“One lesson of recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.”
The level of hubris-laced ignorance it would take an ostensibly intelligent, well-informed individual to make such a statement, in public, in an official capacity, goes beyond political parody.
And yet, there was the American Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, uttering those words at the tail end of a press statement where he questioned the legitimacy of Russia’s dispatch of military forces to Kazakhstan. The Russian actions took place in the wake of widespread violence that prompted the Kazakh President to request help from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which Russia leads.
It should be noted that Russia was invited to send troops to Kazakhstan. Russia was also invited to send troops to Syria. As Blinken was speaking, the US had between 900 and 1,200 troops inside Syria, none of whom were there at the request of the Syrian government. Likewise, the US continues to maintain a force of some 2,500 troops in Iraq, even though the Iraqi parliament has called for their withdrawal for more than a year.
When it comes to understanding what an “unwanted houseguest” looks and acts like, Tony Blinken need only look in the mirror for the perfect illustration.
The US is scrambling to seize the moral high ground when it comes to the issue of military intervention, seeking to exploit the 2008 Russian-Georgian War, the 2014 reabsorption of Crimea, and the 2015 military intervention in Syria to illustrate its position.
While the issue of Russo-Georgian relations is a difficult one, dating to before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is an undisputed fact – indeed, one backed up by the European Union’s inquiry into the incident – that the 2008 conflict was triggered by a Georgian military incursion into South Ossetia, including an unprovoked attack on Russian peacekeeping forces stationed there. Subsequent Russian actions are attributable to Georgian aggression.
Likewise, Russia’s actions vis-à-vis Crimea and the Donbass region, where Moscow supports ethnically Russian separatists, all derive from the so-called ‘Maidan Revolution’, a US and EU-backed insurrection that overthrew Viktor Yanukovich, the duly elected president of Ukraine, and replaced him with a more Washington-friendly government.
And, lastly, the Russian intervention in Syria came at the request of the legitimate government in Damascus, which was under siege from foreign-funded and trained terrorists and insurrectionists. Russia’s actions were decisive, helping shift the military balance in favor of the Syrian government, and leading to the defeat of most of the anti-government fighters. The irony behind the Russian intervention is that it exposed the hypocrisy of the US, in so far as several of the terrorist groups Russia helped defeat were not only affiliates of Al-Qaeda but were also being funded by the US and its allies.
The US presence in Iraq and Syria, however, is the direct consequence of the illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Between the US and Russia, only one nation has violated international law when it comes to disregarding the sovereignty of others – and it is not Russia.
Tony Blinken did not limit his Russo-phobic commentary simply to the issue of unwanted houseguests. When asked during an interview on a Sunday morning talk show on January 9 whether he agreed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was seeking to restore the Soviet Union, Blinken answered: “I think that’s right… I think that’s one of President Putin’s objectives, and it is to re-exert a sphere of influence over countries that previously were part of the Soviet Union,” something that, Blinken added, was “unacceptable.”
First and foremost, as Russia has been making clear during its ongoing European security framework discussions with the US, NATO, and the OSCE this week, the issue of what is or isn’t acceptable when it comes to defining the scope and scale of Russian national security and related spheres of interest, is not something Moscow is willing to subordinate to Washington or its allies. Rather, it is a matter for Russia alone to decide.
It is the US, not Russia, which is seeking to continuously breathe life into the Cold War relic that is the NATO alliance. The history of broken American promises when it comes to the issue of NATO expansion – “not one inch east” has a different meaning in Brussels than anywhere else, it seems.
The ostensibly “defensive” NATO alliance has been, since the end of the Cold War, used for almost exclusively offensive military action, much of which has taken place outside the geographic boundaries defined by the treaty. Whether it be intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the dismemberment of Serbia, intervention in Libya, supporting the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or sustaining the illegal presence of US forces in Syria, NATO has made itself an unwanted houseguest across the globe.
Truth be told, if it were not for NATO actively seeking to attract both Georgia and Ukraine to its roster, the events of 2008 and 2014 might have unfolded completely differently.
Tony Blinken’s comments about the suitability of Russia as a houseguest are as fact-free as any made by senior international statesmen in modern times. The reality is the US is the unwanted houseguest, habitually overstaying its welcome, sowing chaos, death, and destruction in its path.
Using this analogy, Russia could be seen as the emergency clean-up crew tasked with trying to clean up the mess that accrues in the wake of America’s foreign policy tornado. Tony Blinken and his boss, President Joe Biden, seem to have difficulty focusing on the real consequences of their words and deeds, as their gaze is constantly fixed on an artificial horizon that only they can see.
Unfortunately for Washington, the rest of the world knows the truth, and who is to blame for what. Blinken can continue uttering nonsense about Russia but, from such ignorance, does not sound policy come. This should be a lesson for any nation, especially those in Europe, who are looking to the US for sound guidance and leadership when it comes to solving the world’s problems.
January 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | NATO, United States |
5 Comments
The mayor of Washington DC has decided to introduce new Covid restriction to the US capital starting on January 15, when businesses and many venues will start asking for proof of vaccination and, on top, a picture ID as yet more proof – that their vaccine pass really belongs to them.
The new rules concerning ID verification will apply to everyone over 18 who wishes to enter a restaurant, bar, gym, movie theater, etc., and the mandate is being introduced by Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat. Bowser announced the more stringent measures back in December.
Children aged 12 to 18 will also have to show vaccination cards if they wish to enter restaurants, concert venues, bowling alleys, and other venues. In addition, these businesses will have to put a sign in their window that notifies customers and reads, “Attention: Per Mayor’s Order 2021-48, COVID-19 Vaccination is REQUIRED to enter this business” – the Washington DC government’s site explains.
However, the inclusion of photo IDs in the vaccine mandate scheme in the District as an order coming from a Democratic mayor looks puzzling to those who recall that the party’s leaders, including President Biden, previously equated requiring photo IDs to vote to “21st century Jim Crow” – referring to historical state and local racial segregation laws in the US.
When Biden went after Georgia last summer for its new voter law that required citizens to prove their identity with an ID, he effectively accused the state and Republicans of introducing discrimination against minorities, who are most likely to lack picture IDs, saying the new legislation was “un-American” and designed to deny people their rights – in that case, the right to vote.
Biden went on to accuse his political opponents of enacting a law that was “a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience.”
But no such consideration seems to now be extended to Washington DC residents who will have to show their ID cards, driver’s licenses, passports, or another state-issued document to avoid getting cut off from many everyday activities.
January 12, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
3 Comments
Various commentators have suggested that I write something about recent events in Kazakhstan. I’ve been loath to do so since my knowledge of the country is very limited, but there are some interesting things to say about what others have been writing on the topic, particularly concerning how it all relates to Russia. Notably, a certain part of the online commentariat has been keen to express indignation that Russia has “invaded” Kazakhstan to suppress a “democratic revolution”.
The rapid spread of violence in Kazakhstan generated hopes in some circles that the mob would topple the “regime” and install a new government that would somehow or other distance the country from Russia. Alternatively, the hope was that “democracy” would arrive in Kazakhstan. With this, another brick in the wall of authoritarianism would collapse, bringing closer the day when it would collapse in Russia too.
All this was somewhat unspoken, but once the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which includes Russia, announced that it would send troops to help restore order in Kazakhstan, and once Kazakh forces took the offensive and began clearing away anti-government protestors, all these hopes were dashed. The Kazakh government isn’t out of the woods yet. Protests continue in several cities, and things could still go horribly wrong. But at the moment it’s looking like the regime will survive. The internet’s keyboard warriors and online regime changers are seriously annoyed and looking for someone to blame. The guilty party is obvious – Russia.
However, despite the headlines in today’s newspapers about Russia sending troops to “quell” the uprising, the Kazakh state’s survial has little to do with the Russians or the CSTO. It seems as if the CSTO contingent in Kazakhstan will amount to no more than about 2,500 troops, which for a country that size is a tiny quantity. The role of the CSTO is largely symbolic – it sends a message to protestors and Kazakh security forces alike that the government isn’t backing down and has powerful external support. That should deter some of the former while putting a bit of steel in the spines of the latter. Perceptions of strength matter in situations like this, and thus the CSTO’s support perhaps makes a slight difference. But the hard work of restoring order belongs largely to the Kazakhs themselves. Whatever the press tells you, “Russia” isn’t “putting down” the uprising.
Nor can it be said that Russia has “invaded” Kazakhstan, as so many have liked to claim this past week on Twitter. Take for instance all these Tweets from the likes of one-time US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves:
Various themes repeat themselves in all these: invasion, occupation, the “crushing” of democracy, and comparisons of Russia with Nazi Germany. It is, to be frank, more than a little over the top. You can’t invade, let alone occupy, a country the size of Kazakhstan with only 2,500 troops. Furthermore, the troops are there at the invitation of the internationally recognized government – recognized by us in the West as well as by everybody else. That’s hardly an invasion.
Maybe it’s because I’m a total reactionary, but I’m not too fond of the mob, and I’ve never understood why street protest (accompanied by looting and burning) is associated with democracy. The thing is that all those complaining about the efforts to restore order in Kazakhstan aren’t too fond of the mob either, at least when it starts attacking things that they like. A year ago, McFaul and others were complaining loudly about the crowd that assaulted the Capitol building in Washington DC. And none of those whose Tweets I copied above were to be seen complaining when the Ukrainian military responded to protests in Donbass by firing rockets from aircraft and shells from multiple launch rocket systems.
Somehow, though, people are rather inclined to like the mob when it attacks somebody or something they don’t like. If it’s anti-American, that’s bad. But if rioting and looting damages Russian interests – they’re all for it.
But here’s what really gets me. Do the McFauls and Ilveses truly believe that it would be better for Kazakhstan if the Russians and CSTO didn’t help restore order and the state collapsed? There’s a very real danger of at best anarchy and at worst civil war. How would that help anybody? We’ve seen this scenario before. In Ukraine, revolution led to counter-revolution and bloody violence. In Syria, likewise. And so on. It tends not to turn out well.
But it seems like people don’t care. The attitude appears to be “The worse the better”, as long as the chaos is not at home but on Russia’s borders. Let Kazakhstan descend into anarchy – that’s to be preferred to an order backed by the Russians. Suffice it to say, I don’t agree.
January 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Kazakhstan |
1 Comment
Driven by climate madness, the environmental movement has become the greatest advocate of destructive industrial development in history.
As Kant said: “To will the end is to will the means”. In this case the means to the phantom end of climate control have led environmentalists to abandon all of their principles. Solar and wind require environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale. Electrification requires the use of toxic chemicals on a similar scale. The hazardous waste stream is enormous.
Solar is the worst because the destruction of forests and open land is complete. Perhaps something lives under these vast solar slabs but not much and certainly nothing like what they destroy and displace.
As I pointed out in my recent article on Virginia’s ill-named Clean Economy Act, we are talking about hundreds of square miles of solar devastation today, for just one state.
To actually meet our need for electricity would require several thousand square miles of destruction just for Virginia. For the whole country the numbers are staggering, easily the biggest environmental disaster in our history.
Wind is environmentally destructive too, just in a different way.
Let me make this personal. I live in the mountains, in far eastern West Virginia. When I drive to the county seat I get a grand view of the big mountain to the west. It is called the Allegheny Front, the height of land between the Atlantic and Mississippi watersheds. My magnificent natural view is now being industrialized, dotted with windmills and more on the way.
I am sure natural vistas are everywhere threatened, because that is where the best wind is. Mind you we almost never get sustained winds strong enough for full power, but that just means they need more intrusive industrial wind machines to produce the juice.
Even worse, there is a viewpoint up on the Front called Bear Rocks, where crowds gather every fall to watch the hawk migration. Great numbers of hawks come by in swirling groups called kettles, working their way slowly southward down the Front. Surely significant numbers will be killed by the growing phalanx of giant chopping blades.
West Texas has something like 10,000 choppers and other states are rapidly going the same way. That the environmentalists can allow the killing of enormous numbers of protected birds is a clear abandonment of their principles. This is Silent Spring in real life, with entire species threatened.
Then too, environmentalists fight hard for roadless areas. Scattering giant wind machines around a mountain top requires a dense system of access roads, one to every tower. In rugged terrain these systems can be complex and so big, destructive land users.
At the other end of the wire we have chemicals, especially enormous numbers of big batteries.
First come the huge battery arrays needed to turn highly intermittent wind and solar power into reliable juice. Then come the myriad batteries needed to electrify our transportation system, which also requires a lot more solar and wind devastation. Note that a lot of juice will go through batteries twice on its way to use.
Minimizing the use of toxic chemicals has been a cornerstone environmental principle. That the movement should now opt for chemical energy as a central feature of our energy system is a complete abandonment of that principle.
Then there is solid waste, which has always been a central environmental concern. Compared to conventional power plants, wind blades and solar panels are short lived, batteries are ridiculously so. In a solar, wind and battery world we are likely talking about billions of tons of toxic waste.
I think just about every principle of environmentalism is violated by the proposed massive buildout of wind, solar and electrification. Why the environmentalists are not screaming and suing to stop this vast open land destroying, wildlife killing and chemically intensive action is beyond me. Clearly environmentalism has lost its way.
David Wojick contributes Posts at the CFACT site. He is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States |
3 Comments
Over the past several decades, the progressive Left has successfully fulfilled Antonio Gramsci’s famed admonition of a “long march through the institutions”. In almost every Western country, its adherents now dominate the education system, media, cultural institutions, and financial behemoths.
But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.
Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.
Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.
That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.
While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.
This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.
The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.
But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.
The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.
Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.
In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.
These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.
And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.
Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)
In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.
Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more than one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.
But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.
The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.
Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.
Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.
The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.
The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.
So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.
January 5, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Build Back Better, Great Reset, United States |
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Dissecting the Treaty of Versailles’s “Big Four”
In a Daily News Bulletin issued February 4, 1924, by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jewish leaders across the nation publicly mourned the passing of former war-time president Woodrow Wilson, the self-described “staunch friend of the Jews.” The telegram goes on to commemorate Wilson’s “intense interest in Jewish questions” by reviewing his political deeds as president, appointing Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court Bench despite vigorous opposition from the Court itself and urging the approval of the British Mandate over Palestine following the Balfour Declaration.
Nearly a century later, this adulation of America’s twenty-eighth president continues to be echoed by prominent Jewish leaders and intellectuals. In Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg’s book, “Wilson,” this formidable Head of State has influenced the decision-making of each succeeding American president up to former President Donald Trump. Furthermore, Berg argues that Wilson is the most pro-Jewish president in US history. This is attributed to Wilson’s breakaway from American isolationism, which guided the nation’s political function on the world stage for a hundred and twenty-five years.
Six months after winning a second consecutive term as president on the Democratic ticket (the first time since Andrew Jackson’s second term), Wilson asked the legislature to declare war on Germany in an imperative speech to Congress on April 2, 1917. His justification was to answer the question of the role the United States would play in the world – it was America’s duty to ensure that “the world must be safe for democracy.” This rhetoric has been repeated repeatedly by American politicians at all levels in subsequent generations, followed by military action.
As Wilson plunged the nation into Europe’s devastating four-year war which wrought 17 million deaths and 25 million wounded, he often portrayed himself as the beacon of progressive ideals, a missionary of self-determination, democracy, and multilateralism to the world and, by involuntary extension after the First World War, its conquered colonies from the ashes of the defeated German and Ottoman Empires. The question is on whose behalf and if foreign elements were acting abroad, at home, or both.
For example, it is entirely plausible today to assert that the invasion of Iraq was contrived almost entirely by high-ranking Jewish Zionists in the Bush administration for the long-anticipated purpose of removing Israel’s arch-nemesis at the time—Saddam Hussein—in another mission to destroy the Jewish State’s Arab neighbors and assert dominion over the region.The catch was that Israel would not be fronting the 2 trillion dollar bill and sacrificing 190,000 lives; that was left to the Americans.
Eighty years prior, before the founding of modern Israel, this similarly established Zionist paradigm in America’s political institutions persuaded the Wilson administration to do the same. Instead of winning the hearts and minds of the public through unbridled war propaganda and an unprecedented national tragedy for the specific purpose of creating a homeland for Jews, a cooperative network of Zionists in Britain, Russia, and the United States worked towards this goal through the imperial hand of the idealistic Wilson.
Jews long held Woodrow Wilson in high regard for his liberal politics and inclination to address their requests. When the former governor of New Jersey first ran for president in 1912, Boston’s Jewish Advocate published a political ad, pressing readers to join with “practically all the great Jewish leaders throughout the country” in endorsing him.These leaders included financier Jacob H. Schiff, philanthropist Nathan Straus, and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. At the time, beginning in 1906, the United States was faced with the difficult task of admitting roughly ten million immigrants, mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe.
This sudden influx overwhelmed several facets of the native populace, whereby the “restrictionists” emerged with literary test campaigns as a method by which to curtail subsequent waves of immigration. The American Jewish Committee was the most active and significant anti-restricionist lobby group in each of these battles through delay and outright blockage of the legislative passage. During his tenure as president, Wilson assisted by vetoing three restrictive measures he believed were aimed principally at Jews before being overridden by Congress. The AJC’s particular fixation on the plight of Russian-Jewish immigrants caused an extensive lobbying endeavor in America’s foreign policy.
This emerging conflict of interest was sidestepped upon the outbreak of the First World War. The intense pogroms and anti-Jewish sentiment of Czar Nicholas II caused the American Jewish community to side more with Germany than with Allied forces. Immigrant Jews even prayed that the “more civilized” Germans would liberate their suppressed brethren in Eastern Europe from Russian harassment. In the Yiddish press, the enemy was portrayed vividly as: “The Jews support Germany because Russia bathes in Jewish blood.” Who will dare say that it is a crime for Jews to hate their torturers, their oppressors and murderers?” The German Foreign Office took advantage of this position in order to maintain its favor in the Jewish community; in September, 1914, Dr. Isaac Straus was even sent to the United States to manage propaganda work among Jews for the German Information Bureau located in New York.
The German Information Bureau, despite official American neutrality, could not be more pleased following its meeting with the Jewish press. This came at a time when most Americans would rather side with French and British allies out of strong ancestral ties: “So far as our relations with the very influential Jewish press are concerned, they are in good shape, and will be carefully nourished. It is critical in this regard that all news pertaining to them elevate Jewish self-esteem; for example, the appointment of Jewish officers, the installation of Jewish professors, and honors bestowed upon Jewish professors should all be sent here.”
While war efforts were being bolstered in the Jewish press, American Zionist leaders adopted a policy of neutrality for the time being, stemming from Theodor Herzl’s stance on non-partisanship in a neutral country as war raged. During this time, it was Britain’s Grand Fleet that managed the naval blockade of supplies into Germany, starving 400,000 German civilians to death. For the first two years of the First World War, German war efforts nevertheless proved supreme thanks to their unexpected arsenal of submarines against the wealthier, more weaponized Allied Powers. Imperial German forces nearly captured Paris, expelled Russia from the war, and drove the French Army into mutiny, all before a Western Front victory was barely in their grasp by 1918. On three separate occasions throughout 1916, Germany pursued avenues to negotiate for peace, but both British and French resolve maintained that peace would only come about upon Germany’s defeat.
Zionist leaders eventually came to the realization that Allied victory meant Russia’s influence would be amplified in the Near East. In early 1915, a conditional Entente agreement even allocated Constantinople to Russia. This posed an issue as Constantinople rested in the possession of the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany and Austro-Hungary. High-profile Zionists had their eyes eastbound on Palestine as a suitable place to lay the groundwork for a Jewish homeland. In 1896, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, approached Sultan Abdul Hamid II and offered to pay off the Ottoman debt in exchange for a charter that permitted Zionists access to Palestine. The Sultan outright refused.
The prospect of a promised land for Jews never escaped one highly influential man’s attention — Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Through Brandeis, Zionist leadership “passed into American hands by default.” He was considered one of the men of “light and lead” on whom Wilson relied. Born in 1856 to secular Jewish immigrant parents from the present-day Czech Republic, he graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 20 and settled in Boston to open a law firm focused on progressive social causes. In his early career, he was distinguished for his public advocacy against powerful corporations, mass consumerism, monopolies, and public corruption while advising methods to restrict the influence of big banks and money trusts in his collection of essays, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.
These progressive positions would later be taken up by Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson on the larger question of the role of the national government and the future of the American economic system. By that time, Louis Brandeis was head of both the Federation of American Zionists and the American Zionist Movement after meeting the English-born Zionist leader and close associate of the late Herzl, Jacob de Haas. The prominent Jewish lawyer was converted into a staunch Zionist under the mentorship of leading Zionists during that time, such as Aaron Aaronsohn, Horace Kallen, Shmarya Levin, Bernard Rosenblatt, and Nahum Sokolow. From August 31, 1914, to October 1, 1916, Brandeis was also chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for general Zionist affairs.
The Brandeis-Wilson coalition was the start of a political partnership with far-reaching consequences on the international scene until Wilson’s death. The opportunity for career advancement presented itself so visibly that Brandeis switched parties and carried his advocacies, including Zionism, into American political institutions as a high-ranking political figure with direct access to the newly elected U.S. president.
Upon Wilson’s presidential win in November, he noted to Brandeis, “You were yourself a great part of the victory.” During Wilson’s first year as president, Brandeis was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. The ambitious president attempted to make Brandeis his Attorney General and later Secretary of Commerce, but intense resistance from corporate executives forced Wilson to rescind his plan to make the renowned radical part of his cabinet. Instead, he nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, and he was sworn in amid a public outcry.
At a time when correspondence between Zionist leaders and the American president was steadily rising, as the Great War intensified in its first year, Brandeis approached Wilson about Zionist plans, to which Wilson seemed receptive. By 1916, Brandeis established regular contact with the State Department on the future fate of the declining Turkish Empire following the war, with Hungarian-born leading Zionist and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in communication with Wilson’s chief adviser on European politics and diplomacy during the First World War, Edward Mandell “Colonel” House, on Zionist objectives. Specifically, Wise functioned as an intermediary between Wilson and House from 1916 to 1919. Wise began his Zionist career in the late 1890’s by assisting the movement’s ideological development and organization of its membership. Another acquaintance of Herzl’s, he served as American secretary of the World Zionist Movement and was instrumental in producing the aforementioned Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs.
Opposition to American entry into the First World War cut across political, racial, and economic lines. Various factions of society, including socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, pacifists, civil libertarians, Marxists, rural southerners, Canadian and Irish nationalists, and women’s groups, were just some of the small but vocal minorities opposing American militarism. International socialist groups, for example, were keenly aware of the capitalist mobilization the war promised to big business rivals. The working class fought, while the ruling class profited. This was America’s first debut as a global military power and pitted citizen against citizen until eventually the government itself grossly violated civil liberties under the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
In 1916, Wilson reignited his bid for re-election through his continued commitment to progressive change by calling for legislation regulating work hours and a minimum wage. Democrats campaigned on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” insisting to voters that a Republican victory would mean war with Germany. Just four months after his second inauguration, Wilson reneged on his campaign promise of neutrality and officially declared war. By this time, public resistance to this betrayal was minute. The preceding years of preparedness campaigns, patriotic zeal, and heavily propagandized press cycles swayed the consensus into viewing the war as just and necessary. Thousands more dissenters continued to be jailed, silenced, and deported under newly solidified justification.
Shortly after the U.S. entered into the war, the British Foreign Minister, Arthur J. Balfour, arrived in Washington. In a cable, James Rothschild urged Brandeis to discuss Zionism with Balfour on the viability of an English Zionist program to recognize Palestine as the Jewish national homeland. “Unanimous opinion is the only satisfactory solution for Jewish Palestine under British protectorate,” Rothschild explained in a telegram. Russian Zionists fully approve. Public opinion and competent authorities here are favorable… It would greatly help if American Jews would suggest this scheme to their government.The charitable activity of the Zionist movement was over. Now an era of wielding political power has commenced to shift the tide of international conflict under the London-Moscow-New York axis.
Only one month after American entry into the war, Brandeis followed through with Rothschild’s request. Appealing to Wilson’s progressive vision for the globe, Brandeis explained that a Jewish Palestine would fulfill the conditions of the peace settlement Wilson desired; Turkish despotism would be swept aside for a democratic government where economic and cultural development would be undertaken by a historically suppressed people.In reaction to the Balfour Declaration, Wilson said, “The allied nations, with the fullest concurrence of our government and people, agree that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.”
Partnered with Brandeis in courting Wilson was the Austrian-born Jewish lawyer and professor, Felix Frankfurter, a lifelong committed Zionist and member of the Zionist Organization of America. Frankfurter became acquainted with Brandeis in the Parushim, a secret Zionist society, reform movement, and arguably the first modern militant Zionist organization in America. Found by their former mentor, Horace M. Kallento, Zionist purpose was “a group much like the Peace Corps, young men and women who saw the Utopian opportunity that existed for the Jewish people in Palestine and who were willing to devote themselves to an ideal.”
The ideological motivations for endorsing Zionism were personal for Wilson as well: “To think that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” With Wilson formally persuaded, Brandeis passed along the good news via urgent cables to Rothschild in London. Two weeks later, Jacob de Haas, now advisor to Brandeis, cabled Russian born-Zionist leader and future president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, not only outlining the plan for Palestine but to communicate “an accurate statement of the prevailing sentiment in the United States to be presented to the Allied Governments.”
President Wilson was later asked directly by the British government about the likelihood of issuing a declaration of sympathy for the Zionist movement. Wilson responded that the time was not ripe. A month later, Wilson placed his full backing behind the affirmation as pressure mounted against Germany’s Turkish ally to make dispensations to the Zionists. The topic of the Balfour Declaration was on the table between the two world powers. Colonel House complained to Wilson in a note: “The Jews from every tribe have descended in force, and they seem determined to break in with a jimmy if they are not let in.”
Brandeis’ influence over Wilson in regards to Zionist ambition could not be understated. Wilson once remarked that it was Brandeis to whom he owed his career. According to Frank Edward Manuel, Wilson’s interest in Zionism and including it as part of his foreign policy was “being slowly nurtured by Louis Brandeis, one of the men who stood closest to him in the early years of the administration and who became the key figure in future American intervention in Palestine.”
A roadblock in the way of the highly anticipated declaration was the Counselor to the State Department, Robert Lansing. Lansing was completely bypassed in House and Wilson’s correspondence on the Balfour Declaration. In response, Lansing argued in a letter to Wilson why America must decline Balfour’s promise, noting that, among several reasons, “many Christian sects and individuals would undoubtedly resent turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ,” a flagrant secession from the protracted Christian support for the prophetic restoration of Israel.
Lansing ordered Ambassador Walter Hines Page to investigate and report prudently the British reasons for the Balfour Declaration. In spite of political opposition within the State Department, the declaration was officially signed by Lord Balfour after a two-year process of edits by British and American Zionists and officials. Despite its official status as a British document, it was Brandeis who spearheaded its drafting and application through Wilson.
News rapidly spread worldwide upon the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, with heaps of telegrams addressed to Wilson expressing their gratitude for his contributions. Leaflets were dropped over German and Austrian territory announcing, “The hour of Jewish redemption has arrived…” The Allies are giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel… Will you join them and help to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Stop fighting the allies who are fighting for you, for all the Jews… An Allied victory means the Jewish people’s return to Zion.”
By the summer of 1918, Turkish resistance was waning and President Wilson took this time to formally announce his public endorsement of the Balfour Declaration in August. Three months later, Germany was the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice agreement with the Allies. The war was over. The next battle would be held in Paris.
The ambitions of Wilson’s liberal internationalist foreign policy were outlined in the Fourteen Points and used as the basis of terms for Germany’s surrender at the Paris Peace Conference. The Peace Conference produced five treaties, one of which was the notorious Treaty of Versailles. There were a number of high-profile Jews present, not just in diplomatic positions but in many senior and important functions within the Allied delegations. This included Baron Sonnino for Italy, Edwin Montagu for Britain, Louis Klotz for France, and Paul Mantoux as the interpreter for the “Big Three”—United States, Britain, and France.
Wilson also endorsed Rabbi Wise to promote the Jewish program for Palestine in Paris. Another Zionist delegate was Frankfurter, who was among the nearly one hundred intellectuals that signed a statement of principles for the formation of the League of Free Nations Associations. This formally enacted Wilson’s mission to dispel isolationism in favor of increasing American participation in international affairs.
In the midst of empirical savagery slicing up Germany and parceling out Europe’s colonial holdings, the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was presented by a delegation of the Zionist Organization led by Weizmann. The terms of the newly established British Mandate involved promoting Jewish immigration and settlement, suggesting boundaries, self-government, and the assurance of religious liberty.
At the request of President Wilson, Jewish statesman and Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch attended the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor to negotiate a deal with the victorious Allied powers on the destiny of Germany. He served as a member of the American Delegation to the Preliminary Peace Conference and on the Committee on Form of Payments of Reparations. Baruch is credited with managing America’s economic mobilization in the First World War while chairman of the War Industries Board. While Baruch opposed the strenuous financial tenets of punishing Germany, he nonetheless attempted to assist the Senate in passing the Treaty of Versailles.
Baruch also played a significant role in securing France’s vote in favor of the Palestine Partition Plan. He swayed their vote by visiting France’s UN delegate and heavily suggesting that failure to support the resolution could result in America withholding desperately needed monetary support as the war devastated France’s financial market.
The renowned English economist, John Maynard Keynes, was also in attendance at the Peace Conference as a delegate of the British Treasury. Disgusted by the ravenous nature of the treaties, particularly the Versailles Treaty, Keynes publicized a negative portrayal of the treaties in his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In response, Baruch paid John Foster Dulles $10,000 to ghostwrite his own book, The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty, to counter Keynes by exalting the treaties.
The most significant of American Jewish attendees, however, was Justice Brandeis himself, whose task at the world’s peace tables was to assist Colonel House “in collecting peace data for President Wilson.” The task was clear: “Colonel House will devote his attention to problems concerning the war in the west, while Justice Brandeis will study the near eastern question.” Their work will form the basis for the country’s contention.”
For a liberal president known for endorsing and exporting democratic ideals even through coercion, its inconsistent implementation was noted during the peace talks and formally addressed on August 28, 1919, through the presentation of the King-Crane Commission. The commission argued that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably lead to an immediate violation of the right of the indigenous Palestinian people to self-determination and deemed the Zionist program incompatible.
The report also stated that meetings with Jewish representatives led them to conclude that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine through armed forces” and begged the Peace Conference to reject Zionist proposals. The findings of this report were suppressed for three years by Brandeis until after the Peace Accords were passed. Working diligently to ensure the stipulations of the Balfour Declaration were incorporated into the final arrangement was Frankfurter, who found the findings of the commission to “cheat Jewry of Palestine.”
As the dissolution of the former Ottoman Empire began via the Treaty of Sevres, the vehicle for colonizing Palestine as spelled out by the Balfour Declaration was put into effect under the Brandeis-guided Wilson. The Council of the League of Nations and the United States both approved the Mandate for Palestine in July of 1922. It was clear from the beginning that the flagrant denial of self-government for the Palestinian population would continue until the Jews were strong enough to take the reins of government in the region.
For four days in April 1922, Congress debated resolutions brought forth to reaffirm the colonial implications of the Balfour Declaration as urged by Zionists. One of the vocal participants of its opposition was Professor Edward Bliss Reed, who testified in a prophetic hearing before Congress about the outcome of what American support entailed: “If you indorse the Balfour declaration, you are caught absolutely in the mandate…” What I want to warn you against is getting caught up in the mandate in what I consider an impasse. It will devastate this country, Palestine. I want to prevent my country from doing something that will bring it untold trouble.”
Nevertheless, Congress was subjected to endless Zionist pressure and passed the Lodge-Fish Resolution endorsing the British Mandate for Palestine as laid out by the Balfour Declaration, which was signed by Wilson’s presidential successor, Warren G. Harding, on September 21, 1922.
When Wilson died two years later, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, Louis Lipsky, stated publicly, “Mr. Wilson followed with interest the progress of the Zionist movement even after he retired to private life.” In 1921, when informed that the Mandate for Palestine had been finally ratified, he telegraphed to the Zionist Organization of America: “I am proud that it should be thought that I have been of service to the Jewish people.”
The First World War was proclaimed to represent “the war to end all wars”, bringing about a golden future on the promise of self-determination, democracy, mutual security, and peace. The cost would only be the blood and ashes of young, idealistic men committed to the service of their nation. What resulted was the pervasive indifference and lack of cohesive understanding of the memory of the war in spite of its devastating cost. As Steven Trout tried to explain the lack of American consciousness toward the war, “What exactly should the nation recall about the war? Is neutrality failing? The bravery of the combat soldier? The futility of trench warfare? The racial discrimination that permeated the ranks? Are there domestic attacks on German Americans? The botched peace processes? ”
Not to mention the American public that had opposed entry into Europe’s war was forced to grapple with the casualties of 120,000 soldiers and the reintegration of 200,000 wounded men, crippled of mind and body. For Wilson, it was his lifelong and close political partnerships with notable Jewish Zionists fully entrenched in American institutions that prompted his breakaway from isolationism—to which the United States has never returned. More consequential was Wilson’s setting the pattern for amplifying and servicing the dominance of a foreign state as the costs continue to rise.
Footnotes
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, INC., “Leaders Pay Tribute To The Passing Of A Great Statesman,” Daily News Bulletin, last modified February 4, 1924, https://pdfs.jta.org/1924/02-04_025.pdf.
Galia Licht, “Who Was the Most Pro-Jewish U.S. President? Woodrow Wilson, Obviously, ” Haaretz.com, September 25, 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/premium-which-prez-was-most-pro-Jewish-1.5340052.
Casey Titus, “History’s Deceptive Buildup Against Saddam Hussein,” The Duran, accessed March 22, 2021, https://theduran.com/history/deceptive-buildup-against-Saddam-Hussein
Nathan Guttman, “Top White House posts go to Jews,” The Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-features/top-white-house-posts-go-to-jews, last modified April 25, 2006.
Paulina Cachero, “According to reports, US taxpayers have paid an average of $8,000 per person and more than $2 trillion in total for the Iraq War alone.”Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/us-taxpayers-spent-8000-each-2-trillion-iraq-war-study-2020-2, last modified February 6, 2020.
Jonathan D. Sarna, “Woodrow Wilson: A Jewish Hero.”What Should We Do with His Racism? ” The Forward, November 15, 2016, https://forward.com/opinion/450092/woodrow-wilson-was-a-hero-to-jews-what-should-we-do-about-his-racism/?
Joseph Rappaport, “The American Yiddish Press and the European Conflict in 1914.” 113–28 in Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 3/4 (1957).http://www.jstor.org/stable/4465551.
Rappaport, page 116.
Jon Guttman, “Did the Germans Try to Make Peace in 1916?,” HistoryNet, https://www.historynet.com/did-the-germans-try-to-make-peace-in-1916.htm, last modified December 18, 2014.
Elis Gjevori, “How Theodor Herzl Failed to Convince the Ottomans to Sell Palestine,” https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-theodor-herzl-failed-to-convince-the-ottomans-to-sell-palestine-46991, last modified May 25, 2021.
Adler, Selig. “The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era.” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 4 (1948): 303–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615334.
Jewish Virtual Library, “Louis D. Brandeis,” last modified January 2016, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/louis-d-brandeis.
Jonathan D. Sarna, “Louis D. Brandeis: Zionist Leader,” Brandeis University, last updated in 1992, https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarna/americanjewishcultureandscholar.
American Jewish Archives, “A Finding Aid to the Stephen S. Wise Collection, 1893-1969,” The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, accessed December 31, 2021, https://collections.americanjewisharchives.org/ms/ms0049/ms0049.htm
Catherine Gilchrist, “Socialist Opposition to World War I,” Dictionary of Sydney, last modified in 2014, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/socialist_opposition_to_world_war_i
Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann to Brandeis (cable), April 21, 1917 (received April 25), Zionist Archives, New York City, Jacob de Haas Archives.
Lebow, Richard Ned. “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration.” The Journal of Modern History, 40, no. 4 (1968): 507 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1878450.
Jewish Virtual Library, “U.S. Presidential Quotes About Jewish Homeland & Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/u-s-presidential-quotes-about-jewish-homeland-and-israel-jewish-virtual-library, accessed December 31, 2021.
Schmidt, Sarah. “The ‘Parushim’: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1975): 122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23880453
De Haas Archives, Brandeis to Rothschild (cable), May 9, 1917.
Adle, Selig. “The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era.” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 4 (1948): 306. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615334.
Ahmed, Hisham H. “From the Balfour Declaration to World War II: The U.S. Stand on Palestinian Self-Determination.” Arab Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1/2 (1990): 9–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41858937.
Brendan Devenney, “Chapter One—Zionism: The Beginning,” Medium, last modified November 2, 2021, https://medium.com/@dubhelloco/chapter-one-b8d8b77b38b8.
Levene, Mark. “Nationalism and Its Alternatives in the International Arena: The Jewish Question in Paris, 1919.” Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 3 (1993): 522. http://www.jstor.org/stable/260644.
Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, 261.
“BERNARD BARUCH: A PUBLIC MAN’S PRIVATE LIFE,”https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/, n.d.https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/bernardbaruch/world-war-i/.
Saul J. Singer, “Bernard Baruch: ‘America First’,” The Jewish Press-Breaking News, Opinions, Analysis and More on Israel and the Jewish World | Last modified March 29, 2017, https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-Jewish-world/bernard-Baruch-America-first/2017/03/29/.
Gates Brown, “Baruch, Bernard Mannes | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1),” 1914-1918-Online. WW1 International Encyclopedia, last modified March 16, 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/baruch_bernard_mannes.
Butler Citizen, “Zionist Louis Brandeis Takes Control of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference,” Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/35334878/zionists-louis-brandeis-takes-control/, last modified October 2, 1917.
Ahmed, 23,
United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-seventh Congress, Second Session, on H. Con. Res. 52, Expressing Satisfaction with the Re-creation of Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish Race April 18, 19, 20, and 21, 1922 (Kessinger Publishing, 1922), 23–24.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Jews Mourn the Death of Woodrow Wilson,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-mourn-death-of-woodrow-wilson, last modified in 1921.
January 4, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Human rights, Palestine, UK, United States, Zionism |
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AT the end of November, a piece of BBC agitprop to stoke up fervour for vaccinating Africa went viral. As a British citizen of African descent living in London, I was disgusted by it.
I am concerned that people in Africa may ‘get it’ even less than the average Westerner and I really want to try to reach a few Africans who might be wondering what Covid could mean for them.
So let’s start by imagining if Big Pharma were to run a modestly honest advertisement to recruit dealers for pushing Covid ‘vaccines’ in Africa.
It might read something like this: ‘International drug cartel requires Western-educated Black face to front our public campaign to push experimental and unnecessary Covid vaccines on the impoverished African continent.
‘This is a tough market, highly suspicious of the product and not without good reason. Smile and dial merchants need not apply, as you must bypass the consumer to target the decision-maker.
‘Successful applicants must display the ability to rail melodramatically at the “racist vaccine-hoarding” injustices perpetrated by the West against Africa, appealing to the woke sensibilities of those in positions of power within key Western institutions. African leaders will then be expected to do as they’re told.’
I must confess that I reverse-engineered that ad after watching the successful applicant going through the motions like a performing seal on a BBC World News slot set aside for just such agitprop.
Following the latest Covid variant hype, the co-chair of the African Union’s Vaccine Delivery Alliance, Dr Ayoade Alakija, announced on the UK’s flagship propaganda organ: ‘What is going on right now (the emergence of the Omicron Variant) is inevitable.
‘It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent and speedy manner. It is a result of hoarding by high-income countries of the world and quite frankly it is unacceptable. These travel bans are based in politics and not science. It is wrong.’
Abandoning any pretence at journalism, the BBC presenter, Philippa Thomas, played the role of therapist by responding: ‘I hear your anger about the immediate reaction and the lack of action beforehand.’
The stage direction becomes even more obvious and cringeworthy as Thomas then pauses, providing a cue for the good doctor to glance at her script and resume the televised amateur dramatics: ‘So this is hopefully a dress rehearsal because until everyone is vaccinated no-one is safe … why are the Africans unvaccinated? It’s an outrage because we knew we were going to get here.
‘We knew this is where the hoarding, the lack of IP (intellectual property rights) waivers, the lack of co-operation on sharing tech and sharing know-how, we knew this was the crossroads it was going to bring us to. To a more dangerous variant.’
The only valid question she raises concerns the swift travel bans placed on Southern African countries: ‘Why are we locking away Africa when this virus is already on three continents? Nobody is locking away Belgium, nobody is locking away Israel.’
This is an emotional ploy to gain the trust of the small handful of privileged Africans watching this drivel. She is saying to them: ‘I am right-on, woke, one of you.’ She quickly jumps back on board the Covid cult train with a policy ‘nudge’ that must have African leaders reaching for their sickbags.
‘Something needs to be done to everywhere. My recommendation is to have a co-ordinated global shutdown of travel, for the next month if you want, but don’t single out Africa.’
And then back to the greedy, vaccine-hoarding West: ‘The Botswana government ordered 500,000 doses of vaccines at 29 dollars per dose, much higher than the rest of the world paid. They did not get those vaccines because other people jumped ahead in the queue. Moderna supplied to other countries … and so now we have a variant.’
Not a single grain of this guerrilla marketing campaign was challenged by the BBC journalist.
The obvious starting point for a presenter with half an ounce of journalistic integrity would be to explore whether the ‘vaccines’ are working and whether they would indeed have prevented a variant. After all, the fact that they do not halt transmission and infection is no longer controversial.
No sales pitch involving an illness would be complete without recourse to fear-based marketing tactics. Enter the Omicron narrative.
Despite Dr Alakija’s claim that we now have ‘a more dangerous variant’, there was no evidence that this variant would make any difference to disease severity at the time she was invited by the BBC to make her vaccine sales pitch for Africa. (Nor is there proof that vaccination prevents variants from arising in the first place).
Since then, the evidence emerging is that Omicron is less severe than previous variants and more contagious – the ideal combination for hastening herd immunity with minimal population health impact.
Telling medium-sized lies and half-truths with a straight face has always been the minimum qualification for political office, but Covid has raised the bar to a new height – the ability to swim in a pool of one’s own metaphorical vomit without flinching.
The BBC ‘discussion’ might have turned to safety, to tease out how much personal risk Africans will be expected to bear in submitting to a vaccine that doesn’t perform the primary function of a vaccine.
The word ‘safety’, however, was not permitted to impinge in any way on the protestations of the injustice of depriving Africans of the wondrous medical treatments emanating from the hallowed laboratories of Western science.
The reticence about safety is understandable from a marketing perspective since, by any objective measure, these ‘vaccines’ are the most dangerous mass medications rolled out in modern history.
Perhaps Dr Alakija should have been quizzed about how Africans might react to the drug manufacturers’ lack of confidence in the safety of their own products in light of their refusal to distribute it to countries who refuse to provide blanket immunity from liability for injury.
Not a single word of safety information was explored, even in the vaguest terms, in the BBC report. Nothing. Juxtapose studies highlighting the risk of dangerous heart inflammation for young males following Covid vaccination against Africa’s far younger population, with a median age of around 20.
You’d think this safety risk might get a passing mention. Yet neither of the two stooges saw fit to broach the prospect that many young Africans – whose risk of dying from Covid is so small that it is hard to measure – may die following vaccination.
The callousness of this omission is standard operating procedure in Western liberal discourse, a key function of which is to drape a ‘humanitarian’ cloak over policies that enrich corporate interests in the West while harming and exploiting the poor.
Unveiling the farce of the BBC plug for Africa’s vaccination allows us to consider a game in which we imagine what other doctors might say if the BBC were to air credible dissenting voices – a practice that was once regarded as the bread and butter of journalism, but which would now be a radical act of rebellion.
It’s not a difficult game to play. In fact, no imagination is required, because the actual statements of credible dissenting doctors are available on other independent media news channels, as reported in TCW Defending Freedom on December 8.
A new channel based in Austria, AUF1, gives a platform to those medical professionals who refuse to go along with the official narrative.
Typical is Dr Heiko Schöning, who says: ‘The corona panic is a stage-managed production. It’s a confidence trick. It is now urgent that we understand we are now in the grip of a worldwide Mafioso-style criminal enterprise. We can see we are dealing here with organised crime. So what do we do? We don’t play along any longer. Here and now we have to draw the red line.’
Had Dr Schöning just finished watching the two stooges on BBC World News when he described ‘the corona panic’ as ‘a stage-managed production’?
Whether these doctors are right or wrong is irrelevant to the journalistic duty to present credible dissenting voices to the public. The failure to do so goes a long way to meeting the criteria for propaganda.
The question in relation to Dr Alakija’s BBC guerrilla marketing campaign is: Do enough Africans know that there are alternative credible narratives to challenge the mainstream BBC vaccine narrative and how would they respond if these competing narratives were presented?
Does Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, need mass vaccination? Almost two years into this global nightmare, with evidence showing that up to 80% of South Africans (how similar for other African nations?) may have already been exposed to the virus, less than 6% of Africa vaccinated, and a death toll a fraction of that in the ageing populations of the West (Africa’s Covid deaths are 3% of the global total), it is clear that Africa has already learnt to live with the virus.
Had Africans succeeded in applying the same level of rigorous lockdown stupidity that was achieved in the West, it would not have made the slightest difference, as real science is conclusively demonstrating not just the futility of lockdowns but their positive destructiveness.
Despite looser lockdowns (perhaps partly because of this) Africa fared much better than the illiberal West in health outcomes.
No doubt there are other variables at play, but cheap, effective early treatments in some parts of Africa were used to good effect and should continue to be the focus of attention.
Africa and the entire planet would get far more bang for their buck from policies addressing human health holistically rather than with expensive experimental ‘vaccines’ which will continue for as long as human beings are prepared to, or more likely forced to, surrender their bodies to Big Pharma and authoritarian governments.
It must be patently obvious to African leaders that the Covid crisis is a manufactured one, but that does not make it any less of a crisis.
Western liberal democracy is being dismantled at breakneck speed under the cover of Covid containment policies.
The criminality, coercion, censorship, propaganda and blatant negligence all signal the logical conclusion to a brutal colonial mindset – the attempted colonisation of the entire globe to serve the interests of a global elite which has successfully captured Western governments and supranational organisations.
The psychopaths whose aim is to introduce a technocratic global system of human control understand only too well that shutting off travel for economies that rely on tourism is a far bigger killer of economies, and therefore lives, than this virus has ever been.
The message being sent by the sadistic controllers to Africa’s leaders is a simple one: Get serious about imposing vaccines and the technocratic population control measures for which which vaccines are the delivery system … or else.
Covid containment policies represent a desperate authoritarian response to permanent decline. This cannot end well for the West and if the West is a sinking ship, then Africa must not blindly tether itself to this Titanic disaster.
December 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Africa, BBC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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One of the amusing aspects of the ongoing controversy over those still-secret CIA records relating to the Kennedy assassination has been the reaction of lone-nut theorists. Hardly any of them, if any at all, are publicly calling on President Biden to disclose those records now rather than delaying disclosure for another year.
What’s up with that? Surely, lone-nut theorists don’t really buy into the “national security” rationale for keeping 58-year-old records relating to the assassination secret from the American people. I don’t know of anyone who really buys into that rationale. After all, what do they think will happen if those records are suddenly disclosed — that the Cuban communist army will invade Miami and start moving up the coast toward Washington?
I’ll tell you why those lone-nut theorists don’t demand immediate disclosure of those documents? They’re scared. Very scared. They fear, at least on a subconscious level, that those remaining records include powerful circumstantial evidence establishing that what happened on November 22, 1963, was a regime-change operation on the part of the national-security establishment. Why else would they still be hiding those records? No, the Cuban army is not going to invade Miami and start moving north toward Washington.
And no, I’m not suggesting that those 58-year-old, still-secret CIA records contain a confession of wrongdoing. Nobody would be stupid enough to put a confession into writing. And even if someone was that stupid, no one would be stupid enough to deliver such a confession to the Assassination Records Review Board or the National Archives.
The JFK assassination is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Imagine a really complicated puzzle that has 1000 small pieces to it. Your kids have lost 25 percent of the pieces. You decide to put the puzzle together anyway. You finish it. Even though you’ve only got 75 percent of it completed, you can still tell that it’s a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Then, you find several more pieces. You now have 80 percent of the pieces and you’re able to see the Eiffel Tower more clearly.
That’s the way it is with the Kennedy assassination. With around 75 percent of the pieces, one can see that this was a national-security state regime-change operation. What those remaining records will do is disclose several more small pieces that make the regime-change picture even clearer. That’s why they are hiding them. That’s why they have hidden them for 58 years. That’s why they will continue hiding them, even past Biden’s December 22, 2022, deadline for disclosure. It’s because those still-secret records contain additional incriminating pieces to the puzzle that further fill out the regime-change mosaic.
Permit me to address three factors regarding the Kennedy assassination.
The first one is what I call the Inconceivable Doctrine. It holds that it is just inconceivable that the Pentagon and the CIA would conduct a regime-change operation against President Kennedy.
Really? How can it be inconceivable given the fact that the Pentagon and the CIA engaged in regime-change operations against presidents and prime ministers of foreign countries, both before and after the Kennedy assassination?
Their violent coup in Iran in 1953 that ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from office.
Their assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba.
Their regime-change operation in Guatemala in 1954, in which they ousted the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, from office and also targeted him for assassination.
Their repeated assassination attempts against Cuban president Fidel Castro.
Their kidnapping and assassination of General Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces.
Their violent coup in Chile against the democratically elected president, Salvador
Allende, which left him dead.
Their participation in Operation Condor, the top-secret kidnapping, torture, and assassination program in South America.
Given those regime-change operations and Operation Condor, how can it be inconceivable that they would do the same to a democratically elected U.S. president, especially one whose policies they are convinced pose a grave threat to national security.
What lone-nut theorists just do not want to confront is the fact that the little monster that was brought into existence to assassinate and regime-change foreign leaders and others turned inward to protect America from a president whose philosophy and policies, they were convinced, posed a grave threat to national security — a much graver threat, in fact, than those other leaders posed who they assassinated or regime-changed. See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
The second factor: In the Guatemalan and Chilean regime-change operations, the U.S. national-security establishment told their national-security counterparts in those two countries that the latter had the moral duty to protect their countries by ousting their president whose policies supposedly posed a grave threat to their own national security. How can a domestic regime-change operation be inconceivable given that mindset on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment?
The third factor: The fraudulent autopsy. In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board broke the dam of silence surrounding the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted on Kennedy’s body just a few hours after the assassination.
Consider just one aspect to the fraudulent autopsy — the two brain exams that were conducted, the second of which did not involve President Kennedy’s brain.
For 30 years, the national-security establishment had succeeded in keeping its autopsy on Kennedy’s body secret from the American people. It did this by “classifying” it and forcing military personnel involved in the autopsy to sign written secrecy oaths. The personnel were threatened with severe punitive actions if they ever talked about what they had done or seen.
For 30 years, the three military pathologists who conducted the autopsy claimed that there was only one brain examination. That was a lie. And there is no innocent explanation for that lie. It is incriminating, highly incriminating.
The ARRB staff determined that there were two brain exams. John Stringer, the official photographer for the autopsy, told the ARRB that he was at the first brain exam. He told them that at that exam, the brain was “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread. That’s standard procedure in gunshot wounds to the head.
Stringer also stated that the photographs of the brain in the official autopsy records were not the photographs he took.
Stringer also told the ARRB that he was not at the second brain exam, which was attended by all three military pathologists and some unknown photographer. At that second brain exam, the brain was not sectioned. That could not have been the brain at the first brain exam because a sectioned brain cannot reconstitute itself.
And that’s just the tip of the autopsy iceberg. See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.
As I have repeatedly stated over the years, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Certainly no lone-nut theorist has ever come up with one. That’s how we know that this was a national-security state regime-change operation. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means cover-up in the assassination itself, especially given that the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was launched at Parkland Hospital at the moment Kennedy was declared dead. See The Kennedy Autopsy.
Notice something important about all this: Whenever lone-nut theorists say that there isn’t evidence of a domestic regime-change operation, they never — repeat never! — address the fraudulent brain exams and the fraudulent autopsy. That’s because they know that a fraudulent brain exam and a fraudulent autopsy necessarily mean a national-security regime-change operation carried out against Kennedy.
The sooner America comes to grips with the fact that the Kennedy assassination is every bit a part of our legacy as a national-security state as all the other regime-change operations, the better off we will be. Acknowledging the truth about out national-security legacy will be the first step in ridding ourselves of the evil system known as a national-security state and restoring our founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.
December 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | CIA, JFK Assassination, United States |
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At a time when the Biden administration is panicking in an attempt to keep energy prices down, the House has slapped a “fee” on methane that is being called a “stealth tax” on natural gas and everyone who uses it.
The House bill results in an “escalating tax on methane emissions by oil and gas producers,” a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal points out. The tax will hit $1,500 per ton by 2025 and the fee is supposed to be a contribution to recent promises made in Glasgow to curb methane emissions.
The cost of the fee will obviously get passed along to the consumer, which will then result in even higher energy prices than consumers are already struggling with. 180 million Americans use natural gas to hear their homes, the report says.
In the meantime, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has come out and stated that half of U.S. households that heat with natural gas will pay 30% more than winter than they did last year. This methane tax could add another 17% to an average bill, the WSJ editorial board writes.
The WSJ op-ed board calls it a “regressive tax” and says that “Department of Energy notes the average energy burden for low-income families is three times higher than for more affluent households”.
The methane tax “exposes the contradiction at the heart of Democratic climate policy” and clearly violates President Biden’s promise not to raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 per year, the op-ed argues.
The op-ed concludes by arguing that once the methane tax is in place, it’ll be easy to raise over time. Combined with new methane regulations, it’ll continue to raise costs and introduce inefficiencies for producers.
The methane tax is “targeted, punitive and can be linked to higher consumer energy bills,” the op-ed concludes.
December 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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Anti-fossil-fuel climate policies increase energy prices, blackouts and death tolls
Climate policies promoted and imposed by Team Biden and Democrats are based on junk science, headline-grabbing scare stories, and computer models that create far-fetched “scenarios” asserting that fossil fuel use and emissions will cause Earth to warm by 4 degrees C (7 F)over the next 80 years, and cause Arctic warming that will bring colder winters.
Those dire predictions are used to justify more taxpayer-funded “research,” like a recent Columbia University “mortality cost of carbon” study that claims 83 million people (the population of Germany) “could be killed” this century by those rising planetary temperatures. Therefore we must take “immediate action” to “transform” our energy and economic systems, and replace oil, gas and coal with (millions of) wind turbines and (billions of) solar panels and backup batteries.
These policies are lethal for people and planet They would require mining on scales unprecedented in human history, much of it by slave and child laborers, and nearly all using fossil fuels – bringing massive habitat and wildlife losses, air and water pollution, and horrific human health and safety problems.
But since most of the mining, ore processing and manufacturing will occur in other countries, far from the USA, politicians and climateers can say this “alternative energy” is “clean and green.”
Worse, climate policies cause widespread “energy poverty” – energy prices rising above families’ ability to stay adequately warm (or cool) at reasonable cost, given their incomes. That means people die.
Modern housing and energy systems enable people to adapt to and survive even extreme heat and cold – even in Antarctica, which recently had the coldest winter temperatures ever recorded: -61ᵒ C (-78ᵒ F). However, adaptation and survival become nigh impossible when government policies make it hard to heat or cool homes properly amid joblessness, inflation and soaring oil, natural gas, coal and electricity prices.
Indeed, it is often on the coldest and hottest days and nights, when heating or cooling are most essential, that winds blow at inadequate speeds to turn turbine blades and/or the sun shines with inadequate intensity on solar panels, to generate electricity. This (and wind and solar variability in general) results in recurrent blackouts and necessitates “backup” energy: coal, natural gas, diesel, hydroelectric or expensive battery systems, which significantly increase energy costs and worsen energy poverty, illness and death.
Proposed Biden/Democrat Green New Deal policies would require that still perfectly good natural gas furnaces, water heaters, ovens and stoves be replaced with costly heat pumps and electric appliances, powered by expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar systems. They would necessitate installing charging stations for electric cars, upgrading home and neighborhood electrical systems to 220 volts, and having pricey battery “power walls” for backup power during increasingly frequent blackouts.
All this would cost trillions of dollars, with families and small businesses bearing the brunt.
Contrary to faulty global warming “research,” far more people die in cold weather than in hot summers. In the United States and Canada, cold causes 45 times more deaths per year than heat: 113,000 from cold versus 2,500 from heat. Worldwide, with air conditioning far less available in already hot countries than in the United States, some 1,700,000 people die annually from cold versus 300,000 from heat.
A 2014 Public Health England University College of London Institute of Health Equity report underscores how energy poverty severely, disproportionately and inequitably affects poor, elderly, fixed-income and minority families – resulting in numerous, needless illnesses, health problems and deaths.
Cold homes cause or exacerbate risks of asthma, bronchitis, flu, cardiovascular disease and other adverse health conditions. Cold temperatures also increase depression, anxiety and other mental health problems, intensifying medical and physical issues. Young children, older people, those with preexisting health conditions and other vulnerable groups are especially susceptible to hypothermia, illness and death.
The Health Equity Institute calculated that one-tenth of all “excess winter deaths” in England and Wales are directly attributable to fuel poverty, and 21% of excess winter deaths are attributable to the coldest 25% of homes. Between 1990 and 2014, researchers estimated, 30,000 to 40,000 people died each year who would not have perished if their homes hadn’t been so cold. US studies reach similar conclusions.
Adjusting for population, but not for colder winter temperatures in much of the USA (versus England and Wales), this is equivalent to some 170,000 to 230,000 excess winter deaths per year in the United States.
In 2019, 344,000 German families had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay their power bills.
Still worse, coal, oil, natural gas, electricity and home heating costs have skyrocketed since those English, US and German reports were prepared – because of stupid, climate-obsessed, callous policies.
Global demand for gas and coal surged as the world recovered from Covid – but Britain and Europe banned fracking for gas in their enormous shale deposits, Germany is shutting down its nuclear plants, Russia is playing politics with gas deliveries, and UK and EU wind turbines generated far less electricity in 2021 (way below their supposed, “nameplate capacity”) due to unfavorable winds.
No wonder 65% of United Kingdom renters are struggling this year to pay their energy bills, 25% of Scots live in energy poverty, and 400,000 more UK households are on the brink of losing their gas and electricity provider before Christmas. Europe’s energy costs hit new records, and millions of UK households face 70% rise in energy bills. Excess winter death tolls will also likely set new records.
That’s happening in America too, as the Biden Administration stymies leasing, drilling, fracking and pipelines, sends gasoline prices rocketing upward, and launches the highest inflation rate in 39 years.
Climate policies will also exacerbate health risks in hospitals. At 13¢ per kilowatt-hour (average US business rate today) a 650,000-square-foot hospital building would pay about $2.5 million annually for electricity. At 27¢ per kWh (Britain’s earlier average), the annual cost jumps to $5.2 million; at 39¢ per kWh (Germany’s earlier average), to $7.5 million! Those soaring costs would bring chillier conditions, employee layoffs, higher medical bills, reduced patient care, and more deaths.
Consider too that one-third of American families already had difficulty six years ago adequately heating and cooling their homes, and one-fifth of U.S. households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay their energy bills. Even before COVID, low-income, Black, Hispanic and Native American families were spending a greater portion of their incomes on energy than average households.
Impacts on all hard-pressed working families and people on fixed incomes would be just as harmful and disproportionate, as they too spend a greater portion of their limited incomes on energy.
Job destruction, energy poverty, illness and deaths would increase dramatically under anti-fossil-fuel policies mandated and imposed by the Biden Administration and fellow Democrats – in the name of fairness, equity and “climate justice.”
Those policies would also make America’s energy, economy, national security and foreign policy increasingly dependent on China – already the world’s biggest coal user and greenhouse gas emitter – in an increasingly dangerous world. That’s because China controls most of the metals and minerals required by “green” energy and modern transportation, communication and defense technologies.
This is The Real Climate Crisis. The ecological destruction and human death tolls should shock all of us.
They aren’t due to climate changes that are mostly natural, weather events that are no more frequent or extreme than over the previous century, or manmade global warming that exists almost solely in computer models that rely on junk-science greenhouse-gas hypotheses. The real climate crisis is due to policies that are being rammed through on the basis of false premises, fear-mongering and intolerance for fossil fuels.
Congress, courts, states and voters must act now, to reverse the damage that climate and “green” energy policies are having on our economy, jobs, health, well-being, wildlife and environment.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
December 12, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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The photographers claim it caused them “harassment.”Ngô’s lawyer says the lawsuit is “frivolous.”
Two photographers from Portland Oregon have filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against journalist and author Andy Ngô. The photographers claim that Ngô shared their videos of protests in Portland on his Twitter account.
Andy Ngô has amassed a following in conservative circles for documenting riots and other events from BLM supporters, Antifa, and other groups.
The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court of Portland. It cites two videos taken by the plaintiffs, Melissa Lewis and Grace Morgan, during protests in Portland. The plaintiffs want the court to order Ngô to stop sharing their videos and for financial compensation.
The suit claims that Ngô “has made a practice of illegally copying and uploading plaintiffs’ videos onto his own Twitter account.”
The suit also notes that Ngô is popular in “right-wing” circles, and the photographers are “left-wing.” As a result, they allege they are “are deluged with harassing comments” when their videos are shared.
“This has resulted in instances where (Morgan and Lewis) were physically attacked by (Ngô’s) followers,” the suit adds.
The lawyer representing Ngô, Harmeet K Dhillon, claimed that Ngô did not violate Twitter’s rules and described the lawsuit as “frivolous.”
“The plaintiffs shared their videos publicly on Twitter, a platform designed for exactly their purpose, and Mr. Ngô commented on this publicly posted content using Twitter platform tools, not somehow surreptitiously downloading and uploading the clips as the plaintiffs falsely claim,” Dhillon said in a statement.
The complaint appears to be somewhat contradictory, in that it expresses that using a standard Twitter feature to share videos in a way that credits the original tweeter is causing them harassment but also that sharing their videos themselves is copyright infringement.
“Being an effective journalist means people will try to silence you. I was beaten several times by antifa. Now two antifa videographers in Portland filed a lawsuit against me. Why? Because I retweeted them on Twitter,” Ngô commented, showing screenshots of times he used Twitter’s sharing features to share the videos.
December 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Antifa, BLM, United States |
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The JFK assassination is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Imagine a really complicated puzzle that has 1000 small pieces to it. Your kids have lost 25 percent of the pieces. You decide to put the puzzle together anyway. You finish it. Even though you’ve only got 75 percent of it completed, you can still tell that it’s a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Then, you find several more pieces. You now have 80 percent of the pieces and you’re able to see the Eiffel Tower more clearly.
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