The Real ‘Russian Playbook’ Is Written in English
By Patrick Armstrong | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 17, 2020
I hadn’t given The Russian Playbook much attention until Susan Rice, Obama’s quondam security advisor, opined a month ago on CNN that “I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days — but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook“. She was referring to the latest U.S. riots.
Once I’d seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin’s Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place. Here’s an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies (“Ranked #1“) informed us of the “Kremlin Playbook” with this ominous beginning:
There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia’s economic engagement with the region expanded significantly.
And asks:
Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region’s democratic institutions through its influence to ‘break the internal coherence of the enemy system’?
Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can’t possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004’s expectations and 2020’s reality, can’t be that they don’t like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn’t the last.
I found headlines such as these: Former CIA Director Outlines Russian Playbook for Influencing Unsuspecting Targets (May 2017); Fmr. CIA op.: Don Jr. meeting part of Russian playbook (Jul 2017); Americans Use Russian Playbook to Spread Disinformation (Oct 2018); Factory of Lies: The Russian Playbook (Nov 2018); Shredding the Putin Playbook: Six crucial steps we must take on cyber-security—before it’s too late. (Winter 2018); Trump’s spin is ‘all out of the KGB playbook’: Counterintelligence expert Malcolm Nance (May 2019).
Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this video from the Lincoln Project. As Anatoly Karlin observes: “I think it’s really cool how we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?” He has a point: the Lincoln Project, and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.
So let us consider The Russian Playbook. It stands at the very heart of Russian power. It is old: at least a century old. Why, did not Tolstoy’s 1908 Letter to a Hindu inspire Gandhi to bring down the British Indian Empire and win the Great Game for Moscow? The Tolstoy-Putin link is undeniable as we are told in A Post-Soviet ‘War and Peace’: What Tolstoy’s Masterwork Explains About Putin’s Foreign Policy: “In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to construct his own international order…”. Russian novelists: adepts of The Playbook every one. So there is much to consider about this remarkable Book which has had such an enormous – hidden to most – role in world history. Its instructions on how to swing Western elections are especially important: the 2016 U.S. election; Brexit; “100 years of Russian electoral interference“; Canada; France; the European Union; Germany and many more. The awed reader must ask whether any Western election since Tolstoy’s day can be trusted. Not to forget the Great Hawaiian Pizza Debate the Russians could start at any moment.
What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected. There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as human cunning could devise; right up there with the nuclear codes.
So, The Russian Playbook would be extraordinarily difficult to get hold of. And yet… every talking head on U.S. TV has a copy at his elbow! English copies, one assumes. Rachel Maddow has comprehended the complicated chapter on how to control the U.S. power system. Others have read the impenetrably complex section on how to control U.S. voting machines or change vote counts. Many are familiar with the lists of divisions in American society and directions for exploiting them. Adam Schiff has mastered the section on how to get Trump to give Alaska back. Susan Rice well knows the chapter “How to create riots in peaceful communities”.
And so on. It’s all quite ridiculous: we’re supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can’t keep its neighbours under control.
There is no Russian Playbook, that’s just projection. But there is a “playbook” and it’s written in English, it’s freely available and it’s inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it’s named “From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation” and it’s written by Gene Sharp (1928-2018). Whatever Sharp may have thought he was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the world. Billed as “democracy” and “freedom”, their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes. Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington’s line but never in countries that don’t. Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things in the imaginary “Russian Playbook”. So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp’s advice has been used to produce what only the propagandists could call “model interventions“; to the “liberated” themselves, the reality is poverty, destruction, war and refugees.
The Albert Einstein Institution, which Sharp created in 1983, strongly denies collusion with Washington-sponsored overthrows but people from it have organised seminars or workshops in many targets of U.S. overthrows. The most recent annual report of 2014, while rather opaque, shows 45% of its income from “grants” (as opposed to “individuals”) and has logos of Euromaidan, SOSVenezuela, Umbrellamovement, Lwili, Sunflowersquare and others. In short, the logos of regime change operations in Ukraine, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burkina Faso and Taiwan. (And, ironically for today’s USA, Black Lives Matter). So, clearly, there is some connection between the AEI and Washington-sponsored regime change operations.
So there is a “handbook” but it’s not Russian.
Reading Sharp’s book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a “dictatorship” overthrown by “non-violent” resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn’t and it was the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the Nazi state was killed. The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn’t have lasted a minute under Stalin. Otpor was greatly aided by NATO’s war on Serbia. And, they’re only “non-violent” because the Western media doesn’t talk much about the violence; “non-violent” is not the first word that comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014. “Colour revolutions” are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection, there’s much design behind their “spontaneity”. And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see Katchanovski’s research on the “Heavenly Hundred” of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were “a false flag operation” involving “an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland”. There is little in Sharp’s book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined government. He also has the naïve habit of using “democrat” and “dictator” as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts and codfish. But any “dictatorship” – for example Stalin’s is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild “dictators” presiding over extremely unpopular polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.
His “playbook” is useful to outside powers that want to overthrow governments they don’t like. Especially those run by “dictators” not brutal enough to shoot the protesters down. It’s not Russian diplomats that are caught choosing the leaders of ostensibly independent countries. It’s not Russians who boast of spending money in poor countries to change their governments. It’s not Russian diplomats who meet with foreign opposition leaders. Russia doesn’t fabricate a leader of a foreign country. It’s not Russia that invents a humanitarian crisis, bombs the country to bits, laughs at its leader’s brutal death and walks away. It’s not Russia that sanctions numerous countries. It’s not Russia that gives fellowships to foreign oppositionists. Even the Washington Post (one of the principals in sustaining Putindunnit hysteria) covered “The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere“; but piously insisted “the days of its worst behavior are long behind it”. Whatever the pundits may claim about Russia, the USA actually has an organisation devoted to interfering in other countries’ business; one of whose leading lights proudly boasted: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The famous “Russian Playbook” is nothing but projection onto Moscow of what Washington actually does: projection is so common a feature of American propaganda that one may certain that when Washington accuses somebody else of doing something, it’s a guarantee that Washington is doing it.
Veteran activists called out BLM as a tool of the Democrats from day 1. But agenda-driven $Millions drown out the grassroots
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 6, 2020
The Black Lives Matter movement has made millions off black Americans’ suffering. A St. Louis activist explains how it comes from a long tradition of white liberals coopting grassroots movements to push a Democratic Party agenda.
The foundation-funded social justice activism of Black Lives Matter is using black pain to cash in on white liberal guilt, dividing American society in pursuit of a Democratic political agenda, St. Louis activist Nyota Uhura told RT.
Uhura founded her website handsupdontshoot in August 2014 to counter false narratives coming out of the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson following the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
Having witnessed BLM’s rise up close as the nascent organization swooped into Ferguson amid the calls for justice triggered by Brown’s killing, methodically co-opting the genuine protest energy while ignoring or even obstructing those protesters’ demands, Uhura has fought to warn others of what the organization really represents – leveraging black activism into a boost for the Democratic Party.
The science of co-opting movements
Plucking a few Ferguson residents from the streets for a veneer of local credibility, BLM raised $33 million on the back of Brown’s death – money Uhura says her community never saw. Six years later, black St. Louis remains poor and plagued with violence, while BLM has found a new community to exploit.
“They overshadow the work of the grassroots, then they insert themselves as leaders and they go out in the media and claim to be leading these movements,” Uhura said.
Outlining the methodology of BLM and other astroturfed movements, she added that sometimes they literally just showed up at a protest they didn’t plan and did a news conference. This is a tradition she traces back to white liberals’ hijacking of the 1963 March on Washington.
That tradition has been boiled down to a science, she says, with organizations like NetRoots turning out phony ‘activists’ with the ruthless efficiency of an assembly line. “NetRoots is where activists go to audition to be puppets of the Democrats, special interest and white elite nonprofit,” she continued.
“It happens so fast that all the pieces are in place before you even have a chance to know what hit you… Before you even know it, you’re watching the news and they have coopted your movement.”
White liberal and progressive groups “use the energy of our movement to push their agenda” – in BLM’s case, weaponizing the concept of “intersectionality” to broaden the movement’s scope from race to feminism, immigrant rights, LGBT issues, and other causes that directly affect white people.
“In order to mobilize people, they need those black faces out front – because what are they going to look like protesting? Just in terms of optics it’ll look like a Klan rally,” Uhura joked. She has a point – just 17 percent of last month’s protesters were black, according to a Pew Research poll published last week, a statistic the organization’s foes are unlikely to let it forget.
Real activists disenfranchised
Uhura is far from the only grassroots activist to publicly speak out against BLM for pulling a bait-and-switch, substituting the Democratic Party’s pet causes in place of justice for the victims of police violence. The group’s Cincinnati chapter dropped the iconic phrase from its name in 2018, alleging the national organization “capitalized off a nameless groundswell of resistance sweeping the nation, branded it as their own, and profited off [black people’s deaths]” without making an effort to get justice for victims’ families.
The Cincinnati chapter also says that BLM’s 2015 conference in Cleveland – where 12-year-old Tamir Rice had just been gunned down by a cop for holding a toy gun – focused almost exclusively on black transgender rights, further dividing a suffering community.
Los Angeles activists slammed BLM’s local chapter for ignoring the killing of Ezell Ford, a mentally-ill man shot by police in 2014, to travel to Ferguson and piggyback on the Michael Brown shooting. Upon their return to Los Angeles, where the activist community was demanding the city’s district attorney indict Ford’s killers, BLM Los Angeles not only continued to ignore the injustice, one of its leaders actually bestowed a ‘Women in Action’ award on the same DA who exonerated the cops who killed him.
Others take issue with what they see as obvious grifting by some of BLM’s most prominent representatives. DeRay McKesson has promoted brands from Apple to McDonald’s, and even got himself arrested in a Twitter T-shirt in what many activists believe was a staged promotion.
Shaun King is so legendary for making large sums of money raised “for the movement” disappear that the Daily Beast wrote a story about it. King recently announced a “Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission” in conjunction with three of the same “progressive prosecutors” that activists like Uhura have denounced for failing to police the police.
‘They always march us back into the voting booth’
Like all controlled opposition movements, one of BLM’s primary functions is to derail meaningful change. Uhura explained, “They always march us back into the voting booth.”
Well-heeled movement activists consistently divert money and energy into electing Democratic Party candidates or “progressive” prosecutors, none of whom hold police accountable when they murder innocent black men, whether it’s in Ferguson, Los Angeles, or New York City.
For this reason, she’s not convinced by the group’s recent calls to defund police, or the Minneapolis City Council’s pledge to do just that – the governments of Ferguson and St. Louis promised all manner of reforms they didn’t deliver. Many that did pass were hopelessly watered-down or have since been rolled back, and Uhura sees ‘defund the police’ as just another fundraising tactic.
The only electoral solution to the black community’s problems is “weaponizing our politics,” according to the veteran activist – all incumbents have to go. They’ve had their chance to make a difference, and proven themselves unwilling to deliver. “It might take one or two election cycles to mold a person into what we need, but right now we’re losing anyway,” she explained. “We have to just clean house and get rid of everybody. How can it be worse?”
BLM recently came under fire for doling out just six percent of its donations to local chapters over the past three years, with a whopping 83 percent going to pay consultants and travel costs. The complicated route the money takes from donor to chapter has elicited extensive speculation about the possibility of money laundering, and BLM representatives have been almost cartoonishly cagey when asked by reporters about their finances
Co-founder Alicia Garza has denied the group is backed by foundations at all, even though billionaire currency speculator George Soros alone has given over $33 million to BLM, its founders, and associated groups, and the Ford Foundation pledged to raise $100 million in 2016. Fellow co-founder Patrisse Cullors has held up a fact-check by PolitiFact, funded by the same Omidyar Network that funds BLM, as “proof” the group isn’t linked with the Democratic Party.
But it’s the group’s function as an ideological launderer that has thus far insulated it from accountability. From the corporations pouring millions of dollars into its coffers to burnish their woke cred, to the politicians donning Kente cloths and pandering their way to re-election, BLM positions itself as ‘the’ black activism group, overshadowing grassroots campaigners and sucking up all available cash – literally starving out the competition, as genuine movements struggle to be heard by the media and greater public over the foundation-funded din.
This model of activism has been so successful over the decades that it has come to dominate every cause from environmentalism to civil liberties, offering young people a “romanticized view of activism where it’s all hashtags, all patty-cake, all sugar and cream, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
Uhura, however, is confident that BLM’s true nature will be exposed, citing the movement’s own inherent discrimination: “How does Black Lives Matter get to decide WHICH black lives matter when they purposefully omit straight black people and straight black men whose death they profit from?”
But as long as grassroots activists are losing ground to foundation-funded rivals, new BLMs will keep popping up. Real activists must “create an alternative” to foundation-funded movements, she says – or risk losing the next generation to the Democratic operatives and keeping justice out of the reach of black communities forever.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
“Woke” America is More Asleep to Injustice Than Ever
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 06.07.2020
To drive home just how superficial and empty recent protests in America are and how little besides further division and destruction will become of them – take the fate of two fictional characters recently put in the spotlight by baying activists – PepsiCo’s “Aunt Jemima” breakfast food brand and Mars Incorporated’s “Uncle Ben’s” rice products.
Both came into the crosshairs of “woke” America. Both fictional characters will now no longer be used.
It might appear like a huge victory for “woke” America.
CNN in their article, “The Aunt Jemima brand, acknowledging its racist past, will be retired,” would claim:
Quaker Oats is retiring the more than 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand and logo, acknowledging its origins are based on a racial stereotype.
“As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations,” the Pepsi-owned company said in a statement provided to CNN Business.
And the London Guardian in their article, “Uncle Ben’s rice firm to scrap brand image of black farmer,” would claim:
The rice company Uncle Ben’s is to scrap the image of a black farmer the brand has used since the 1940s and could change its name, as companies react to growing concerns over racial bias and injustice.
The parent company, Mars, said Uncle Ben was a fictional character whose name was first used in 1946 as a reference to an African American Texan rice farmer.
While there is no doubt that both fictional characters represented stereotypes and are rooted in America’s racist past – “woke” America’s belief that somehow this was a priority or some form of victory begs belief. So does the fact that those opposed to expanding mobs and their “cancel culture” have crafted the most anemic counterpoints.
Some claim that the fictional characters were either inspired or portrayed by real African Americans who profited from the branding.
What neither side mentioned was the very real abuses both companies are guilty of – abuses that are both inhumane and rooted in extraordinary, inexcusable, and thus far utterly unaddressed racism.
PepsiCo and Mars Sponsor/Profit From Slavery and Mass Murder
Both “woke” America as well as those trying to form opposition to it have entirely missed the fact that PepsiCo and Mars Inc. – two multi-billion dollar businesses – are literally engaged in modern day slavery to create their products while sponsoring policy think-tanks that have engineered wars targeting African nations, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands and open-air slave markets where black people – today – are sold into bondage.
This would seem to be a much greater transgression against black people than their crude depictions in company branding and demands much more serious action than merely adjusting marketing strategies – such as demanding boards of directors to resign or full-spectrum, permanent boycotts for these businesses and their many subsidiaries and brands.
Unfortunately for “woke” America, fictional characters are a priority taken head-on all while activists blissfully munch on chocolate bars made by cocoa harvested by African slave labor and sip on drinks made by a corporation which sponsors US wars abroad in which blacks are mass murdered and enslaved.
Your Mars Inc. Chocolate Comes from Slave Labor
If you enjoy chocolate snacks like 3 Musketeers, Snickers, Mars, and Milky Way bars, the chocolate you ate most likely came from a developing nation with dismal working conditions and in many cases, child and slave labor.
Mars Inc. along with Nestle, Hersey, and many other chocolate companies, source cocoa from Africa and especially the nations of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.
A Washington Post article published just last year titled, “Cocoa’s child laborers,” would note:
Mars, Nestlé and Hershey pledged nearly two decades ago to stop using cocoa harvested by children. Yet much of the chocolate you buy still starts with child labor.
The article elaborated, noting:
About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West Africa where, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report, more than 2 million children were engaged in dangerous labor in cocoa-growing regions.
When asked this spring, representatives of some of the biggest and best-known brands — Hershey, Mars and Nestlé — could not guarantee that any of their chocolates were produced without child labor.
Black children used as labor and under conditions and for wages bordering slavery to produce cocoa Mars Inc. knowingly uses in its products – and makes billions of dollars off of – seems like a much bigger issue than what is undoubtedly offensive labelling practiced by Mars Inc. through its “Uncle Ben’s” brand.
Indicative of the carefully controlled nature of ongoing protests is how the Washington Post has reported on Mars Inc.’s genuinely offensive, even criminal predation on black labor in Africa in the past as well as Mars Inc.’s offensive branding more recently, but failed to link the two in its most recent reporting – thus artfully avoiding a genuinely “woke” readership and any genuine damage real protests and boycotts would have on Mars Inc. and other corporations whose interests Washington Post regularly serves as a voice for.
Big-Biz like PepsiCo and Mars Inc. are an Affront to All
Mars Inc. – alongside PepsiCo, Nestle, and Hersey – was also involved in funding anti-labelling campaigns to prevent legislation from passing that would force food manufacturers to inform consumers their products contained genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Corporations spending money to hide dangerous ingredients from consumers endangers everyone’s health – black and white, left and right.
Mars Inc., PepsiCo, and others defend such campaigning, claiming that such legislation would be “costly” – as would ensuring all of their ingredients are ethically procured and free of child and/or slave labor.
Yet Mars Inc., PepsiCo, and others are multi-billion dollar businesses. The Mars family which owns Mars Inc. consists mostly of family members who are billionaires – not mere millionaires – but billionaires.
Their daily “concerns” include ensuring their sprawling 82,000 acre ranches have enough water and that they receive the most lenient penalties when crashing their Porsche SUV’s into vans carrying families.
Mars Inc. and other multi-billion dollar businesses can afford to do better, simply at the cost of being slightly less well-off billionaires or perhaps even being demoted to millionaires – yet they simply and deliberately choose to profit off the backs of poorly informed consumers at home and exploited/enslaved labor abroad.
If what Mars Inc. and PepsiCo contributed to was only limited to cultivating ignorant consumers at home and using slave labor abroad it would be bad enough. And if America’s “woke revolution” was serious about justice, Mars Inc. and PepsiCo would be on the chopping block for much more than their crude, racist marketing, and would have more demanded of them.
But that is not all Mars Inc. and PepsiCo are contributing to.
Sponsoring Warmongering and Mass Murder in Africa (and everywhere else)
Both PepsiCo and Mars Inc. are sponsors of policy think tanks like the Brookings Institution whose “scholars” and “fellows” churn out the blueprints for US wars which are then rubber stamped by the US Congress and sold to the public by the corporate media.
Brooking Institution’s 2019 annual report (PDF) lists both companies – PepsiCo and Mars Inc. – as sponsors as were both companies in 2011 (PDF).
Brookings and its corporate-sponsored staff worked diligently in 2011 to help sell the US military intervention in the North African nation of Libya. It was a key institution involved in creating and spreading the notion of “R2P” or the “responsibility to protect” used as flimsy cover for a long-planned US desire to effect regime change in Libya.
As early as February 2011, the Brookings Institution published articles and papers like, “United States Must Take Lead on Libya,” in which Brookings “Senior Fellows” – funded by the likes of PepsiCo and Mars Inc. – made the nascent calls for US military intervention that would eventually lead to the US arming militants openly and carrying out air strikes across the nation.
Indeed, the US armed militants in eastern Libya – a hotbed for racism and extremism and the epicenters of Al Qaeda in the country – as well as provided roving bands of armed gangs air support as they swept the nation.
When Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was violently swept from power later that year, the estimated 2.5 million Africans from across the continent he took in, providing housing and living wages to, found themselves being hunted by US-backed militants.
To explain the blatant and explosive racism that predictably swept Libya in the wake of the US-backed war, articles like the CS Monitor’s “How Qaddafi helped fuel fury toward Africans in Libya,” would claim:
Many experts – and African migrant workers themselves – say the animosity stems from anti-African racism found throughout the Arab world. But some say the anger has been made much worse by Mr. Qaddafi’s moves to buy the loyalty of black Libyans from the south of the country as well as his decades-long efforts to build Africa-wide patronage networks at great cost to the country’s Arab majority.
In other words – the CS Monitor and the Western “experts” it cited claim Qaddafi “fueled fury toward Africans” by merely spending resources to help them. It is an oblique attempt to justify the racism-driven genocide US-backed militants carried out during their “victory lap” in Libya.
Black Africans living in Libya were either driven out of the country, across the Mediterranean and into Europe to face hardship and racism there or either mass murdered in Libya or rounded up and enslaved.
The Western media – partners with institutions like Brookings – denied this at first – or attempted to excuse it like the CS Monitor – but eventually covered the fallout US military intervention in Libya and its long-planned regime change agenda triggered.
Reuters in their article, “African workers live in fear after Gaddafi overthrow,” would admit:
Tens of thousands of foreign workers have fled Libya since the armed revolt against Gaddafi’s 42-year-rule began in February, with Africans afraid they have become targets for fighters who accuse them of being mercenaries for Gaddafi.
This antipathy appears to have spread to all Africans, leaving them vulnerable to attacks, robbery and other abuse by the gun-toting, mostly young, fighters who ousted Gaddafi.
Identity cards of nationals from Chad, Niger, Mali, Sudan and other African states have been found on the bodies of gunmen who anti-Gaddafi fighters say were paid to confront them.
The BBC in its article, “Libya migrant ‘slave market’ footage sparks outrage,” would admit:
Migrants trying to reach Europe have spoken of being held by smugglers and forced to work for little or no money.
The footage released by CNN appears to show youths from Niger and other sub-Saharan countries being sold to buyers for about $400 (£300) at undisclosed locations in Libya.
While these media sources covered the fallout of the 2011 US military intervention, they were careful not to link the fallout directly to the intervention.
The US war against Libya was a humanitarian catastrophe deliberately engineered by Western think tanks funded by big-business like PepsiCo, Mars Inc., and many others, rubber stamped by politicians in Washington – both Democrat and Republican – and eagerly sold to the public by the corporate media.
And even as recently as 2016, Brookings “Senior Fellow” Shadi Hamid in a piece published on Brookings’ site titled, “Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They’re wrong,” would remain insistent in defending the US-led war and the decimated, racist, and dysfunctional Libya left in its wake.
He argues that if the US didn’t intervene, Qaddafi would have successfully eliminated the racist extremists in eastern Libya and particularly in Benghazi who would eventually carry out genocide against Libya’s black population. Hamid simply omits any mention of this or who actually was based in Benghazi and instead refers to them merely as “protesters.”
Thus, PepsiCo and Mars Inc. – alongside oil corporations and weapons manufacturers – are funding an institution that not only engineers and eagerly promotes wars, they fund an institution that is utterly unapologetic about the calamity these wars cause – including wars like in Libya ending tragically for 2.5 million black Africans.
“Woke” America needs to be conscious enough to recognize the true injustice underpinning American society. It is very likely that as protesters in America and online around the globe rail against “Aunt Jemima” and “Uncle Ben’s” many activists are eagerly enjoying many of the other products produced by and profiting PepsiCo and Mars Inc. – oblivious to the fact that the ingredients are procured through child and slave labor in Africa and the profits are directed into promoting wars that leave blacks abroad dead, displaced, or enslaved. And as long as this is the case, nothing of any genuine substance will ever change in America or across the wider Western World.
If real justice is what Americans – all Americans – want, they need to truly wake up to this fact first.
CIA Information Warfare Succeeds: Occupation of Afghanistan forced to continue, Trump’s real crimes in Afghanistan ignored
By Ben Barbour | Global Research | July 5, 2020
On July 1st the House Armed Services Committee voted to hinder Donald Trump’s ability to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. House Democrats on the committee teamed up with Republicans, including Liz Cheney (daughter of war-architect Dick Cheney), to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act “that prohibits Congress from spending money to pull US troops out of Afghanistan without first meeting a series of vague conditions that critics said appeared to prevent withdrawal.” Without any public debate the US will now continue its occupation after the CIA claimed that Russia paid Taliban-linked groups to kill American soldiers.
What’s the evidence? General John Nicholson speculated that Russia was arming the Taliban in 2017. In April 2019, three marines were killed in an attack that the Taliban claimed responsibility for. Unnamed intelligence officials believed that the Russians may have payed militants to attack US troops. In March 2020, The CIA concluded that the Russians were paying the bounties. They cited testimony from captured militants and pointed to a Seal Team Six raid of a Taliban outpost that resulted in the recovery of a half a million in cash.
That’s it. That’s all the information that the American public is allowed to know. It’s hardly even mentioned that the NSA disagreed with the CIA’s assessment, stating “the information wasn’t verified and that intelligence officials didn’t agree on it.” Furthermore, the Department of Defense (DOD) claimed that “to date, DOD has no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports.” Americans are taking the CIA’s word as gospel.
How exactly did the CIA conclude that the half a million in cash came from Russia and not from Taliban opium trafficking operations? The US military claimed that 60% of the Taliban’s funding comes from the opium trade. Is $500,000 in cash unheard of in opium sales? Who are these captured militants that claimed that Russia payed bounties for dead American soldiers? Were these militants tortured by the CIA? The CIA has the largest torture program in the world. Is the information reliable or was the information obtained under dubious circumstances? How do we even know these militants actually made these claims?
The foundation of the assertions is also questionable. Americans are supposed to believe that the Taliban had to be prompted to attack American soldiers. The US has been occupying Afghanistan for nearly 20 years. The war in Afghanistan has resulted in over 2,400 dead American soldiers and over 38,500 dead civilians. US soldiers have been targeted by the Taliban and an assortment of other militant groups over the past 19 years. That’s the cost of occupation. If over 38,500 civilians have been killed, then there are a lot of angry Afghans that lost family members. Russia does not need to pay the Taliban or any militant group to attack US soldiers. This should not need explanation. The rush to accuse Trump of treason has made Americans lose their critical thinking skills.
More partisan liberals are upset about Trump’s inaction over unproven allegations of Russian bounties than they are by Trump’s record setting bombing campaign in Afghanistan:
“in 2019, according to figures released by Air Force Central Command, the United States ‘dropped more munitions on Afghanistan than in any other year over the past decade.’ More bombs were dropped in most months of 2019 than in any previous months since records were first made publicly available in 2009.”
These bombings led to a massive surge in civilian casualties. In one case, at least 30 pine nut farmers were killed in a drone strike that resulted in zero militants being killed. Where is the outrage over this? How many more Afghans are going to die if Trump is pressed to be even more unhinged to prove he is not a traitor? The end game is more death and more occupation.
This new scandal being pushed by the CIA also conveniently deflects from Trump’s real scandals in Afghanistan. In June, Trump signed an executive order “imposing sanctions on several individuals associated with the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
The ICC is investigating war crimes in Afghanistan. Their investigations include potential American war crimes. They may even involve Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: “Pompeo may be personally at risk for wrongdoing that the Court could uncover of CIA activities when he was the director of the agency.” The Trump administration is claiming that because the US has not ratified the Rome Statute, that the ICC has no legal basis to prosecute American war crimes. This is incorrect. The Rome Statute allows the ICC to prosecute non-party countries if war crimes are committed by that party in a country that has ratified the Rome Statute. Afghanistan has ratified the Rome Statue. That puts the US on the hook for potential war crimes committed in that region.
Needless to say, never-Trump neocons have been silent about Trump’s targeting of the ICC. Likewise, partisan liberals have not gone after Trump on this front either. The reasons are obvious. The Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations are culpable in war crimes in Afghanistan as well. The nearly two-decades long war is a bipartisan project. Furthermore, self-professed left-wingers and liberals are taking their cues from Bush-era neocons like David Frum, Bill Kristol, and an assortment of pro-war goons from the Lincoln Project Political Action Committee.
Russiagate broke partisan liberals’ brains. They are now calling for Trump to ramp up escalation in Afghanistan. They actually believe the absurd over-the-top ads put out by the Lincoln Project. Donald Trump ramped up the war in Afghanistan in 2017 when he did a 3,500-troop surge from 10,500 to 14,000 troops. Trump then increased bombing campaigns throughout his term and set records for bombings in 2019. Civilians casualties spiked. In June 2020, he targeted the ICC for having the audacity to look into US war crimes.
None of this barbarism earned Trump the ire of prominent neoconservatives and liberals. Trump is being vilified for having talks with the Taliban and taking steps towards scaling-down US troop presence. After four years of Russiagate hysteria the only explanation for Trump’s actions is capitulation to Russia. Afghan civilians be damned, Trump needs to ramp up again in Afghanistan to stop Putin or he’s a traitor! The neocon dogma pushed onto liberals by never-Trump Republicans did its job. Partisan liberals are parroting the line of the CIA. The attempt to sabotage talks with the Taliban and prevent troop withdrawals from Afghanistan worked.
“The Resistance” just helped push the continued occupation of Afghanistan to score cheap political points. The CIA thanks them for their “patriotism.”
Ben Barbour is an American geopolitical analyst.
Are the Democrats a Political Party or a CIA-Backed Fifth Column?
By Mike Whitney • Unz Review • July 5, 2020
How do the Democrats benefit from the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests?
While the protests are being used to paint Trump as a race-bating white supremacist, that is not their primary objective. The main goal is to suppress and demonize Trump’s political base which is comprised of mainly white working class people who have been adversely impacted by the Democrats disastrous free trade and immigration policies. These are the people– liberal and conservative– who voted for Trump in 2016 after abandoning all hope that the Democrats would amend their platform and throw a lifeline to workers who are now struggling to make ends meet in America’s de-industrialized heartland.
The protests are largely a diversion aimed at shifting the public’s attention to a racialized narrative that obfuscates the widening inequality chasm (created by the Democrats biggest donors, the Giant Corporations and Wall Street) to historic antagonisms that have clearly diminished over time. (Racism ain’t what it used to be.) The Democrats are resolved to set the agenda by deciding what issues “will and will not” be covered over the course of the campaign. And– since race is an issue on which they feel they can energize their base by propping-up outdated stereotypes of conservatives as ignorant bigots incapable of rational thought– the Dems are using their media clout to make race the main topic of debate. In short, the Democrats have settled on a strategy for quashing the emerging populist revolt that swept Trump into the White House in 2016 and derailed Hillary’s ambitious grab for presidential power.
The plan, however, does have its shortcomings, for example, Democrats have offered nearly blanket support for protests that have inflicted massive damage on cities and towns across the country. In the eyes of many Americans, the Dems support looks like a tacit endorsement of the arson, looting and violence that has taken place under the banner of “racial justice”. The Dems have not seriously addressed this matter, choosing instead to let the media minimize the issue by simply scrubbing the destruction from their coverage. This “sweep it under the rug” strategy appears to be working as the majority of people surveyed believe that the protests were “mostly peaceful”, which is a term that’s designed to downplay the effects of the most ferocious rioting since the 1970s.
Let’s be clear, the Democrats do not support Black Lives Matter nor have they made any attempt to insert their demands into their list of police reforms. BLM merely fits into the Dems overall campaign strategy which is to use race to deflect attention from the gross imbalance of wealth that is the unavoidable consequence of the Dems neoliberal policies including outsourcing, off-shoring, de-industrialization, free trade and trickle down economics. These policies were aggressively promoted by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as they will be by Joe Biden if he is elected. They are the policies that have gutted the country, shrunk the middle class, and transformed the American dream into a dystopian nightmare.
They are also the policies that have given rise to, what the pundits call, “right wing populism” which refers to the growing number of marginalized working people who despise Washington and career politicians, feel anxious about falling wages and dramatic demographic changes, and resent the prevailing liberal culture that scorns their religion and patriotism. This is Trump’s mainly-white base, the working people the Democrats threw under the bus 30 years ago and now want to annihilate completely by deepening political polarization, fueling social unrest, pitting one group against another, and viciously vilifying them in the media as ignorant racists whose traditions, culture, customs and even history must be obliterated to make room for the new diversity world order. Trump touched on this theme in a speech he delivered in Tulsa. He said:
“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Author Charles Burris expanded on this topic in an article at Lew Rockwell titled America’s Monumental Existential Problem:
“The wave of statue-toppling spreading across the Western world from the United States is not an aesthetic act, but a political one, the disfigured monuments in bronze and stone standing for the repudiation of an entire civilization. No longer limiting their rage to slave-owners, American mobs are pulling down and disfiguring statues of abolitionists, writers and saints in an act of revolt against the country’s European founding, now re-imagined as the nation’s original sin, a moral and symbolic shift with which we Europeans will soon be forced to reckon.”
The statue-toppling epidemic is vastly more disturbing than the the looting or arson, mainly because it reveals an ideological intensity aimed at symbols of state power. By tearing down the images of the men who created or contributed to our collective history, the vandals are challenging the legitimacy of the nation itself as well as its founding “enlightenment” principles. This is the nihilism of extremists whose only objective is destruction. It suggests that the Democrats might have aspirations that far exceed a mere presidential victory. Perhaps the protests and riots will be used to justify more sweeping changes, a major reset during which traditional laws and rules are indefinitely suspended until the crisis passes and order can be restored. Is that at all conceivable or should we dismiss these extraordinary events as merely young people “letting off a little steam”?
Here’s how General Michael Flynn summed up what’s going on on in a recent article:
“There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history… I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth…. The dark forces’ weapons formed against us serve one purpose: to promote radical social change through power and control.”
I agree. The toppling of statues, the rioting, the looting, the arson and, yes, the relentless attacks on Trump from the day he took office, to Russiagate, to the impeachment, to the insane claims about Russian “bounties”, to the manipulation of science and data to trigger a planned demolition of the US economy hastening a vast restructuring to the labor force and the imposition of authoritarian rule; all of these are cut from the same fabric, a tapestry of lies and deception concocted by the DNC, the Intel agencies, the elite media, and their behind-the-scenes paymasters. Now they have released their corporate-funded militia on the country to wreak havoc and spread terror among the population. Meanwhile, the New York Times and others continue to generate claims they know to be false in order to confuse the public even while the people are still shaking off months of disorienting quarantine and feelings of trepidation brought on by 3 weeks of nonstop social unrest and fractious racial conflict. Bottom line: Neither the Democrats nor their allies at the Intel agencies and media have ever accepted the “peaceful transition of power”. They reject the 2016 election results, they reject Donald Trump as the duly elected president of the United States, and they reject the representative American system of government “by the people.”
So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: Which political party is pursuing a radical-activist strategy that has set our cities ablaze and reduced Capitol Hill to a sprawling war zone? Which party pursued a 3 year-long investigation that was aimed at removing the president using a dossier that they knew was false (Opposition research), claiming emails were hacked from DNC computers when the cyber-security company that did the investigation said there was no proof of “exfiltration”? (In other words, there was no hack and the Dems knew it since 2017) Which party allied itself with senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA, NSA and elite media and worked together collaboratively to discredit, surveil, infiltrate, entrap and demonize the administration in order to torpedo Trumps “America First” political agenda, and remove him from office?
Which party?
No one disputes the Democrats right to challenge, criticize or vigorously oppose a bill or policy promoted by the president. What we take issue with is the devious and (possibly) illegal way the Democrats have joined powerful elements in the Intelligence Community and the major media to conduct a ruthless “dirty tricks” campaign that involved spying on members of the administration in order to establish the basis for impeachment proceedings. This is not the behavior of a respected political organization but the illicit conduct of a fifth column acting on behalf of a foreign (or corporate?) enemy. It’s worth noting that an insurrection against the nation’s lawful authority is sedition, a felony that is punishable by imprisonment or death. Perhaps, the junta leaders should consider the possible consequences of their actions before they make their next move.
What we need to know is whether the Democrat party operates independent of the Intel agencies with which it cooperated during its campaign against Trump? We’re hopeful that the Durham investigation will shed more light on this matter. Our fear is that what we’re seeing is an emerging Axis–the CIA, the DNC, and the elite media– all using their respective powers to terminate the Constitutional Republic and establish permanent, authoritarian one-party rule. As far-fetched as it might sound, the country appears to be slipping inexorably towards tyranny.
US used media agency to covertly aid Hong Kong protesters, but tell us how ‘foreign meddling’ is a threat to ‘our democracy’
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | July 3, 2020
Even as Washington designated the Chinese media as a hostile foreign agent, its own propaganda agency was funneling money to the Hong Kong protesters. In a fitting twist, this was revealed by partisan leakers with an ax to grind.
“US has been exposed for funding last year’s Hong Kong protests,” declared columnist Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post on Thursday. Lo brings up the revelation that one of the subsidiaries of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) had to freeze an estimated $2 million worth of contracts aimed at helping anti-Beijing activists in the southern Chinese city.
The source for this is a recent Time magazine article, relying mainly on anonymous USAGM officials upset about the overhaul implemented by the agency’s new head, Michael Pack, an appointee of President Donald Trump, confirmed by the Senate in early June.
The contracts in question were run through the Open Technology Fund, officially an NGO that funds “open-source internet freedom projects” such as the encrypted-messaging app Signal. All of its funding comes from Congress, just like the National Endowment for Democracy, which spent around $643,000 to “foster civil society” in Hong Kong last year.
Given that whoever pays the piper calls the tune, Beijing sees this as direct US meddling in the unrest in Hong Kong – a territory ruled by the British for over a century before being handed back to China in 1997. The city erupted in protests last spring, over a law that would allow extraditions to the mainland. When demonstrators began waving US and British flags, meeting with US diplomats and getting aid from ‘NGOs,’ they gave China a perfect excuse to pass a new security law.
Now imagine the US reaction if Chinese ‘nonprofits’ funded entirely by the government were funneling money to ‘human-rights’ programs in the US, or Black Lives Matter, or Antifa, or any of the groups going around smashing monuments and torching shops across America over the past month. You wouldn’t have to try very hard, given the actual US crackdown on Chinese phone companies such as Huawei and ZTE Corporation, or the State Department designation of several Chinese media outlets as “foreign missions,” accused of engaging in “propaganda” and not journalism.
To China, this rightly looks like a double standard. Most Americans, however, don’t think twice about it. Of course, the US is allowed to do anything it pleases anywhere it wants, from ‘helping democracy’ via color revolutions to ‘humanitarian’ bombing. It’s the exceptional nation, the greatest country in the world, and so on. Even the activists who condemn it as irredeemably racist and in need of revolution at home, generally have no beef with Washington’s meddlesome foreign policy abroad. How else can one explain the recent political marriage of Democrats and neoconservatives, aimed against Trump?
As part of the campaign by this axis and its media allies, for the past four years, the US mainstream media has incessantly hyped the narrative of ‘Russian meddling’ in ‘our democracy,’ based on evidence-free conspiracy theories and wishful thinking.
Media outlets such as RT figured prominently in this propaganda, with fully a third of the infamous Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 – which kicked off the Russiagate madness – dedicated to RT programming. Never mind that it dated back to 2012 and was therefore both obsolete and irrelevant; that wasn’t allowed to get in the way of a good story.
Yet it’s Washington that’s actually meddling, and in places like Hong Kong. In that light, the narratives about ‘Russian’ and ‘Chinese’ interference in the US certainly appear to be a massive case of psychological projection. Perhaps the groups seeking meaningful change in this country ought to address that first.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
CHOP’s choreographed ‘revolution’ has ended in failure, but success was never the plan
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 1, 2020
The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest has finally collapsed, having served its purpose as a cautionary tale of a police-free society. But it was arguably doomed from the start, a trap for both “defund police” backers and their foes.
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan gave the order earlier this week to shut down CHOP – formerly known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ – sending in police on Wednesday morning to arrest the stragglers. The unusual social experiment – it’s not every day a city’s government lets a group of anarchists, some heavily armed, take over a six-block area that includes a police precinct – had been marred by escalating violence in recent weeks, though it seemed designed to exacerbate societal fault lines from the start.
CHOP widened the political divide from both “sides,” providing endless fodder for conservative commentators’ “woke” jokes (who can forget the long-haired man haranguing his “fellow white people” to fork over $10 to the next black person they saw?), fearmongering over alleged threats to “take over” larger sections of Seattle (to say nothing of the beheadings implied in renaming the zone to CHOP), and gleeful I-told-you-so’s over everything from reported food shortages to outbreaks of violence.
Meanwhile, the Zone’s inhabitants were openly dangled by liberal media as “bait” in front of President Donald Trump, taunting him in the hope he’d send in the National Guard and serve up the footage of American soldiers stomping “peaceful” protesters that they desperately wanted for the next installment of the ‘Orange Man Bad’ reality show.
Ironically, it was Durkan who ultimately ordered the recapture of the six blocks she’d turned over to the protesters in the first place nearly a month ago. Durkan soured on the encampment she’d initially called a “summer of love” after socialist city councilwoman Kshama Sawant led protesters literally to her doorstep over the weekend, where they apparently left their mark in the form of obscene graffiti. But it was on Durkan’s orders that the cops had abandoned the East Precinct, whose “conquest” was framed as the crowning achievement of the CHOP occupiers. CHOP, it seemed, had fulfilled its goals.
The mix of Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators hadn’t even spent a week in their downtown utopia before they released a list of mostly laudable demands, fatally spiked with unworkable and downright offensive “solutions” that promoted a return to racial segregation under the guise of progressivism. For most of CHOP’s inhabitants, the zone seemed to be an exercise in live-action role-playing, with no danger of actually having to follow through with their demands or run a sustainable society outside the capitalist system.
When reality finally intruded in the form of multiple shootings that left two young black men dead, CHOP became an ideal bedtime story to warn on-the-fence liberals thinking of backing the “defund the police” movement away from the notion that a society without law enforcement was possible. Predators do not become good citizens just because the threat of incarceration is removed. If anything, abolishing the police emboldens those warped human beings who delight in preying on the weak. While one can argue that much low-level crime – burglary, drug-dealing, fraud, and so on – has its roots in economic desperation, serious offenses like murder and rape cannot be engineered out of society by dissolving police forces and reallocating the money to social programs.
Focusing the energy of the protest movement spawned by George Floyd’s killing on dismantling the police all but guarantees that desperately needed reforms will never come. While only seven percent of Americans surveyed last month thought the country’s policing system needed no changes, the notion of defunding the police was also profoundly unpopular, supported by just 27 percent of respondents. Accountability measures – assigning independent prosecutors to cases in which civilians are killed by police, or ending the “qualified immunity” protection that shields bad cops against misconduct lawsuits – enjoyed broad support, however.
CHOP will no doubt be held up in the coming months as “proof” that alternative social structures don’t work – or a dramatic tale of a collapsed dream of a new society – as if its leaders had really intended to make a permanent community or lead a real revolution. Sincere revolutionaries should recognize it for what it was – a Hollywood-grade production – and get back to work transforming society.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Afghanistan Bounties: Pot, Meet Kettle (and Turn Off the Stove!)
By Thomas L. Knapp | The Garrison Center | June 29, 2020
“American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan,” claims the New York Times.
More controversially, the authors write that US president Donald Trump was briefed on the assessment (he denies it) and the piece’s tag line says that his administration “has been deliberating for months” on how to respond (he says the US intelligence community didn’t find the claims credible).
Naturally, the response preferred by those who buy the Times‘s version of events is:
First, make domestic political hay with it. Sure, trying to frame Trump as a Russian asset has backfired spectacularly every time it’s been tried, but sooner or later it’s bound to work, right?
Second, make foreign policy hay with it. Punish the Russians until they’ve been baited back to full-blown Cold War levels of enmity, all the while whining that “they hate us for our freedom.”
I’ve got a better plan.
First, reduce the US military presence in Afghanistan to zero. If there aren’t any US forces in Afghanistan, no US forces in Afghanistan will be in danger due to supposed “Russian bounties.”
Second, ignore — forget! — the slim possibility that Russian bounties were behind any American deaths.
Problems solved.
Why should the US let the Russians off the hook and quit worrying about it? Here’s why:
To date, fewer than 2,500 Americans have died in Afghanistan in nearly 19 years of war.
The Russians’ 1979-1989 Afghan war lasted about half as long. Their toll was 15,000 dead.
Why didn’t the Russians get off as lightly as the Americans?
Because the US government spent at least $3 billion directly funding and arming groups like al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan (through the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”), and billions more indirectly via the Pakistani government.
Even counting only the known direct aid, that amounts to a $200 in-kind bounty for every dead Russian soldier. $200 was a pretty sweet paycheck, more than Afghanistan’s per capita GDP during most of that period.
If there is a Russian bounty program on US troops in Afghanistan now, it’s clearly been less successful than the equivalent US program was 30-40 years ago. And with that program, the US government gave up any conceivable standing to complain about a Russian remix.
That supposed remix is just one more reason, from among a long list of good reasons, to bring the troops home from Afghanistan.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).
The Memorials to Judah Benjamin
Jewish slave-owners exempt from attacks by BLM?
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 30, 2020
The current wrath directed against anything or anyone having had anything to do with slavery or even racial discrimination includes destroying historical memorials and monuments as well as changing names that have stood for more than a century. Much of it has been focused on white nominally Christian males, mostly of Anglo-Saxon stock, understandable as the United States was a child of Great Britain and a majority of the country’s leaders for nearly two centuries came from families descended from the British Isles.
Slavery in the United States version is, of course, seen in black and white terms but slavery in a broader historical context is much more complicated. There have been slaves since ancient times through the eighteenth century in many countries and most of them have been white. Sometimes they were called something different. Indentured servants were de facto slaves, as were the serfs in Russia, who were tied to the land and were not liberated until 1861.
The very word slave comes from Slav, as many of the slaves in the Middle Ages were from the Slavic parts of the Balkans bordering on the Adriatic, where mostly Muslim seagoing raiders would attack coastal villages and carry off the inhabitants. Italy was likewise afflicted and the numerous small castles and improvised forts along the Italian and Croatian coastlines were intended to providing a refuge for villagers against the corsair slavers.
In the United States currently progressives of all types and colors are flocking to the revolutionary banner hoisted by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other associated groups. Not surprisingly, given the liberal leanings of American Jews as well as their historical connections, Jewish groups have been actively engaged in the ongoing movement for racial justice. American Jews have played major roles historically in the founding and financial support of some of the most important civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1909, Henry Moscowitz was a co-founder the NAACP. Photos of the boards of directors of the various organizations well into the 1970s frequently reveal a majority of white Jews seated together with minority blacks. Kivie Kaplan was, for example, the national president of the NAACP between 1966 and 1975.
But this characterization of Jews as benefactors for the civil rights movement has also produced some curious omissions in the accepted historical narrative of who did what to whom in the slavery trade. It is well established, though never taught in schools, that Jews from Britain and Holland were involved in the African slave trade that prevailed after the European discovery of the Americas. In the United States, concentrations of Jews in the American south were in slave trading centers, notably in Charleston South Carolina, Savannah Georgia, Richmond Virginia and in New Orleans Louisiana. Many of the Jews themselves owned slaves.
The debate over Jewish involvement in both the business side of the slave trade as well as in actually possessing slaves comes down to “proportionality.” As the historical record makes clear that Jews in the south were engaged in both the importing and selling slaves as well as exploiting slave labor, the question becomes whether they were central to the process or just one of many identifiable groups that were peripherally involved in what was a major segment of the southern economy. The issue became extremely heated in the 1990s when mostly black academics argued that the Jewish role was pivotal while mostly Jewish professors responded that it was insignificant. In March 1995 the American Historical Association (AHA) got involved by issuing its first ever “policy resolution”, coming strongly down on the Jewish side of the argument, which should surprise no one. AHA argued that it was wrong to use historical analysis to vilify one group before citing a memo by two Jewish professors which asserted that the role of their co-religionists had been marginal.
For those who are interested in more on the discussion, the following article might be helpful, though it is on a Jewish website, cites only Jewish sources for it debunking of the idea that Jews might have been heavily engaged in the slave trade, and also brings in the most disreputable sources that say the contrary. It nevertheless concedes that Jews were involved in the slave trade and also possessed slaves, though it seeks to minimize the extent to which that was true. Much more interesting is a short book by a distinguished Wellesley History Professor Tony Martin “The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.” Martin describes in some detail how he was subjected to a “hysterical campaign” by Jewish organizations and fellow academics to have him discredited and fired after he assigned to his class on African-American history a short reading on the Jewish role in antebellum slavery.
Be that as it may, everyone should be aware that delving around in the past can be a messy business with no easy answers and little in the way of lines drawn between right and wrong. But in this case, the current unrest brings one around to a chap named Judah Benjamin. Judah was born in the West Indies to a British-Jewish family before winding up in Charleston and eventually New Orleans, where he became a lawyer and made a fortune. He was elected to the U.S. Senate from Louisiana. Among other investments, he owned a sugar cane plantation that included 140 slaves.
In March of 1861, Benjamin was named Attorney General of the Confederacy by President Jefferson Davis, whom Benjamin knew from the Senate. Davis would sometimes say that Benjamin was “the brains of the Confederacy.” That same year, Benjamin was also named Confederate Secretary of War, a post that he later resigned to become Secretary of State, a position that he held for the remainder of the conflict. It was the second most powerful position in Richmond’s Confederate bureaucracy.
When the Confederacy fell, Benjamin fled to London and eventually to Paris, where he rebuilt his fortune by again practicing law. Benjamin died in Paris in 1884 at the age of 72. He was buried in the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery with a simple headstone inscribed “Phillipe Benjamin.” In 1936, the United Daughters of the Confederacy paid for a monument to be placed over his grave.
So, the question becomes, with BLM and other wreckers trying to destroy America’s historical monuments, to include those commemorating the Founding Fathers, Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus, Catholic saint Junipero Serra and even abolitionist Hans Christian Heg, why is it that Judah Benjamin has somehow been missed? He was a slave owner and worked as a lawyer in New Orleans where there was a thriving slave market as well as an economy built around cotton exports, which were driven by slave labor. He eventually became the number two man in the southern Confederacy, which is being regularly denounced as fighting a war to maintain slavery.
Well, of course the answer is quite simple. No politician or journalist who wants to stay employed would dare to publicly link Jews and slavery. BLM is also extravagantly funded by various guilt ridden foundations and other folks who are no doubt sensitive to the fact that there are certain issues that cannot be raised, and the people with their hands out know perfectly well what they can and cannot do or say to keep the money flowing.
For what it’s worth, there are a few monuments to Judah Benjamin sitting around just waiting to be trashed. In 1948, Charlotte, North Carolina’s two Jewish congregations, Temple Israel and Temple Bethel, erected a marker on South Tyron Street at the site of the demolished house of merchant Abraham Weil where Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis found shelter in April 1865 as they fled the northern army. To their credit, the congregations are now seeking to have the memorial removed.
Also of note is the 5-foot-high pink marble column topped by a sundial located in Sarasota, Florida at the point where Benjamin escaped from the United States. The monument is inscribed “Near this spot on June 23, 1865, Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State of the United Confederacy, set sail for a foreign shore.”
Yet another stone marker is located at 9 West Main Street in Richmond, Virginia, identifying the location of Benjamin’s residence during the Civil War. Another stone marker can be found in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It recalls how Benjamin “attended Fayetteville Academy on this site.” There is still another stone monument in Bradenton Florida erected by the Judah P. Benjamin chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy and in North Carolina there is a Highway Historical Marker Program plaque that marks the site of Benjamin’s no longer existing boyhood home.
But the most impressive historic site commemorating Benjamin’s legacy is the Judah P. Benjamin Confederate Memorial at Gamble Plantation in the town of Ellenton, Florida, south of St. Petersburg. The historic site is maintained as a state park by the Florida Department of Natural Resources and also by the Judah P. Benjamin Chapter No. 1545 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is the only surviving antebellum plantation in central and south Florida and includes the mansion and gardens as well as a visitors’ center. A large bronze memorial plaque commemorates Benjamin. Nevertheless, the connection with Benjamin is admittedly tenuous as he only sought refuge there briefly in 1865 during his flight to England.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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Because no animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2, it cannot properly be termed a zoonosis.* Should we call it a labnosis? And what does that mean?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 12, 2021
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
Why did they do it? … continue
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- FARA Docs: Israel is Spying On Millions Of Christian Americans In Their Churches
- Why US presidents from both parties end up cursing Benjamin Netanyahu
- Israel Asked Facebook to Censor Iran War Content, Internal Documents Show
- Deaths in Gaza undercounted, possibly by 100s of thousands; “Psychopath” Ben-Gvir talks trash – Daily Update
- UNICEF: “Trauma is woven into the very fabric of childhood in Gaza”
- 15 articles a day: The extent of the Israeli army’s media interference
- Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounces Israeli seizure of church land in Jerusalem
- How Hillel International uses antisemitism training and ‘campus climate’ concerns to attack Palestine solidarity
- Old Iraq war architects rise up against Trump’s Iran deal
- No Tricks Zone
- German Wind Turbines Face Regulatory Shutdown Due To Excessive Noise
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
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