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Global Giants: American Empire and Transnational Capital

Maximilian C. Forte review of Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips (Introduction by William I. Robinson). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. LCCN 2018017493; ISBN 9781609808716 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609808723 (ebook); 353 pps.

Giants: The Global Power Elite, by Peter M. Phillips, Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University, opens with a stated intention of following in the tradition C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite. This book is clearly meant to be a contemporary update and expansion of Mills’ work, such that the “power elite” now becomes the global power elite (GPE) in Phillips’ volume—and central to the idea of a global power elite is the transnational capitalist class that was at the core of the theorization of Leslie Sklair. One of the most important features of this book, in my view, is that it overcomes the unproductive dichotomy that continues to silently inform many academic and political debates on this question: is the contemporary world order one dominated by US imperialism or transnational capital? Phillips’ answer is productive (even if I do not entirely agree): transnational capital has acquired US power and uses the power of the US state to further its aims, protect its interests, and enforce its agenda. Where I differ, the difference is a relatively slight matter of emphasis: Phillips’ model is largely correct, but it is also important to remember that the wealthiest, most numerous, and most powerful membership of the “transnational” capitalist class is in fact American.

Aside from this, Phillips reveals how even now mere mention of the “transnational capitalist class” is obscured in mainstream corporate media coverage. As he points out: “the concept of a global transnational capitalist class is essentially completely absent from corporate news coverage in the United States and Europe” (p. 62).

The centrepiece of this work is its detailed exposition of the 389 individuals who constitute the core of “the policy planning nongovernmental networks that manage, facilitate, and protect the continued concentration of global capital” (p. 10).

I am thankful to the author for providing me with a free copy of this text, so that this review could be written. I have also assigned one of the chapters as required reading in one of my recent courses (DeGlobalization & the Nation), and thus I also have the benefit of feedback from students on some of the book’s key contents.

Chapters—Contents

The Preface to the volume effectively summarizes the key contents of the book and outlines its principal arguments. It was not prepared as a mere formality, and is worth reading on its own.

The Introduction, “Who Rules the World?” was written by William I. Robinson, one of the leading scholars today on the topic of the transnational capitalist class.

Chapter 1, “Transnational Capitalist Class Power Elite: A Seventy-Year History,” aims at explaining the “transition from the nation state power elites described by Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital around the world”. In this chapter Phillips traces the development of the concept of global power elites from the work of C. Wright Mills, through to Leslie Sklair, William Robinson, William Carroll and even David Rothkopf. While the author also invokes “shadow elites,” he does not mention the work of Janine Wedel in this regard. Phillips also provides a detailed outline of the nature of global wealth inequality, ranging from the control of wealth by a few, to over-accumulation, and starvation. In addition to the preface, this is the chapter that makes the central arguments of the book.

Chapter 2, “The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global Capitalism,” identifies the 17 global financial giants—money management firms that control more than one trillion dollars in capital. As these firms invest in each other, and many smaller firms, the interlocked capital that they manage surpasses $41 trillion (which amounts to about 16% of the world’s total wealth). The 17 global financial giants are led by 199 directors. This chapter details how these financial giants have pushed for global privatization of virtually everything, in order to stimulate growth to absorb excess capital. The financial giants are supported by a wide array of institutions: “governments, intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, militaries, and corporate media all work in support of their vital interests” (p. 60).

Chapter 3, “Managers: The Global Power Elite of the Financial Giants,” largely consists of the detailed profiles of the 199 financial managers just mentioned.

Chapter 4, “Facilitators: The Power Elite Policy Planning Center of the Transnational Capitalist Class,” examines the membership of two non-governmental Global Elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission. The chapter also goes into some depth in related organizations, such as the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. Detailed profiles of the directors of the G30 are included in this chapter, as well as profiles of the members of the Trilateral Commission Executive Group.

Chapter 5, “Protectors: The Power Elite and the US Military NATO Empire, Intelligence Agencies, and Private Military Companies,” focuses on the power of “the US/NATO military empire”. As Phillips explains, the US/NATO functions as a “transnational military police state” that operates in nearly every country in the world, and, “threatens nations that do not fully cooperate with global capital with covert activities, regime change, and heavy negative propaganda” (p. 12). Phillips also examines how the global Giants, “invest in war making as a method of using surplus capital for a guaranteed return, with an increasing use of private military/security companies for protection of Global Power Elites and their wealth” (p. 12). Detailed profiles of the 35 members of the Atlantic Council Executive Committee form part of this chapter. This chapter also examines “Private Military Contractors,” focusing on Blackwater and G4S.

Chapter 6, “Ideologists: Corporate Media and Public Relations Propaganda Firms,” concentrates on the extensive investment by the Giants in corporate media and their expanding “use of public relations propaganda companies in the news systems of the world” (p. 13). The six major global media organizations The chapter this focuses on the six leading global media organizations, and how they offer ideological justification for corporate capitalism while censoring contrary perspectives. As Phillips explains early in his book:

“We have a media system that seeks to control all aspects of human thinking and promotes continued consumption and compliance. The dominant ideological message from corporate media today is that the continued growth of the economy will offer trickle-down benefits to all humans and save the planet”. (p.13)

One outstanding fact that is presented at the start of this chapter is that, “corporate media receive anywhere from two thirds to 80 percent of their broadcast and print news content from public relations and propaganda (PRP) firms” (p. 263). Since only a handful of media companies monopolize the world market of information distribution, this fact reveals a monumental bullhorn in the hands of the transnational capitalist class (p. 265). This chapter also informs us that, in the US, the number of media companies has declined from 50 in the early 1980s to just six today, and that 98% of all US cities are served by only one daily newspaper (p. 264).

This chapter also provides detailed profiles of the major media and public relations firms in the US, along with discussion of some of their noteworthy international interventions. In addition, the chapter discusses propaganda and the “engineering of consent”.

Chapter 7, “Facing the Juggernaut: Democracy Movements and Resistance,” offers “a summary and what-needs-to-be-done statement” (p. 13), that emphasizes what needs to be done to reform the system, in very broad terms, with a return to the principles outlined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The books ends with a postscript which amounts to a letter to the Global Power Elites “asking them to consider future generations when making decisions regarding global capital, and urging them to take corrective action before more serious and inevitable unrest and environmental devastation take effect” (p. 13).

“Global Power Elites”: the Transnational Capitalist Class

Phillips describes the Global Power Elite as follows:

“The Global Power Elite function as a nongovernmental network of similarly educated wealthy people with common interests of managing, facilitating, and protecting concentrated global wealth and insuring the continued growth of capital. Global Power Elites influence and use international institutions controlled by governmental authorities—namely, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), NATO, World Trade Organization (WTO), G7, G20, and many others”. (p. 9)

Therefore what Phillips indirectly points to here is the growing recognition of the fact that, far from the promised obsolescence of the state, globalization has not only been enacted by states, the power of certain states has in fact increased. On the other hand, he apparently endorses Robinson’s claim that nation-states have become, “little more than population containment zones,” while “the real power lies with the decision makers who control global capital” (p. 26). Both propositions are unconvincing: first, populations are clearly not being contained; second, if states matter so little, and the real decision-makers are global capitalists, then why do the latter need states?

Indeed, Phillips appears to be of two minds on this question. He does note, for example: “The World Bank, IMF, G7, G20, WTO, Financial Stability Board, and Bank for International Settlements are institutions controlled by nation-state representatives and central bankers with proportional power/control exercised by dominant financial supporters, primarily the United States and European Union countries” (p. 161). Critical institutions of the global capitalist system are themselves state institutions. Clearly then, states are a lot more than just population containers. The shaky narrative of this book is a product of an underlying theoretical lack of clarity.

Global Power Elites, as Phillips explains, “are the activist core of the Transnational Capitalist Class—1 percent of the world’s wealthy people—who serve the uniting function of providing ideological justifications for their shared interests and establishing the parameters of needed actions for implementation by transnational governmental organizations” (p. 10). They should therefore not be confused with all elites, nor apparently with elite technocrats who serve in government but who are not among the world’s wealthiest people. The GPEs also apparently exclude the lobbyists, academics, media and think tank members who constitute a large part of what Janine R. Wedel describes as flexible “influence elites,” in her own updating of Mills’ work on elites (see “From Power Elites to Influence Elites: Resetting Elite Studies for the 21st Century” in the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Elites and Power after Financialization).

What unites the members of the GPEs are common interests and backgrounds. They tend to interact with each other regularly, and a wide range of mutually reinforcing organizations. It can come down to sharing the same university affiliations and membership in social clubs—“It is certainly safe to conclude they all know each other personally or know of each other in the shared context of their positions of power” (p. 11). Elsewhere in the book, these transnational elites are described as effectively forming a club: “interacting families of high social standing with similar lifestyles, corporate affiliations, and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools” (p. 22). “The power elite policy groups inside the Transnational Capitalist Class,” Phillips observes, “are made up of persons with shared educational experiences, similar lifestyles, and common ideologies” (p. 214). The degree of commonality among the elites studied in this book is striking:

“One hundred thirty-six of the 199 power elite managers (70 percent) are male. Eighty-four percent are whites of European descent. The 199 power elite managers hold 147 graduate degrees, including 59 MBAs, 22 JDs, 23 PhDs, and 35 MA/MS degrees. Almost all have attended elite private colleges, with 28 attending Harvard or Stanford”. (p. 62)

Of those same 199 individuals, 59% are from the US; many of the 199 are dual citizens; and, “they live in or interact regularly in a number of the world’s great cities: New York City, Chicago, London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, and Singapore” (p. 63). Of the same 199 global financial directors, 69 have attended the World Economic Forum (p. 147).

Less convincing was William Robinson’s assertion, in the Introduction to the book, that suggests that national capitalists have effectively vanished. Presumably they metamorphosed into a transnational capitalist class, and for that reason Mills’ work needs to be updated (p. 17). What was missing here then was a golden opportunity to reflect on the fractious breakup of the dominant elites into a diminished and angered national capitalist faction in opposition to the transnationalist faction. That alone could have done more to explain the rise of Trump, as a champion of national capital, than resorting to facile ideological truisms about “populism”. Unfortunately, Robinson is destined to continue missing this, as elsewhere he quickly rushed to assert that Trump himself was a leading representative of the transnational capitalist class—and it was as unconvincing as it was misleading. Even worse, Robinson risks reducing “transnational capitalist class” to something like “fascist”: a term of abuse, with limited explanatory power. Unlike Robinson’s comments in this book, Phillips seems much more attuned to the reality of factions that exist even among the global power elites (p. 23).

Phillips describes the world’s top billionaires as “similar to colonial plantation owners” (p. 21), which can be a useful way for conceptualizing Western power structures as they have developed over the past five centuries. Phillips thus points to the UK’s Barclays Bank as an example of the colonial heritage at work today: “Barclays Bank [is] the number-one most connected firm. Barclays is a 300-year-old banking company founded in 1690 in London. Barclays grew with the expansion of the British Empire and now offers services in more than 50 countries and territories, serving some 49 million clients” (p. 79)

Transnational capitalists work through an array of institutions such as, “the World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, the G20, G7, World Economic Forum, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements,” among others (p. 25). This book also cites the The Handbook of Transnational Governance (2011) which “lists 52 trans-governmental networks, arbitration bodies, multi-stakeholder initiatives (with internet cooperation), and voluntary regulation groups (fair labor/trade associations)” as key bodies of the transnational capitalist class. It’s not clear why, if their interests and agendas are shared in common, they would need so many multilateral international organizations—at the very least it would seem to be an inefficient diffusion of effort.

The other question is, if the global power elites discussed in this book control/manage a total of about $41 trillion, and the world’s total wealth is estimated at $255 trillion, then that would mean the global power elites in fact control a minority share of global wealth (roughly 16%). Then who owns or controls the other 84%? Elsewhere in the book it is revealed that “147 companies controlled some 40 percent of the world’s wealth” (p. 36). Then the question becomes: who controls the remaining 60%? Also, is control the same thing as ownership? Later the book informs us that, “in excess of $74 trillion of inter-invested centralized capital” is controlled by 69 cross-invested firms (p. 49). This would mean that they control just over 29% of the world’s wealth. One wishes that some overall profile of global wealth ownership and distribution had been provided in this book, so as to better contextualize what the “giants” really own.

American Power Elites (APEs)?

One of the ironies in this text is what Phillips reveals in Chapter 1:

“The top six billionaires in 2017, with their country of citizenship and estimated net worth, were Bill Gates (US, $88.8 billion), Amancio Ortega (Spain, $84.6 billion), Jeff Bezos (US, $82.2 billion), Warren Buffett (US, $76.2 billion), Mark Zuckerberg (US, $56 billion), and Carlos Slim Helú (Mexico, $54.5 billion). Forbes’s billionaire list contained 2,047 names in 2017”. (p. 21)

Thus of the top six billionaires, four are American. As for the Forbes list, in 2019, seven of the top 10 billionaires listed are American. In fact, the list has become increasingly American since circa 2012, according to this compilation of annual rankings, returning to the situation that was observed from before 2005. In total, 14 of the world’s richest 20 persons are American. Overall, 607 of the world’s 2,153 billionaires in 2019 are American—or just over 28%, which still reflects a disproportionately large American presence. As mentioned above, the American proportion has been steadily increasing:

So what does one conclude from this picture? Is it in fact transnational capital of a global power elite that has dominated globalization, that we are seeing here? Or would it be more accurately reflective of reality to speak of an American Power Elite that dominates the world’s circuits of wealth creation and concentration? The answer has enormous import for how we think about globalization vs. American imperialism as the best mode of describing contemporary reality.

As we saw in the last section, the inability to explain why transnational capitalists need states is one of the most serious flaws in explanations that claim states have been diminished while transnational capitalists have real power. If they had real power, they would not need states. Thus one of the problems of this book is that it under-theorizes critical areas that really needed attention, if we were really to update Mills’ work.

US Imperialism and Transnational Capitalism

One of the key strengths of this book is that it goes against fashionable theorizing on the political left, prevalent among academics and activists, that minimizes or even refuses to name US imperialism. As Phillips shows in this book, the US is the foundation of transnational policing that works to enforce the interests of global capital. In particular, the global financial giants invest heavily in war-making as a means of profitably deploying excess capital.

Thus Phillips notes that, “the policy elites in the United States have been mostly united in support of an American empire of military power that maintains a repressive war against resisting groups…around the world” (p. 23). He also points out: “uncooperative regimes are undermined and overthrown in support of the free flow of global capital for investments anywhere that returns are possible” (p. 64).

“Humanitarian intervention” is also critically addressed by Phillips. He argues that the transnational capitalist class promotes “military interventions [that] are ideologically justified as peacekeeping or humanitarian missions,” primarily in cases where governments are “viewed as unfavorable to the TCC’s capital interests”—in such cases then, “resistance forces will be supported and encouraged toward regime change, as in…Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia” (p. 30). It is refreshing to read a North American academic who recognizes this reality. As indicated in the list of contents, Phillips dedicated an entire chapter to the subject of US empire (chapter 5).

The protection of transnational capital, Phillips argues, is what lies behind the production of “failed states, manufactured civil wars, regime changes, and direct invasions/occupations”. Each of these is a manifestation of “the new world order requirements for protecting transnational capital” (p. 215).

NATO is a key part of Phillips’ discussion, and he notes that NATO members collectively account for 85% of the world’s military spending (p. 223). Phillips’ argument is that NATO is the leading military defender of the interests of global capital: “NATO is quickly becoming a US military empire supplemental police force for the Global Power Elite and the Transnational Capitalist Class” (p. 224). In conjunction with this, he discusses the role of the Atlantic Council as the chief purveyor of NATO propaganda.

Yet, despite Phillips’ own arguments about manufactured civil wars, “resistance” groups funded if not created by Western powers, and regime change war—he still manages to produce an unquestioning endorsement of “Arab Spring protests” in North Africa as examples of resistance against neoliberal austerity politics (p. 304).

Global Inequality

Global inequality has become extreme under the dominance of the Global Power Elites. As William Robinson writes in the Introduction,

“the richest 1 percent of humanity in 2017 controlled more than half of the world’s wealth; the top 30 percent of the population controlled more than 95 percent of global wealth, while the remaining 70 percent of the population had to make do with less than 5 percent of the world’s resources”. (p. 15)

Phillips recounts a recent finding that only eight individuals now own half the world’s wealth (p. 21).

While not always clear about whether “the richest 1 percent” are the top 1% in the US or the top 1% of the world as a whole, the book informs us that the top fraction “increased their total wealth by 42.5 percent in 2008, and 50.1 percent in 2017,” and in the latter year, “2.3 million new millionaires were created, bringing the total number of millionaires around the globe to more than 36 million”; these millionaires represent “0.7 percent of the world’s population controlling more than 47 percent of global wealth’; the world’s bottom 70% only control 2.7% of total wealth (pp. 301–302).

This book also relays the following overview of global wealth inequality:

“The world’s total wealth is estimated to be close to $255 trillion, with the United States and Europe holding approximately two thirds of that total; meanwhile, 80 percent of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population lives on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live on only $1.25 per day”. (p. 30)

Robinson offers a partial/partisan view of the political results of increasing inequality, asserting that it has fueled “populist insurgencies” (thus unfortunately reinforcing elitist terminology), and that these are dominated by racist, xenophobic, and nativist concerns. What Robinson does not do is offer an explanation as to why those on the losing end of globalization in North America and Europe have turned to the right, and not the left.

What Robinson predicts is that the global concentration of wealth is, in effect, suicidal: it will lead to a global contraction of demand, and thus the global market will be unable to absorb the output of the global economy, and at that point the system will seize up. Is this something to be celebrated or criticized?

Phillips makes a similar point about the over-accumulation of capital: “there are only three mechanisms of investing excess capital: risky financial speculation, wars and war preparation, and the privatization of public institutions” (p. 30). What needs to be explained to readers is why, if capital over-accumulation is really a problem, would the holders of such capital invest in areas that generate even more capital.

Land and hunger also stand out as one of the strong points of this book’s explanations. First, some important statistics are provided, such as: the UN’s World Food Program estimates that 1 in 9 people go to bed hungry each night, which amounts to 795 million people suffering from chronic hunger; nine million die each year from starvation; one-third of the planet suffers from malnutrition; two billion more people will be lacking food by 2050, according to UN forecasts; and yet, “chronic hunger is mostly a problem of distribution, as one third of all food produced in the world is wasted and lost” (p. 31). Phillips clearly pins the blame of this mal-distribution on global speculation invested in agricultural lands, and global speculation in food, which have both raised the costs of land and food, and displaced populations (pp. 31, 63). As Phillips explains:

“In the last ten years, more than $90 billion has been invested in 78 countries for buying up more than 74 million acres of farmland. The result is mass corporate farming, usually for export, and the removal of these lands as a local food source”. (p. 32)

While the book tends to endorse much of the emergency talk around “climate change,” it’s important to note that Phillips is aware of some of the glaring opportunism that motivates some of the crisis-making:

“Amazingly, TCC/Global Power Elite money managers study the transforming environment for new investment opportunities. Climate change investing can be profitable, according to Forbes, and getting in on low-carbon investments, and sectors that will benefit should climate stress increase—such as defense, health care, and property insurances—can prove lucrative. Increasing interest in new mining opportunities available due to global warming is an important issue in Greenland. Private investment in the control of water sources is seen as an increasingly attractive opportunity for power elite speculation”. (p. 32)

Criticisms of the Book

Unfortunately, much of the book is written for an audience that is already prepared to believe and accept its main arguments and their assumptions. The question then is why such an audience would need this book. The echo-chambering of public discourse is itself echoed louder than ever in academic production. This book is not written for, say, skeptical students who are unconvinced and like to raise questions. On the other hand, it can be useful precisely for generating questions.

What in my view is one of the least attractive features of the book is the tendency to reduce discussion to moral principles. In that respect it is a very American book, which follows the very American tradition of displacing politics into morality. The result is a moralistic appeal for reform. Thus the book is directed at precisely those elites who are least likely to read or care about this book. However, matters become even murkier when the book’s idea of reform means that activists should volunteer to work with billionaires: “An honest, open look at real human options is vitally needed, and social movement activists seeking to end the crisis of humanity may find allies at the top willing to make radical readjustments needed to prevent wars, mass poverty, and environmental degradation” (p. 159). In an open letter to the Global Power Elite at the end of the book, we read this: “We absolutely believe that continued capital concentration and neoliberal austerity policies only bring greater human misery to the vast majority of people on earth” (p. 320, emphasis added). Why reduce what the book shows to be factually true, a matter of objective knowledge, to a matter of belief? Why should anyone care what the author and his colleagues “believe”? Sometimes the book has an unfortunate tendency of diminishing itself.

Theory remains relatively under-developed in this book, which tends to leave major questions unspoken (some of which were discussed in the sections above). The result is that books like C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite remain as outstanding contributions, and the updating of his work is something that still needs to be done. Neither this book, nor other attempts at updating Mills, are yet ready to be read as “Mills Part 2”.

Related to the latter point, we seem to be generating an ever expanding vocabulary for describing essentially the same phenomenon. Thus, added to the base that is the transnational capitalist class (which is sufficient), we have shadow elites, influence elites, flexible networks, and now global power elites. Pretty soon, rather than having work that takes our understanding further, we will instead have works that lose time and energy in just clearing up the mystifying mass of new labels.

Though I intensely dislike facile comments like, “some of the book’s strengths are also its weakness,” I find myself here needing to make the same comment about the immense catalogue of empirical detail that appears in the profiles of the 389 individuals and the dozens of organizations named in this book. In that respect, the book begins to resemble more of a database, that makes for tedious reading. Seen from another angle, the book serves as a reference resource. However, what really stands out is the limited theorization of the material, that really does not expand on or elaborate on either the works of Mills, Sklair, or William Robinson.

Restrictions on access to the power elites means that the profiles that are provided in the book are based almost exclusively on open source documentation. The profiles thus result as flat, and almost lifeless—useful perhaps for statistical analysis, but almost devoid of oral history and cultural content.

Sometimes this book mirrors a website more than a printed volume, meaning that there can be excessive interleaving with contents that are already widely available. Thus the book unnecessarily reproduces, in full, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The tendency to copy and insert so much that is open source tends to produce excessive length.

Diagrams in the book are often useless spaghetti illustrations of many dozens of crisscrossing lines linking inter-locked firms. The point is to show that each one is connected to every other—and it is far more economical to express that fact with words.

The Introduction by William Robinson was, surprisingly, one of the disappointing elements of this book. Robinson exploited the opportunity to sound off on a range of issues that personally anger and frustrate him—everything from Trump to climate change. I gather that this a popular Californian academic narrative. The chapter on the whole has a certain apocalyptic, doomsday quality to it, which is arguably more of a reflection of how culturally unprepared Americans are when it comes to absorbing the reality of their imperial decline: “If we do not annihilate ourselves in a nuclear holocaust or descend into the barbarism of a global police state, we will have to confront the threat of a human-induced sixth mass extinction that scientists say has already begun” (pp. 15–16).

At times, the book appears to pander to the fixations of the liberal-left, especially where climate emergency alarmism and identity politics are concerned. We are thus told at various points that this or that board of directors is exclusively male, or exclusively white, or white and male—as if the aesthetic veneer of dominance is what should occupy our attention.

Sometimes the book paints an excessively bleak and hopeless picture of inevitable collapse and war. The power of elites is sometimes overstated. Assumptions that poverty leads to rebellion (p. 303) are part of the book’s baggage of truisms, even if there is painfully little evidence to validate such assumptions. The point is that if it is all so bleak, then that defeats the chances of reform, the same reform that the book advocates. Phillips argues that unless something is done soon, movements like Occupy Wall Street will continue to emerge (p. 305)—to which the answer has to be a big “so what?”

Lastly, the index contains some notable errors and omissions, and is actually not very useful for using this book.

Conclusion

Reminding me of the some of the great books written by Susan George in the 1980s on debt crises and hunger, this is one of the more original and important contributions to early 21st-century debates about the decline of the 20th-century phenomenon known as “globalization”. It will serve as a valuable reference to many students of globalization, both within and outside of academia. Thus, despite my criticisms above, I would still recommend this book as required reading for any students in the fields of Political Science and International Relations, Global Sociology, and International Political Economy, as well as perhaps students in Economic Anthropology. What is especially valuable about this book is more than just its detail, but its reconciling of transnational capitalism with US empire. Even where the book falls short, it does so in a manner that provokes many productive and constructive questions.

For me personally, what emerged from studying this text is recognition of the degree to which states still matter immensely in the so-called globalized world (produced by states themselves), and the extent to which the US stands on top of globalization. It is no surprise then that we see the decline of US empire at the same time as the rise of de-globalization. Not discussed in this volume—and hardly mentioned on this site either—is the rise of an embryonic new order dominated by China, as evidenced by its extremely ambitious and widely spread Belt and Road Initiative.

Source: https://zeroanthropology.net/2019/11/27/global-giants-american-empire-and-transnational-capital/

December 2, 2019 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Economics, Timeless or most popular | France, UK, United States | Leave a comment

Western media excited about ‘new Iran revolution’, but polls tell a different story about protests

By Sharmine Narwani | RT | November 27, 2019

Data from two foreign polls tell a very different story about protests in Iran. The economy is tough, but a majority of Iranians back their government’s security initiatives and reject domestic upheaval.

On November 15, angry Iranians began pouring onto the streets to protest sudden news of a 50% fuel price hike. A day later, peaceful demonstrations had largely dissipated, replaced instead by much smaller crowds of rioters who burned banks, gas stations, buses and other public and private property. Within no time, security forces hit the streets to snuff out the violence and arrest rioters, during which an unconfirmed number of people on both sides died.

Western commentators tried in vain to squeeze some juice out of the short-lived protests. “Iranian protesters strike at the heart of the regime’s legitimacy,” declared Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution. France 24 asked the question, is this “a new Iranian revolution?” And the LA Times slammed Iran’s “brutal crackdown” against its people.

They grasped for a geopolitical angle too: protests in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq that were based almost entirely on popular domestic discontent against corrupt and negligent governments, began to be cast as a regional insurrection against Iranian influence.

And despite the fact that the internet in Iran was disabled for nearly a week, unverified videos and reports curiously made their way outside to Twitter accounts of Iran critics, alleging that protestors were calling for the death of the Supreme Leader, railing against Iran’s interventions in the region and calling for a fall of the “regime.”

Clearly, the initial protests were genuine – a fact that even the Iranian government admitted immediately. Reducing petrol subsidies on the cheapest fuel in the region has been an issue on Iran’s political agenda for years, one that became more urgent after the US exited the Iran nuclear deal last year and began to tighten the sanctions screws on Iran again.

To try and understand Iranian reactions in the past twelve days, let’s look at two opinion polls conducted jointly by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and Toronto-based IranPolls in the immediate aftermath of the 2017/2018 protests/riots – and in May, August and October 2019, when the US “maximum pressure” campaign was in full gear.

What leaps out immediately from the earlier 2018 poll is that Iranians were frustrated with a stagnant economy – and 86% of them specifically opposed a hike in the price of gasoline, the main impetus for protests this November.

Ironically, this month’s gasoline price hike was meant to generate upward of $2.25 billion earmarked for distribution to Iran’s 18 million most hard-hit families. In effect, the government was softening the fuel subsidy reduction with payouts to the country’s neediest citizens.

The 2018 poll also lists respondents’ single biggest woes, ranging from unemployment (40%), inflation and high cost of living (13%), low incomes (7%),financial corruption and embezzlement (6%), injustice (1.4%), lack of civil liberties (0.3%), among others.

These numbers suggest the 2018 protests were overwhelmingly in response to domestic economic conditions– and not over Iran’s foreign policy initiatives or “widespread repression” that was heavily promoted by western media and politicians at the time.

The same Suzanne Maloney quoted above on this month’s protests, insisted in a 2018 Washington Post article: “The people aren’t just demonstrating for better working conditions or pay, but insisting on wholesale rejection of the system itself.”

In fact, in the 2018 poll, only 16% of Iranians agreed with the statement “Iran’s political system needs to undergo fundamental change,” with a whopping 77% disagreeing.

Like protests this month in Iran, the 2017-18 demonstrations also morphed into small but violent riots, and Iranian security forces hit the streets to stop the chaos. But in the aftermath of those events – and despite endless foreign headlines about the “brutality” of the security reaction – Iranians overwhelmingly sided with their government’s treatment of rioters.

Sixty-three percent of those polled in 2018 said the police used an appropriate amount of force, and another 11% said they used “too little force.” Overall, 85% of Iranians agreed that “the government should be more forceful to stop rioters who use violence or damage property.”

This Iranian reaction must be understood in context of Iran’s very insecure neighborhood, region-wide terrorism often backed by hostile states and a relentless escalation against Iranian interests after Donald Trump became US president. His “maximum pressure” campaign has only worsened matters, and Iranians consider themselves in a state of war with the United States – on constant guard against subversion, sabotage, espionage, eavesdropping, propaganda, border infiltration, etc.

Earlier this decade, the US military declared the internet an “operational domain”of war, and cyber warfare has already been widely acknowledged as the future battle frontier in conflicts. Iran was one of the early victims of this new warfare, when the suspected US/Israeli Stuxnet virus disrupted its nuclear program.

The US military has set up war rooms of servicemen dedicated to manipulating social media and advancing US propaganda interests. The British army has launched a “social media warfare” division, its initial focus, the Middle East. Israel has been at the online propaganda game forever, and the Saudis have recently invested heavily in influencing discourse on social media.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the Iranian government shut down the internet during this crisis. Expect this to become the new normal in US adversary states when chaos looms and foreign information operations are suspected.

The western media themes of corruption, violent repression, popular rejection of the Islamic Republic and its regional alliances have been consistent since the 2009 protests that followed contentious elections in Iran. They flared up briefly in early 2011, when western states were eager for an “Iranian Spring” to join the Arab Spring, and became popular narratives during 2017-18 protests when social media platforms adopted them widely.

This November, those narratives sprung to the surface again. So let’s examine what Iranians thought about these claims in October when CISSM/IranPolls published their latest, extremely timely survey.

Iran’s regional military activities

Sixty-one percent of Iranians support retaining military personnel in Syria to contain extremist militants that could threaten Iran’s security and interests. Polls taken since March 2016 confirm the consistency of this view inside Iran, with a steady two-thirds (66%) of respondents supporting an increase in Iran’s regional role.

Asked what would happen if Iran conceded to US demands and ended the US-sanctioned Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) activities in Syria and Iraq, 60% of Iranians thought it would make Washington demand more concessions – only 11% thought it would make the US more accommodating.

Moreover, the October 2019 report says negative attitudes toward the United States have never been higher in CISSM/IranPoll’s 13 years of conducting these surveys in Iran. A hefty 86% of Iranians do not favor the US, and those who say their view of the US is very unfavorable has skyrocketed from 52% in 2015 to 73% today.

They could care less that Washington has sanctioned the IRGC and its elite Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, who is the most popular national figure of those polled, with eight in ten Iranians viewing him favorably. If anything, a hefty 81% of Iranians said the IRGC’s Mideast activities has made Iran “more secure.”

As for the IRGC’s role in Iran’s domestic economy – a favorite subject of western foes who cast the military group as a malign and corrupt instrument of the state – today 63% of Iranians believe the IRGC should be involved “in construction projects and other economic matters,” as well as continuing their security role. In times of crisis, they’re viewed as a vital institution: the IRGC and Iranian military scored top points with the public (89% and 90% respectively) for assisting the population during crippling floods last Spring, which displaced half a million Iranians.

Economy and corruption

Seventy percent of Iranians view their economy as “bad” today, a figure that has stayed surprisingly consistent over the past 18 months, despite the imposition of US sanctions last year. The majority blame domestic mismanagement and corruption for their economic woes, but a rising number also blame US sanctions, which is possibly why 70% of Iranians prefer aiming for national self-sufficiency over increasing foreign trade.

Asked about the “impact (of sanctions) on the lives of ordinary people,” 83% of Iranians agreed there was a negative impact on their lives. Oddly, since the US exited the JCPOA, economic pessimism has dropped from 64% in 2018 to 54% last month-mainly, the poll argues, because Iranians feel the US can’t realistically pressure Iran much further with sanctions. Accordingly, 55% of Iranians blame domestic economic mismanagement and corruption for Iran’s poor economy versus 38% who blame foreign sanctions and pressure.

The blame for much of this mismanagement and corruption is pinned on the administration of President Hassan Rouhani, whose favorability numbers dropped under 50% for the first time, to reach 42% this August. Fifty-four percent of Iranians think his government isn’t trying much to fight corruption.

In contrast, 73% believe the Iranian judiciary is much more engaged in fighting economic corruption, up 12% since May.

On the economic front, it appears that Iranians have largely been disappointed by the promises and vision of this administration, which could benefit its Principlist opponents in upcoming parliamentary elections. The fuel tax hike two weeks ago was a necessary evil and a brave move by Rouhani, despite the mismanagement of its public rollout. Unfortunately, Iranians, who have railed against subsidy removals for years, are unlikely to be forgiving anytime soon.

On the political front, Iranians appear to be largely in lockstep with their government’s foreign policy and military initiatives, viewing the IRGC’s activities – domestic and regional – very favorably, and supporting Iran’s involvement in neighboring Iraq and Syria, both for security reasons against terrorism and because they believe in an active regional role for Iran. In terms of support for their leaders, a majority of Iranians view favorably the IRGC’s Soleimani (82%), followed by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (67%) and Judiciary Head Ebrahim Raisi (64%), which covers an unexpectedly broad spectrum of political viewpoints in the country.

In light of these numbers, it is fair to say that there is no “second revolution” on Iran’s horizon, nor any kind of significant rupture between government and populace on a whole host of key political, economic and security issues. Foreign commentators can spin events in Iran all they want, but so far Iranians have chosen security and stability over upheaval every time.

*Poll numbers in this article have been rounded up or down to the nearest unit.

November 29, 2019 Posted by aletho | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Sanctions against Iran | Leave a comment

The ballad of India’s Kashmir and Israel’s Palestine

Palestinian children play outside their dwelling in al-Eizariya town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the background.

By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | November 29, 2019

“I believe the security situation will improve (in J&K), it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back … and you will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world.”

“I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”

The above reported remarks by India’s consul-general in New York Sandeep Chakravorty while addressing an audience of Kashmiri Pandits raised some dust in the Indian media. But his job or career is no mortal danger.

For, Chakravorty must be an intelligent man and probably estimated that he was only articulating from a Track 1.5 platform the Modi government’s surreptitious policy in J&K — following the Israeli footfalls of forcible occupation and colonisation of lands inhabited by alienated people.

Whether the policy is doable or not is for time to tell. To my mind, the final word is not yet available whether even the brutal Israeli policy will work or not. Besides, circumstances are vastly different, and Kashmir is not an analogous situation.

The main difference is that although the Indian state resorted to the use of force, much like Israel had done in Palestinian lands, the security situation has only deteriorated over the years, over decades. There are no two opinions that even half a million troops could not achieve anything by way of enduring results in the Kashmir valley.

The ground realities in the valley militate against repression and state terrorism as viable policy option for a country such as India. The stark evidence of it lies in the government’s decision in August to change the status of J&K, which is an admission of failure rather than a mark of triumphant glory.

Consul-general Chakravorty seems unaware how Israel went about systematically to prepare an external environment first by subduing the Arab countries that surrounded it and harboured sympathy, and were willing to support the Palestinian cause. Arguably, India too should begin with defeating and subduing Pakistan first? But, honestly, such an option is not available for India in our thermonuclear era, now or ever, the bravado of our ruling elite and their acolytes notwithstanding.

Then, there is the western support for Israel, which helps it to get away with murder. The underlying factors here are complex and deep rooted in history. At its core, the western countries are constantly forced into an attitude of atonement for their anti-semitism that has a long and loathsome history dating back centuries. Remember the notorious Dreyfus affair in France — leave alone the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust, which makes Angela Merkel wobbly in the legs even today when she mentions Israel.

Israel plays the “anti-semitic card’ very effectively. In actual practice, any criticism of Israeli state violations against Palestinians is instantly discredited as being “antisemitic”. Today, US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are in the crosshairs of the Israeli lobby for this reason. Corbyn’s sin is that he has pledged to cut military trade with Israel and move to officially recognise a Palestinian state, if elected to power.

The well-known commentator Finian Cunningham recently wrote, “This conflation of valid criticism of the Israeli state with being “anti-Jew” is a cynical distortion which is wielded to give Israel impunity from international law. It plays on moral blackmail of critics by equating the historical persecution of Jews and in particular the Nazi holocaust with the sanctity of the modern Israeli state.”

Unfortunately, there is a notion even amongst educated Indians (including bureaucrats in the Indian Foreign Service) that linking up with the Jewish organisations would enable India to piggy ride on the Israeli lobby in the US. The false notion largely stems from sinister claims about the influence of “Jewish money” — and, it is not of recent origin. Didn’t Brajesh Mishra, the NSA under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, envisage a US-Israel-India condominium?

The heart of the matter is that India is not Israel. Unlike Judaism, Hinduism is not an Abrahamic religion and it is not joined at the hips with the Christian world. This is one thing. Second, while large sections of Hindus too have suffered cruel persecution through centuries, it happened to be at the hands of their co-religionists. Clearly, there is no reason for atonement on the part of the West.

Third, while Indian-Americans are a prosperous community relatively, their clout in the Wall Street is minimal. Unlike the “Jewish lobby”. Simply put, following the Israeli footfall on the occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian homeland or the territories illegally annexed during wars will not take India very far in regard of the J&K situation.

The bottom line is that the western opinion on Kashmir is supportive of neither India nor Pakistan. It always rooted for the “Third Option” — an independent and sovereign state of Kashmir. The official US position, in particular, always made it a point to stress that any solution should take into account the “wishes of the Kashmiri people.”

In the prevailing geopolitical situation in Asia, an independent Kashmir state will be a strategic asset for Washington. Surely, any colonisation of Kashmir Valley by non-Kashmiris grates against the US interests. Israel, on the contrary, is itself a western creation on the map of the Middle East and the US condones Israel’s war crimes and aggressive state policies as a matter of regional strategy.

One would imagine that an Indian diplomat of the rank of ambassador would know that discretion is the better part of valour. Yet, he voiced maverick opinions like a run-of-the mill rabble-rouser on the Hindutva platform, which, he should be intelligent enough to grasp, would only serve to confirm Pakistani allegations regarding the Modi government’s intentions behind the change of status of J&K. The politicisation of the Foreign Service, which such sordid episodes highlight, won’t serve any good.

November 29, 2019 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | India, Israel, Kashmir, Palestine | Leave a comment

Recognition of a Palestinian state without liberation is an illusion

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | November 26, 2019

During the Berlin European Council summit in 1999, the European Union declared “its readiness to consider the recognition of a Palestinian state in due course” and conditionally dependent upon the Oslo framework, as well as “Israel’s security and Israel’s acceptance as an equal partner in the region.” Two decades later, the EU is still being prompted to recognise a Palestinian state.

The latest recommendation came from Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister, Jean Asselborn, as a reaction to the US reversing its official position over the legality of Israeli settlements. However, Asselborn himself emphasised the limitations of such a move, describing it as “a mere recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to [their] own state.” Speaking to Reuters, Asselborn insisted that any such recognition “would not be meant against Israel,” but rather a step towards implementing the two-state paradigm.

In other words, such recognition would merely affirm the EU’s consistency with its foreign policy. By no means is EU recognition of a Palestinian state meant to advance Palestinian liberation. Furthermore, the constant political reactions to the US and Israel advancing colonial expansion in Palestine is rendering any possible significance of recognition negligible.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) highlighted reasons why the European Parliament should vote in favour of a Palestinian state, mentioning, among other things, the “significant EU financial investment in the two-state solution”. Of particular significance is how the ECFR ties recognition of a Palestinian state to Israel’s purported legitimacy as evidenced by its statement that, “Recognising a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders reaffirms the EU’s support for the two-state solution and the legitimacy of Israel.” Furthermore, the ECFR opined that such recognition would “likely have a restraining influence” on Palestinians resorting to armed resistance. The Council maintained that in the event of “no progress with Israel, at least all is not lost in the world and that their [the Palestinian] leadership can deliver a diplomatic success.”

What the ECFR fails to mention is that diplomatic successes for Palestinians, conditioned as they are by powerful institutions aligned with Israeli demands, are responses as opposed to claims for rights. The fact that the Palestinian Authority is at the helm, endorsing this labyrinth of half-truths that protects Israel at all costs, creates bleak prospects for the people of Palestine. It is one thing to advocate for the two-state paradigm, and another to impart what the PA is grovelling for at an international level, namely prioritising Israel’s presence and security narrative at the expense of Palestinian land and people, which is what the two-state compromise is all about, as the ECFR spells out.

Even if it were to issue such recognition, the EU will not step away from its commitment to maintain Palestinians as a humanitarian project. State recognition without its equivalence in terms of land, sovereignty and liberated people is as deceptive as the state-building which the EU funds the PA for, in return for its complete acquiescence to the two-state paradigm which keeps Palestinians stateless. Without changing its politics, EU rhetoric and drawn-out symbolic concessions will only serve to highlight the fact that a Palestinian state without Palestinian liberation is an illusion.

November 26, 2019 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | European Union, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

OPCW report on Douma chemical incident omitted & misrepresented key facts, leaked email by dissenting inspector shows

RT | November 24, 2019

An internal OPCW email indicates that the chemical weapons watchdog’s leadership doctored a report on the 2018 Douma incident to bring it in line with West-favored claim that it was an attack by the Syrian government.

A newly published internal email seriously undermines the justification for the show of force conducted by the US, Britain and France in response to the alleged attack. The three NATO allies unleashed barrages of cruise missiles at targets in Syria, which they claimed to be involved in producing chemical weapons.

In April 2018, a chemical weapons attack was reported in Douma, Syria, with dozens of civilians allegedly killed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) sent a fact-finding mission to the site, although the inspection was stalled by fighting between radical jihadists, who controlled Douma at the time of the incident, and the Syrian government forces. Nevertheless, evidence was eventually collected and the OPCW produced a report that all but pinned the blame for the attack on Damascus.

An internal email sent by one of the inspectors in that team indicates that the management of the organization seriously modified the document, totally omitting facts that didn’t fit the anti-Damascus narrative and misreporting others to fit it. The email was released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks and covered by several leading European publications, including La Repubblica in Italy, Stundin in Iceland, Der Spiegel in Germany, and the Mail on Sunday in the UK.

The email sent by the inspector, whose name was redacted, outlines several instances, in which facts discovered by the team had been distorted or suppressed in a draft OPCW report, resulting in “an unintended bias” of the resulting text.

One objection related to saying that the team discovered sufficient evidence that chlorine gas was likely released from two cylinders found at two locations in Douma. The actual evidence pointed to the presence of one or several chlorine-containing chemicals. It might have been the gas, but it could as well be something other like chlorine-based bleach.

Another complaint was about overstating the levels of chlorinated organic derivatives found in the environment. “They were, in most cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is essentially trace quantities,” the email states.

The compounds in question are a tell-tale sign of reactive chlorine that can be found long after the toxic chemical itself has dissipated, which was relevant in this case because the fact-finding mission reached Douma weeks after the incident.

The changes made in the report also point to the cylinders as the likely source of the chlorine gas. The inspectors who wrote the original report “purposely emphasized” that though it may be the case that they found insufficient evidence to affirm the theory. “It is possible the error was simply a typo. This is a major deviation from the original report,” the inspector wrote.

One of the major omissions deals with inconsistency between the victims’ symptoms as reported by witnesses or shown in footage of the purported attack and those that people affected by chlorine gas are supposed to have. Dropping that section “has a serious negative impact on the report as this section is inextricably linked to the chemical agent identified,” the email said.

Another objection refers to parts of the original report describing the placement of the cylinders and the damage found on them and in the area, which were “are essentially absent from the redacted report.” The prevailing narrative was that the cylinders were dropped from the air by government forces. An engineering assessment penned by OPCW inspector Ian Henderson, which was leaked earlier in May, said the evidence could not support this scenario and had been suppressed by the OPCW.

The email is consistent with what an OPCW whistleblower earlier told an expert panel by the Courage Foundation last month. It also gives credence to a scolding story in CounterPunch, which said Robert Fairweather, the chief of cabinet of then-Inspector General Ahmet Uzumcu, of being the driving force behind the alterations.

CounterPunch apparently cites the same internal email as well as claims by a whistleblower, who said Fairweather allowed three US officials to have an impact on the drafting process. The Americans pressured the OPCW into blaming the Syrian government. The organization leadership then decided it needed to include a ‘smoking gun’ in the final report the whistleblower said.

Fairweather is the recipient of the email, though interestingly his name was redacted by the Mail on Sunday for unclear reasons. The British newspaper, however, provided some additional details into how the preparation of the report happened. It said four increasingly censored versions of the document had been produced as OPCW management fought off dissenting voices among the scientists. The final version was released in March this year.

Also on rt.com:

Leaked OPCW memo casts doubt on watchdog’s Douma ‘chemical attack’ conclusions

OPCW put lid on key evidence in Douma chemical incident – watchdog whistleblower

‘Highly likely’ is the new evidence: Five times Western officials had no proof but media fell for it

November 24, 2019 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | OPCW, United States | Leave a comment

The Bambi Syndrome

Tony Heller | November 22, 2019

The BBC is working hard to misinform British children and make them neurotic cannon fodder for the climate agenda. What is the end game?

November 24, 2019 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | BBC | Leave a comment

The Left is from Jerusalem

By Gilad Atzmon – November 24, 2019

We learned yesterday that Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (“XR”) apologised after his comments about the Holocaust sparked outrage.

I was curious to find out what it was that Hallam said that led to such indignation. German Green politician Volker Beck accused Mr Hallam on Twitter of “bringing the climate movement into disrepute.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the Nazi genocide was “uniquely inhumane” (can the German foreign minister provide a list of what he considers to have been ‘humane’ genocides?). Ullstein, Hallam’s German publisher announced it had stopped publication of Hallam’s book on climate change and that it was disassociating itself from his comments.

Judging by the scale of the histrionics I assumed that Hallam had broken every rule. He must have praised Hitler or perhaps justified or even denied the Holocaust all together. Apparently, he said nothing at all like that. In an interview with Die Zeit, Hallam stated that the Holocaust was “just another fuckery in human history.” The “fact of the matter,” he said, “is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history.” He concluded by observing that genocides have occurred repeatedly over the past 500 years and “in fact, you might say it is like a regular event”.

At least on its face, his statements were factually correct, Hallam didn’t deny or diminish anyone’s suffering. Quite the opposite, he expressed a universal disgust with all forms of oppression and hatred.

What was Hallam’s crime? Apparently, that he spoke both authentically and ethically, and ignored the fact that this form of discourse is extinct within contemporary ‘Left’ and progressive circles.

XR’s Annemarie Botzki tweeted: “We distance ourselves from Roger Hallam’s trivialising and relativising comments about the Holocaust.” Hallam is being accused of ‘trivializing’ and ‘relativizing’ the holocaust simply by noting the clear and undeniable fact that history has witnessed more than one systematic destruction of one people by another.

The study of history benefits from a comparative approach. Our scholarly understanding of the past expands when we can see, for instance, the equivalence between the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Our understanding of Zionism grows when we delve into the parallels between the national socialist aspirations of the early Labour Zionists and those of German National Socialism that surfaced later. Yet, within the domain of the Holocaust religion such a scholarly comparative approach is regarded as the ultimate heresy. To examine the Holodomor, the Boer War, Stalin’s crimes, Neocon global atrocities, or Israeli War Crimes alongside the Holocaust is perceived by some as the ultimate profanity as it ‘relativises’ that which ‘must’ extend beyond history and reason, namely ‘The Holocaust.’

For Jewish institutions, Holocaust: ‘Relativisation,’ ‘Trivialization’ and ‘Universalization’ are the ‘ultimate crimes’ as they tend to prevent the crystallization of the Holocaust as a unique chapter in human history. The attempt is made by these institutions to prevent the application of language that is ‘specific to the holocaust’ to events that are unrelated to it or to Jewish suffering in general.

We are stumbling upon two core elements at the heart of the Holocaust religion. One is, of course, the primacy of Jewish suffering. The other is the Orwellian attempt to dominate language, terminology, vocabulary and expressions by restricting the usage of certain words so the words themselves serve Jewish identitarian causes.

The great Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz noticed as early as the 1970s that the Holocaust was morphing from an event in history into a dogmatic religion. It was he who coined the notion “Holocaust religion.” Leibowitz perceived that, although Jews believe in many different things, Judaism, Bolshevism, Human Rights, Zionism and Anti Zionism: all Jews believe in the Holocaust. A decade later in 1987, Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir expanded on this shift in Jewish consciousness and identification. In his paper On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise, Ophir admitted that “a religious consciousness built around the Holocaust may become the central aspect of a new religion.”

Ophir listed the four commandments of the new religion:

1. “Thou shalt have no other holocaust.”

2. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness.”

3. “Thou shalt not take the name in vain.”

4. “Remember the day of the Holocaust to keep it holy, in memory of the destruction of the Jews of Europe.”

Ophir’s commandments illuminate these two Judeo Centric core elements of the Holocaust religion. The primacy of Jewish Suffering (1, 2 and 4) and strict lingual restrictions (1,2 &3).

Orwell’s insights into left authoritarianism that made 1984 into a prophetic masterpiece together with Ophir’s thoughts provide us with the intellectual framework to understand both the Jewish and the Left’s attitude toward the Holocaust. The Left that, at least in the past, attempted to unite us in the name of a universal ethos is now at the forefront of the battle against each of its own core values: the ethical, the universal (equality) and, most important, freedom.

Noticeably, not a single Left politician or thinker stood up for Hallam and his expression of a genuine humanist and universalist outlook. This is tragic but not surprising. It can easily be explained by the concepts of ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem.’ If Athens is the birthplace of philosophy and Jerusalem is the home for Torah and Mitzvoth, then Athens teaches us how to think while Jerusalem produces a set of directives as, for example, what ‘not to say.’ The Left’s call that was born of an Athenian instinct that was both dialectical and universal has generally been reduced into a Jerusalemite set of ‘commandments’ that are totally removed from truthfulness, authenticity or human nature.

It is this Jerusalemite authoritarian mode that is quintessential to contemporary Left politics and explains why Corbyn’s Labour has expelled its best members for truthful speech. Why is it that Corbyn himself never stood for Ken Livingstone and others who were telling the truth? This systematic failure of Left politics may explain why the promised revolution never materialized. It also explains why Hallam was stabbed in the back by his allies for telling the truth.

Truth is from Athens but the Left is from Jerusalem.

November 23, 2019 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Ukrainegate 13,000 Times Worse Than You Think

By Joe Giambrone | Dissident Voice | November 22, 2019

Did you know that Donald Trump had the State Department, USAID, NED, and the CIA fund and train Neo-Nazi, fascist militias to overthrow the government of Ukraine? These riot mobs, primarily Svoboda and Right Sector, stormed the capital, firebombed and shot the police, and destroyed democracy inside Ukraine. When the legitimately elected president was forced out by the rioters, the population which had supported him in the east seceded from the country, tearing the entire nation into pieces and sparking a civil war. The Ukraine civil war has cost the lives of over 13,000 Ukrainians. There is so much blood on Donald Trump’s hands.

Oh, wait a minute! That was Barack Obama. Change that paragraph, please.

Since 2014, it’s been glaringly obvious to astute (and honest) observers that the Administration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden supported the most vicious street mobs in Europe, people who considered themselves proud fascists. Western media routinely censored this part of the story. Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, made deals with their leaders and was caught on an open phone line handpicking the next unelected leader of Ukraine, someone they could sell to the US public: “Yats is the guy.”

Representative Dennis Kucinich expressed outrage on Bill O’Reilly’s TV show that the Obama Administration had aided this bloody, illegitimate coup. The head of the CIA-linked STRATFOR called Ukraine “the most blatant coup in history.”

America’s proxy terrorists burned Kiev, seized power violently, and through the power of the purse strings, Obama’s Administration installed friendly-faced fascists, who immediately set about attacking their countrymen in the east, with a policy of mass murder and indiscriminate bombings. Eastern provinces of Crimea and Donetsk, which notably had supported the ousted president, held referenda. The people there voted overwhelmingly to secede from the illegitimate, unelected, foreign-sponsored coup regime in Kiev.

The above is most certainly not the reason cited this week for Impeachment hearings.

Aiding and abetting fascist militias to violently siege a foreign capital is not considered a crime in Washington DC, at all. Conversely, it is business as usual, as Bolivians and Venezuelans can attest to.

Woody Allen directed a film entitled “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That pretty much sums up the DC circus unfolding in Congress. Everything above is completely true, and yet Barack Obama is heralded as someone in the neighborhood of saints and superheroes. To the belligerent American empire, Obama was a star quarterback. Let’s not even delve into Barack’s support for Al Qaeda in Syria, and another half-million dead there, or we’ll be here all day.

Donald Trump made a phone call. In his phone call, he is said to have bullied the President of Ukraine a little. He may have even delayed some weapons transfers to that country, which was engaged in a proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia and its separatist allies in the east of Ukraine.

That’s a crime? A real crime? In light of over thirteen thousand slaughtered and an illegal coup in broad daylight? Trump’s telephone call is the real crime?

Other Presidents haven’t bullied other client-state puppet leaders, ever?

And why exactly is the President of the United States of America required to send lethal weapons to foreign fascists at all? Has anyone located that section of the Constitution?

This farce is so laughable on its face and so irrelevant to the American people’s interests, that it’s difficult to overstate the insanity—and outrageous hypocrisy—of the Democrats’ contrived “Ukrainegate” case. This impeachment charge has nothing whatsoever to do with right and wrong.

In 2014, Barack Obama’s White House, “refused to include weapons in an aid package… for embattled Ukraine despite an impassioned plea by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for more military assistance.” Obama didn’t send any weapons at all, which would have provoked Russia to an even greater degree, after overthrowing their legitimately elected next-door ally and tearing Ukraine apart. It was obvious that Russia wasn’t “invading” Ukraine, as propaganda memes claimed, but simply responding to these international crimes and to the dangerous destabilization on its border. The US had already done quite enough damage, and they didn’t need to escalate a proxy war against Russia toward nuclear Armageddon.

Which brings us now to Donald Trump, who became interested in Joe Biden’s obvious corruption inside Ukraine, installing his own son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. Hunter Biden knew absolutely nothing about Ukraine or the natural gas industry. The nepotism was glaring. This was clear graft, payback, kickback, corruption, parasites descending after the violent seizure of the state. Biden the elder was in charge of US Ukraine policy, and specifically the big money spigot, after the illegal, US-supported coup there.

Then—as Joe will be Joe—Biden bragged publicly about getting Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired to the strains of Washington insider laughter. The Ukrainian prosecutor had been investigating that same company which Biden had arranged his son Hunter onto the board of. Biden’s conflict of interest was so obvious that Trump certainly believed he was onto something. Joe Biden, and media sympathetic to his claims, has predictably tried to cloud the issue, but the corruption is too obvious not to notice. This should, and may, have ended Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.

What happened in Ukraine was old-timey Smash & Grab, a reckless attack right on Russia’s western border. Joe Biden arrived to grab as much loot from Ukraine’s gas sector as he possibly could through a cut-out, his son. Biden used his leverage over Ukraine’s international “loan guarantees” (which is money the coup leaders receive but don’t have to pay back) to finance their new illegitimate junta.

Biden’s own quid pro quo, in his own words: “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” This is exactly the type of crime they now accuse Trump of perpetrating with his telephone. The hypocrisy is comical.

The Obama Administration’s corruption, along with a bloody war and thirteen-thousand corpses, is what a real crime looks like. Hold onto that picture.

Democrats were allegedly the good guys vis a vis Ukraine?

Weren’t these international war crimes breaching the UN Charter, which demands exclusively peaceful actions between states, Article II?

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

— United Nations Charter, a ratified Treaty, and the “Supreme Law of the Land”

Launching a proxy war on nuclear-armed Russia was a sane foreign policy? Sending even more arms to escalate that conflict was allegedly such a glorious idea that any delay in weapons shipments becomes an impeachable offense?

This unserious charge leveled against Donald Trump distracts from all of his obvious corruption. Trump’s Emoluments violations have been impeachable for years, but the Democrats weren’t interested. Do Democrats long to cash in on the Office of the Presidency next time?

Multiple deaths of refugee children in US federal custody at the southern border could be considered murders linked directly to official policies of harsh treatment and deliberate neglect. Are Democrats afraid of exposing Obama’s own caging of immigrant children?

This current Ukrainegate impeachment charade appears to be motivated only by blind partisanship and the desire to insulate corrupt insiders like Joe Biden from any scrutiny of their actions. The farce has gone so over-the-top that even as Democratic partisan media heralded the testimony of Trump’s Ukraine Ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, Donald Trump’s allies have already used portions of her testimony as a video advertisement for his reelection!

Yovanovitch blatantly lied in her introductory remarks and was caught admitting that Obama’s own State Department had groomed her to answer uncomfortable questions about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his appointment inside Ukraine’s gas sector. This gift to Trump now undermines the entire endeavor.

Are Democrats trying to hurt or to help Trump’s reelection?

Joe Giambrone’s fabulous new novel is DEMIGODS.

November 23, 2019 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Obama, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Fueling Iran’s Protests

Ron Paul Institute | November 23, 2019

What’s behind the most recent violent protests in Iran? Is it really all about a gasoline price increase? Why is US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo so enthusiastic about the protests, telling them that the US stands with them against their government? What’s the role of the CIA and the notorious “Ayatollah Mike” in fanning the flames? RPI’s Daniel McAdams joins PressTV’s Debate program to discuss Iran unrest:

November 23, 2019 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | CIA, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Sanctions against Iran, Saudi Arabia, United States | Leave a comment

Iraq invasion ‘Godfather’ berates Trump for not thinking of NEXT WAR in Syria

By Helen Buyniski – RT – November 22, 2019

Unreconstructed neocon Paul Wolfowitz has slammed President Donald Trump for ‘abandoning’ the Kurds, insisting the US will need them next time there’s a war in Syria. Trump’s blunder, then, is thinking wars can “end.”

The man once described by CNN as “the heart and soul of the Iraq war” points out in an op-ed in the New York Times on Thursday that decades of meddling in the Middle East have made the US some friends in the region – namely, the Kurds. Casting them aside, he says, will make future meddling much more difficult.

The failed war’s mastermind reminds Trump that because the US’ Kurdish and Arab allies were gracious enough to serve as cannon fodder in the fight against the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Syria and Iraq, the US lost just six soldiers, compared to 11,000 from the US-backed opposition. A less belligerent mind might see this as exploitation, rather than alliance – but friendship means never having to say “sorry I turned your homeland into a hotbed of sectarian conflict.”

When the next war comes around – and Wolfowitz assures us there will be a next war – the US will be sorry it spurned its Kurdish friends, he warns. The inveterate warmonger calls Trump short-sighted for viewing all engagement in the Middle East through the lens of the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, and holds up a failed Shiite uprising against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a cautionary tale of what happens when the US isn’t lurking in the shadows ready to play World Police at the drop of a shell – but glosses over the fact that every war Wolfowitz has backed in his lengthy career has ended with the “liberated” country all but turned to dust.

In Wolfowitz’s view, there is no “right” way to leave a war. “Walking away from [the Middle East] has a way of sucking America back in,” he warns – as if the power vacuum he warns will develop in the absence of a firm American hand to guide backward local politicos is an actual literal vacuum, capable of sucking American troops through space. The only way to prevent this is to prop up US “allies” at the helm of these countries and surround them with American “advisers” so they don’t make the mistake of listening to their people.

But even as he warns against allowing power vacuums to develop, he tears into former President Barack Obama for not backing the Syrian opposition’s efforts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, lamenting that a bit of support in the right place could have “toppled the regime… with little risk to Americans.” Apparently, some power vacuums are more dangerous than others.

Wolfowitz admitted in 2013 that the Iraq War was a disaster, but insisted this was only because he wasn’t actually its “architect,” all CNN plaudits aside – he had wanted Iraqi leadership from the start, rather than the embarrassingly colonialist look of having American “viceroy” Paul Bremer running the show. Americans would still be behind the scenes pulling the strings, however – he has bemoaned the lack of “leadership qualities” in Iraqi politicians as recently as 2017, insisting the US must maintain a presence in the country to keep it from “going to hell literally.” For a man who spends so much time mouthing platitudes about democracy, he is wildly allergic to self-rule by Middle Eastern peoples. Had the Bush Administration simply done things according to his plan – adopted the properly colonialist model of backing one group of Iraqis against the others – everything would have been peachy.

That complete lack of insight has made Wolfowitz one of the loudest cheerleaders for any and all wars since his tenure. He was a big fan of invading Libya, and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal begging Trump to bomb Syria (which Trump did). It’s astonishing that any serious politician still listens to the man who infamously promised in 2003 that the Iraqi people “would greet [American troops] as liberators,” obviating the need for a heavy troop presence in the country. Trump’s repeated attempts at leaving Syria have all crumbled in the face of opposition from the entrenched interests that Wolfowitz represents. But if he stops even trying to pull Americans out of the region, Wolfowitz will be right – these wars will keep happening.

November 22, 2019 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Middle East, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

The Umbrella Man, the Sins of the Father, and the Kennedy Curse

By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • November 22, 2019

I first heard of the so-called “Umbrella Man” from a commenter to my unz.com article “Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?” (thanks again). It is one of the most puzzling pieces in the JFK assassination file. An intriguing introduction to it is this short interview of Josiah Thompson filmed by Errol Morris for the New York Times, on the 48^th anniversary of his death:

Or view on Vimeo.

This film is interesting because, besides presenting the facts accurately, it illustrates the kind of “cognitive dissonance” they can produce, leading reasonable people to believe an implausible but harmless and comforting explanation, rather than a more logical but deeply disturbing one. In that case, it seems that normally programmed brains will reject vigorously, as unspeakable and therefore unthinkable on the conscious level, the notion that John Kennedy’s assassination can possibly have anything to do with his father’s appeasement policy in 1938, despite the fact that that notion has been deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind through the twin Jewish mythemes of “The Sins of the Father” and “The Kennedy Curse”, as illustrated by those two books:

The “sins of the father” is a not-so-subtle reference to Exodus 20:5:

“I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

Chief among Joe Kennedy’s sins was, of course, that “he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler” (publisher’s presentation of Kessler’s book).

The “Kennedy Curse” is a quasi kabalistic attempt to explain how the Kennedys were “on a fatal collision course with reality” because they “made the fatal mistake of thinking of themselves as divine.” By implication, their assassinations are to be blamed on their “self-defeating behavior” (publisher’s presentation of Klein’s book).

Taken together, those twin hasbara refrains evoke a notion of divine punishment. JFK and RFK were punished for the sins of their Jew-hating, Nazi-loving father. Mind you, it was Yahweh who took vengeance, not Israel!

The Umbrella Man fits so perfectly in this mythic narrative! The problem is that myths are not supposed to incarnate themselves so patently in physical reality. The implications are here too disturbing: for no reasonable man can believe that Yahweh supernaturally inspired Louie Steven Witt his “bad joke” (as he called it when interviewed by the special House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978). Then who inspired it?

Such a question is off-limit for Josiah Thompson’s mind. So he simply decided not to see anything “sinister” in the weird fact that he relates. He not only takes Witt’s explanation at face value (“this is just wacky enough, it has to be true!” in other words, credo quia absurdum), but assumes that the strange behavior of the Umbrella Man and JFK’s assassination are unrelated, and happened precisely at the same time and at the same spot by pure quantum physics coincidence.

By setting his mind on that explanation, Thompson obviously feels relieved not to have to get into “conspiracy theories”, because “everybody else got into the conspiracy theories,” and he is above the crowd. I find it hard to explain that this is the same Josiah Thompson who published in 1967 a book titled Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the President, for which he studied the Zapruder film and interviewed eyewitnesses in order to come up with a plausible line of fire, and the conclusion of a conspiracy and government cover-up. What happened to Josiah in between?

Russ Baker has posted on his website WhoWhatWhy a couple of articles in reaction to Thompson’s NYT interview: here and here. Contrary to Thompson, he finds Witt’s explanation literally unbelievable, and opts for the theory of the “signal man”: the Umbrella Man was “signaling the shooters, perhaps that JFK had been hit, perhaps that he still seemed to be alive, perhaps to keep shooting.” That theory, adopted by film director Oliver Stone for his 1991 movie JFK, is of course far more credible than the theory of the fléchette-shooting umbrella that Thompson chose to mention to his own satisfaction. But I must say I find it not entirely convincing. I cannot conceive that professional snipers would need such a conspicuous accomplice, standing almost in their line of fire (in the case of those shooting from the Grassy Knoll).

I also find no reason to doubt, as Baker does, that Witt was the real Umbrella Man. Witt was identified by neighbors and local newsmen before he came forward to the HSCA, and the photos of him on Dealey Plaza seem to match.

Baker borrows from John Simkin of Spartacus Educational the opinion that the umbrella was never the symbol of Chamberlain anyway, and so that Witt’s explanation makes no sense. Baker is wrong on that point, apparently. The umbrella was so much the iconic trademark of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that cartoonist David Low of the London Evening Standard, not only systematically drew him with his umbrella, but even drew him as an umbrella!

Chamberlain, who became a reviled symbol of appeasement (his biography bears the significant title, More Than Munich: The Forgotten Legacy of Neville Chamberlain) was the archetypal Umbrella Man.

According to Edward Miller,

“Umbrella protests first began in England after Chamberlain arrived home from the [Munich] conference carrying his trademark accessory. Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas.”[1]

Louie Steven Witt declares in his testimony to the HSCA that he had heard that “some members of the Kennedy family” had once been offended in an airport by people brandishing umbrellas. I haven’t found any confirmation that Joseph Kennedy or any other Kennedy had been heckled by open umbrellas as a “silent protest” against their objectionable lack of love for the Jews, but I find it plausible that “the umbrella was a sore spot to the Kennedys,” as Witt put it in his HSCA testimony. So John Kennedy being heckled with Chamberlain’s umbrella at the same time as being assassinated under Ben-Gurion’s order does strike me as both plausible and significant, as a sort of cryptic signature by the Zionist-Irgun mafia.

In my view, summarized here, John Kennedy was assassinated by Israel for three major reasons:

Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s interpretation, it was to plunge into the Israeli deep state and supervise Kennedy’s assassination that Ben-Gurion resigned in July 1963 before receiving Kennedy’s ultimatum letter demanding inspections of Dimona.

American Zionist Council: John Kennedy and his Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright (whom Kennedy had been prevented to name as Secretary of State) aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have rendered its lobbying division, the AIPAC, near powerless. On October 11, 1963, the AZC received a formal demand from RFK’s office to register within 72 hours (details here).

Nasser: Kennedy unequivocally supported Arab nationalism in 1957 as a senator,[2] reversed Eisenhower’s foreign polity in a pro-Nasser way (as documented by Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012), and committed the U.S. to support U.N. Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That was a major threat to Zionist interests, who had bet on making Nasser an enemy of the United States.

To these reasons for assassinating Kennedy, we must add the opposite reasons for putting Johnson instead in the Oval Office, for Johnson buried both the Dimona and the AZC proceedings, and cut U.S. support for Nasser’s in order to boost support to Israel. In 1967, he would commit high treason against his own country by allowing and covering-up Israel’s failed false-flag attack on the USS Liberty. No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy.

In the Zionists’ view, JFK’s anti-Israel policies (discreet or secret) were part of a more general “Kennedy problem” that went back to his father’s attempt to prevent WWII by supporting Chamberlain’s appeasement with Hitler rather than Churchill’s appeasement with Stalin. According to German documents declassified in 1949, the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, after meeting U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in 1938, wrote that he “understood our Jewish policy completely,” and was “Germany’s best friend” in London.[3] When Roosevelt entered the war, Joseph Kennedy resigned, and later complained privately that, “the Jews have won the war.”[4] According to biographer David Nasaw, Joseph was not an anti-Semite in the racial sense, but rather someone who believed in a Jewish conspiracy to push the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany (Nasaw insists he was mistaken, because “Jewish influence on American foreign influence was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent”).[5]

Zionists had reasons to fear that Joseph Kennedy did “inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s” (as printed in September 1960 by the Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party).[6] In 1940, John had published a book titled Why England Slept, adapted from his Harvard thesis which was, as the title alluded, a response to Churchill’s 1938 book While England Slept, and a veiled support for his father’s pro-appeasement views. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances for the presidency, rather than build it on hypocrisy. Although Zionists probably didn’t know it until recently, in 1945, JFK had written the following in his diary, as quoted here by Abigail Abrams:

“You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”[7]

Joseph Jr., Joseph Sr., and John Kennedy in 1938

The Kennedys were a family of strong traditions and strong convictions. They had to be destroyed, politically as had Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and if necessary physically, before they extirpate America from Zionists’ clutches.

Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson’s support, and supervised by the local B’nai B’rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy’s visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK’s assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).

When trying to make sense of Dallas’ Umbrella Man, we are faced with a dilemma: should we believe Witt’s explanation of his strange behavior (as does Josiah Thompson), or should we consider him an accomplice to the assassination (as does Russ Baker)? Only in the framework of the Israeli theory pioneered by Michael Collins Piper is it possible to surmount the dilemma.

Let’s recap what we know for certain. Fact number 1: on the sunny day of November 22, 1963, one man was standing on the President’s motorcade route with an open umbrella, at the precise moment and place when JFK was shot. To assume that the Umbrella Man’s strange behavior and JFK’s assassination are unrelated is unreasonable. The coincidence is just too improbable.

Fact number 2: In 1978, Louie Steven Witt claimed in front of the HSCA that he was the Umbrella Man and explained that he wanted to heckle JFK about his father’s policy of appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

Although Thompson and Baker disagree about everything else, they agree that there can be no connection between John Kennedy’s assassination and Joseph Kennedy’s appeasement policy. That is where they are both wrong.

Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a sayan? Not necessarily. Operations like the JFK assassination are planned on a strict need-to-know basis: no one knows more than he needs to know. Witt declared to the HSCA that he belonged to no organization whatsoever. He summarized his motivation for his “bad joke” in these words:

“In a coffee break conversation someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a little heckling.”

What would be interesting to know is: who inspired Witt during his coffee break? Did the coffee break take place in the office of Witt’s Jewish boss, director of the Rio Grande National Life insurance Co. in Dallas? Did Witt have insurmountable debts, like Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby? Russ Baker mentions that the company wrote a lot of insurance for the military and was located in the same building that housed the local office of the highly negligent Secret Service.

Mr Witt, would you kindly come forward again and answer a few questions?

Notes

[1] Edward H. Miller, “Umbrella Man”, November 22, 2013, on The Historical Society, on

[2] “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, ‘The New Dimensions of American Foreign Policy’,” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1957”; Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 554.

[3] Edward Renehan Jr., “Joseph Kennedy and the Jews”, History News Network; Kellen Perry, – “The Dark Side Of Joe Kennedy Sr.” allthatsinteresting.com, April 17, 2017.

[4] Quoted in Herbert Druks, John F. Kennedy and Israel, Praeger Security International, 2005, p. 10

[5] David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, Penguin, 2015, p. 509.

[6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 252.

[7] Abigail Abrams, “Auction of Rare Diary Highlights What John F. Kennedy Really Thought About Hitler,” Time, March 23, 2017, on

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

November 22, 2019 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | JFK Assassination, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Unspeakable Memories: The Day John Kennedy Died

By Edward Curtin | November 22, 2019

There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on a November 22nd Friday like this in 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-six years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today. In other words, to understand it in its most gut-wrenching reality: that the American national security state will obliterate any president that dares to buck its imperial war-making machine. It is a lesson not lost on all presidents since Kennedy.

Unless one is a government disinformation agent or is unaware of the enormous documentary evidence, one knows that it was the CIA that carried out JFK’s murder. Confirmation of this fact keeps arriving in easily accessible forms for anyone interested in the truth. A case in point is James DiEugenio’s recent posting at his website, Kennedys and King, of James Wilcott’s affidavit and interrogation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, declassified by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1998. In that document, Wilcott, who worked in the finance department for the CIA and was not questioned by the Warren Commission, discusses how he unwittingly paid Lee Harvey Oswald, the government’s alleged assassin, through a cryptonym and how it was widely known and celebrated at his CIA station in Tokyo that the CIA killed Kennedy and Oswald worked for the Agency, although he did not shoot JFK. I highly recommend reading the document.

I do not here want to go into any further analysis or debate about the case. I think the evidence is overwhelming that the President was murdered by the national security state. Why he was murdered, and the implications for today, are what concern me. And how and why we remember and forget public events whose consequences become unbearable to contemplate, and the fatal repercussions of that refusal. In what I consider the best book ever written on the subject, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2009), James W. Douglass explains this in detail, including the James Wilcott story.

Realizing what I am about to say might be presumptuous and of no interest to anyone but myself, I will nevertheless try to describe my emotional reactions to learning of John Kennedy’s murder so long ago and how that reverberated down through my life. I hope my experiences might help explain why so many people today can’t face the consequences of the tragic history that began that day and have continued to the present, among which are not just the other assassinations of the 1960s but the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent endless and murderous “war on terror” with its mind-numbing propaganda and the recent anti-Russia phobia and the blatant celebration of the so-called “deep-state’s” open efforts to overthrow another president, albeit a very different one.

On November 22, 1963 I was a college sophomore. I was going down three steps into the college dining hall for lunch. (Many of my most significant memories and decisions have taken place on steps, either going up or going down; memory is odd in that way, wouldn’t you say?) I remember freezing on the second step as a voice announced through a PA system that the president had been shot in Dallas, Texas. When I finally recovered and went down into the building, another announcement came through saying the president had died. The air seemed to be sucked out of the building as I and the other students with a few professors sat in stunned silence. Soon little groups on this Catholic campus joined together to pray for John Kennedy. I felt as if I were floating in unreality.

Later that day when I left the campus and drove home, I thought back to three years previously and the night of the presidential election. Everyone at my house (parents, grandparents, and the five sisters still at home) had gone to bed, but I stayed up past 1 A.M., watching the television coverage of the vote count. My parents, despite their Irish-Catholicism, were Nixon supporters, but I was for JFK. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would vote for Nixon, who seemed to me to personify evil. When I finally went up the stairs to bed, I was convinced Kennedy would win and felt very happy.

It wouldn’t be for another tumultuous decade before I would hear Kris Kristofferson sing

Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse
Or if the going up is worth to coming down….
From the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse
The goin’ up was worth the coming down

and I would ask myself the same question.

In the meantime, the next few years would bring the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile crisis, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, among other significant events, and for a high school student interested in politics and world events it was a heady and frightening few years. It was a country of newspapers back then, and I would read perhaps 3-4 each day and sensed a growing animosity toward Kennedy, especially as expressed in the more conservative NYC papers. I can remember very little talk of politics in my home and felt alone with my thoughts. As far as I can remember, this was also true at the Jesuit high school that I attended. And of course nothing prepared me for the president’s murder and the feeling of despair it engendered in me, a feeling so painful that I couldn’t really acknowledge it. At nineteen, I felt traumatized but couldn’t admit it or tell anyone. After all, I was a scholar and an athlete. Tough.

Then on Sunday morning my family had the TV on and we watched as Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy the government said had killed the president. The unreality was compounded manyfold, and when later it was reported that Oswald had died, I felt I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone, a popular television show at the time, whose narrator would say we are now entering the weird world between shadow and substance.

The next day a friend and I went to the Fordham University campus to visit a Jesuit priest who was a mentor to us. He had the television on for JFK’s funeral and we sat and watched it for a while with him. After a few hours, it became too painful and the two of us went outside to a football field where we threw a football back and forth. Perhaps subconsciously we were thinking of Kennedy’s love of football; I don’t know. But I remember a feeling of desolation that surrounded us on that empty cold field with not another soul around. It seemed sacrilegious to be playing games at such a time, yet deep trauma contributes to strange behavior.

Then I went on with my college life, studying and playing basketball, until the day after Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Those New York newspapers that didn’t like Kennedy, hated Malcolm even more and were constantly ripping into him. I vividly remember talking to my college basketball teammate the next day. His sense of devastation as a young African American struck me forcefully. As we walked to basketball practice and talked, his sense of isolation and gloom was palpable. Visceral. Unforgettable. It became mine, even though I didn’t at the time grasp its full significance.

In 1968 when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, I was driving to visit a girlfriend and remember hearing the news on the car radio and feeling deeply shocked. I felt immediately oppressed by the first warm spring evening in the New York area. It was as if the beautiful weather, usually so uplifting after winter and so joyously stimulating to a young man’s sexuality, was conspiring with the news of King’s death to bring me down into a deep depression.

Soon the country would awaken on June 5 to the surreal news that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles the night before. Like so many Americans, when he died not long after, I felt his death was the last straw. But it was far from it. For all the while Lyndon Johnson had lied his way to election in 1964 and escalated the Vietnam war to savage proportions. Death and destruction permeated the air we were breathing. The year 1968 ended with the suspicious death in Thailand of a hero of mine, the anti-war Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. Subsequent research has shown that that too was an assassination. And while all of this was going on and my political consciousness was becoming radicalized, I became a conscientious objector from the Marines. I was 24 years old.

By the late 1970s, having been fired from teaching positions for radical scholarship and anti-war activities, and mentally exhausted by the unspeakable events of the 1960s, I retreated into the country where I found solace in nature and a low-key life of contemplation, writing literary and philosophical essays, a novel, book reviews, and becoming a part-time newspaper columnist. By the 1990s, I gradually returned to teaching and a more active political engagement, primarily through teaching and writing.

Then in 1991 Oliver Stone jolted me back in time with his film JFK. I found powerful emotional memories welling up within me, and growing anger at what had happened to the U.S. in the previous decades. Soon JFK Jr., who was investigating his father’s assassination and was about to enter politics and take up his father’s mantle, was killed in a blatantly rigged “accident.” A month before I had been standing in line behind his wife in the bakery in my little town while he waited outside in a car. Now the third Kennedy was dead. I called my old friend the Jesuit priest from Fordham, but he was speechless. The bodies kept piling up or disappearing.

When the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened, I realized from day one that something was not right; that the official explanation was full of holes. My sociological imagination took fire. All that I had thought and felt, even my literary writing, came together. The larger picture emerged clearly. My teaching took on added urgency, including courses on September 11^th and the various assassinations.

Then in 2009 I read and reviewed James Douglass’s masterpiece, JFK and the Unspeakable, and my traumatic memories of 1963 and after came flooding back in full force. I realized that those youthful experiences had been so difficult for me to assimilate and that I therefore had to intellectualize them, for the emotional toll of re-experiencing them and what they meant was profound. The book really opened me to this, but so too did the awareness of how sensitive I was to John Kennedy’s death, how emotional I felt when reading about it or hearing him speak or listening to a song such as “The Day John Kennedy Died” by Lou Reed. It was as though a damn had burst inside me and my heart had become an open house without doors or windows.

I tell you all this to try to convey the ways in which we “forget” the past in order to shield ourselves from powerful and disturbing memories that might force us to disrupt our lives. To change. Certain events, such as the more recent attacks of September 11, have become too disturbing for many to explore, to study, to contemplate, just as I found a way to marginalize my feelings about my own government’s murder of President Kennedy, a man who had given me hope as a youngster, and whose murder had nearly extinguished that hope.

Many people will pretend that they are exposing themselves to such traumatic memories and are investigating the events and sources of their disquietude. It is so often a pretense since they feel most comfortable in the land of make-believe. What is needed is not a dilettantish and superficial nod in the direction of having examined such matters, but a serious in-depth study of the facts and an examination of why doing so might make one uncomfortable. A look outward and a look inward. Just as people distort and repress exclusively personal memories to “save” themselves from harsh truths that would force them to examine their current personal lives, so too do they do the same with political and social ones. When I asked two close relatives of mine, both of whom came close to death on September 11, 2001 at The World Trade Towers, what they have thought about that day, they separately told me that they haven’t really given it much thought. This startled me, especially since it involved mass death and a close encounter with personal death in a controversial public event, two experiences that would seem to elicit deep thought. And these two individuals are smart and caring souls.

What and why we remember and forget is profoundly important. Thoreau, in writing about life without principle, said, “It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember.” This is so true. We are consumed with trivia, mostly by choice.

Perhaps a reason we remember so much trivia is to make sure we forget profound experiences that might shake us to our cores. The cold-blooded public execution of President John Kennedy did that to me on that melancholy Friday when I was 19, and by trying to forget it and not to speak of it, I hoped it would somehow go away, or at least fade to insignificance. But the past has a way of never dying, often to return when we least expect or want it.

So today, on this anniversary Friday, another November 22, I have chosen to try to speak of what it felt like once upon a time on the chance that it might encourage others to do the same with our shared hidden history. Only by speaking out is hope possible. Only by making the hidden manifest.

T. S. Eliot wrote in “Journey of the Magi” words that echo ironically in my mind on this anniversary of the day John Kennedy died:

All this was a long time ago, I remember

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and

Death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Remembering in all its emotional detail the day John Kennedy died has been a long and cold journey for me. It has allowed me to see and feel the terror of that day, the horror, but also the heroism of the man, the in-your-face warrior for peace whose death should birth in us the courage to carry on his legacy.

Killing a man who says “no” to the endless cycle of war is a risky business, says a priest in the novel Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone. For “even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse.”

John Kennedy was such a man.

Eliot was right: Sometimes death and birth are hard to tell apart.

President Kennedy’s courage in facing a death he knew was coming from forces within his own government who opposed his efforts for peace, nuclear disarmament, and an end to the Cold War – “I know there is a God-and I see a storm coming. I believe that I am ready,” he had written on a slip of paper, and his favorite poem contained the refrain, “I have a rendezvous with death” – should encourage all of us to not turn our faces away from his witness for peace.

We must stop being at ease in a dispensation where we worship the gods of war and clutch the nuclear weapons that our crazed leaders say they will use on a “first-strike” basis. If they ever do, Eliot’s question – “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” – will be answered.

But no one will hear it.

November 22, 2019 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | JFK Assassination, United States | Leave a comment

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US Also Destroyed Iraqi Water Supply During First Gulf War

International Humanitarian Law prohibits the attack, destruction, or rendering useless of objects indispensable to civilian survival.

By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | June 10, 2026

… During the first Gulf War, the United States “deliberately bombed Iraq’s water system,” Thomas J. Nagy, a professor at George Washington University, wrote in September, 2001. The Bush administration, “with malice aforethought,” “destroyed, removed, or rendered useless” Iraq’s ‘drinking water installations and supplies’… They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA’s own words, ‘fully degrade’ Iraq’s water sources.”

Nagy found declassified documents at the website of the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illnesses that detailed the effort to degrade Iraq’s water supply and commit a serious violation of humanitarian law. The documents included “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerability,” “Disease Information,” “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq,” “Medical Problems in Iraq,” “Status of Disease at Refugee Camps,” “Health Conditions in Iraq,” and “Iraq: Assessment of Current Health Threats and Capabilities.”

Then Representative Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia (subsequently removed from Congress), referred to the Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities document, and said, “Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations.” … Read full article

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Chapters—Contents

“Global Power Elites”: the Transnational Capitalist Class

American Power Elites (APEs)?

US Imperialism and Transnational Capitalism

Global Inequality

Criticisms of the Book

Conclusion

Palestinian children play outside their dwelling in al-Eizariya town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the background.

Tony Heller | November 22, 2019

Joseph Jr., Joseph Sr., and John Kennedy in 1938

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