrington, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where he taught for 24 years. His research is on Iberian movements of national identity and contemporary Catalan culture. His essays are published at Words in The Pursuit of Light.

September 30, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Democratic Party, Now the Leading Party of War

By John V. Walsh | The Greanville Post | September 27, 2022

Last May a remarkable column by Stephen Kinzer appeared in the Boston Globe. It was headlined: “Republicans Return To Their Roots As The Antiwar Party.”

More significantly, the subheading ran: “Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that.” It began:

“With Americans now engulfed in passion for Ukraine, it wasn’t surprising that President Biden proposed sending $33 billion worth of weaponry and other aid to Ukraine’s beleaguered military. Nor was it surprising that Congress raised the number to $40 billion, or that both the Senate and House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor. Hidden within that lopsided vote, though, was a shocker: Every single “no” vote – 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House – came from a Republican.

“Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that. This month’s votes in Washington signal a dramatic role reversal. Suddenly it is conservative Republicans who oppose US involvement in foreign wars.”

Strikingly not only did the “conservative” Democrats vote for the $40 billion that included more weapons of death and destruction for Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian. All the “progressives” did so, including AOC and The Squad, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee and all the rest. It was a clean sweep.

Second, this was not a one-off event. There is another vote coming up in the next few weeks for another $13.7 billion for Ukraine with over $7 billion for weapons. What is the response of the 100 Democrats to this request by Biden? The answer came during the September 11 Week Of Action called for by Code Pink and the progressive Peace In Ukraine Coalition reported here as follows:

“In the nation’s capital CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Colonel Ann Wright and other activists, kicked off the Week of Action, going door to door to the offices of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), …. While some members of the caucus call for much-needed diplomacy and raise concerns about the risk of nuclear war – either through a miscalculation or an intentional first strike – not one member of the nearly 100-member CPC will commit to voting against more weapons for Ukraine.” (Emphasis, jw)

This was also acknowledged in a very dispiriting interview by The GrayZone with prominent activists after the lobbying effort.

The pro-war mentality among the “progressive” Dem pols is not limited to Biden’s cruel proxy war to the last Ukrainian. It extends to a second proxy war now being ginned up in Taiwan. When Nancy Pelosi recently visited the island to stir up secessionist sentiment, not a single progressive Democrat in Congress made so much as a peep of protest. In fact Rep. Ro Khanna, Co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential campaign boosted it in rants on CNN and Twitter.

Both of these proxy wars bring the US into conflict with two other major global nuclear powers. If the progressive pols cannot be against military escalation in cases like this, it is hard to see that they have any claim to be for peace. And yet all too many activists in the progressive antiwar movement are loyal to them. In fact some peace organizations have gone so far as to endorse them for election in 2022, even after their vote for the $40 billion to Ukraine for example here!

Moreover this support for the proxy war in Ukraine shows up among rank and file Democrats as well. By every measure in a recent Ipsos poll taken after 6 months of war, support for intervention in Ukraine was higher among Democrats than among Republicans or Independents. IF the roots of this are partisan in nature, that is deeply disturbing because it means that Democrats will follow warhawks simply because they are Dems. Biden may be a case in point for such misplaced loyalty.

Let me end on a personal note. Working in peace organizations and coalitions, I find many activists who labor mightily for the cause of peace also maintain loyalty to the Democratic Party. And that loyalty extends especially to the “progressive” Democratic politicians. This is most disturbing because on the most important issues of war and peace, these peace activists get nothing in return. And since there is no price to pay for their hawkish votes, these politicians will simply ignore such activists. This is an abusive relationship and ought to be terminated forthwith.

The minimal policy of those who work for peace should be quite simple: no votes for politicians who vote to fund war in Ukraine – no matter the Party. Otherwise those who support war and US unipolarity will continue to ignore those who work for peace.

September 30, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Don Quixote… de la Left!

By Jordan Henderson | OffGuardian | September 25, 2022

The pull of Right vs Left Politics is still so strong, at least here in the USA, that I feel the need to state at the outset that my motivation here is not to score any points for the Right. This painting – Don Quixote de la Left – is a picture of the Woke Left.

A few months ago I painted a similarly unflattering and honest portrait of the Christian Right. The intent of these paintings is to serve as open windows presenting clear views of dissenting perspectives.

Critically portraying both wings of the ruling class, makes it evident, I hope, that these works are not part of the Right/Left trap.

Early this year, lines of heavy trucks rumbled across Canada’s frozen north and converged on Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers. The protest swelled in number, expanding in scope to a protest against the Medical Police State in general.

The Ottawa Freedom Convoy was sufficiently monumental that even the mainstream “news” was eventually forced to acknowledge its existence whereupon they began slandering it. This coverage did not last long: the current thing changed, the Ukraine War was brought to the front of the world stage, and most everything else was shoved off the stage.

I’m revisiting the Freedom Convoy. I wish to spark additional conversation about it. So I created this artwork. I intend it as a tribute befitting the valorous deeds of the . . . counter protesters and Canadian police; I’ll immortalize their symbiotic relationship.

Like the knights of old, the counter protesters and police sallied forth to subdue the rabble of unruly peasants, putting them back in their proper place firmly under the thumb of the authorities.

The slander against the Freedom Convoy was not particularly sophisticated; it amounted to ignoring that the protest was obviously a protest against the Medical Police State, and instead making up stories about it being a vaguely racist/fascist/Nazi event where the racist/fascist/Nazis inadvertently brought anti-vax signs and forgot the racist/fascist/Nazi signs that they were supposed to bring.

The logic goes like this: If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is definitely a racist/fascist/Nazi.

If they look like, act like, and sound like, people protesting the Medical Police State, then they must really be racist/fascist/Nazis disguised as freedom advocates.

Any evidence that supported the racist/fascist/Nazi narrative was widely trumpeted, and any evidence that contradicted this narrative was discounted – if it was acknowledged at all.

For example: The Nazi flag guy at the Ottawa Trucker Protest, whoever he was, fits the Establishment Narrative, so he represents the Freedom Convoy.

However, Sikhs at the Freedom Convoy, some of whom brought the Sikh flag, were an inconvenient reality that directly contradicted the Establishment Narrative. So according to those who wish to see the Freedom Convoy in a negative light, the Sikh protesters do not represent the Freedom Convoy.

Apparently the Sikh protesters do not represent anything at all; they are just “a Token.”

1 Nazi Flag Guy = Emblematic of the Freedom Convoy.

100 Sikhs = Token/Not Emblematic of the Freedom Convoy.

How does Candice Sero, an Indigenous woman at the protest who was trampled by the RCMP, fit the narrative?

…Well let’s just pretend that didn’t happen; ignore her, ignore tens of thousands of other protesters, ignore why they were there, and what they were about, and let’s get back to focusing on that Nazi Flag Guy.

As a counter-protester helpfully explained:

I tried really hard to de-emphasize issues of vaccination/COVID restrictions that were being used, in my mind, as cynical ‘wedge’ issues, and to emphasize opposing the convoy as a political vehicle of the far-right,”

This determination to see the Freedom Convoy as a racist/fascist/Nazi event, reality be damned, reminded me of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha.

I built my painting around that famous knight, because tilting at windmills was the principal activity of the Counter Protesters and Police who suppressed the Freedom Convoy.

I present – Don Quixote…de la Left!

Don Quixote de la Left – Oil Painting by Jordan Henderson – 36×52 inches / 91×132 centimeters

September 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Chile’s Boric wasted an opportunity for Palestine at the UN General Assembly

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | September 24, 2022

Chilean President Gabriel Boric may currently be the most outspoken leader in Latin America on Palestinian rights and Israeli violations. However, his rhetoric leaves much to be desired. It, in turn, raises questions about how Chile – the country with the largest Palestinian community in the region – can differentiate itself from other countries to become a model to follow, rather than following international consensus over the two-state compromise and Israel’s security narrative.

In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Boric spoke about Palestine’s right to freedom and sovereignty while mangling his message by including a false equivalence with Israel that eliminates the colonial context. “[Palestinian people] should yield to their inalienable right to establish their own free and sovereign state. In the same way, [let’s] guarantee Israel’s legitimate right to live within secure and internationally recognised borders,” Boric asserted.

Boric’s speech was pronounced “politically correct”, while noting that Chile’s stance has always advocated for the recognition of Palestinian people’s rights and Israel’s rights while promoting the two-state compromise, like the rest of the international community. In which case, Boric’s activist stances as president are unlikely to leave any impact on Chilean diplomacy. Under Boric, the Chilean government is advocating for the same stance that his predecessor Sebastian Pinera adhered to, which is a bonus for Israel, despite the grievances Israeli media aired upon Boric’s electoral victory.

Days before his UNGA speech, Boric postponed accepting the credentials of the new Israeli ambassador to Chile, Gil Artzyeli, in response to the Israeli forces’ killing of 17-year-old Palestinian Odai Trad Salah in Kufr Dan near Jenin. However, his stance, which made headline news in major media outlets worldwide, was diminished by the UNGA speech that attempted equivalence between the coloniser and the colonised while simplifying, to the point of obliteration, the reason why Palestinians are deprived of a state, possibly permanently.

Boric is not unaware of the Palestinian plight as a result of Zionist colonisation. Neither is he oblivious to the fact that Palestinians and the indigenous people of Chile – the Mapuche – have suffered similar forms of aggression because of governments criminalising their struggle for land reclamation and political autonomy. Yet, it is possible that, as president, Boric’s activist stances will be mellowed by diplomatic requirements, such as abiding by the two-state compromise, which has failed Palestinians and become defunct in all but international rhetoric.

Prior to the presidency, Boric stood out as one of the most vocal activists in Chile. As president, Boric is navigating a complex reality that includes the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and ties to Israel during that period, as well as the country’s reliance on securing military and surveillance equipment from Palestine’s oppressors.

To cast Israel and legitimacy together is an aberration, particularly when using such descriptions to balance advocating for Palestinian rights. Boric wasted an opportunity at his first UNGA speech to call out Israel’s colonial violence and how it invalidates legitimacy. It is not up to the international community to guarantee Israel’s existence, but Boric knows that Chile can play a pivotal role in ensuring that the international community gravitates towards the legitimacy of the Palestinian people’s political demands.

September 25, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Political Protest Is Not a White Collar Crime”

By Diana West | OffGuardian | September 23, 2022

On July 30, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a post-Enron law “aimed at fraud in corporations,” as summed up in a headline in the New York Times.

The newspaper elaborated:

The bill, an extensive overhaul of corporate fraud, securities and accounting laws, creates a regulatory board with investigative and enforcement powers to oversee the accounting industry and punish corrupt auditors. It also establishes new standards for prosecuting wrongdoing and gives corporate whistle-blowers broad new protections. Executives who deliberately defrauded investors would face long prison terms.

Did you know that this same bill crafted to stop white-collar-crime is being used as a big stick felony  charge against January 6 protestors?

I refer to the provision of the law against “obstruction of an official proceeding.” It’s a crime, the DOJ website tells us, which carries “a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, fine of $250,000 or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense.”

The financial penalty — that fine of $250,000 “or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense” — really gives it all away. That is, the crime this law is meant to prohibit is inextricably connected to financial activity, not political protest.

This provision already has an infamous and unjust past.

Perhaps its very first application was by mad-dog-prosecutor Andrew Weissman, who was able to convince a jury to convict and thus bankrupt the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for its business-as-usual, internal-policy-perfect destruction of Enron documents in the period before the company ever received a subpoena.

The Supreme Court overruled the lower court verdict, 9-0.

Now the misbegotten provision is being totally and willfully misapplied to political protest.

Indeed, in President Bush’s brief remarks on signing the bill twenty years ago, he singled out this one section of the lengthy law to reassure the American people that it would not be used to infringe on the People’s right to protest.

As Bush put it:

To ensure that no infringement on the constitutional right to petition the Government for redress of grievances occurs in the enforcement of section 1512(c) of title 18 of the U.S. Code, enacted by section 1102 of the Act, which among other things prohibits corruptly influencing any official proceeding, the executive branch shall construe the term “corruptly” in section 1512(c)(2) as requiring proof of a criminal state of mind on the part of the defendant.

It’s well worth remembering that the right to petition the Government for redress of grievance, as attorney Joseph D. McBride explains, was continually exercised across the country for much of the year 2020 during the George Floyds protests which preceded the January 6 protest.

“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” McBride recently told the Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we saw it.”

As reported by Deborah Heine in American Greatness :

McBride posited that the left-wing agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of “civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government entities to view even violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.

In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.

Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.

“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”

It is also the stuff of dictatorships to twist the law, hold show trials, and criminalize the state of mind of the political opposition.

Diana West is an award-winning journalist, a syndicated columnist for 15 years, and the author of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (Center for Security Policy Press, 2019), American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press 2013) and The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press 2007). In Fall 2013, West brought out a companion volume to American Betrayal titled The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners, which includes essays by the late Vladimir Bukovsky and M. Stanton Evans. She blogs at dianawest.net, and makes videos here. Having earned her Twitter suspension, Diana now thinks aloud and uncensored at Gab @realDianaWest.

September 23, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Iraqi girl killed during US military drills

The Cradle | September 22, 2022

A 15-year-old Iraqi girl, Zainab Essam Majed al-Khazali, was killed on 20 September by the gunfire of US army troops as they were conducting military drills on Victoria Base, near Baghdad International Airport.

The Iraqi Security Media Cell (ISMC) announced that it has launched an investigation into the murder, which it initially referred to as a “random shooting.”

Iraq’s security forces, however, said: “The killing of Zainab Essam Majed coincided with the presence of training operations for the American forces … the bullet that was taken out of the girl’s head confirms that it is from one of the weapons used by the American forces in the embassy and airport.”

The head of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq resistance group, Qais al-Khazali, demanded via twitter that “intelligence services present a detailed report to the Iraqi people, explaining … this cowardly incident, and how a military base can exist on Iraqi soil in clear violation of the Iraqi constitution … and sovereignty.”

Khazali also condemned the use of live ammunition in the US training and drill exercises, which he said were carried out in a residential area with a disregard for civilian life.

According to reports, the girl, who bears the same family name as the Asaib Ahl al-Haq leader, is the granddaughter of a member of the organization who was martyred, Majed al-Khazali. Her funeral procession was held the following day.

The killing of Zainab al-Khazali took place near the notorious Abu Ghraib prison camp, which was formerly run by US forces during the years following its invasion and occupation of the country in 2003.

Abu Ghraib was the center of several scandals involving the brutal torture, mistreatment, and murder of dozens of Iraqis by US military personnel.

The illegal US occupation of Iraq, which persists until today, has been responsible for the deaths of at least one million Iraqis.

Khazali was killed just days after the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran, whose passing has been used by western media and political leaders to further their attacks against the Islamic Republic.

During his speech at the UN General Assembly (UNGA), US President Joe Biden blasted Tehran for Amini’s death while in police custody, while at the same time failing to make any mention of Khazali.

September 22, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

In This House . . .

“Joint Base Cape Cod” contaminated groundwater plumes

By Richard Hugus | September 18, 2022

As reported by national news in the US, on September 16, 2022, 50 illegal immigrants from Venezuela were flown from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Officials on the island said they did not have the resources to take care of the immigrants, so they were transported by the Massachusetts National Guard to a military base on Cape Cod. The immigrants were tolerated on Martha’s Vineyard for exactly two days.

The military base they were taken to, with the purposely non-descriptive name, “Joint Base Cape Cod,” is about 30 miles north of the church in Edgartown where the immigrants stayed. The base was formerly known as the Massachusetts Military Reservation, or Otis/Camp Edwards. The base is notorious for being a dump site for the federal government, so it probably seemed to the authorities a logical place to get rid of the immigrants. The 22,000 acre base was designated a Superfund site in 1989 due to massive amounts of fuels and solvents dumped at Otis Air Base into the sandy soil above Upper Cape Cod’s sole-source aquifer. As more and more contaminated groundwater was being discovered on the Air Force side, yet more was discovered from the past dumping of propellants and explosives by the Army at Camp Edwards. At one site on the base in the 1960s, the Air Force dumped up to 6 million gallons of aviation fuel on the ground just to test aircraft emergency release valves. Enough fuel from here and elsewhere got into water supplies in nearby Forestdale to the point that tap water at a kitchen sink could be lit on fire. Meanwhile, the Army was accustomed for years to firing Howitzer and mortar rounds into the base “impact area” whose explosions would shake windows in residential areas all over the Upper Cape. Nearby residents also lived with the frequent sound of machine gun fire from one of many gun ranges. Indeed, the Army National Guard has lately insisted it needs 200 acres of forest clearcut for a new machine gun range, with 5,000 acres reserved for strays and overshoots. For those feigning such concern, this was some place to send a group of helpless refugees. The public has no access to and very little knowledge of this huge area of sunny Cape Cod.

Martha’s Vineyard has had its own episode of Pentagon abuse. A small island called Nomans, just south of the Vineyard, was used as an aerial bombing range for many years, leaving the land littered with unexploded ordnance and contaminated soil. Rather than remediate, the US Navy conveniently handed the land over the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who simply called it a conservation area, posted No Trespassing signs, and called it a day. The small island, a beautiful gem once inhabited by Wampanoag Indians and early settlers, it is now just a sacrifice zone, like a closed landfill. No one is allowed to set foot on it.

Both Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard have a service and tourist economy. Most people who live and work there are not wealthy, but have jobs serving the wealthy in one way or another. They build and repair the homes of the rich, they entertain them, run the restaurants, cook the food, clean the houses, and maintain their boats and cars. Low wage workers and immigrant labor are brought in every year for the summer season as there is evidently not enough money to pay local workers asking for a decent wage. Nor can working people afford houses on local wages. It’s a rentier economy. Poverty is real on both Martha’s Vineyard and the Cape because so many among the rich know very well how to spend as little of their money as possible for the services they receive. While working people there might not be happy about immigrant labor lowering wages and taking jobs, they would not have called the National Guard to come in and remove the strangers from Venezuela. And of course they would not have had the power to do so even if they wanted to. That call had to have come from new world order hopeful Governor Charlie Baker, on orders from Vineyard residents like Barack Obama who don’t want to see the results of the unrestricted immigration that they initiated actually becoming visible in their own neighborhoods. This is why the 50 Venezuelans were brought to eastern Massachusetts’ go-to military dump site, incidentally also home to the Barnstable County Jail — another thing no one wanted to see or hear anywhere else on the Cape.

We might ask why people in Venezuela got to the point of leaving family, home, culture, and country to emigrate in the first place. Obviously, two decades of coup attempts from the Chavez era on, relentless sanctions, and the theft of assets by the US has made life in Venezuela hard for many people. The US government created this problem. The further abuse of Venezuelans in a program of engineered destruction of sovereign countries and cultures, which is what the immigration crisis amounts to worldwide, is the same attack multiplied. Democrats are accusing Republicans of using the 50 immigrants as pawns. Higher powers still are using the Democrats and Republicans as pawns. This is a play inside a play and involves a level of manipulation that is not just cynical, but diabolical.

We’ve all seen the “In This House, We Believe” signs. The signs are displayed by some of the people on Martha’s Vineyard who this past week didn’t mind seeing 50 of the world’s poor carted off to a restricted military base. Between the lines on these cute little emblems of virtue we now read the ugly truth:

In this house, we believe . . .

In complete, shameless hypocrisy

In full totalitarianism, as long as it’s nicely wrapped in self-righteous liberal jargon

Virtue-signaling is better by far (and much easier) than actual virtue

Immigrants are welcome (to mow our lawns and wash our dishes)

Climate change is real (how else do we explain it being sunny one day and cloudy the next?)

All orientations are preferable to heterosexuality — the human race has gone on long enough

We hate humanity

A woman’s rights are human rights (but there is no such thing as a woman, so there is no such thing as “women’s rights”)

Black lives matter (especially when they can be used to create disruption and chaos while we do nothing to actually improve the lives of black people)

No human is illegal (unless he’s too close to my $12 million oceanfront property)

There is no place for hate (unless you’re a white hetero male, a Palestinian, a Muslim, a Christian, a Russian, a ‘right wing extremist’, an anti-vaxxer, a climate ‘denier’, or anyone else on our list)

Science is real (so long as it serves pharmaceutical company profits and ‘great reset’ eugenics)

Love is love, and all other nice-sounding, mystifying, empty tautologies

Kindness is everything (after money, power, and control)

September 18, 2022 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

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