The internet is not capable of accommodating the download speeds necessary to validate the claims by Guccifer 2.0, that they hacked documents from across the Atlantic, according to a former technical director at the National Security Agency.
Guccifer 2.0, the cyber personality which claimed to have hacked documents belonging to members of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, is likely to be a front for the CIA, according to analysis conducted by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Bill Binney, a cryptogropher and former technical director at the US National Security Agency (NSA), blew the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programmes after serving with them for 30 years. Mr Binney explains to Sputnik that despite Guccifer 2.0 claiming to have hacked documents which the cyber criminal later published, the download speeds necessary to have obtained the documents simply are not available across the World Wide Web.
Sputnik: What were the conclusions that you came to regarding a cyber personality known as Guccifer 2.0 and his claims that he had hacked a trove of documents?
Bill Binney: Guccifer 2.0, posted files from the 5th of July [2016], the 1st of September [2016] in batch mode. He also put files out in the 15th of June that had Russian fingerprints. So to go straight at those, we had some collaborating analysts looking in the UK, looking at the data also. And they came up with a match of five files out of the Guccifer 2.0 batch on the 15th of June, they found five of those files also posted by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails, the same files. Now, the difference is the Guccifer 2.0 posts had Russian fingerprints. You know, Cyrillic characters and things like that implanted in the file. The WikiLeaks files posted, of those same five emails, did not have Russian signature prints in it. So that told us that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these Russian fingerprints. And we had some other fingerprint evidence of them using that.
Then, when we looked at the 5th of July 2016 and the September 2016 data that was posted by Guccifer 2.0, he would give a bio, we had extracted file names, number of characters and the timestamp at the end of the file. And he did the batch. So there was one file after the other. It was timestamped at the end of each file. So all we had to do was [assess the] difference in time between the files and see how many characters were passed and we calculate the transfer rate. And when we did that we got rates between 14 and 49.1 megabytes per second. That’s between 19 and 49.1 million characters per second. And we knew that the international web across the Atlantic to Europe, somewhere in Eastern Europe could not handle that kind of rate transfer.
Some people here thought we could. So we said, okay, we’ll try it. And we tried it from Albania, Serbia, Netherlands and the UK. The fastest we got with between two data centres, one in New Jersey and one in the United Kingdom in London. And that was 12 megabytes per second, which is slightly less than one fourth necessary capacity to transfer just the data, not counting overhead that goes with it and all of that… So all of that said to us, it was not there.
Sputnik: Was there anything else?
Bill Binney: There was another factor. We looked at the files again and if you ignored the date and the hour, the two [batches] shuffled together like a deck of cards. That is the times, [if you] looked only at a minutes, seconds and milliseconds, the data from the 1st of September merged into the time holes of the 5 July data. Which meant it was shuffling like one of cards. You have one file, he separated in two, then they had a range change on the date and the hour. You can’t do it on minutes and seconds because they keep changing. I mean, you’d have to go up there every minute and every second you got to know it’s not possible to do that, without extreme effort I’d say. What that said to us was this guy is fabricating the data, he’s playing with the data, he’s playing with us…
Vault 7
Then we went back and looked at the Vault 7 material (descriptions of CIA hacking tools published byWikiLeaks), which said that there’s a programme called Marble Framework, which [the CIA can use to] modify an attack and make it look like someone else did the attack, and the countries they had the capability to do that [to] were Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Arab countries. Also [Vault 7] said that the Marble Framework programme was [used] one time in 2016. Well, we think we found that one time. That one time came up and that fit very well with what was going on which we were finding out with the Guccifer 2.0 material. He was fabricating it. So that suggested us all the evidence was pointing back to CIA as the originator Guccifer 2.0. And that Guccifer 2.0 was inside CIA.
Sputnik: Just to clarify, the documents Guccifer 2.0 was publishing weren’t what is known as the DNC leaks or DNC hacks that WikiLeaks published in three batches?
Bill Binney: [Yes]. [Gucifer 2.0] claimed to have hacked [the documents he published].
The Hammer
There’s another whistleblower that we’re working with also and they’ve talked to us about a programme called The Hammer. This programme was set up inside CIA by, according to the whistleblower, by [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and [former CIA chief John] Brennan. And it was done so that they could spy on anybody they wanted to, without anybody in the intelligence community or the US government or any other government knowing they were doing it. The programme actually goes… back to 2003, I believe, with you when they first set it up. But [the whistleblower] also said that after that they had a secret operation inside CIA, by this group of people inside CIA looking at the Trump campaign and anybody else they wanted to sign on.
And it was done in that way, because, see, if you go into the NSA data and which the Five Eyes can do that as well, if you do that, anybody going in there, you’re tracked and recorded [when you use the surveillance system]. It’s wherever you go and what you do. And that’s based on the network logs. And also if you do an unmasking, you have to make a request and that’s recorded, who did it, what time, what the subject was and what the justification was and what person they were after. So, you know, all that stuff is recorded to go there. But if you set up your own separate one, nobody knows what you’re doing. And that’s exactly what this [whistleblower] is claiming. I’m pointing to that group as the group that was probably the originator of Guccifer 2.0 and also this fabrication of the entire story of Russiagate.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
In my previous article, I discussed the role of the Brookings Institute’s founder Strobe Talbott as an integrated part of the puzzle behind Russia Gate and also his indoctrination as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford alongside his room mate Bill Clinton in 1966.
I addressed the rise of the Rhodes Trust in 1902 as think tank designed explicitly to sabotage the spread of a multipolar model of sovereign republics applying “American system practices” of protectionism, national banking and internal improvements in the post Civil War era.
In this follow up article, I would like to pursue the deeper philosophical structure of the Rhodes Scholar world view as it expressed itself in Strobe Talbott’s 1992 Time Magazine manifesto “The Birth of a Global Nation” which he wrote in preparation for the new phase of his career swarming into the White House with dozens of other Rhodes Scholars who sought to define the conditions of the new unipolar age.
All Talbott quotes in this text are taken from this 1992 manifesto.
The Birth of a Global Nation
Standing on the cusp of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the rise of a unipolar era in 1992, Talbott couldn’t help but celebrate the dissolution of sovereign nations and the creation of a world government stating that within the next century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority…”
Ignoring the fact that sovereign nation states were created as instruments to protect citizens from empires, Talbott falsely defines nationalism in the following terms: “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming sovereignty and paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how much true sovereignty any one country actually has.”
This false definition of nationalism (which has become hegemonic amongst academia in recent generations) then sets up a series of false problems which he proceeds to “solve”.
In the Hobbesian system of zero sum thinking that Talbott imposes onto world history, nation states are assumed to be the natural outgrowth of selfishness, exploitation of the weak and war. Here Talbott entirely ignores all evidence that history’s wars have been artificially manipulated by a transnational financial elite and instead characterizes war as mankind’s natural state of being- thus requiring some sort of resolution of a leviathan or global force of enlightened elites from above:
“The big absorbed the small, the strong the weak. National might made international right. Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war… perhaps national sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
Then describing the hoped-for era of world government which he believes to be a utopian future age, Talbott lists the creation of the wonderful 20th century innovations of the League of Nations, NATO, the IMF and Globalization.
Talbott describes NATO as “history’s most ambitious, enduring and successful exercise in collective security” and then celebrates the International Monetary Fund. Talbott said “the free world formed multilateral financial institutions that depend on member states’ willingness to give up a degree of national sovereignty. The International Monetary Fund can virtually dictate fiscal policies, even including how much tax a government should levy on its citizens.”
Forecasting the Blair-Cheney R2P protocol which would soon justify the humanitarian bombings of Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and Syria, Talbott championed the destruction of national sovereignty made possible by the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 saying “the internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to the world community. But the principle of ‘humanitarian intervention is gaining acceptance.”
Straussian Neocons vs Rhodes Scholars
So far, if Talbott’s worldview looks pretty similar to that of your typical neocon, then don’t be surprised.
The goals of a neoliberal Rhodes Scholar imperialist and a neoconservative Straussian imperialist are essentially the same. Both types ultimately seek a post-nation state world order governed by a financial oligarchy and their technocratic alpha managers, and both define “power” in absolutely Nietzschean terms of “force”.
There are however several important differences which may seem superficial yet are important to understand if one wishes to avoid “left vs right” traps in thinking that many well-intentioned analysts are inclined to fall into.
One primary difference is that while neocons of a Kagan-Cheney-Bolton variety are much more willing to accept the fact (at least amongst themselves) that their ideal world order necessitates constant states of asymmetric “forever wars” of each against all- managed by their alphas from above, the left-wing imperialists of Talbott’s mindset prefer to promote a more pacifist narrative which I have no doubt some of them- including Talbott himself- actually believe to be true. Theirs is an “enlightened” rainbow fascism with a democratic face and a green Malthusian veneer which Aldous Huxley once described as “a concentration camp without tears.”
The Green Path to World Government
Returning to Talbott’s manifesto, the green path to the new world order that differentiates a neo con from neo liberal is introduced along with his admiration for a powerful individual:
“Last month’s Earth Summit in Rio signified the participants’ acceptance of what Maurice Strong, the main impresario of the event, called ‘the transcending sovereignty of nature’: since the by-products of industrial civilization cross borders, so must the authority to deal with them.”
In a 1992 essay entitled ‘From Stockholm to Rio: A Journey Down a Generation’, Maurice Strong (whom Talbott has always revered) wrote:
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
Two years earlier, Strong gave an interview wherein he described a “fiction book” he was fantasizing about writing which he described in the following manner:
“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Much like his sociopathic counterpart George Soros, Strong’s entire career had been devoted to the cause of a green world government from his earliest days as a Canadian Rockefeller asset and vice-president of Power Corporation, to his entry into the new Liberal Government of Lester Pearson in 1963. It was here that Strong created the Canadian International Development Corporation that helped accelerate 3rd world debt slavery (granting loans to poor nations on the condition that they adhered to IMF/World Bank conditionalities which kept them forever undeveloped and colonized.) Strong’s great innovation during this time was his enforcement of the idea of “appropriate technologies” which poor nations were expected to invest in rather than advanced “dirty technology” like nuclear power which “modified natural tribal ecosystems” too much.
In many ways, Maurice Strong along with Prince Philip (who was President of the World Wildlife Fund while Strong was WWF Vice President in 1977) and Laurence Rockefeller (controlling hand behind both America’s conservation movement and UFO disclosure movement), were founders of the Green New Deal which is currently being pushed as the “solution” to the imminent economic collapse.
The ‘One and the Many’
An important philosophical concept must be tackled by all truth seekers in order to fully appreciate the imperial games and manipulations which have defined our collective history as well as our collective future. While this concept can be formulated in many ways, its most simple expression is “the paradox of the One and the Many”.
The paradox in three short steps:
ALL processes which are ponderable exist simultaneously as “one”, “many” and “infinites”.
According to the rules of logic, a thing can be either “A” or “Not A”, but it can never be both “A” and “Not A”
Thus, how could something simultaneously be both one, many and infinite?
Let’s get out of the abstract realm for a second by looking at a concrete example.
A human being can be conceptualized as a one (ie: a person with one body and one identity), but also as a many (ie: the sum total of limbs, organs, cells, bones etc…). It can also be defined as an infinitely subdivided entity of atoms, and sub-particles ad infinitum. The same goes for a building, a chair, tree, dog, a poem, a painting or even HUMANITY itself.
In his beautiful Philebus dialogue (on how we judge “Good/Evil”), Socrates describes the discovery of this trifold character of all reality as a Promethean gift which must then be harnessed responsibly:
“A gift of heaven, which, as I conceive, the gods tossed among men by the hands of a new Prometheus, and therewith a blaze of light; and the ancients, who were our betters and nearer the gods than we are, handed down the tradition, that whatever things are said to be are composed of one and many, and have the finite and infinite implanted in them: seeing, then, that such is the order of the world, we too ought in every enquiry to begin by laying down one idea of that which is the subject of enquiry; this unity we shall find in everything. Having found it, we may next proceed to look for two, if there be two, or, if not, then for three or some other number, subdividing each of these units, until at last the unity with which we began is seen not only to be one and many and infinite, but also a definite number; the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the entire number of the species intermediate between unity and infinity has been discovered,—then, and not till then, we may rest from division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless individuals may allow them to drop into infinity. This, as I was saying, is the way of considering and learning and teaching one another, which the gods have handed down to us.”
As if to warn future lazy-minded Rhodes Scholars who prefer to skip steps in their understanding of the system of humanity which they wish to manage politically- Plato says:
“But the wise men of our time are either too quick or too slow in conceiving plurality in unity. Having no method, they make their one and many anyhow, and from unity pass at once to infinity; the intermediate steps never occur to them.”
The question then presents itself: How do we define the relationship of the infinite to the many and the many to the one? Is the one merely a sum-total of parts? Or is it something more?
An empiricist (or one who has enslaved their metaphysical capacities to sense perceptive rules) would have to conclude: Yes.
Since metaphysical notions like Justice, Goodness, Soul, Purpose, Creativity, etc… have no parts, are not bounded by time or spatial constraints (you can’t cut a “Justice” in half and share it) and are thus not subjected to sense perception- the empiricist asserts that they cannot actually exist in any meaningful way. Like Plato’s Callicles featured in the Gorgias dialogue or the brutish Thrasymachus in Book one of the Republic, such “abstract” concepts are just social conventions (like Talbott’s “nation states”), used for utilitarian reasons of managing society but never assumed to be true by an “enlightened” master class.
Pick up any Platonic dialogue and you will encounter rigorously dialectic treatments of this problem from a multitude of angles. It is worth the exercise.
Rhodes Scholars, Straussians, and other imperialists across the ages, have always been and will always be very aware of this paradox. All imperialists who enslave their reasoning powers to sense perception all suffer from the same inability to resolve ontological paradoxes which Socrates warned us of in the Philebus Dialogue above… They wish to rule without first having taken the time to know either the nature of the species they wish to rule, the universe they wish to rule in, and consequently they don’t even know themselves (breaking the cardinal rule of philosophy extolled by both Socrates and Confucius: “Know thyself”).
This small philosophical sojourn takes us back to Talbott’s 1992 manifesto.
Talbott’s Failed Solution to the One and the Many
Talbott ends his treatise with a telling insight into the oligarchical “false resolution” to the One and the Many paradox: describing the Balkanization process that would soon be imposed upon the Soviet Union and the larger spread of subdividing separatist movements across the world, Talbott states that they are a “basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern themselves. That is being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time.”
Defining society “locally, regionally and globally”, Talbott lays out an infinite [locally sub dividable], many [regional ever-more Balkanizable nations] and inescapable one [the global community].
Since this configuration is rooted in the belief that “wholes = the sum of their parts”, Talbott’s ilk choose to promote forms of “world federalism” that impose order onto society from above.
If humanity can be socially engineered to think locally, subdivided according to race (see: Black lives Matter), creed, micro states, genders (also infinitely sub-dividable), etc… then the slaves can happily vote for whichever local CHAZ warlord or parliamentarian on their tiny section of the board game as they see fit. In the end their choice won’t matter very much since the rules of the world game system would be forever out of their sphere of “democratic” influence.
This utopian subdivided world of micro-democracies would be “harmonized” by a global order of non-elected social engineers and enlightened elite who would scientifically manage the diminishing returns of resources to be allocated to the useless eaters in this Brave New World. The new world religion would have a decisively green tint, morality would become reduced to the liberal nothingness of “tolerating infinitely subdividing opinions and genders” and Orwell’s vision would be complete.
The only problem was the Multipolar Alliance
We have been introduced to the false resolution of the One and the Many adhered to by imperialists and technocrats. Let us now look at a more healthy resolution to the paradox which has been adopted by leaders of the Multipolar Alliance which took on a powerful character with Xi Jinping’s 2013 announcement of the New Silk Road, and Putin’s entry into Syria in 2015. Since 2015, both the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, Arctic development and New Silk Road (that has seen 135 nations join) has integrated into one unified system along with an alternative multipolar financial architecture, increasingly independent from western oligarchical manipulation.
The re-assertion of national sovereignty tied to this multipolar alliance enrages technocrats like Talbott and other British Imperial deep staters to the ends of the earth for the simple reason that it is based not upon “structural controls of the many” under stasis, but on scientific and technological progress. This principle of creative change is the resolution to the ontological paradox raised in every Platonic dialogue. When one takes creative reason and its fruits into account as the defining characteristic of humanity as a One, then we come to recognize that humanity will always be more than the sum of its parts. Humanity, is a self-perfectable species capable of boundless discoveries of principles of the universe, and self-reflexively translating those concepts back upon our species through scientific and technological progress which has allowed our species to leap far beyond the limits to growth bounding all other species of life, to the point of sustaining nearly 9 billion souls on the earth today.
Since this open system/creative character is intrinsically uncontrollable, and a cause of disequilibrium, Rhodes Scholars and neocons who are obsessed with godlike control can do nothing but hate and fear it.
The return of nationalistic impulses to America in 2016 after decades of neocon/Rhodes Scholar controls represented the deep state’s greatest fear and for this reason, a desperate and sloppy dossier was concocted to undo the election at all costs.
Luckily, the near-absolute controls which the oligarchy enjoyed in 1992 as it celebrated the New World Order have fast slipped away, and the jig, as they say, is increasingly up.
Today, nation states (including the USA itself) have the first chance in decades to save themselves from a new global bankers’ dictatorship by jumping on board a new system of win-win cooperation both on earth and, increasingly in space.
The first item on the agenda must be the immediate acceptance of President Putin’s call for a five-nation emergency summit followed soon thereafter by a new economic system driven by great projects, long term growth and CREATIVE CHANGE.
Two Palestinian mothers share their experiences attempting to visit their children who are serving sentences in Israeli prisons:
Khaled B., 13, recounts his time in solitary confinement:
Israeli forces shot child who posed no threat:
May 2, 2019
Israeli forces shot Palestinian child Mahmoud Qaddumi, 13, with live ammunition in both legs at a time when he did not pose a threat, and then arrested him. Defense for Children International – Palestine visited him in the hospital, where he was recovering from surgery. He hopes to walk.
Defense for Children International – Palestine is an independent NGO dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian children.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hinted that sanctions may be in store for Belarus following the state’s heavy-handed response to opposition protesters, who have disputed the result of the recent presidential election.
Asked how Washington would respond to the opposition crackdown during an interview with Radio Free Europe on Wednesday, Pompeo said that both sanctions and trade penalties were on the table, suggesting the US could also halt oil shipments to the east European nation.
“What is it that we believe that we can do, not just the United States unilaterally, but in a multilateral way to deliver good outcomes for the Belarusian people, whether that turns out to be sanctions or turns out to be making decisions about product deliveries?” Pompeo asked rhetorically, adding that he was “deeply disappointed” by the election and its violent aftermath.
“Those are all things that are yet to be determined. We’re still pretty fresh off this election and we need to see how things settle out here in the near future.”
The country’s August 9 presidential election has kicked off a wave of unrest among the political opposition, who insist that incumbent Alexander Lukashenko’s landslide victory was rigged, keeping him in office for his sixth consecutive term since 1994. Some four days after the contentious race, mass protests continued to engulf the capital of Minsk and other cities, seeing violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces, who have made more than 6,000 arrests in that time.
Though Washington has imposed and removed sanctions on Minsk intermittently over the last decade – last scaling back penalties in 2015 after Lukashenko freed a number of political prisoners – relations between the two countries have improved in recent years, with the US making at least one major oil shipment to Belarus since May. That may change following Pompeo’s remarks, however, in which he also said the US would attempt to lean on its “European friends” to join the effort to punish the Lukashenko government. Other countries in the region have already signalled willingness to pursue that goal, with Poland, Latvia and Lithuania threatening to impose sanctions of their own unless they are permitted to mediate talks between the state and the opposition.
Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well 21st Century Socialism.
When Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says small nuclear reactors “could be a game changer in providing safe, zero-emitting, base load power in many areas of the province,” as he did Sunday in a tweet, he’s pulling your leg.
For a variety of economic and technical reasons, the scenario Kenney described while re-tweeting a CBC story about his announcement that Alberta intends to sign onto the three-province effort to develop small nukes is unlikely ever to occur.
Kenney and his government’s officials certainly know this.
This is not a judgment call on whether “small modular reactors” — as the companies proposing manufacturing these things prefer to call them to sooth a public skittish about the word “nuclear” — will perform as advertised. Small nuclear reactors can be built and should be able to be operated reasonably safely.
Nor is it a call on whether nuclear power is the solution to a warming planet or a dystopian nightmare with the potential to make things even worse. There are reasonable voices on both sides of that debate.
The problem is that the economics of the scheme described by Kenney just don’t add up.
Consider these facts:
As long as natural gas is cheap and plentiful, small nuclear reactors will not make economic sense.
Except in a few locations like very remote mines, small nuclear reactors will never make sense from an economic standpoint as long as natural gas is readily available and inexpensive, as it is now in Canada and will likely remain.
Even a modular reactor built by a mature industry selling lots of units would cost more to build and run than a natural-gas powered plant. And right now, there is no approved small reactor design anywhere in the West, and no mature industry to make them.
Even if this idea is not just a pipe dream, no electrical utility is ever going to buy one unless they are forced to by government policy or regulation — the kind Alberta’s United Conservative Party purports to be opposed to. Nor will any bitumen-mining company.
Probably the only way to make these things competitive would be to impose a stiff carbon tax that vastly increases the price of natural gas.
Small nuclear reactors are not necessarily as cheap to build as nuclear fairy tales like the premier’s suggest.
Creating an acceptable small nuclear reactor design all the way from the drawing board to approval by a national nuclear regulatory authority will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
While dozens of speculative companies are printing colourful brochures with pretty pictures of little nukes being trucked to their destinations, very few are serious ventures with any possibility of building an actual reactor. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency says diplomatically there are about 50 concepts “at different stages of development.” Those that are serious, like NuScale Power in the United States, have huge amounts of government money behind them.
The only small nuclear reactor plant known to be operating in the world now is the Akademik Lomonosov, Russia’s floating power barge with two 35-megawatt reactors aboard. From an original estimate of US$140 million in 2006, its cost had ballooned to US$740 million when the vessel was launched.
Operational costs are bound to be higher because it floats, but the kind of small reactors Kenney is talking about won’t be cheap by any yardstick.
Small reactors are less economical to run than big reactors.
If a reactor is only producing 300 megawatts of electricity compared to 800 megawatts or more, it’s not going to generate as much profit for its private sector owners. This is why all reactors getting built in the world nowadays are large — 1,000 to 1,600 megawatts.
Ontario Power Generation Inc.’s eight operational reactors at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station on Lake Huron can produce a combined 6,200 megawatts. The eight reactors at the Pickering NGS near Toronto have combined output of 3,100 megawatts.
This is why nobody wanted to buy the scaled-down CANDU-3 reactor, development of which was paid for by Canadian taxpayers in the 1980s. At 300 megawatts, CANDU-3s were just too small for commercial viability. A working CANDU-3 has never been built.
The cost of small reactors would have to come down significantly to change this. And remember, the research and development requirements of small reactors are just as high as for big ones. With nobody manufacturing modules, there are no existing economies of scale. In other words, dreamy brochures about the future of small reactors are just that — dreams.
By the way, in 2011 the Harper government privatized the best commercial assets of Crown-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., to … wait for it … SNC-Lavalin Group Ltd. Think about that every time you hear Conservatives in Ottawa screeching about the goings on at SNC-Lavalin!
In the Alberta government’s news release, Energy Minister Sonya Savage was quoted saying “Alberta’s rich uranium deposits … could make us an attractive destination to develop and deploy SMRs.”
Not really.
With one exception, all current small reactor designs use enriched uranium, and Canada doesn’t produce any. So if we adopted a lot of the small reactors being touted by Premier Kenney right now, we’d be putting our energy supply in the hands of foreigners.
Would putting a large percentage of our national power needs directly in the hands of other countries be sound policy from the standpoint of security or sovereignty? Not if you’ve been paying attention!
Global uranium markets are already saturated, so there’s no way this will become a new resource industry for Alberta.
Don’t expect a boom in uranium mining in Alberta, either. There’s a worldwide glut of the stuff. Prices are low. (Sound familiar?) Existing suppliers have invested billions to mine high-grade deposits, and even that production is fetching only depressed prices.
So nobody’s interested in creating new uranium mines in Alberta, probably ever.
Small reactors might be safer than big reactors, but we don’t really know that.
Kenney and Savage talk about small reactors as if it were a fact they’re safer than big reactors. Maybe they are. But we don’t really know that because nobody but the Russians actually seems to have built one, and in most cases they haven’t even been designed.
Remember, the Russians’ small reactors are both on a barge. For what it’s worth, critics have called it “floating Chernobyl.”
However safe they are designed to be, small reactors won’t be safe without public regulation.
This is an important consideration. The safety of electricity generation projects regardless of what kind of fuel they use needs to be watched over by accountable, responsible, and, yes, properly paid public employees.
This runs counter to the philosophy of all four provincial governments involved in the inter-provincial effort to encourage the development of small nukes.
With the potential effects of a nuclear disaster so long lasting, can we trust industry to regulate itself? More importantly, can we trust a UCP government not to hand regulation of these plants to the for-profit companies that would operate them?
Then there’s still the matter of waste disposal.
Nuclear plants don’t produce a lot of waste by volume, but what there is sure has the potential to cause problems for a very long time. Thousands of years and more. So safe storage is an issue with small nukes, just like it is with big ones.
Where are we going to store the waste from all these wonderful small nuclear reactors Kenney is talking about?
Canada created the Nuclear Waste Management Organization to find a “willing host community” for a deep geological repository capable of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years. Almost nobody wants the stuff, for obvious reasons. Does any Alberta community want to put up its hand?
“More research and development work is required on the fuel cycle for some SMR technologies,” the UN’s IAEA notes cautiously.
Alternatively, spent fuel could be reprocessed in fast reactors. But why do that when natural uranium prices, just like oil prices, are in the bargain basement, making fast reactors uneconomical? What are we going to do to raise prices? Build a uranium pipeline?
So what gives?
None of this sounds like the basis of an exciting new industry for Alberta. On the contrary, there’s a whiff of scam about the whole effort to proselytize the idea of a small reactor manufacturing industry, which wouldn’t be located in Alberta anyway, and more uranium mining, which isn’t going to happen.
The timing of last Friday’s announcement was certainly intended as a distraction from a political embarrassment the day before.
But arguably the whole memorandum of understanding is a distraction too, a way to tell citizens and foreign investors fretting about global climate change, “Don’t worry about it, we’re working on it.” That’s less embarrassing than admitting that we’re doing very little to reduce CO2 emissions.
Ontario has a big nuclear industry with lots of private employers and a large workforce, so for a modest investment it looks good for Premier Doug Ford to sign on.
How many jobs is it likely to create here in Western Canada? Well, Saskatchewan’s ministry of the rnvironment recently posted a job for a “Director of SMRs.” That person will supervise four people. That’s probably about it for the foreseeable future.
If Alberta ends up with the same number of people working on this, we’ll be lucky.
David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald.
Why did London host a convention of anarchists in July 1881 less than three months after they had murdered the Liberator Tsar of Russia?
The International Anarchist Congress of London, from July 14 to July 20, 1881 was highly unusual in many ways, though it has almost totally been forgotten by history, save as a curiosity.
It was the last such gathering to be held for more than a quarter of a century until the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in August 1907. During that time, there were four other unsuccessful attempts to call international congresses, in Geneva in 1882, in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1890 and once again in Paris in 1900.
Those interested in the procedural minutiae of the congress can easily enough find obscure academic articles discussing theoretical intellectual positions held and debated at the Congress.
But as far as I have been able to find, no historians have given any serious study to the possibility that the Congress may have been used to coordinate or plan any program of “Propaganda of the Deed” – the assassination of important political leaders across Europe and the Americas, which was central to the achievement of the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s goals.
Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.
Most striking of all, there appears never to have been any serious investigation conducted as to why the British government permitted its capital London, to be the host of the conference that on the surface stood for the destruction of everything that the British Empire, its traditions and institutions held dear.
The decision to permit the 1881 congress to gather in London was particularly striking – and from the Russian government’s point of view outrageous – because it opened only four months almost to the day after Tsar Alexander II, the Great Liberator who freed 24 million serfs from slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union through the U.S. Civil War, was assassinated by a specially designed shrapnel grenade thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on Sunday, March 13, 1881.
That hideous crime was planned and committed by the Narodnaya Volya, “The People’s Will” itself a strange, tiny, conspiratorial group shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions to this day.
The name of the group suggests – as it was meant to – a mass popular movement, But the Narodnaya Volya was no such thing. The best estimates of Russian and Western historians alike put it at no more than 200 members. Almost none of these were from peasant backgrounds. They were almost all from favored, prosperous, professional middle class families and in some cases even from aristocratic backgrounds.
Interestingly, the followers of the late Osama Bin Laden in the first generation of al-Qaeda that carried out the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 exhibit an almost identical set of profiles, as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal bin Abdelaziz ibn Saud has pointed out.
The Narodnaya Volya was only founded in 1879. But it was totally crushed by 1884. Yet in the first two years of its existence, it operated with apparent impunity carrying out no less than eight attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander. No other tsar in Russian history including Alexander’s son and grandson after him was ever hunted so mercilessly and relentlessly by assassins.
The Narodnaya Volya never lacked for any of the financing it needed for its murderous schemes. The Russian internal security services, who proved extremely efficient and energetic in smashing the group after it carried out its bloody deed, seemed utterly helpless and inept against it until that point. This may in large part have been because the group was so tiny and so novel in its operational techniques.
Who led the Narodnaya Volya? Its documented leaders were Andrey Zhelyabov and Sofya Perovskaya. Perovskaya came from an aristocratic background but showed little capability beyond her own murderously intense fanaticism and strange obsession with murdering the tsar. Other members of the group when arrested openly commented on her merciless hatred for the ruler who had liberated the serfs.
But Perovskaya from 1872 was personally very closely associated with the then handsome, dashing and charismatic anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. It is likely they were lovers.
The carefully (British) constructed image of Kropotkin that endures to this day is a tubby, kindly, smiling old, bearded Father Christmas. In his youth, however, he was darkly satanically handsome and was obsessed with Goethe’s devil figure Mephistopheles in “Faust.”
For Perovskaya, Kropotkin would have been the dashing, aristocratic brilliant love of her life. For Kropotkin, the rather plain Perovskaya would have been a means to an end: The hunting and murder of the tsar.
Kropotkin came from one of the most aristocratic eminent families in Russia. He claimed descent from the House of Rurik, the original ruling family of Russia. He had actually been a personal page of Tsar Alexander II in his early years in power. He had been brutally bullied (or so he later claimed) when entering the Imperial corps of pages. For ever after, he maintained an intense personal hatred of the tsar, intensified by the years he spent as a prisoner for his subversive activities in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg starting in 1872. His escape was engineered by friends in 1876.
Kropotkin’s relationship with Perovskaya starting in 1872 in the Tchaikovsky (not the great musical composer) Circle is the key documented fact that links Kropotkin directly to the murder of the great tsar he so intensely personally hated. The group’s leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky, like Kropotkin found protection in Britain for most of his later life.
Kropotkin was a noted scientist in his day who contested Darwin and argued a version of evolution based on natural cooperation rather than natural selection. In fact it was superficial and crackpot but interestingly has recently been revived, along with his scientific reputation in British academic circles.
During the remainder of his own long life (he died in 1921 at the age of 79), Kropotkin was allowed to live in complete peace and security in Britain. Not coincidentally, Britain was the only major country in Europe not to suffer from the mysterious outbreak of assassinations that swept the continent and even the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.
As Matthew Ehret has noted, the anarchist assassinations seemed to disproportionately target major leaders who rejected free trade and a global economic order dictated by British financial interests from the City of London. Its victims included U.S. presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897) and King Umberto I of Italy (1900).
In addition, in 1878 alone, anarchists attempted to kill Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany twice as well as the Kings of Spain and Italy. Kropotkin hailed all these efforts at “the Propaganda of the Deed.” Not coincidentally, all of these leaders, especially the old Kaiser, Bismarck’s patron and protector stood like Tsar Alexander II squarely opposed to British efforts at global financial domination.
Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.
To this day, British historians and other writers have unanimously continued to swallow the approved line that Kropotkin was a kindly, brilliant, pacifist saint – belonging to the company of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King rather than that of Sergei Nechayev and Dostoyevsky’s “Devils.”
The hyper-energetic, much loved and woefully idiotic American popular historian Barbara Tuchman spread this Disneyworld fairy tale image of Kropotkin in her enormously popular and influential history of the pre-World War I world “The Proud Tower” in 1966. Typically, she won the Pulitzer Prize twice for writing other histories that got their central facts and theses wrong.
A serious study of the role of Kropotkin and his “Anarchist International” in the assassinations of the late 19th century is well over 100 years overdue.
But even in that age of carefully selected and discriminating terror, the hunting and murder of the great liberator Tsar Alexander stands out for its relentless nature and obsessive cruelty.
That age of assassinations and the Anarchists Congress that the British so incongruously hosted in July 1881 is not just a matter of abstract curiosity about a long forgotten and irrelevant past. It offers disquieting parallels to the use of targeted assassinations and the methodical destabilization of great nations in the name of free trade, democracy and human rights that continues at a feverish pace in our own time.
As the great American novelist William Faulkner rightly wrote in “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Alan Dershowitz, in Guilt by Accusation, writes, referring to accusations concerning his alleged sexual misconduct,
“Evidence was no longer important. It was the accusation that mattered, as well as the identities of the accuser and accused. The presumption shifted from innocence to guilt. For a man to call a false accuser a liar became a political sin, even if the accused had hard evidence of the accuser’s lies, as I did.”
The main purpose of his short book is to dent the credibility of Virginia Roberts Guiffre who, as well as being a leading witness against Dershowitz’s friend and former client Jeffrey Epstein, has claimed that the latter trafficked her for sex with Mr Dershowitz.
Now that Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested and charged we can only hope that the courts get to the bottom of the matter and find out what actually did or did not happen.
However, Mr Dershowitz, as well as writing his case-for-the-defence in relation to Virginia Guiffre, has also expended effort to discredit another person who has made accusations damaging to him. That person is Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein and whose allegations against him and others are recounted in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.
Although Farmer does not claim to have been abused by Dershowitz, she does state in an affidavit that she saw Dershowitz on a number of occasions at Epstein’s New York mansion where she worked, “going upstairs at the same time there were young girls under the age of 18 who were present upstairs in the house.” Dershowitz vigorously denies that this was even possible, saying that he only met Epstein “well after she [Farmer] stopped working for him”. According to Dershowitz, Farmer stopped working for Epstein in the “early summer of 1996” with Dershowitz only meeting Epstein for the first time, via Lynn Forester (Lady d’Rothschild), in the summer of 1996. However, Farmer claims in an interview with the journalist Whitney Webb that Dershowitz met Epstein years before he claims, via Bert Fields, the husband of Barbara Guggenheim.
Curiously Dershowitz, in his recent article aiming to discredit Farmer, does not mention the one time he is referred to by name in Webb’s lengthy phone interview. Instead, he sets out to depict Farmer as someone who may have“been motivated by the anti-Semitic attitudes she has long harboured, to falsely accuse prominent Jews of sexual misconduct.”
It is this suggestion and others made in the article that I want to examine here. Note that Farmer’s claims about Dershowitz are in fact relatively mild and hardly the high-coloured stuff we might expect of an anti-Semitic liar; indeed, Dershowitz’s reference to “prominent Jews” in the plural may suggest that he is attempting to undermine Farmer’s claims about Epstein, Maxwell and perhaps others, rather than just himself.
The claims that Dershowitz makes about Farmer’s alleged anti-Semitism are a large part of the ‘evidence’ he brings forward to undermine the testimonial authority that Farmer claims to have as an alleged victim of Epstein. If Farmer can be shown to be a raving anti-Semite with a vicious attitude towards Jewish people, then her testimony becomes more questionable both in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of judges.
Dershowitz opens the article by citing, in quotation marks, six statements that he asserts Farmer uttered in the course of the interview.
Here they are:
“I had a hard time with all Jewish people.”
“I think it’s all the Jews.”
“They think Jewish DNA is better than the rest of us.”
“These people truly believe they are chosen every one of them.”
“All the Jewish people I met are pedophiles that run the world economy.”
“They are ‘Jewish supremacists’” and they are “all connected” through a mysterious organization called MEGA, which is run by Leslie Wexner who is “the head of the snake.”
Most readers, on seeing these statements, would conclude that whoever uttered them was someone with very bigoted attitudes towards Jews in general and prone to the kind of conspiratorial thinking that takes hold in the minds of people with paranoid tendencies.
What happens if we actually listen to the interview, to which Dershowitz provided no link or reference? As there is no transcript of the interview I have transcribed the relevant sections of it myself, together with timings so that readers can check for accuracy.
Exhibit 1
“They think Jewish DNA is better than the rest of us.”
This is cited by Dershowitz as an example of the“bigotry Maria Farmer spewed during a recorded two-hour interview that can be heard online.”
What Farmer actually said, in the relevant section of the interview (and the only time she mentioned DNA) is as follows:
14.09-14.41 DNA
“When I called Ghislaine [Maxwell] and asked why I couldn’t eat there [at a private and exclusive country club] she said “it’s a Jewish country club, you’re not Jewish, they’re not going to serve you.” This is how this woman spoke to me, yeah. This is how these people think Whitney. They, honest to God, think their DNA is better than everybody else’s, I swear to you. It was a theme all the time with them. With Eileen Guggenheim, with Jeffrey Epstein, with Ghislaine. It was a theme.”
It is quite clear from the context that Farmer, when she says “They”, is referring to the set of people she mentions and not all Jewish people. Yet Dershowitz, by stripping away the context of the quotation, leads the reader to assume that “They” is a universal ascription of certain views to Jews in general of the kind that might be made by a genuinely bigoted person.
Exhibit 2
“I had a hard time with all Jewish people.”
“I think it’s all the Jews”.
“All the Jewish people I met are pedophiles that run the world economy.”
The context of these quotations can be seen below.
“1hr 24.05 “I was actually glad I was in hiding in obscure hillbilly town. Like I’ve had to live in horrible places full of ignorant hillbillies and it was a relief because they weren’t elites, you know. It was just, it’s, for a long time I had a hard time with all Jewish people, I’m gonna be honest with you. For a long time I was like, I think it’s all the Jews. Like I don’t know, because my sister is like, “Maria, it’s just the ones you met, it’s these people.” It’s just unfortunate that all the Jewish people I met also happen to be pedophiles that run the world economy, you know. So it giveslike a bad taste in your mouth. But David Icke has kind of helped me with that. I kind of understand it better now, but like er that looks hard. You know, they did a number on all of us. We’ve all had a hard time with, like, a lot of it because of the abuse, you know. So it’s hard to not then go, all these people are like this when it’s not true, not all of them, just a huge chunk of elites are like this.”
The first thing to notice here is that Dershowitz removes the words “For a long time” from both the first and second quotes. Had he kept the phrase in, this might have led readers to ask what Maria Farmer’s evolving attitudes were and whether she has distanced herself or is in the process of doing so from previous attitudes. Compare how you might react on hearing that someone had said, “For a long time, I thought, black people are inferior”, as opposed to hearing the person had simply said “black people are inferior”.
Farmer explicitly distances herself from a bigoted stance towards “all Jewish people” seeing herself as trying to recover from such an attitude. In this context, she refers to the advice of her sister and, alarmingly, that of David Icke who certainly has trafficked in wild conspiracy theories concerning lizards and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not the best choice for a guide, to put it mildly, and a worrying sign of Farmer’s naivete – but the point here is that she is actively resisting a tendency to bigotry she presents as arising from her traumatic experiences.
Again she refers to the specific people she came across in the Epstein set, who she claims are powerful pedophiles that run the world economy. And she suggests that as a result of the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of people within this elite set, she developed an attitude towards Jews that was bigoted and which she is trying to resist. She does not deny that she has sometimes blurred the line between Jews generally and the arrogant criminal conduct of the elite set, but it must be recalled that she was a young woman at the time of the alleged abuse and has since struggled with her prejudice, hoping to overcome it.
It is hardly unusual for abuse victims to develop negative and irrational attitudes to groups of people who share features with their abusers. Female rape victims not uncommonly struggle not to have negative attitudes to all men, or to all men who share certain physical characteristics with the men who raped them. Very often such victims know that such attitudes are irrational and struggle with them. Or think of the attitudes to ‘all Germans’ of some Holocaust victims, or to ‘the Japanese’ of British prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, or of the attitudes of Jewish and Palestinian victims of Palestinian and Israeli terrorism to those they identify with the terrorists. To quote Maria Farmer in a way that deliberately suppresses her struggles with past attitudes and depict her as a straightforward bigot to be excoriated is to suppress the voice of someone who may simply be trying to recover from damage inflicted upon her.
Exhibit 3
“These people truly believe they are chosen every one of them.”
Maria Farmer does not actually say what Dershowitz has her saying (by combining two clauses in different sentences). Again, “every one of them” clearly refers to a specific group, the Epstein set.
1hr 32.04-1hr 32.47
“You wouldn’t believe the way Jeffrey and Ghislaine spoke about African-Americans. It was like, it made my skin crawl. Anybody who was not Jewish, and you should write about this, but the way they spoke about them, it was really horrifying and it showed me a great deal about how these people truly believe that they are chosen to do something here. I don’t know, it’s unbelievable to me. I mean, and it was every one of them, the way they spoke. And one time I heard Isabelle say to her mother Eileen [Guggenheim] “Mommy, why do you call Maria a nobody” and she said “Honey, Isabelle, Maria is not a Jew, she is a nobody. So you can see why, for about 20 years…”
Exhibit 4
“They are “Jewish Supremacists”
1hr 33.45-1hr34.04
“This is a problem, this elitism is very deep and these are the people pushing racism, these are the people saying, pushing white, saying there is White Supremacy, which maybe there is in some ignorant Southern hillbilly groups, but I don’t know any White Supremacists but I know a lot of Jewish Supremacists they’re all elites and they are all connected. And they are the biggest Supremacists I have ever met. And the things they said about Black people made me cry. Honest to God. It made me sick.”
Note that Dershowitz completely misquotes Farmer here and again, by stripping the quotation of context leads his readers to assume that “They” refers to all Jews, rather than Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their set. Presumably for Dershowitz, someone condemning White Supremacists they had met, and referring to that particular group as ‘they’, could be condemned as having a bigoted attitude to all white people – even if they said in the same interview that they know this isn’t about white people as a group.
It is worth now quoting Farmer at length to gain an insight into the levels of dishonesty Dershowitz is to employ.
PART 2
34.19 – 37.27
“So Jeffrey and Ghislaine they were at the estate, they came like three times to visit Wexner while I was there. And they would go meet with him and then they would come back. And Ghislaine said they were working on all these Israeli charities for students and for,you know,Jewish people. And I remember thinking, oh that’s weird. And she was like, she was like “you don’t understand our loyalty to Israel, Maria. You don’t understand our loyalty.” She’s like, “unless you’re a dual citizen you just don’t get it”. She’s like “your people could never understand.” She would say “My people, your people, The Chosen Ones”, all that bullshit. And I’m just like…Let me tell you something, if I walk out of here not at all racist it’s a freaking miracle. Because I struggle every day with it. I’m like urgh I was so abused. I guess it could have happened from any group but because they are the ones that happen to control the world. It’s hard, it’s really hard, like this specific group of elites. It’s really hard to not just hate them, you know. So I haven’t gotten over hating that Ghislaine and the way she…
WW: I think they try and lump everyone in by design too, you know, in order to give themselves protection.
MF: Yes.
WW: I think it’s very intentional.
MF: It is very intentional.
WW: I can’t blame you for feeling that way considering what you had to go through so.
MF: Right. Well I don’t really feel that way. Let me tell you my background. Every boyfriend I’ve ever had was very Jewish, like 100 per cent, and never, I mean I had the best relationships in New York, I mean these were like the most patient guys, I don’t know why they put up with me, I think back on it and like those were the nicest guys. So there were the four boyfriends I had and everybody who got in touch with them says you know what Maria your boyfriends loved you so much and say nothing but nice things. So I have had very good experiences.But it was the Eileen Guggenheim thing and the Ghislaine all of that really soured me on like the religious, on religion in general, if you wanna know the truth. Like religion being used against people. And erm just all of it. It just really soured me. And I don’t, I don’t totally trust people, even though I have friends that are Jewish, like I still havefraught trust issues because, and it’s so unfair to them – rationally I know it’s unfair, but I was so, you know, scalded by the hot water, you know, I just can’t, I just can’t, I just can’t stick my hand back in. Like it’s too hard right now.
WW: That’s ok, it makes sense.
MF: But I don’t totally feel that way. I’m just being honest. I’m like a really honest person Whitney. And so, most people will never talk about that stuff. And I’m not…and the other thing that pisses me off is this whole anti-semitic bs because they call Bernie Sanders anti-semitic.
WW: Oh yeah, I know.
MF: I’m like, when is it going to end.
WW: It’s out of control. And the whole dual loyalty thing, you can’t say that even though you just mentioned what Ghislaine told you, right? Sheldon Adelson, he’s on video saying, all I care about is being a good citizen of Israel and he’s the top political donor in the United States. So the fact you’re not allowed to talk about is I think very troubling, right so…”
Whatever one makes of Farmer’s claims, there can be no doubt that Dershowitz has concocted a grotesque smear, depicting her as something she is not to a wide readership who will never hear the interview. Perhaps, using his own standards, we should begin to question his own reliability as a witness, using his actual – not fabricated or misleadingly presented – words.
It is not as though Dershowitz doesn’t have an impressive track record when it comes to smears and character assassination; in particular, blaming victims is something he has shown himself very willing to do.
Dershowitz falsely claimed that Norman Finkelstein suspected his mother of being a ‘kapo’ by distorting a moving account of her experiences Finkelstein had recalled. He falsely and without evidence claimed that Walt and Mearsheimer drew from “neo-Nazi” websites for their work on the Israel Lobby. He called Richard Goldstone a “moser” and accused Robert Fisk of anti-Semitism when he attempted to look for the possible motivational causes of the hijackers of 911, telling listeners that Fisk was anti-American and that “anti-Americanism is the same as anti-Semitism”[1].
Readers can look up Finkelstein’s thorough refutation of Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel in Beyond Chutzpah, for examples of his deeply biased, deeply unreliable approach and well-documented attempts to justify numerous war crimes and his defence of torture.
As Finkelstein points out, Dershowitz asserts in Chutzpah,
“Anti-Semitism is the problem of bigots…Nothing we do can profoundly affect the twisted mind of the anti-Semite”. As Finkelstein puts it, “In sum, Jews can never be culpable for the antipathy others bear towards them: it’s always of their making, not ours.” (p81 Beyond Chutzpah)
Such a point is worth remembering when examining Dershowitz’s book The Case Against Israel’s Enemies. In this later book, he argues that the dispossession of the Palestinians was deserved because of their support for Hitler during World War II (in this he differs from Joan Peters whom he heavily relied on in writing his earlier The Case for Israel which largely adopted her debunked conclusions). He states that “The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.” (p. 196) There is, of course, not the slightest evidence of this ‘significant role’, but Dershowitz thinks it acceptable to smear an entire people and use such statements to justify ongoing human rights abuses against that same people to this day.
It’s a familiar story. Ignoring the historical context, the Occupation, “they” deserve what they get because, well, they are bigoted towards Zionists for no reason whatsoever. And as a result, we can safely ignore their testimonial authority with regard to what Dershowitz calls the “so-called Palestinian Nakba” (p.206).
Maria Farmer is only the latest victim of Dershowitz’s smears. Before you throw people under the bus, it’s best to dehumanise them, ignoring the harms done to them in order to justify your character assassination (or, when it comes to Israel, the ‘targeted’ assassinations Dershowitz supports).
Dershowitz’s latest article is of a piece with his advocacy for Israel’s crimes over the years. Blaming the victim, while making oneself invulnerable to criticism by demeaning those who dare to criticise, is a hallmark of Dershowitz’s career.
Notes
[1] The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Harper Perennial 2006) p. 1034.
Video of woke ™️ Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris explaining her ghoulish, neoconservative views on the Middle East and Israel to AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
“America’s support for Israel’s security must be rock-solid.”
“As Iran continues to launch ballistic missiles… we must stand with Israel.”
“I support the U.S. commitment to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance.”
Last November, Moshe Loth testified as a plaintiff in the trial of wheelchair-bound nonagenarian Bruno Dey. Loth accused him of being an accessory to his torture and grandmother’s gassing during the “Holocaust” at the Stutthof concentration camp in the final years of World War II.
Loth stated that his mother Helene became pregnant with him while interned at Stutthof. As an infant, he was tattooed and subjected to cruel medical experiments. His grandmother Anna was gassed to death, a death affirmed by the Yad Vashem.
In a gesture of Jewish empathy and compassion, he publicly forgave Dey and gave him a hug.
The problem is Moshe was actually born Peter Oswald Loth, to a Protestant German family. His older brother Gustav was a corporal in the Waffen-SS and nobody in his family ever set foot in a concentration camp.
Der Spiegel exposed him during the trial, not because his story was unbelievable, but because he was a Gentile. None of the other witnesses flown in mostly from America and Israel were subjected to the same scrutiny.
Thus the increasing desperation of an insecure German government and Zionist power structure running out of Nazi strawmen to rationalize its totalitarianism and create a climate of fear.
Dey’s case was noteworthy from the start due to the bizarre decision to try a 93-year-old man as a juvenile. Dey had previously been questioned and cleared by German police in the 1970s and 80s, yet prosecutors decided to drag him to court at an age where it is unlikely he has any recollection of what happened 75 years ago, or even the soundness of mind to properly defend himself.
German prosecutors charged Dey as an accessory to the murder of 5,230 persons in a camp he briefly served at as a low level soldier. They relied heavily on contemporary precedents of guilt-by-association, pioneered at the trial of John Demjanjuk in 2011. Before Dey, Oskar Groening was convicted under the new German judicial philosophy in 2014. He was convicted of helping kill 300,000 Jews in his capacity as an accountant at Auschwitz.
The accusers did not bother to build a case against Dey, nor incriminate him as an individual in any killings. The entire case was predicated solely on the fact that he was stationed at Stutthof as a conscript in the German military and so he hadto have knowledge of supposed gassings and killings– something Dey vehemently denied and the plaintiffs never proved.
Holocaust trials in Germany are designed to be Kafka traps. It is illegal to question the veracity of atrocities Jews claimed to have seen no matter how scientifically and logically impossible, whether homicidal gas chambers or gasoline injections to the heart.
Besides Loth, other “witnesses” gave highly dubious testimony. A woman named Asia Schindelman said she saw the guards at Stutthof feed Jewish women to their dogs, while others were killed by being tossed on electrified fences.
Though the case against Dey was weak even by show trial standards, he was still convicted and given a two year suspended sentence.
Dey’s legal team tried to appeal this ludicrous decision but mysteriously dropped their case yesterday before it was ever heard.
With the ruling in Dey’s case safe, German jurisprudence now solidly affirms the idea of collective guilt, as the judge overseeing the case made clear in a closing statement.
This is very convenient for the German state. For Holocaust propagandists, they now have a fresh pool of potential subjects to sacrifice to the Shoah God.
An incredible report on Real Clear Politics by Paul Sperry on July 24 has revealed a new dimension to the Russiagate frenzy that contaminated American politics for the last four years. While all claims of Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin have been thoroughly debunked over recent months, it was believed that the culprits of this coup effort were merely swaths of deep state operatives in the DNC alongside British Intelligence assets like Christopher Steele, and Sir Richard Dearlove.
All of these things are still very true, but the story has just become significantly more interesting.
As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.
This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on Trump in the first place!
Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).
The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.
Nunes stated:
“You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”
Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.
Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006 and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a “creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on his Linkedin account.
The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.
Apparently having two dossiers full of the same lies is more believable than only one.
Other information which has surfaced- especially since Steele’s recent UK trial testimony was made public, is that Talbott reached out to the MI6 asset in August 2016 to discuss the dossier, while comparing notes on the Shearer file. With Trump’s surprise election in November 2016, both Steele and Talbott met to strategize how they should handle the Steele dossier going forward.
Another Brookings Institute player who interfaced directly with Steele and ensured that the dossier made it into the hands of prominent pro-impeachment figures and news media outlets in America was none other than regime-change queen Victoria Nuland herself who hired Steele as an advisor during the Ukraine Maidan debacle and met with him on several occasions to discuss the dossier before Trump’s election. Both Nuland and her neo-con husband Robert Kagan serve as Senior Fellows at Brookings Institute.
The Real issue of Talbott’s British Pedigree
It would here be the height of folly to presume, as some commentators have done, that Talbott’s role in this operation indicates an American guiding hand between the plot to undo the 2016 elections. The fact is that Talbott’s entire life and world outlook have been shaped not by wholly anti-American ideas but rather by British Imperial principles that are programed into the minds of all Rhodes Scholars during his time in Oxford from 1966-1968.
It was here that young Nelson Strobridge (Strobe) Talbott III adopted a near-religious commitment to a post-nation state world order. Upon his return to America, Talbott was positioned into a prominent role in the western propaganda bureau serving as a leading editor of Time Magazine. It was during the end of this phase of his career that the soon-to-be Assistant Secretary of State outlined his manifesto for the New World Order in a July 20 1992 article entitled “The Birth of a Global Nation”. Where Talbott stated:
“All countries are basically social arrangements…. No matter how permanent or even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary…. Perhaps national sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all…. But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government.”
Everything Talbott has done in the ensuing three decades (along with the throngs of other Rhodes Scholars who flooded into the White House with Clinton’s 1992 election) can be understood by this general philosophical premise and gets to the heart of the false dispute between neoconservative imperialists whom Talbott appears to despise, and neoliberal imperialists of a Malthusian/Green New Dealing variety like Talbott.
The Rise of the Rhodes Trust
Talbott’s neoliberal outlook was originally expounded by the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 Confessions of Faith and upon whose name and will, the scholarship founded in 1902 was based. In this document Rhodes stated:
“Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire…”
The fear which Rhodes and leading imperialists presiding over a dying British Empire faced in the end of the 19th century was that a new global system of win-win cooperation was fast emerging in the wake of Lincoln’s victory over the British-supported slave confederacy in 1865. This was a system defined by a mandate to ensure credit functioned as an instrument for agro-industrial progress and internal improvements outlined by Lincoln’s advisor Henry Carey (who also acted as lead organizer of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition which exported this system globally) who stated in his Harmony of Interests:
“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labour of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the labourer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”
While this system was vigorously applied in 19th century Russia to build the Trans-Siberian Rail with the help of American engineers and industrialists, it was also applied in President Sadi Carnot’s France, Otto von Bismarck’s Germany and even in Japan during the Meiji Restoration.
Sadly, instead of a new age of progress envisioned by such figures as Lincoln-allies William Gilpin or Henry Carey, China’s President Sun Yat-sen, Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier or Russia’s Sergei Witte, a calamitous 20th century of war and assassinations unfolded as the British Empire was re-organized under the guiding light of the Roundtable Movement/Rhodes Trust from Oxford, and the Fabian Society from the London School of Economics. Both think tanks indoctrinated talented youth from around the world, who were deployed back into their home countries to permeate all layers of public and private policy and which ultimately aimed at 1) abolishing sovereign nation states, 2) instituting world government in order to impose population control under a scientific dictatorship and 3) eliminate the conception of mankind and natural law that gave rise to the greatest renaissance movements over the previous 2,500 years.
Rhodes described this indoctrination process in the starkest terms in his 1877 Testament of Faith:
“Let us form the same kind of society a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his Country.”
To this day over 8,000 students have been processed by the Rhodes Trust, with 32 being taken in from America every year permeating every branch of society.
The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment”:
“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.
It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.”
With the return of nationalism on a global scale guided by the post 2013 New Silk Road framework, and especially within America itself since Trump’s 2016 election, these hives of indoctrinated scholars have been in conniption fits over the loss of their utopian blueprints for a New World Order. Putin-hating ideologues like Strobe Talbott and his ilk can kick and scream all they want but since Russiagate was their last and biggest gamble to run a coup on Trump, the hope for America’s accepting Putin’s offer for a 5-nation emergency summit to re-organize the world system is still possible.
Of course, it should never be forgotten that animals are not less dangerous when they are wounded and desperate, and with the meltdown of Russiagate and the light increasingly shining on the British agents in America, these beasts are more dangerous than ever.
In my next article, we will tackle the psychology of a Rhodes Scholar using Strobe Talbott as a convenient case study.
Transhumanism promises us a fantastic future in which humans overcome disease, aging, and even death. It just requires us to take the final step and merge fully with machines. But its secret past in crypto-eugenics reveals a darker future, one in which a GenRich elite rule over the GenPoor masses. Are you ready to give up your humanity?
At one time, the ‘Arab-Israeli Conflict’ was Arab and Israeli. Over the course of many years, however, it was rebranded. The media is now telling us it is a ‘Hamas-Israeli conflict’.
But what went wrong? Israel simply became too powerful.
The supposedly astounding Israeli victories over the years against Arab armies have emboldened Israel to the extent that it came to view itself, not as a regional superpower, but as a global power as well. Israel, per its own definition, became ‘invincible’.
Such terminology was not a mere scare tactic aimed at breaking the spirit of Palestinians and Arabs alike. Israel believed this.
The ‘Israeli miracle victory’ against Arab armies in 1967 was a watershed moment. Then, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, declared in a speech that “from the podium of the UN, I proclaimed the glorious triumph of the IDF and the redemption of Jerusalem.”
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
The sentiment in Eban’s words echoed throughout Israel. Even those who doubted their government’s ability to completely prevail over the Arabs, joined the chorus: Israel is unvanquishable.
Little rational discussion took place back then, about the actual reasons why Israel had won, and if that victory would have been possible without Washington’s complete backing and the West’s willingness to support Israel at any cost. … continue
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Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.
Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.
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