This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. One of the biggest frauds of the final stage of that war was the meeting at Yalta of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the 1952 Republican campaign theme, “20 years of treason.”
The American media uncorked a barrage of tributes to Roosevelt on the 75th anniversary of his death in April. CNN, for instance, trumpeted Roosevelt as “the wartime president who Trump should learn from.” But there was scant coverage of one of his greatest betrayals.
Roosevelt painted World War II as a crusade for democracy — hailing Stalin as a partner in liberation. From 1942 through 1945, the U.S. government consistently deceived the American people about the character of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one of the “freedom-loving nations” and stressed that Stalin is “thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” But as Rexford Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters and an open admirer of the Soviet system, groused, “The Constitution was a negative document, meant mostly to protect citizens from their government.” And when government is the personification of benevolence, no protection is needed.
Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s top aides, proclaimed that communism was “the antithesis of Nazism” because it was based on a “belief in the control of the government, including the economic system, by the people themselves.” The fact that the Soviet regime had been the most oppressive government in the world in the 1930s was irrelevant, as far as Roosevelt was concerned. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert, author of Magic and Mayhem, observed, “FDR remarked that most of what he knew about the world came from his stamp collection.”
Giving Stalin everything
The Roosevelt administration engineered a movie tribute to Stalin — Mission to Moscow — that was so slavish that Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich observed that “no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to present such outrageous lies.” In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” with Stalin at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. Roosevelt helped set the two-tier attack that permeated much of postwar American foreign policy — denouncing cynics, while betraying foreigners whom the U.S. government claimed to champion. (Someone should ask the Kurds if anything has changed on that score.)
Prior to the Yalta conference, Roosevelt confided to the U.S. ambassador to Russia that he believed that if he gave Stalin “everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Stalin wanted assurances from Roosevelt and Churchill that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured during the war by the Germans or who had abandoned the Soviet Union would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, Operation Keelhaul forcibly sent two million Soviets to certain death or long-term imprisonment in Siberia or elsewhere. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Operation Keelhaul “the last secret” of World War II and it was covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s. The fact is that those mass deaths that were facilitated by the U.S. and British governments rarely rated even an asterisk by the media-beloved historians who tout the “Good War.”
In the final communiqué from Yalta, Roosevelt, along with Churchill and Stalin, declared that “a new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army.” Liberation? Tell that to the Marines. A few weeks later, on March 1, 1945, he gave a speech to Congress touting his triumph at Yalta. In it he declared, “The decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a compromise…. It will include, in the new, strong Poland, quite a large slice of what now is called Germany.” He agreed with Stalin at Yalta on moving the border of the Soviet Union far to the west — thereby effectively conscripting 11 million Poles as new Soviet Union citizens.
Poland was “compensated” with a huge swath of Germany, a simple cartographic revision that spurred vast human carnage. As author R.M. Douglas noted in his 2012 book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press), the result was “the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 — were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland.” At least half a million died as a result. George Orwell denounced the relocation as an “enormous crime” that was “equivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell protested, “Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?” Roosevelt signed those death warrants at Yalta. Freda Utley, the mother of the late publisher and author Jon Utley, did some of the first and best reporting on the vast suffering ensuing from the German expulsions. Chapters from her book The High Cost of Vengeance are available at fredautley.com. (The U.S. government approved similar brutal mass forcible transfers in former Yugoslavia during the Clinton administration.) But the German civilians killed after the war were simply another asterisk that could safely be ignored by Good War chroniclers.
Roosevelt boasted to Congress, “As the Allied armies have marched to military victory, they have liberated people whose liberties had been crushed by the Nazis for four long years.” At that point, he and the State Department knew that this was a total lie for areas that had fallen under the control of the Red Army, which was busy killing or deporting to Siberia any potential political opponents. Roosevelt claimed that the deal at Yalta was “the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish people.” But he betrayed the exiled Polish government in London and signed off on Soviet-style elections with no international observers — effectively giving Stalin unlimited sway on choosing Poland’s rulers. Any illusions about Soviet benevolence towards Poland should have been banished when the Red Army massacred the Polish officer corps at Katyn Forest — an atrocity that the U.S. government assiduously covered up (and blamed on the Nazis) during the war.
The façade of benevolence
In a private conversation at Yalta, Roosevelt assured Stalin that he was feeling “more bloodthirsty” than when they previously met. Immediately after the Yalta conference concluded, the British and American air forces turned Dresden into an inferno, killing up to 50,000 civilians. The Associated Press reported that “Allied air bosses” had adopted “deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” Ravaging Dresden was intended to “‘add immeasurably’ to Roosevelt’s strength in negotiating with the Russians at the postwar peace table,” as Thomas Fleming noted in The New Dealers’ War. Vast numbers of dead women and children became simply one more poker chip. Shortly after the residents of Dresden were obliterated, Roosevelt pompously announced, “I know that there is not room enough on Earth for both German militarism and Christian decency.” Government censorship and intimidation helped minimize critical coverage of the civilian carnage resulting from U.S. carpet-bombing of cities in both Germany and Japan.
Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” By the time he died the following month, he knew that democracy was doomed in any turf conquered by the Red Army. But the sham had been immensely politically profitable for Roosevelt, and his successors kept up much of the charade.
U.S. government secrecy and propaganda efforts did their best to continue portraying World War Two as the triumph of good over evil. If Americans had been told in early 1945 of the barbarities that Yalta had approved regarding captured Soviet soldiers and the brutal mass transfer of German women and children, much of the nation would have been aghast. War correspondent Ernie Pyle offered a far more honest assessment than did Roosevelt: “The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days, it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.”
In the decades after Yalta, presidents continued to invoke lofty goals to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In each case, massive secrecy and perennial lies were necessary to maintain a façade of benevolence. Americans have still not seen the secret files behind the harebrained, contradictory interventions in Syria from the George W. Bush administration onwards. The only certainty is that, if we ever learn the full truth, plenty of politicians and other government officials will be revealed to be bigger scoundrels than suspected. Some of the orchestrators of mass misery might even be compelled to reduce their speaking fees.
“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so,” George Washington University history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. Presidents have perennially used uplifting rhetoric to expunge their atrocities. On the 75th anniversary of Yalta, Americans have no reason to presume that presidents, top government officials, or much of the media are more trustworthy now than they were during the finale of the Good War. Have there been other Operation Keelhaul equivalents in recent years that Americans have not yet learned about? Yalta’s betrayals are another reason to be wary when pundits and talk-show hosts jump on the bandwagon for the next killing spree abroad.
On August 28, Dr. Caleb Rossiter, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, published an open letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on the issue of censorship. He states:
“In July you wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and, to my shock and dismay, asked him to censor me and the CO2 Coalition of climate scientists and energy economists, of which I am the executive director. At issue is an op-ed on the arcane mathematics of computerized climate models that I co-authored in 2019 with our senior fellow Patrick Michaels, a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists.
“I’ve been struggling to find some common ground that would interest you in looking carefully at my opinions, both on the “climate disinformation” you allege and on the concept of censoring rather than debating opinions with which one disagrees. […]
“The energy with which you pursue your argument that the CO2 Coalition should be banned from Facebook for promoting “climate denialism” is impressive, but you’ve violated our first rule in analysis: understand the other point of view so you can portray it accurately before questioning it.
“You should have contacted the CO2 Coalition to see if you could learn anything from their view of the facts, let alone of the media characterizations and conclusions about its interaction with Facebook. The Coalition website has a specific statement countering the original news claim that Facebook made an exception for the op-ed in question because it contained “opinion.” […]
“And there is absolutely no evidence as of yet for your claim that, “The devastation caused by the climate crisis will also be disproportionately felt by communities of color…” Even if there were, we have learned here in class to do full analysis of not just the costs, but also the benefits of various policy choices. Wouldn’t banning cheap, reliable energy in favor of costly, intermittent “renewables” under a “carbon neutral” Green New Deal itself badly damage communities of all colors? (Remember, there is nothing renewable about the mining and manufacturing infrastructure needed for wind turbines and solar panels and their storage batteries!)
“Similarly, you worry over media reports that combined climate and economic mathematical models can be tuned to project CO2-driven extreme weather that reduces US GDP by ten percent in 2100 – but then you leave out the tremendous, fossil-fueled increase in GDP by then that would more than pay for such damages.
“You argue that Facebook should censor non-alarmist views because, “the climate crisis and environmental degradation are not matters of opinion. They are existential threats that hurt communities and economies throughout the world – including and especially Black communities and other communities of color.” But of course these claims are the essence of matters of opinion! They involve judgments that can go either positive or negative, depending on reasonable choices in analysis of the claims and counterclaims on science, economics, and health, as well as on the costs and the benefits of changing our energy mix. […]
“As I follow your argument for Facebook censoring my views, (1) the CO2 Coalition knowingly lies (that’s the definition of disinformation); (2) these lies will reduce public support for “action on climate change” (actually, energy action, since the climatic results of reducing CO2 emissions are precisely what the models have tried, and failed so far, to project); and (3) without such action, “communities and economies… will continue to be ravaged by the climate crisis.” (Actually, “continue” is premature, since as noted, there is no climate crisis yet, only a projected one.)
“There is much here, of course, that I think is unproven and that I think you didn’t prove or even try to prove in your letter. But even if it were all true, wouldn’t it be better to tolerate our disagreement, and then defeat my nefarious efforts in debate than to simply silence them? Surely, Facebook users are smart enough to assess evidence and make up their own minds, just like my students were. I still subscribe to the dictum often attributed to Voltaire: I may disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The full letter can be downloaded at the link below.
A small number of very rich men are quite sure they know what is best for the future of the world and have enough wealth and influence to believe they can make it happen. They can be called oligarchs, but the term is inadequate. They are a special category, the shapers of the Global Governance destined to replace bourgeois democracy. I can name two: one who is famous, notorious even, but very old, and another who is a generation younger, not yet so well known or so rich but probably even more influential.
The Global Governors
The old one is of course George Soros, who needs no introduction. He has no doubt that the world should be one big Open Society — in a word, globalization — in which borders and nation states dissolve into a kaleidoscopic mix of cultural identities in which major decisions are taken by brilliant financial oligarchs like himself.
The younger one is Nicolas Berggruen, the dashing 59-year-old Paris-born son of a leading art collector. Berggruen enjoys double U.S.-German citizenship and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the NYU Commission on Global Citizenship, the Brookings International Advisory Council, the Leadership Council at Harvard’s Kennedy SchoolCenter for Public Leadership, the World Economic Forum – and on and on. He helped get Emmanuel Macron elected president of France and has friendly relations with Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union Commission.
The billionaire has his own “think and action tank,” the Berggruen Institute, to promote his interests which center on “global governance.” He is particularly interested in technological ways to shape and guide the world of the future. The future for Berggruen belongs to digitalization and above all transhumanism. In a short video, he muses over whether or not the digital age makes us “less human.”
Nicolas Berggruen, center, in 2017. (Financial Times, Flicker, CC BY 2.0)
We are all connected and “less free” but we are all “part of something bigger — communities, families, friends” … The digital world “looks less human but it’s still being created by us.” (And who is “us” exactly?) Berggruen’s model of the future family may be seen in his own choice: two motherless children manufactured with donated ovules and born by two surrogate wombs.
Like European-born Soros and Berggruen, the United States is above all the current command and control center of the Western world still aspiring to be the nucleus of a global empire. U.S. elections are important to these world visionaries in staying the course of world transformation. For both of them, President Donald Trump can only be an intolerable glitch in the screen. This must be corrected in 2020. The entire liberal elite is in overwhelming agreement.
The Transition Integrity Project
Rosa Brooks, in 2018, during a New America conference. (New America, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
So, it has been easy to arouse near panic in the Washington Establishment and beyond over the notion that Trump might not be dislodged by the November 2020 election. Fear is being spread less that Trump might win the election (too unthinkable to think) than that he will lose the election but refuse to budge. This possibility received a big boost from a unique social event organized by Professor Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, a leading champion of women’s participation in the National Security State, and historian Nils Gilman, a head researcher at the Berggruen Institute.
This well-connected pair easily enlisted dozens of power pointers to take part in what The Boston Globe called “a Washington version of Dungeons and Dragons,” on the model of Pentagon planners who form teams to imagine what the U.S. and Russia might do in a nuclear war confrontation. They named their fun and games the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), clearly suggesting that the “integrity” of the anticipated transition from Trump to Biden was their main concern.
Only a few of the 67 participants have been identified: anti-Trump Republican Michael Steele, former President Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, David Frum (ghost writer of President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech), and neoconservative political analyst William Kristol.
On Aug. 3, the Transition Integrity Project issued its report, entitled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.” This report gave the results of the make-believe gaming scenarios, which provided imaginary support to the growing liberal Democratic hypothesis that Trump is determined to steal the November election.
“Like many authoritarian leaders, President Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for potentially ignoring or disrupting the voting process, by claiming, for instance, that any mail-in ballots will be fraudulent and that his opponents will seek to have non-citizens vote through fraud.” It was taken for granted throughout that Trump’s fears and accusations are fake whereas his opponents’ fears and accusations are soundly based.
The Transition Integrity Project report made a feeble attempt to appear neutral: “TIP takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either party could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to ‘dirty tricks’” — a neutrality consistently violated by the entire exercise.
The exercise comprised four scenarios: (1) an ambiguous voting result, (2) clear victory by the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, (3) clear Trump win, (4) narrow Biden win. The game was played by teams, primarily “Team Biden” and “Team Trump,” but it is pretty clear that none of the players were pro-Trump, including the players on “Team Trump.” But the games claimed to show how Trump supporters would react in these circumstances.
“Team Trump was consistently more ruthless than Team Biden — more willing to ignore existing democratic norms, to make use of disinformation, to deploy federal agencies to promote Trump’s personal and electoral interests, and to engage in intimidation campaigns.”
But “Team Biden” was much nicer:
“Team Biden generally felt constrained by a commitment to norms and a desire to tamp down violence and reduce instability.”
“Team Biden often had the majority of the public on its side, and the ability to mobilize resentment about the structural disenfranchisement in the way we conduct presidential elections.”
Russiagate intruded into the gaming in an odd and even ludicrous way: “There was quite a bit of speculation that Trump might […] attempt to rally nationalist feelings to himself, or placate foreign leaders to whom he may feel beholden, such as Vladimir Putin.” Huh?
Nobody Dares Lose
Campaign image of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. (2020DemConvention, Twitter)
A particularly alarming and disturbingly credible assumption of the Transition Integrity Project game is that in this election, neither side is prepared to accept defeat. The scenario exercises “revealed that for many Democrats and key Democratic constituencies, this election represents an existential crisis, the last chance to stop a rapid and potentially irreversible U.S. decline into authoritarianism and unbridled nativism.” So, as much as Trump, many Democrats are ready to stop at nothing to win this election – for the best of reasons, of course.
Trump is depicted as equally desperate to win in order to avoid being treated as a criminal. An underlying assumption of this story-telling is that once out of office, Trump will be arrested and tried for unspecified crimes. This would indeed be an incentive for him not to lose.
At this point, it is necessary to recall that democratic election of national leaders depends on a degree of mutual trust that is being lost in America. The United States regularly insists that all foreign countries should elect their leaders by “fair and free elections.” But there are many countries where, at some time of their historical development, this method is not advisable because one party, or tribe, fears for its very life if a rival party, or tribe, should take power.
In such states, peace depends on the rule of a king, a mediator, a dictator. The United States can currently be seen to be regressing to just such a degree of mutual hatred and distrust.
No Compromise
It seems to me that if the Democratic Establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him.
As to the latter: “Participants in the scenario exercises universally believed that self-preservation for President Trump and his family will be Trump’s first and possibly only priority if he is forced to concede electoral defeat.” So, it is a bit odd that the Transition Integrity Project goes on to report that: “During several of the TIP exercises, Team Biden attempted to enter into negotiations with Team Trump about a pardon and graceful transition, but those overtures were consistently rejected.”
Since there were no Trump supporters on either team, these game results merely reflect the intention of the Democratic Establishment to assume that Trump will be charged with “state crimes,” as yet unspecified. No compromise deal is desired.
As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. Trump is not against absentee ballots, which require identification of the voter, comparable to going to the polls, but is suspicious of mass mailings of ballots back and forth.
In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. Indeed, in the course of Game No. 1, “a rogue individual destroyed a large number of ballots believed to have supported Biden.” Why could the gamers imagine Biden ballots being destroyed, but rule out destruction of ballots supporting Trump?
2000 presidential election recount underway in Palm Beach County, Florida, Nov. 18, 2000. (Dtobias, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise? Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.
It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic Establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.
Preparing for Regime Change
The classic regime change scenario involves a contested election, mass street demonstrations including civil disobedience and finally, military intervention.
So, to start with, the gamers posit an authoritarian leader who won’t step down. That’s Trump.
Next, “a show of numbers in the streets – and actions in the streets – may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome.” In an interview
stressing “the flaws in our electoral system,” Transition Integrity Project organizer Gilman said that what we need “is for people to be prepared to take to the streets in nonviolent protest” if appeals to officials do not suffice.
“We’ve learned over the last couple of months, since the Movement for Black Lives protest really took off again in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that taking to the streets and showing commitment to a democratic process beyond just the ballot box is a really important part of driving change.” The demonstrations must be nonviolent, Gilman stressed.
As the Transition Integrity Project report put it, “the scale of recent demonstrations has increased the stakes for the Democratic Party to build strong ties with grassroots organizations and be responsive to the movement’s demands.” Certain of these grassroots organizations – MoveOn and Black Lives Matter – have enjoyed financial support from Soros, as the Democratic Party clearly tries to co-opt the protests.
George Soros. (georgesoros.com)
According to the scenarios, such protests could arise not only in case Trump refused to recognize a Biden win, but also, in Game No. 3, in case of a “comfortable Electoral College victory for President Trump (286-to-252) but also a significant popular vote win (52 percent for Trump, 47 percent for Biden). The game play ended in a constitutional crisis, with threats of secession, and the potential for either a decline into authoritarianism or a radically revamped set of democratic rules that ensure the popular will prevails (abolishment of the Electoral College…)”
The Biden campaign retracted its initial concession, capitalizing “on the public’s outrage that for the third time in 20 years a candidate lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College.” The Biden campaign encouraged California, Oregon and Washington to secede “unless Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms to fix our democratic system to ensure majority rule.” Congress supported Biden. “It was unclear what the military would do in this situation”.
In reality, Democrats know that they have managed to keep the Permanent State, including the military and intelligence agencies, on their side throughout Trump’s presidency. Where are the forces that could carry out a pro-Trump coup d’état?
Whose Coup?
Hillary Clinton addressing Democratic convention, July 2016. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr)
“During the exercises,” the report notes, “winning ‘the narrative’ emerged as a potentially decisive factor. Either side can expand or contract the ‘margin of contestation’ if they succeed in substantially changing how key decision makers and the public view the ‘facts,’ the risks of action or inaction, or external events such as civil unrest.”
Winning the narrative appears to be a main purpose of the Transition Integrity Project, and it was quickly seconded in its efforts by top Democrats.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Hillary Clinton said in an interview on Aug. 25.
A couple of days later, Al Gore, the former vice president and unsuccessful 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, chimed in. Trump, he said in a particularly loaded image, is “attempting to put his knee on the neck of democracy” by criticizing mail-in ballots. “He seems to have no compunctions at all about trying to rip apart the social fabric and the political equilibrium of the American people, and he’s strategically planting doubts in advance.”
People ask whether Trump will leave office next Jan. 20. “Well,” said Gore, “it doesn’t matter because it’s not up to him. Because at noon on January 20th, if a new president is elected… the police force, the Secret Service, the military, all of the executive branch officers, will respond to the command and the direction of the new president.”
The Bottom Line
Outside the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Jan. 24. (World Economic Forum, Mattias Nutt, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Meanwhile, Americans can listen to the extravagant rhetoric of the two enemy camps, calling on them to choose between “authoritarian white supremacy” and “radical Marxist socialism” while offering absolutely nothing in terms of coherent public policy of benefit to the American people and the world. The politicians cling to ineffective office, while the future is being planned elsewhere.
Policy will be designed by the Global Governors, for instance at the next meeting in Davos of the World Economic Forum which, according to its founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lay out the “Great Reset” agenda for the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is destined to reshape all our lives. Nicolas Berggruen will be there with his ideas. So will other billionaires.
They will not be “conspiring,” but rather laying plans for what they consider best for the world. There is no political system enabling us to influence or even fully understand the projects they will sponsor. Surely these projects deserve to be sharply debated. But the politicians supposedly representing us are somewhere else, fighting furiously with each other over contrived issues.
The Electoral College is not the most fatal flaw in American democracy. Rather, it’s the monopoly of political discourse by a two-party system fueled essentially by personal ambition, taking its cues from lobbies, the military industrial complex, Wall Street and the Global Governors.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020).
Semites are a language group not a religious group. They spoke (and still do) Semitic languages, especially the Canaanite and later Aramaic dialects of Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.
The Western world today is seething with accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, a threatening term with nasty connotations. Before 1879 nobody had heard of ‘anti-Semitism’ although hard feelings towards Jews as a religious group had existed for many centuries. One thinks immediately of the atrocities of the first Crusades (1096), the massacre at York in 1190, and the expulsion of Jews from England by Edward I in 1290 (only to be allowed back in 1657 by Oliver Cromwell). But discrimination against Jews existed long before, in various countries and for various reasons.
Then along came a German agitator and journalist, Wilhelm Marr, who coined the expression ‘anti-Semitism’ knowing full well that it embraced all Semitic peoples including Hebrews, Arabs and Christians of the Holy Land. It wasn’t long before it was twisted to become a metaphor for hostility only toward Jews based on a belief that they sought national and even world power. More recently Holocaust denial and criticism of the state of Israel’s vile behaviour have been considered anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism too is claimed to be anti-Semitic because it singles out Jewish national aspirations as illegitimate and a racist endeavour. Which of course they are, as Israel’s recently enacted nation state laws prove.
Indeed, some hardcore Israel flag wavers regard any pro-Palestinian, pro-Syrian or pro-Lebanese sentiments to be anti-Semitic even though those peoples are constantly victims of Israeli military aggression.
The hijacking of the term anti-Semitism and its fraudulent conversion into a propaganda tool for defending the Zionist Project has enabled brazen attacks on our rights to free speech and attempts to shut down peaceful debate on Israel’s crimes. The word anti-Semitism, as now used, is a distortion of language and a deliberate misnomer larded with fear and trembling for those touched by it. This prompted Miko Peled, the Israeli general’s son, to warn a Labour Party conference that “they are going to pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn… the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they [the Israelis] have no argument…”
And so they did. Jeremy Corbyn, a genuine anti-racist, critic of Israel and champion of Palestinian rights, was soon gone. He was the only British leader who might have reduced Israel’s sinister influence on UK policy. But his Labour Party, like the cowards they are, surrendered to Israel lobby pressure and helped bring him down. Israel’s pimps at Westminster and in local parties across the country were able to chalk up a famous victory.
They even managed to force the Party to adopt the discredited International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism and incorporate it into the Party’s code of conduct. The new leader is their obedient stooge. He has publicly bent the knee, tugged the forelock.
Who has the claim?
However, it has been shown that most Jews today are not descended from the ancient Israelites at all. For example, research by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, published by the Oxford University Press in 2012 on behalf of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, found the Khazarian Hypothesis to be scientifically correct, meaning that most Jews are Khazars and confirming what some scholars had been saying. The Khazarians converted to Talmudic Judaism in the 8th Century and were never in ancient Israel.
No doubt these finding will be challenged by Zionist adherents till the end of time. But DNA research suggests that no more than 2 per cent of Jews in present-day Israel are actually Israelites. So, even if you believe the myth that God gave the land to the Israelites, He certainly didn’t give it to Netanyahu, Lieberman and the other East European thugs who infiltrated the Holy Land and now run the apartheid regime. It seems the Palestinians (Muslim and Christian) have more Israelite blood. They are the true Semites.
As for Zionists’ preposterous claim to exclusive sovereignty over Jerusalem, the city was at least 2000 years old and an established fortification when King David captured it. Jerusalem dates back some 5000 years and the name is likely derived from Uru-Shalem, meaning “founded by Shalem”, the Canaanite God of Dusk.
In its ‘City of David’ form Jerusalem lasted less than 80 years. In 928BC the Kingdom divided into Israel and Judah with Jerusalem the capital of Judah, and in 597BC the Babylonians conquered it. Ten years later in a second siege the city was largely destroyed including Solomon’s temple. The Jews recaptured it in 164BC but finally lost it to the Roman Empire in 63BC. A Christian (Crusader) kingdom of Jerusalem existed from 1099 to 1291 but held the city for only 101 of those years. Before the present-day shambles, cooked up by Balfour and stoked by the US, the Jews had controlled Jerusalem for around 500 years, say historians – small beer compared to the 1,277 years it was subsequently ruled by Muslims and the 2000 years, or thereabouts, it originally belonged to the Canaanites.
Counter-measure
Since the three main Semitic faiths – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – all have historical claims to Jerusalem and a presence there, and masses of non-Semitic believers around the world also wish to visit the holy places, the best solution seems to be the one recommended by United Nations General Assembly resolutions 181 and 194: that Jerusalem is made a corpus separatum, an open city administered by an international regime or the UN itself. Why this hasn’t been implemented isn’t clear. We’ve seen the abominable discrimination inflicted on Palestinian Muslims and Christians by Israel since seizing control of Jerusalem.
The other side could play word games too – and with more honesty. Anti-Semitism has been fashioned by the Zionists into a catch-all smear weapon. What if pro-Palestinian groups and the BDS movement declared themselves (in correct parlance) to be ‘pro-Semitic’, i.e. supportive of all those with genuine ancestral links to the ancient Holy Land and entitled to live there in freedom?
They could coin a new expression just like Marr and establish it through usage.
Swinemunde was a beautiful seaside resort on the German Baltic coast. During World War II, it was of no military value other than a few piers where ships could dock. It had escaped aerial attacks as its population grew with refugees from bombed out cities. On March 12, 1945, the United States Army Air Force carpet bombed the town killing over 23,000 civilians. This was not a mistake, but part of a genocide campaign to kill German civilians and destroy homes.
In 2017, explosive allegations first emerged that the authorities of the Chechen Republic were reportedly interning gay men in concentration camps. After a three year period of dormancy, the accusations have resurfaced in a new feature length documentary by HBO Films entitled Welcome to Chechnya. Shot between mid-2017 and early last year, the film has received widespread acclaim among Western media and film critics. Shortly after its release last month, the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an increase in economic sanctions and imposed travel restrictions against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his family, citing the putative human rights abuses in the southern Russian republic covered in the film.
Most of the boilerplate reviews of Welcome to Chechnya have heaped particular praise upon the documentary’s novelty use of ‘deepfake’ technology to hide the identities of alleged victims in the cinematic investigation. Yet at the closing of the film, one subject who previously appears with his likeness concealed by AI reveals himself at a news conference without the disguise—rendering the prior use of synthetic media fruitless. Maxim Lapunov, who is not even ethnically Chechen but a Russian native of Siberia, is still the only individual to have gone public with the charges. Despite the obvious credibility and authenticity questions regarding the use of such controversial technology, it has not prevented critics from lauding it unquestioningly. Unfortunately, even some in alternative media have been regurgitating the film’s propaganda such as The Intercept, a slick online news publication owned by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar whose financial ties to the national security state and U.S. soft power institutions conflict with the outlet’s purported mission. Notably, The Intercept’s glowing review of Welcome to Chechnya was written by Mehdi Hasan, a journalist who also works for Al-Jazeera, a news agency owned by the ruling emirs of Qatar, a theocratic dictatorship where homosexuality is actually illegal .
The documentarians follow the work of a purported network of activists who evacuate individuals like Lapunov out of the Caucasian republic. This is the film’s primary source of drama, despite their encountering seemingly no difficulty from the local authorities in doing so. We are then subjected to random cell phone clips of apparent hate crimes and human rights abuses going on, but at no point does the film crew even visit the Argun prison where the anti-gay pogroms are alleged to have taken place. In 2017, the imperial hipsters at Vice news were given unrestricted access to the facility where nothing was found and the warden adamantly denied the allegations — but not without expressing his own disapproval of homosexuality which was assumed by his interrogators to be evidence of the detentions having occurred. In the HBO documentary, a similar hatchet job is done to Ramzan Kadyrov, whose uncomfortable denial of the existence of homosexuality in the deeply conservative and predominantly Muslim republic is implied to be proof that the purges must be happening. One may recall this same sort of smear tactic was previously done to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, Kadyrov and the warden’s predictable responses to the subject serve only as confirmation bias, not confirmation.
The selective outrage in response to the alleged purges, like all things Russia-related, is highly politicized. Western viewers would have no idea that of the 74 countries worldwide where homosexuality is still criminalized, Russia isn’t among them. In more than a dozen of those nations, same-sex activity is punishable by death, a few of which happen to be close strategic allies of the United States, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. As recently as 2017, the U.S. was one of 13 countries to vote against a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution condemning countries with capital punishment for same-sex relations to avoid falling-out with those allies, most of which have legal systems established on their respective interpretations of Sharia law. While the local authorities of the Muslim-majority Chechen Republic have been allowed to introduce some elements of the fundamentalist religious code by the Russian government such as the banning of alcohol and gambling and requiring the wearing of hijab by women, as a federal subject it is still ultimately beholden to Russia’s secular constitution. In fact, it was Kadyrov’s predecessor, Alu Alkhanov, who hoped to govern Chechnya with Sharia law, not the current administration. Credulous audiences would have no clue that Kadyrov actually represents the more moderate wing of Chechen politics because there is absolutely no history or context provided, a deliberately misleading choice on the part of the filmmakers.
The absence of any historical background deceptively suggests that the anti-gay sentiment in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus is somehow an extension of the homophobia in Russia itself, despite the autonomous differences in religion, culture, and society. In the last decade, the weaponization of identity politics has been central to Washington’s ongoing demonization of Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, with the issue of LGBT rights particularly given significant attention. While homosexuality is decriminalized, there is admittedly no legal prohibition of discrimination against the LGBT community in Russia. In particular, human rights groups have condemned the notorious federal law passed in 2013 known as the ‘gay propaganda law’ that forbids the distribution of information promoting “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors, which entails the banning of gay pride parades and other LGBT rights demonstrations. However, the measure enjoys widespread support among the Russian people whose social conservatism has been resuscitated by the Orthodox Church since the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is rather ironic and hypocritical that the West has since taken issue with this turn, considering it facilitated that political transformation.
In reality, the reason for the relentless vilification of Putin has absolutely nothing to to do with the exaggerated plight of gays in Russia and a lot more to do with the reversal of policies under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. In the nineties, the mass privatization of the former state-owned enterprises during Russia’s conversion to capitalism resulted in the instant impoverishment of millions and the rapid rise of the notorious ‘oligarchs’ which the West characterized at the time as progression towards democracy. In the loans-for-shares scheme, a new ruling class of bankers and industrialists accumulated enormous wealth overnight and by the middle of the decade, owned or controlled much of the country’s media outlets. The oligarchs held enormous power and influence over the deeply unpopular Yeltsin, who would surely have lost reelection in 1996 without their backing and the assistance of Western meddling in the form of massive loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
While economic disparity and corruption persists today, overall the Russian economy has been rebuilt after its energy assets were re-nationalized and brought back under state control by the Putin administration, resulting in improved living standards and income levels for the last two decades. By the same measure, the Russian people can hardly be blamed for associating homosexuality with the unbridled neoliberalism, vulture capitalism and draconian austerity imposed on their country by Western capital. It is also truly paradoxical that the notion of “Russian oligarchs” has become synonymous with Putin in the minds of Westerners when many of the most obscenely wealthy oligarchs of the Yeltsin era now live in exile as his most ardent political opponents after they faced prosecution for their financial crimes. Not coincidentally, the initial reports of the ‘gay gulags’ in Chechnya were published in Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper partly owned by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the very man who ushered in the economic liberalization which auctioned off the state assets to oligarchs like co-owner Alexander Lebedev.
Gorbachev’s reforms, particularly that of perestroika (“restructuring”), also had destructive consequences for the national question and ethno-regional interests. V.I. Lenin had famously called the Russian Empire a “prison house of nations”, in reference to its heterogeneous range of nationalities and ethnic groups. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 especially re-agitated ethno-national conflicts in the Caucasus, a region that had enjoyed several decades of relative harmony and stability under socialism with rights and representation that did not exist in pre-revolutionary Russia. While Azerbaijan and Georgia were granted independence, Chechnya and many other municipalities remained under federal control of the Russian Federation, as sovereignty did not constitutionally apply because it had never been an independent state. Not to mention, its oil and gas reserves are essential to Russia’s very economic survival.
The jihadism which plagued the Caucasus was an outgrowth of the U.S.-backed ‘holy war’ in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration. It was the Polish-born Brzezinski who not only authored the geostrategy of arming the mujahideen against the Soviets but the efforts to turn Russia’s own large Muslim minority community against them. This was mostly unsuccessful as the majority of its 20 million Muslims (10% of the population) are harmoniously integrated into Russian society, but the Atlanticists did fan the flames of a militant secessionist movement in Chechnya that erupted in a violent insurgency and became increasingly Islamist as the conflict dragged on. For Washington, the hope was that the West could gain access to Caspian oil by encouraging the al-Qaeda-linked separatists rebranded as “rebels” vulnerable to its domination in the energy-rich region. The collapse of the USSR already escalated hostilities between the intermingling ethnic communities of the region, but the antagonisms were intensified by CIA soft power cutouts like the Jamestown Foundation fomenting the secessionist insurrection. As the separatist movement grew increasingly Wahhabist thanks to U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, its more moderate nationalist faction led by Akhmad Kadyrov eventually defected back to the Russian side. The elder Kadyrov would pay the price when he was assassinated in a 2004 stadium bombing in Grozny during an annual Victory Day celebration, with his son becoming one of his successors.
The Kremlin’s support for the Kadyrovs should be understood as a compromise which prevented the more radical Islamists from taking power, which apparently Washington would be happier with running the North Caucasus. What a human rights utopia Chechnya would be as a breakaway Islamic state, under the salafists which during the Chechen wars committed unspeakable acts of terrorism including the taking of hospital patients, theater goers, and even hundreds of schoolchildren as hostages. One can be certain that if there aren’t anti-gay pogroms going on in Chechnya now, there definitely would be without the likes of Kadyrov in power. In the documentary, what the Chechen leader does implicitly acknowledge may be occurring are individual honor killings within families and clans, a social problem common in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, and certainly not a human rights issue particular to Chechnya. Many instances of honor killings in the Muslim world have included homosexuality as a motive for the extrajudicial killings by relatives of victims believed to have betrayed the family honor. On the other hand, Kadyrov himself has overseen the establishment of unprecedented reconciliation commissions to address the issue of honor culture, blood feuds and vendetta codes of Caucasian tribes. Kadyrov’s promotion of reconciliation has made significant progress in reducing such killings which were rampant during the Chechen Wars as family members would often seek to avenge the deaths of loved ones. Now that the region is in a period of relative stability, peace and economic recovery, with the once devastated city of Grozny now known as the ‘Dubai of the North Caucasus’, the West is suddenly feigning concern over human rights.
The swift end brought to the conflict by Putin was another reason for his becoming a target of Washington who had been counting on the balkanization of southern Russia. In a pinnacle of imperial projection, the explanation for Putin’s rise to power has since been revised by the Atlanticists to his having somehow secretly masterminded the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings while director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor), as if the neocons hope to deflect all of the longstanding rumors about the Bush administration and the 9/11 attacks onto the Kremlin. Except this Machiavellian conspiracy would be a lot more believable if the Chechen wars had not been going on since the early nineties, with much worse terrorist attacks already having been committed by the separatists, such as the taking of thousands of hospital patients as hostages in southern Russia. Since the end of the Chechen Wars, on the flip side the U.S. has also backed Russian opposition figure and Putin critic Alexei Navalny, a right-wing Islamophobe who has pledged to secede the North Caucasus while comparing its Muslim inhabitants to cockroaches. Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and minuscule 2% support among Russians, Navalny has been depicted as a “pro-democracy” and “anti-corruption” campaigner in Western media, who have been crying foul over his recent suspected poisoning in Russia and ensuing comatose airlift to Germany. If only the naive American liberals who read The New York Times and The Washington Post had any idea that Mr. Navalny has far more in common with the dreaded Mr. Trump than Putin does.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has already experienced blowback for its nurturing of terrorism in the Caucasus in the form of the Boston Marathon bombings, which recently returned to the news when convicted Chechen-American perpetrator Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence was vacated on appeal last month. In the aftermath of the April 2013 attacks, it was revealed that Tsarnaev’s deceased older brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been radicalized attending seminars financed by the Jamestown Foundation while traveling abroad in Tblisi, Georgia, and the brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni had previously been married to the daughter of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer Graham Fuller, Brzezinski’s CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the Afghan-Soviet war. It also came to light that ‘Uncle Ruslan’ had previously worked for the CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and established a company called the Congress for Chechen International Organizations which funded Islamic militants in the Caucasus. Despite the astounding ‘coincidences’ surrounding the Tsarnaev clan, Uncle Ruslan was never considered a person of interest by the FBI, who had ignored warnings by the Russian FSB of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremism prior to the attacks.
Two years before Putin’s election, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the prime mover of the West‘s plan to dominate the globe by using Islam to bring down the USSR in delivering the Soviet equivalent of the Vietnam War, wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997):
“… The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.”
Those words were written before the return of both Russia and China on the world stage, developments that have thrown a monkey wrench into Washington’s plans which the Russophobic Warsaw-native did not anticipate in his blueprint for Western hegemony. When the U.S.-backed headchoppers in the Syrian war nearly had control of Damascus, just a thousand miles or so from Sochi, the threat of jihadism returning to the Caucasus became very real. Beginning at the Munich Conference in 2007, Putin had begun to criticize the monopolistic expansion of NATO on Russia’s borders — but after the subsequent overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi where Moscow witnessed Libya transformed into a hotbed of terrorism like post-Saddam Iraq, the prospect of the same happening in Syria was an existential threat that could not be tolerated. In mainstream media, reality has been inverted where Moscow’s self-defense has been portrayed as expansionism, even though the so-called “annexation” of Crimea was virtually nonviolent compared to the Nazi junta initiated by Washington in Ukraine and the Russian-speaking people of Donetsk and Luhansk who voted to join Russia did not wish to end up like those massacred in Odessa. Besides, is the U.S. not currently annexing northeast Syria? The Crimean parliament and Syrian government invited Moscow, while the same cannot be said for the US presence in violation of international law.
Those in Washington with no respect for the sovereignty of nations would prefer Americans to see Russia as an adversary. During the Cold War, the threat was communism, but with capitalism restored in Eastern Europe, it became necessary to manipulate liberals into perceiving Russia as an ultra conservative regime. They must also keep Americans from knowing the true history of US-Russia relations — that Russia was the first nation to recognize American independence when Catherine the Great’s neutrality during the Revolutionary War indirectly aided the Thirteen Colonies in their victory against the Loyalists and Great Britain. During the War of Independence, the Russian Empress had maintained relations with the U.S. and rebuffed British requests for military assistance. The Russian Empire also later helped secure the Union victory during the Civil War, with an Imperial Navy fleet off the shores of the Pacific preventing the Confederates from landing troops on the west coast and deterring intervention by the British and the French. Then as Allies in WWII, while the U.S. was victorious in the Pacific, it was the Soviets who truly won the war in Europe, a feat the Anglo-Americans are still trying to take credit for to this day. Unfortunately, despite his promising rhetorical embrace of détente with Moscow that has made him the subject of political persecution, Donald Trump has proven to be every bit as hostile toward Russia as his forerunners. With the latest actions taken by his state department regarding Chechnya that are right out of the Brzezinski playbook, the idiom that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” certainly applies to Washington and US-Russia relations.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached atmaxrparry@live.com
Over a year ago I published the book Power and Primacy: The History of Western Intervention in the Asia-Pacific, which was an attempt to fill what I saw as a gap in scholarship on the subject. I found that while several scholars had covered individual cases of Western powers intervening in the region, from David Easter and Geoffrey B. Robinson’s works on the Western-engineered coup and massacres in Indonesia of an estimated 500,000 to 3 million people[1] – to Bruce Cumings and Hugh Deane’s works on the Korean War, there were no major works assessing broader trends and consistencies in Western intervention. Power and Primacy was thus written to show the consistencies in Western designs towards the region and the means used to achieve them over a period of more than 70 years, from the Pacific War which began in 1941 to Western policies towards China and North Korea today.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the dismantling of the Japanese Empire, and the famous declaration by General Douglas MacArthur that, with the region’s only non-Western military power and the world’s only non-Western naval power now defeated, ‘The Pacific is now an Anglo-Saxon lake.’ While the U.S. and its allies portrayed themselves as a benevolent and democratising force in the region, the darker aspects of East Asia’s time under the new hegemon, which starkly contradict this, have seen very little discussion or coverage. It is notable, for example, that after the Japanese Empire’s fall not only did living standards in southern Korea fall dramatically after it was placed under the rule of an American military government, but mass rapes, the use of comfort women, and serious human trafficking – the very things used by many to justify the American embargo on Japan which had started hostilities in 1941 – not only continued but were expanded under U.S. control. The government of Syngman Rhee, the Princeton-educated Christian radical the U.S. placed in power, killed 2% of its population at the most conservative estimate within five years, placing hundreds of thousands more in concentration camps and exercising a level of brutality not seen even under the Japanese Empire.
With Japan today having seen 75 uninterrupted years with tens of thousands of Western soldiers based on its territory, where they appear set to remain indefinitely, this is a suitable time to reflect on the nature of the relationship between the country and the West – which is very far from that of equal sovereign powers with shared goals and ideals. Evidence for this has ranged from massive involvement of American intelligence in the political process, including funding pro-Western political parties and supporting their election campaigns,[2] to the testimonies of multiple officials. Former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, for example, noted regarding his country’s inability to reach a deal with Russia over the Kuril Islands due to an effective American veto over all major foreign policy decisions: “I think it represents a big problem that when making foreign policy decisions, Tokyo is always guided by the United States’ approach. Japan depends on America.” He further stated: “The Japanese media and government… always take America’s side. Tokyo is dependent on the US’ views … Japan will continue to side with America and the G7 countries.”[3] Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, who in the 1950s had also sought to resolve the dispute with Moscow and sign a peace treaty on the basis that Japan would receive two of the four islands, was harshly threatened by the U.S. and was ultimately forced to concede to Washington’s demands not to go through with an agreement. Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori came to a similar conclusion regarding the country’s lack of effective sovereignty in an interview with Russian state media in 2018. [4]
Beyond these political indicators, however, are more human indicators of the nature of America’s place in post-war Japan which cannot be overlooked, and which contrast very strongly with portrayals in the vast majority of Western media including both documentaries and popular media. An extract from the book Power and Primacy, pages 66-69, given below, recently reached over 3 million viewers on social media and highlighted the true consequences for Japan’s population of subjugation by the United States. The full references are provided in the book itself. Perhaps most importantly, this is not presented as an isolated set of cases of U.S. and Western conduct towards an East Asian population placed under their power – rather it is part of a much wider trend which if anything was considerably more extreme in Vietnam and in both South and North Korea – the latter of which was briefly occupied by U.S. forces in 1950. An understanding of the past is key to comprehending the nature of Western involvement in the Asia-Pacific region today, which is why I found that this project was particularly essential now in light of the ‘Pivot to Asia,’ the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Trump administration’s recent ‘Tech War’ on China and other key events which have increasingly placed the region at the centre of determining the future of world order.
Text Start:
There was a far darker side to the U.S. and allied occupation of Japan, one which is little mentioned in the vast majority of histories – American or otherwise. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, mass rapes by occupying forces were expected… [despite setting up of a comfort women system which recruited or otherwise trafficked desperate women to brothels] such crimes were still common and several of them were extremely brutal and resulted in the deaths of the victims. Political science professor Eiji Takemae wrote regarding the conduct of American soldiers occupying Japan:
‘U.S. troops comported themselves like conquerors, especially in the early weeks and months of occupation. Misbehavior ranged from black-marketeering, petty theft, reckless driving and disorderly conduct to vandalism, assault, arson, murder and rape. Much of the violence was directed against women, the first attacks beginning within hours after the landing of advanced units. In Yokohama, China and elsewhere, soldiers and sailors broke the law with impunity, and incidents of robbery, rape and occasionally murder were widely reported in the press [which had not yet been censored by the U.S. military government]. When U.S. paratroopers landed in Sapporo an orgy of looting, sexual violence and drunken brawling ensued. Gang rapes and other sex atrocities were not infrequent […] Military courts arrested relatively few soldiers for their offences and convicted even fewer, and restitution for the victims was rare. Japanese attempts at self-defense were punished severely. In the sole instance of self-help that General Eichberger records in his memoirs, when local residents formed a vigilante group and retaliated against off-duty GIs, the Eighth Army ordered armored vehicles in battle array into the streets and arrested the ringleaders, who received lengthy prison terms.’
The U.S. and Australian militaries did not maintain rule of law when it came to violations of Japanese women by their own forces, neither were the Japanese population allowed to do so themselves. Occupation forces could loot and rape as they pleased and were effectively above the law.
An example of such an incident was in April 1946, when approximately U.S. personnel in three trucks attacked the Nakamura Hospital in Omori district. The soldiers raped over 40 patients and 37 female staff. One woman who had given birth just two days prior had her child thrown on the floor and killed, and she was then raped as well. Male patients trying to protect the women were also killed. The following week several dozen U.S. military personnel cut the phone lines to a housing block in Nagoya and raped all the women they could capture there – including girls as young as ten years old and women as old as fifty-five.
Such behavior was far from unique to American soldiers. Australian forces conducted themselves in much the same way during their own deployment in Japan. As one Japanese witness testified: ‘As soon as Australian troops arrived in Kure in early 1946, they ‘dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and then raped them. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night.’ Such behavior was commonplace, but news of criminal activity by Occupation forces was quickly suppressed.
Australian officer Allan Clifton recalled his own experience of the sexual violence committed in Japan:
‘I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by twenty soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians. The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep.’
Australians committing such crimes in Japan were, when discovered, given very minor sentences. Even these were most often later mitigated or quashed by Australian courts. Clifton recounted one such event himself, when an Australian court quashed a sentence given by a military court martial citing ‘insufficient evidence,’ despite the incident having several witnesses. It was clear that courts overseeing Western occupation forces took measures to protect their own from crimes committed against the Japanese – crimes which were largely regarded as just access to ‘spoils of war’ at the time by the Western occupiers.
As had been the case during the war, underreporting of rapes in peace- time due to the associated shame in a traditional society and inaction on the part of authorities (rapes in both cases occurred when Western militaries were themselves in power) would lower the figures significantly. In order to prevent ill feeling towards their occupation from increasing, the United States military government implemented very strict censorship of the media. Mention of crimes committed by Western military personnel against Japanese civilians was strictly forbidden. The occupying forces ‘issued press and pre-censorship codes outlawing the publication of all reports and statistics “inimical to the objectives of the Occupation.”’ When a few weeks into the occupation Japanese press mentioned the rape and widespread looting by American soldiers, the occupying forces quickly responded by censoring all media and imposing a zero tolerance policy against the reporting of such crimes. It was not only the crimes committed by Western forces, but any criticism of the Western allied powers whatsoever which was strictly forbidden during the occupation period – for over six years. This left the U.S. military government, the supreme authority in the country, beyond accountability. Topics such as the establishment of comfort stations and encouragement of vulnerable women into the sex trade, critical analysis of the black market, the population’s starvation level calorie intakes and even references to the Great Depression’s impact on Western economies, anti-colonialism, pan-Asianism and emerging Cold War tensions were all off limits.
What was particularly notable about the censorship imposed under American occupation was that it was intended to conceal its own existence. This meant that not only were certain subjects strictly off limits, but the mention of censorship was also forbidden. As Columbia University Professor Donald Keene noted: ‘the Occupation censorship was even more exasperating than Japanese military censorship had been because it insisted that all traces of censorship be concealed. This meant that articles had to be rewritten in full, rather than merely submitting XXs for the offending phrases.’ For the U.S. military government it was essential not only to control information – but also to give the illusion of a free press when the press was in fact more restricted than it had been even in wartime under imperial rule.
By going one step further to censor even the mention of censorship itself, the United States could claim to stand for freedom of press and freedom of expression. By controlling the media the American military government could attempt to foster goodwill among the Japanese people while making crimes committed by their personnel and those of their allies appear as isolated incidents. While the brutality of American and Australian militaries against Japanese civilians was evident during the war and in its immediate aftermath, it did not end with occupation. The United States has maintained a significant military presence in Japan ever since and crimes including sexual violence and murder against Japanese civilians continue to occur.”
For A. B. Abrams’ upcoming work, scheduled for publication in October 2018, titled Immovable Object: North Koreans 70 Years at War with American Power:
For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more of the articles and their columnar headlines.
I’d never thought much of Donald Trump, but can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet another article headlining the “lies” of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue. The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another “social distancing” advice column about Covid-19, or further explanations of how “peaceful protesters” had recently set a government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago’s wealthiest downtown shopping district.
The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have apparently forgotten the word “bubble.” Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it did in the past.
I can’t exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I certainly noticed the change not longer after a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient “wokeness” its highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper, perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of denouncing the dishonesty of “Our American Pravda” in my own articles may have finally begun to register in my own mind.
There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our “excess deaths” from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000, indicating that the American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed, and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid reporting seem few and far between these days.
The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal, which I read immediately afterward. After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun. But Murdoch totally confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate Murdoch-haters as The Nationacknowledged this surprising reality.
Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme “political correctness” allow an outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal‘s regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
Numerous publications have documented America’s severe mistakes in combating the disease, but this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original outbreak by Chinese authorities.
The article revealed that top public health officials at China’s Center for Disease Control only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25 suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:
Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.
All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered by America’s leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies describing the “cataclysmic” disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.
A few months ago, I had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
An entirely new disease that spreads in silent, asymptomatic fashion can easily escape initial detection, and we should not be surprised that no one in China noticed the Wuhan outbreak when it first began in October or November. But America’s intelligence operatives were entirely aware of what was happening from the very beginning, and began informing all our allies. This seems about as close to a “smoking gun” as we can ever likely to encounter in the annals of the murky world of intelligence operations.
Moreover, I have also noted the very unusual international pattern the deadly disease immediately began to follow:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
So if the journalists at the WSJ had merely taken note of what had previously been reported by ABC News and confirmed by Israeli television, they would surely have earned themselves a Pulitzer Prize. But earning and receiving are two separate matters, and they might easily have instead been purged for treading upon such touchy national security matters. After all, our own webzine was banned by both Facebook and Google just days after we raised these same matters.
Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded that discretion is the better part of valor.
This article is taken from a talk I gave at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Albuquerque last week, on the controversial subject of saturated fats. Some of the slides that I used for this talk are put in here [not included].
The medical establishment and government health authorities say that consumption of saturated animal fats is bad for us and causes heart disease. According to the lipid hypothesis — the label used for the diet-cholesterol theory of heart disease — saturated fats raise serum cholesterol levels, and high blood cholesterol causes obstructive plaques to form in arteries, called atherosclerosis. This pathologic process causes coronary heart disease and the need for coronary artery bypass surgery, which is what I do.
Types and Structure of Fats
Animals and tropical plants contain saturated fats while plants outside the tropics have mostly unsaturated fats. Saturated animal fats are in milk, meat, eggs, butter, and cheese. And tropical coconut and palm oil contain a lot of saturated fat.
The food industry makes trans fats. They do this by shooting hydrogen atoms into polyunsaturated vegetable oils. This straightens out the fatty acid molecules and packs them closer together, giving vegetable oil so treated a solid texture like lard. Trans fats are used to make margarine, with yellow bleach added so it looks like butter. They are also used to prolong the shelf life of bakery products, snack chips, imitation cheese, and other processed foods.
Fats have a string of 3 to 22 carbon atoms. The carbon atoms of saturated fats have a full complement of hydrogen atoms attached to them. Unsaturated fats lack a full complement of hydrogen atoms. Artificially created trans fats have hydrogen atoms that wind up being located on opposite sides of the carbon double bond, which straightens the molecule out and makes it mimic saturated fat.
Crisco
A hundred years ago less than one in one hundred Americans were obese and coronary heart disease was unknown. Pneumonia, diarrhea and enteritis, and tuberculosis were the most common causes of death. Now, a century later, the two most common causes of death are coronary heart disease and cancer, which account for 75 percent of all deaths in this country. There were 500 cardiologists practicing in the U.S. in 1950. There are 30,000 of them now — a 60-fold increase for a population that has only doubled since 1950.
In 1911, Procter and Gamble started marketing Crisco as a new kind of food. The name Crisco is derived from CRYStalized Cottonseed Oil. It was the first commercially marketed trans fat. Crisco was used to make candles and soap, but with electrification causing a decline in candle sales, Procter and Gamble decided to promote this new type of fat as an all-vegetable-derived shortening, which the company marketed as a “healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.” At the time Americans cooked and baked food with lard (pork fat), tallow (beef and lamb fat), and butter. Procter and Gamble published a free cookbook with 615 recipes, from pound cake to lobster bisque, all of which required Crisco. The company succeeded in demonizing lard, and during the 20th century Crisco and other trans fat vegetable oils gradually replaced saturated animal fats and tropical oils in the American diet.
Evidence Supporting the Lipid Hypothesis
Rabbits, Cholesterol, and Atherosclerosis
In 1913 a Russian physiologist fed high doses of cholesterol to rabbits and showed that cholesterol caused atherosclerotic changes in the rabbit’s arterial intima like that seen with human atherosclerosis. Over the ensuing decades other investigators did atherosclerosis research on cholesterol-fed rabbits, which they cited in support of the diet-cholesterol theory of heart disease.
Framingham Heart Study
In 1948, government-funded investigators began following some 5,000 men and women in Framingham, Massachusetts to see who developed coronary heart disease. They found that people with elevated cholesterol were more likely to be diagnosed with CHD and die from it.
Six years later the American Heart Association began promoting what it called the Prudent Diet, where “corn oil, margarine, chicken, and cold cereal replaced butter, lard, beef, and eggs.”
Ancel Keys Six-Country and Seven-Country Studies
Ancel Keys, the father of K-rations for the military, published a study in 1953 that correlated deaths from heart disease with the percentage of calories from fat in the diet. He found that fat consumption was associated with an increased rate of death from heart disease in the six countries that he studied.
He followed this up with a more detailed Seven Country Study published in 1970, using three of the countries that were in the original six-country study — Italy, Japan, and the U.S. — and four other countries — Finland, Greece, The Netherlands, and Yugoslavia. This study further cemented the association of fat consumption and death from heart disease, which led to the McGovern Report.
McGovern Report
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by Senator George McGovern, released, in 1977, its “Dietary Goals for the United States,” designed to reduce fat intake and avoid cholesterol-rich foods. These dietary goals became become official government policy.
Further Developments
McDonalds and the Center for Science in the Public Interest
Next, in 1984 the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, joined the fray and started to coerce fast-food restaurants and the food industry to stop baking and frying food with animal fats and tropical oils. McDonalds fried its French fries with beef fat and palm oil. That’s why they tasted so good. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s well-orchestrated saturated fat attack coerced McDonalds and other fast-food chains to switch to partially hydrogenated, trans-fat vegetable oil.
USDA Food Pyramid
Adhering to the now well established low fat dogma, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1992, published its Food Guide Pyramid. The “pyramid” arranges food in sections that convey the message, “Fat is bad” and “Carbohydrates are good.” Carbohydrate-rich bread, cereal, rice, and pasta fill the large bottom space. and are to be consumed in abundant amounts, “6–11 servings” a day. Further up, as the pyramid narrows, fruit, which is also high in carbohydrates, is accorded “2–4 servings”; whereas the portion that includes meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts is allowed only “2–3 servings.” Fats and oils are placed in the small top portion of the pyramid and labeled “Use sparingly.”
Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010
Beginning in 1980, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services has published every five years an updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The most recent one, published in December 2010, recommends reducing saturated fat intake to 7 percent of caloric intake, down from its previously recommended 10 percent.
Meet the Fats
The USDA dietary guidelines and the American Heart Association group trans fats and saturated fats together and demonize them both as solid fats. The heart association’s website has a “Meet the Fats” link where the bad fats brothers are Sat and Trans — saturated fats and trans fats. The better fats sisters are Poly and Mon — polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats.
Swedish Heart Institute, Seattle and Dean Ornish
Indoctrinated in low-fat dogma by health organizations, nutrition authorities, and the government, I would instruct my heart surgery patients to eat a low fat diet, telling them to cut all the fat off their meat and not eat more than one egg a week. And following the USDA food pyramid I did not express any concerns about how much carbohydrates they might consume, from starch in bread, pasta, rice, and potatoes and sugar in fruit, fruit juices, pastry, and sodas.
When I was the director of the heart institute at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle in the 1990s I looked into establishing a Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease at Swedish. The Ornish Program limits fat intake to less than 10 percent of calories in the diet, with, as one study shows, only 1 percent saturated fat. I had a cardiologist at Swedish accompany me to New York to visit the leading Dean Ornish Program there. We came back and recommended that Swedish establish one in Seattle.
I was wrong. Several years later, after leaving Swedish and rejoining the faculty the University of Washington, I came upon an article by Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon titled “The Oiling of America” that was published in the magazine Nexus in 1999. It stimulated me to look more carefully into this subject.
Sleeper
Oscar Wilde said “Life imitates art.” He noted that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” In his film Sleeper Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, part owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant in Greenwich Village. He was cryogenically frozen in 1973 after a botched peptic ulcer operation done at the now closed St. Vincent’s Hospital. Two hundred years later scientists wake him up and revive him.
Scene from movie
In a scene from this movie (shown at the meeting), the two scientists have this exchange. Dr. Aragon: “Has he asked for anything special?” Dr. Melik: “Yes. This morning for breakfast he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk.” Dr. Aragon: “Oh yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.” Dr. Melik: “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or hot fudge?” Dr. Aragon: “Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.” Dr. Melik: “Incredible!” The YouTube title of this scene is Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper may accurately portray healthy eating in the future, (available HERE),
Tiger’s milk is said to be America’s original carbohydrate-rich, protein-rich nutrition bar. It was popular in the 1970s and is still sold. I got this one from Amazon.com (that I show at the meeting). As this cinematic work of art predicts, in 2173 deep fat, steak, cream pies, and hot fudge will have replaced wheat germ, organic honey, and tiger’s milk as health foods.
But if life does imitate art, what about all the evidence that shows saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause atherosclerosis?
Evidence Against the Lipid Hypothesis
Feeding Cholesterol to Omnivores Does Not Cause Atherosclerosis
Plants do not contain any cholesterol. Animals are the only source of cholesterol, and herbivores do not eat animal products. Rabbits, being a herbivore, are not designed to digest animal fat and cholesterol, so when it is fed high doses of cholesterol one should not be surprised if the cholesterol winds up getting stuck in any part of the poor rabbit, including its blood vessels. Feeding high doses of fat and cholesterol to omnivores, like rats and dogs, does not produce atherosclerotic lesions in them.
Other Countries with CHD-Death and Fat Consumption Data
Evidence against fat wilts upon close scrutiny. In his Six Country Study, Ancel Keys ignored data available from 16 other countries that did not fall in line with his desired graph. If he had chosen these six other countries [on the left side], or even more strikingly, these six countries [on the bottom right] he could have shown that increasing the percent of calories from fat in the diet reduces the number of deaths from coronary heart disease.
22 Countries with Such Data including four other groups of people
If Keys had included all 22 countries in his study, the result would have been a clutter of dots like this.
In fact, it turns out that people who have highest percentage of saturated fat in their diets have the lowest risk of heart disease.
Diets in People with the Lowest Risk of Heart Disease — Masai, Inuit, Rendille, Todelau
The diet of the Maasai tribe in Kenya and northern Tanzania consists of meat, milk, and blood from cattle. It is 66 percent saturated fat.
The diet of Inuit Eskimos in the Artic, consisting largely of whale meat and blubber, is 75 percent saturated fat; and they live long healthy lives free of heart disease and cancer.
The Rendille tribe in the Kaisut Desert in NE Kenya subsist on camel milk and meat, and a mixture of camel milk and blood, known as “Banjo.” Their diet is 63 percent saturated fat.
The Tokelau live well, without cardiologists, on three atoll islands that are now a territory of New Zealand. Their diet consists of fish and coconuts, which is 60 percent saturated fat.
Like these groups of people around the world, breast-fed infants in developed first-world countries also have a diet that is high in saturated fats. The fat in human mother’s milk is 54 percent saturated fat.
The Hunter-Gatherer Diet
The study referenced here, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is considered to be the most comprehensive analysis done on the Paleolithic hunter-gather diet. Anthropologists have assessed the diets of 229 hunter-gather populations that survived into the 20th century and can be viewed as surrogates for our Paleolithic, Stone Age ancestors.
When they can get it, these modern-day hunter-gatherers consume high amounts of animal food, which can make up to 85-100 percent of their calories, like the Maasi, Inuit, and Rendille peoples. They eat virtually all of the fat on the animal, including its organs, tongue, bone marrow, and brain. Other carnivores do the same thing. Lions, for example, will eat the organs and fat of their kill and leave the lean muscle meat for scavengers.
Since hunter-gatherers do not engage in agriculture, they have no corn, rice, or wheat to eat. They obtain only a low amount of carbohydrates from wild plants, gathering seeds, nuts, roots, tubers, bulbs, and fruits from them.
The Human Diet Throughout History
The Paleolithic Era, or Stone Age, lasted two-and-a-half million years, beginning with our human ancestor Homo hablis, and progressing through a succession of species to ours, Homo sapiens, which has existed for some 200,000 years.
The Agriculture Age began approximately 10,000 years ago and during this time, through 500 generations, carbohydrate consumption gradually increased. Even so, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, sugar consumption was one-fifth of what it is today. Now we are eating a greatly increased amount of carbs in cereal grains, dairy products, beverages, refined sugar, and candy, along with processed vegetable oils and dressings that did not exist in our diet for 99.9 percent of human history. During this time the human genome became adapted to follow a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Nevertheless, health authorities today say that we should do the opposite and follow a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
As calories, fat and carbs are interchangeable, protein less so. One can eat and digest only so much protein. When the protein content of the diet exceeds 35 percent of calories, nausea, diarrhea, and weakness ensue. These symptoms disappear when protein is dropped to 20-25 percent of calories.
YouTube on Ancel Keys
The new social media of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is not only helping to overthrow dictators and autocratic regimes but also wrong medical dogmas. This one, titled Big Fat Lies (shown at the meeting), exposes the chicanery Ancel Keys practiced in his work (availableHERE).
The Framingham Study 30-years on
But what about the Framingham Study? In 1987, in the Journal of the American Medical Association Framingham Study investigators reported these two important findings: 1) Over age 50 there is no increased overall mortality with either high or low serum cholesterol levels, and 2) In people with a falling cholesterol level (over the first 14 years of the study), for each 1% mg/dl drop in cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in all-cause mortality over the next 18 years. (JAMA 1987;257:2176-2180)
Contrary Long-term Findings of the Framingham Heart Study
Then, in 1992, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the third director of the study, Dr. William Castelli, reported: “In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol” … We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least, and were the most physically active.” (Arch Int Med 1992;152:1271-2)
Most doctors have not heard about these findings because medical organizations, notably the American Heart Association, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry have ignored them. After all, prescribing statin drugs to lower cholesterol is a $25 billion/year industry.
The Politics Behind the McGovern Report
What about our government and the McGovern Report? The YouTube video titled “The McGovern Report” (shown at the meeting) deals with it in a pithy way (available HERE).
Mary Enig, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Maryland, is interviewed in the video. In 1978, she was the lone whistleblower warning people about the dangers of trans fats. The medical establishment, government, and the food and drug industry belittled and ignored her findings that trans fats interfere with critical enzyme systems in the body and suppressed these findings for 25 years. As evidence of their dangers continued to grow the FDA, finally, in 2003, announced that beginning in 2006 the food industry must display how much trans fat the product contains on its nutrition facts label. Having ignored the subject since its inception in 1980, the government’s 2005 Dietary Guidelines for American at last warned them to restrict their consumption of trans fats. In 2006 New York became the first city in the nation to ban trans fats in restaurant food.
Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
Evidence that the McGovern Committee did not have in the 1970s is this 2005 report of European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics.
They show an inverse correlation with saturated fat consumption and rate of heart disease. Countries with the lowest consumption of saturated fat have the highest rates of heart disease. Georgia, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Croatia, Macedonia, and Ukraine all have a saturated fat consumption that is less than 7.5% of calories, which is what the USDA and American Heart Association recommend, but their death rate from heart disease is quite high. Austria, Finland, Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France have high levels of saturated fat in their diet and low rates of heart disease. France, with the highest fat consumption, has the lowest rate of deaths from heart disease amongst these 14 European countries.
Reasons Why Saturated Fats Are Good For Us
The Biologic Importance of Saturated Fat
There is good reason why 54 percent of the fat in mother’s milk is saturated fat. Cell membranes need saturated fatty acids to function properly and be “waterproof.” The heart prefers saturated long-chain 16-carbon palmitic and 18-C stearic acid (over carbohydrates) for energy. Bones need them to assimilate calcium effectively. They protect the liver from the adverse effects of alcohol and medications like Tylenol. Lung surfactant is composed entirely of saturated 16-C palmitic acid, and when present in sufficient amounts prevents asthma and other breathing disorders. Saturated fats function as signaling messengers for hormone production.
They play an important role in the immune system by priming white blood cells to destroy invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, and to fight tumors. And medium-chain 12-C lauric acid and 14-C myristic acid (in butter) kill bacteria and candida fungus.
Saturated fats signal satiety, so you stop eating because you feel full, lose fat, and maintain a normal weight.
And, importantly, eating saturated fats reduces consumption of health-damaging carbohydrates and polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Cracks in the Wall of Diet-Cholesterol Heart Orthodoxy
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is a leading establishment medical journal that defends the lipid hypothesis. Even this journal has backed down and is now reporting cracks in the wall of diet-cholesterol-heart orthodoxy. A meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease does not support the notion that saturated fats increase the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, or peripheral vascular disease.
And this journal also recently published a prospective cohort study of 53,000 women and men comparing their intake of carbohydrates and saturated fats and found that replacement of saturated fats with high glycemic index carbohydrates significantly increases the risk of heart attacks.
A Randomized Double-Blind Trial on the Effects of Coconut Oil on Abdominal Obesity
This trial, published in the journal Lipids, enrolled 40 women with a waist circumference > 35 inches. Twenty were randomized to take 30 ml — two tablespoons — of coconut oil a day (Group C) over a 12-week period. The other 20 took 30 ml soybean oil/day (Group S).
The Group C women taking the coconut oil exhibited a significant reduction in waist circumference (for the statisticians among us the P value was 0.005) with no change in the soybean Group S. And the only thing that the saturated fat-laden coconut oil did to cholesterol levels was to raise HDL cholesterol, the one that advocates of the lipid hypothesis call the “good” cholesterol. (Lipids 2009;44:593-601)
Eat Fat Lose Fat
Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, president of the Weston Price Foundation, have written a book titled Eat Fat Lose Fat: Lose Weight and Feel Great with Three Delicious, Science-based Coconut Diets. I highly recommend it. The fat content of coconut oil is 92 percent saturated fat, the highest saturated fat content of any food. I now start each day with two tablespoons of coconut oil.
Other Considerations
Roles Cholesterol Play
What about cholesterol? As with saturated fat, it is not a villain. On the contrary, cholesterol is critical for good health. It is an essential component in every cell in the body. Although few doctors know this, more than 20 studies have shown that elderly people with a high cholesterol blood level live longer than do those who have a low cholesterol blood level.
Cholesterol is the mother of hormones. It is converted into stress and sex hormones, like cortisol, testosterone, and estradiol, in the adrenal cortex. The liver turns cholesterol into bile salts needed for intestinal absorption of fats and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. And when exposed to UVB rays in sunlight or at a tanning salon, the skin turns cholesterol into vitamin D.
Cholesterol also is the body’s fire brigade. It repairs damage to the body’s tissues, particularly the damage in arteries inflammation does to cause atherosclerosis. Blaming cholesterol for atherosclerosis is like blaming firemen for the fire they have come to put out.
Along with saturated fats, cholesterol is also an integral component of cell membranes.
The brain and nerve tissue contain the highest concentration of cholesterol in the body. It is a key component in forming synapses — cell connections — needed for good mental functioning, learning, and memory.
If not cholesterol, then what causes heart disease?
Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory process brought on by eating too many carbohydrates and omega-6 vegetable oils. Stress plays a role and possibly also bacterial infection.
A deficiency of various vitamins shown here may also play a role in causing atherosclerotic heart disease, as may an excess or deficiency of various minerals.
U.S. Dietary Fat: Animal and Vegetable Sources 1909 and 1985
Over the past century, butter consumption has plummeted from 18 grams per person per day to 5 grams. Consumption of lard has dropped substantially while use of shortening has almost tripled. In 1909, shortening was a natural product made with coconut oil and lard. Shortening used today is made out of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Consumption of margarine made with trans fats has gone up five fold, and vegetable oils, more than fifteen-fold. Along with trans fats, these often rancid vegetable oils are new to the human diet.
A good case can be made that these changes in fat-and-oil consumption over the last hundred years are the major cause of the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and learning disabilities in children. Observing the increasing use of vegetable oils during the 1940s and 1950s, a few physicians, notably Dr. Weston A. Price and Dr. Francis Pottenger, predicted that there would be increasing rates of such diseases.
Prevalence of Obesity among US adults 1950-2010
An epidemic of obesity has accompanied the adoption of a low-fat diet. With only 1 in 150 people obese when the century began, by 1950 nearly 10 percent of Americans were obese. Thirty years later, in 1980, it had risen to 15 percent. Then following publication of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines and its every-five-year updates, obesity in Americans has steadily risen. Now two-thirds of the American public is overweight, with more than one-third, obese. Today the average American weighs 30 pounds more that he or she did 100 years ago. American women weigh and average 167 pounds and men, 191 pounds.
There is solid evidence that this epidemic of obesity has resulted from replacing saturated fat in the American diet with carbohydrates and processed polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
Carbohydrate Consumption and Obesity
The rise in obesity parallels closely the rise in carbohydrate intake. As Gary Taubes shows in his book Why We Get Fat: and what to do about it, carbohydrates, not overeating or a sedentary life, are what make you fat. Eating fat and protein don’t make us fat, only carbohydrates do.
The Primal Blueprint Carbohydrate Curve
This graph, in Mark Sisson’s book The Primal Blueprint, compares carbohydrate intake with weight.
Consuming less than 150 grams of carbs a day enables one to maintain a stable weight. More than that and you gain weight. One burns more fat and will lose weight when carbohydrate intake is less than 100 grams a day. Unfortunately, Americans today consume between 300-500 grams of carbs a day.
The Epidemic of Diabetes
Over a 30-year period from 1980-2008 the prevalence of diabetes more than tripled. Now, in 2011, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet, 25.8 million children and adults in the U.S., 8.3 percent of the population, have diabetes; and 79 million people, based on their fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1c levels, are prediabetic.
Diabesity
Diabetes and obesity go together, so much so that these disorders are now being called “diabesity”. Body mass index (BMI) is the commonly used measure for obesity, calculated by dividing one’s weight in kilograms (Kg) by one’s height in meters squared (Kg/m2). One is considered to be obese if the BMI ≥30, and morbidly obese with a BMI of ≥35.
People with a BMI ≥35 are 10 times more likely to develop diabetes in their lifetimes than those with a normal BMI of 18.5-25. The lifetime risk of diabetes is around 30 percent for people who are overweight with a BMI of 25-30, 50 percent for obese people with a BMI of 30-35, and around 70 percent for people who are morbidly obese.
Disease Trends and Butter Consumption
Consumption of butter has dropped precipitously while cancer and heart disease has soared. The rise in cancer and heart disease certainly cannot be blamed on high-saturated-fat butter.
The Health-Damaging Effects of a Low-Fat, High-Carbohydrate Diet
A 12-ounce can of coke has ten teaspoons of sugar, which contain 42 grams of sugar, supplying 167 calories. A 20 ounce bottle has 17, and a 30 ounce bottle, 27 teaspoons of sugar. The average American drinks 600 cans (56 gallons) of soft drinks a year, up from 216 can in 1971. The average American teenager drinks 3 to 6 cans of soda a day!
One-third of our dietary sugar comes from sodas, and they have become America’s number one source of calories.
Disasters
Disasters that may confront us can be divided into ones that are natural and those that are human made. The natural ones range from an earthquake to an impact event, like the one 65 million years ago where an asteroid six miles in diameter collided with the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, and all other life forms larger than a small chicken.
Human-made disasters include political, economic, and martial types, a number of which Doctors for Disaster Preparedness has addressed. To this list must be added the nutritional disaster of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
These trucks laden with soda pop serve as its weapons of mass destruction.
Health Benefits of a Low-Carbohydrate, High-Saturated Fat Diet
In addition to Eat Fat, Lose Fat, I recommend two more books that can help us reduce our carbohydrate intake. One is Life Without Bread: how a low-carbohydrate diet can save your life. It describes diets that limit carbohydrate intake to 72 grams a day, which is equivalent to 6 slices of bread. The other one is Why We Get Fat: and what to do about it by Gary Taubes. Noting that meat, fish, and eggs contain no carbohydrates, he suggests that you can eat as much of them as you like, along with leafy green vegetables. (Try chicken salad wrapped in lettuce rather than as a sandwich between two slices of bread.)
The ideal caloric ratio between carbohydrates, fats, and protein is carbohydrates, 10-15 percent; proteins, 15-25 percent; and fats, 60-70 percent of calories, with the majority of them being saturated fats. Among the different kinds of fats, saturated fats and monounsaturated fats are good; except for omega-3 and a small amount of omega-6 essential fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats are bad in the high quantities that they are eaten in a Western diet, particularly industrially processed vegetable oils; and trans fats are terrible. Saturated animal fat is best obtained from grass-fed beef and pastured chickens, along with nitrate-free, additive-free bacon and sausage; and seafood from wild, not farm-raised, fish.
The Sacred Cow
Healthy milk and meat comes from contented cows on pasture, eating grass food that they are genetically designed to eat.
The “Efficient” Industrial Confinement Model
Confinement operations like these produce meat that is too high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fat and too low in vitamins. It being certified “organic” is not sufficient. The turkeys in the photo in the lower left can be sold as organic because they are “cage free”! The best meat to eat is that which is “Certified humanely treated” or “100% grass-fed/finished.”
The Pastured Poultry Model
Pastured poultry produce eggs much richer in nutrients such as vitamins A and D and omega-3 fatty acids. Like with the turkeys so confined, organic eggs are produced mainly in barns. One wants to eat pastured eggs like those sold at a farmer’s market.
Three types of eggs
The color of the yolk is an indication of the presence of nutrients. The pastured egg, with its dark orange color, is full of nutrients. The organic store egg less so. The supermarket egg, pale as it is, would be even whiter if the chickens weren’t fed orange foods and dyes.
Confinement Butter vs. Grass-Fed Butter
The butter on the right was made from cream from cows on green pasture. The deep yellow color is indicative of high levels of omega-3 fats and fat-soluble vitamins. The butter on the left was made with cream from confined cows. Commercial butter like this has artificial color added to it so the consumer will not know that it is actually colorless.
Conclusion
Enjoy eating saturated fat but preferably from grass-fed animals.
For further reading on this subject, I recommend two articles, which are available online. One is the article that prompted me to question the lipid hypothesis. The second one is my now more enlightened view on this subject.
I did a podcast on the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate, high-saturated-fat diet on the Livin La Vida Low Carb Show. The show’s host, Jimmy Moore, has titled it, “Cardiac Surgeon Dr. Donald Miller Tells Dr. Dean Ornish to Take a Hike.” A link to it is HERE (and on my website).
Supporters of the orthodox view that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease who dismiss these books, unread, bring to mind George Orwell’s definition of orthodoxy: “Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think.” And Frank Zappa put it well when he said, “The mind is like a parachute, it works only when it is open.” One needs to approach this subject with an open mind.
MP Alister Jack has finally replied to my question asking where he and the UK government stand on the threat by Israel to annex more Palestinian territory known as the West Bank. It seems the Government has urged them not to do it.
I doubt if his letter reproduced here, is his own work. It is sprinkled with the humbug and deceit repeated for decades by Tory and Labour governments and was likely penned at least 20 years ago by a Foreign Office scribbler vaccinated with an Israeli embassy gramophone needle. It is still used as a reply template by MPs and ministers who dare not speak their own minds or are plain clueless.
As usual, Her Majesty’s Government wants “a safe and secure Israel” but only “a viable and sovereign Palestinian state”. What a deplorable statement. Viable means workable in the most meagre sense. And when it comes to safety and security why can’t Mr. Jack be evenhanded? His words (if they are indeed his) express clear racial prejudice favouring the wellbeing and prosperity of one people at the expense of another which, I’d have thought, deserves a sharp rap on the knuckles.
He says there can be no changes to the status quo without a negotiated agreement between the parties. Mr Jack is surely aware that the status quo is itself illegal and breaches umpteen UN resolutions. And why does he feel the Palestinians must ‘negotiate’ their freedom? Picture the scene with the invader holding a gun to the head of the victim whose land the invader has occupied under brutal military control and in defiance of international law for 70+ years. Why is Mr Jack joining his colleagues in calling for more lopsided negotiations instead of pushing for law and justice?
‘Nothing shall be done to prejudice the rights of non-Jewish communities….’ Sorry, forget that.
So many experts are saying that a negotiated two-state solution is impossible. Does anyone seriously think the Israelis will voluntarily give up their ill-gotten territorial gains which are crucial to their Greater Israel dream? The only peaceable way to change their mind is through the persuasive power of BDS and other sanctions. For that reason BDS is under relentless Zionist attack and is fiercely opposed by the servile UK Government. The reason why the West endlessly woffles about ‘negotiations’ is their cowardly failure ever since 1948 to confront Israel’s greedy ambition for expansion and domination. That inconvenient bit in Britain’s 1917 pledge to Rothschild and the Zionist Federation about “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” is best forgotten. It’s so much easier for the UK Government to say and do nothing while their Zionist ‘friends’ surreptitiously complete their programme of creeping annexation. And never mind the 70+ years of grief this has caused innocent Palestinians.
Mr Jack refers to Boris Johnson’s article in Yedioth Ahronoth which appeared on the very day Netanyahu was supposed to be carrying out his crazed threat. “Annexation would represent a violation of international law…. I profoundly hope that annexation does not go ahead,” he wrote. “If it does, the UK will not recognize any changes to the 1967 lines, except those agreed between both parties.” But Israel has repeatedly violated international law and repeatedly been rewarded, so why should it care what the UK thinks about boundary changes? They have been changing all the time. Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem (including the Old City) in 1967 was a flagrant breach of international law, and what did the UK or anyone else do about it? “I want to see an outcome that delivers justice for both Israelis and Palestinians,” says Johnson absurdly. He has no interest in justice otherwise he’d be leading the charge for implementing international law and UN resolutions which have already ruled on the issue.
As for Israel’s annexation misfire, it looks like world hostility gave Netanyahu cold feet and he and Trump cast around in desperation for a face-saver. They found it the United Arab Emirates’ ‘MBZ’ with whom they cobbled a deal for full diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE provided Israel suspended annexation, and this is touted as a triumph. No-one of course insisted on actually abandoning annexation and you can bet the piecemeal ethnic cleansing, destruction of Palestinian homes and confiscation of their lands will continue unabated.
Mr. Jack then says he’s proud that the UK supports UNRWA and is providing £34.5 million funding this year. If the Palestinians were allowed their universal right to freedom of movement and self-determination in their homeland there’d be no need to keep throwing our tax money at agencies like UNRWA. It’s scandalous that money for our own schools and hospitals has been diverted to subsidise Israel’s long-running programme of thieving, collective punishment, dispossession and the trashing of the Palestinian economy.
Mr Jack goes on to say: “The UK’s position on Israeli settlements is clear.” Well no, it isn’t. They are illegal and even constitute a war crime yet the UK Government doesn’t mind if companies or individuals profiteer from using and endorsing those squats to the detriment of the Palestinians. And he seems to agree with his government’s opposition to the UN’s business and human rights database. Back in March 2016, UN Human Rights Council resolution 31/36 mandated the High Commissioner’s Office to produce a database of all businesses engaged in activities related to Israel’s settlement enterprise and having implications for the rights of the Palestinian people. Fair enough, you might think. But a year ago 103 local, regional and international organizations felt it necessary to call on the High Commissioner to release the Database expressing deep concern that the document and names of the companies facilitating the settlement programme had been withheld from circulation for 3 years due to political pressure. In the meantime the Israeli government had escalated the construction of new squats and broadcast its intention to formally annex parts of the West Bank in further violation of international law.
“The Database will bring an important degree of transparency on the activities of businesses which contravene rules and principles of international humanitarian and human rights law as a result of their operations in or with illegal Israeli settlements,” they said.
Amnesty International commented: “Naming the businesses which profit in the context of this illegal situation sends a clear message from the international community that settlements must never be normalized. These companies are profiting from and contributing to systematic violations against Palestinians.”
And Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights said: “The UK Government abstained on the vote of this Human Rights Council resolution in March 2016…. It was the only state to declare that the database was ‘inappropriate’ and that ‘it would not co-operate in the process’ of its implementation.” LPHR felt that the reasons given for the Government’s position “did not individually or cumulatively amount to an adequate basis for justifiably opposing the UN Database”. One such reason was that the UK Government thought the Human Rights Council should focus on states rather than private companies. LPHR says this contradicts the UK’s earlier agreement, along with the rest of the international community, that companies as well as states have vital responsibilities in protecting and advancing respect for human rights.
I won’t trouble Mr Jack for an explanation for all this. It’s enough that voters and campaigners are aware of the skullduggery.
The end of the Cold war brought peace to Europe and armies began to demobilize. The American empire exploited this trust and ignored promises made to the Russians to expand NATO and absorb former Warsaw Pact nations and even former Soviet Republics. Efforts then focused on conquering the large former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. The Russians had found Ukraine unproductive, corrupt, and troublesome so granted it independence in 1991. The American empire plotted to absorb Ukraine into NATO and sent military units to Ukraine to bolster the Ukrainian army with plans for building American military bases. An American instigated coup in Ukraine led to bloody fighting and major economic disruptions.
“The Independent Ukraine’s Painful Journey Through the Five Stages of Grief”; explains Ukraine’s current status; The Saker; Unz.com; https://www.unz.com/tsaker/the-indepe…
The US Army’s huge effort to secure Ukraine can be seen in the 349 articles posted at its website just over the past five years: https://search.usa.gov/search/news?af…
The United States provided Ukraine with $1.5 billion in military aid since 2014, to include $250 million in 2019. The purpose of these weapons is to kill Russians. https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Rele…
When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.
Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.
Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.
It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.
The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.
Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Death threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.
Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.
For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.
The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.
These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.
The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.
Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.
Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.
The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.
In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.
Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.
Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.
The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.
A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.
Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.
Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.
Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.
Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.
Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.
Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.
Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.
Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.
The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.
But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February. … continue
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