On Friday, The New York Timescontinued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.
A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.
Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.
More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There. When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:
Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
Chile 1973: “No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself.”
Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”
See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.
There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.
Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”? Possibly. But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.
Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?
The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Times editorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.
What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.
Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.
While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Timescheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:
“The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
“Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
“The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”
Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:
[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused.
Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.
For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Timesstill profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.
Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media—living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire—could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims.
Understanding imperialism as a general phenomenon loses sight of its modus operandi in any specific and meaningful context. While the exercise of imperialist power is a common strategy, its motives, instruments, objectives and engagement vary, depending on the nature of the imperial ruler and targeted country.
Venezuela, the current target of US, President Donald Trump, is a case illustrating the ‘peculiarities’ of imperialist politics. We will proceed to outline the background, techniques and impact of the imperial power grab.
Historical Background
The US has a long history of intervention in Venezuela primarily to gain control of its oil wealth. During the 1950’s Washington backed a military dictatorship –led by Perez Jimenez– until it was overthrown by a mass alliance of revolutionary socialist, nationalist and Social Democratic parties. Washington could not and did not intervene; instead it sided with the center-left Democratic Action (AD) and center-right COPEI parties which proceeded to declare war against the radical left. Over time US regained hegemony until the economy went into crises in the 1990’s leading to popular uprisings and state massacres.
The US did not intervene initially as it felt that it could co-opt Hugo Chavez because he was unaffiliated with the left. Moreover, the US was militarily committed to the Balkans (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East and preparing for wars against Iraq and other nationalist countries which opposed Israel and supported Palestine.
Using the pretext of a global terrorist threat Washington demanded subordination to its declaration of a world-wide ‘war against terrorism’.
President Chavez did not submit. He declared that “you do not fight terrorism with terrorism”. The US decided that Chavez’s declaration of independence was a threat to US hegemony in Latin America and beyond. Washington decided to overthrow elected President Chavez, even before he nationalized the US owned petroleum industry.
In April 2002, the US organized a military-business coup, which was defeated within forty-eight hours by a popular uprising backed by sectors of the military. A second attempt to overthrow President Chavez was set in motion by oil executives via a petroleum lock-out. It was defeated by oil workers and overseas petrol exporters. Chavez national-populist revolution proceeded to nationalize oil corporations who supported the ‘lock-out’.
The failed coups led Washington to temporarily adopt an electoral strategy heavily financed via Washington controlled foundations and NGO. Repeated electoral defeats led Washington to shift to electoral boycotts and propaganda campaigns designed to illegitimatize the electoral success of President Chavez.
Washington’s failed efforts to restore imperialist power, boomeranged. Chavez increased his electoral support, expanded state control over oil and other resources and radicalized his popular base. Moreover, Chavez increasingly secured backing for his anti-imperialist policies among government and movements throughout Latin America and increased his influence and ties throughout the Caribbean by providing subsidized oil.
While commentators attributed President Chavez mass support and influence to his charisma, objective circumstances peculiar to Latin America were decisive. President Chavez’s defeat of imperialist intervention can be attributed to five objectives and conditions:
The deep involvement of the US in multiple prolonged wars at the same time – including in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa distracted Washington. Moreover, US military commitments to Israel undermined US efforts to refocus on Venezuela.
US sanctions policy took place during the commodity boom between 2003 – 2011, which provided Venezuela with the economic resources to finance domestic social programs and neutralize local boycotts by elite allies of the US.
Venezuela benefited by the neo-liberal crises of the 1990’s-2001 which led to the rise of center-left national popular governments throughout the region. This was especially the case for Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras. Moreover, ‘centrist’ regimes in Peru and Chile remained neutral. Furthermore Venezuela and its allies ensured that the US did not control regional organization.
President Chavez as a former military officer secured the loyalty of the military, undercutting US plots to organize coups.
The world financial crises of 2008-2009 forced the US to spend several trillion dollars in bailing out the banks. The economic crises and partial recovery strengthened the hand of Treasury and weakened the relative influence of the Pentagon.
In other words, while imperial policies and strategic goals remained, the capacity of the US to pursue conquests was limited by objective conditions.
Circumstances Favoring Imperial Interventions
The reverse circumstances favoring imperialism can be seen in more recent times. These include four conditions:
The end of the commodity boom weakened the economies of Venezuela’s center-left allies and led to the rise of far-right US directed client regimes as well as heightening the coup activities of US backed opponents of newly elected President Maduro.
The failure to diversify exports, markets, financial and distributive systems during the expansive period led to a decline in consumption and production and allowed imperialism to attract voters, especially from middle and lower- middle class consumers, employees, shop keepers, professionals and business people.
The Pentagon transferred its military focus from the Middle East to Latin America, identifying military and political clients among key regimes – namely Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.
Washington’s political intervention in Latin American electoral processes opened the door to economic exploitation of resources and the recruitment of military allies to isolate and encircle nationalist, populist Venezuela.
Objective external conditions favored Washington’s imperial quest for domination. Domestic oligarchic power configurations reinforced the dynamic for imperial intervention, political domination and control over the oil industry.
Venezuela’s decline of oil revenue, the elite mobilization of its electoral base and its systematic sabotage of production and distribution had a multiplier effect. The mass media and the self-proclaimed electoral-right embraced the US led far-right coup which manipulated democratic and humanitarian rhetoric.
Washington heightened economic sanctions to starve the low income Chavista supporters, and mobilized its European and Latin American clients to demand Venezuela’s surrender while planning a bloody military coup.
The final stage of the US-planned-and-organized military coup required three conditions:
A division in the military to provide the Pentagon and coup planners a ‘beachhead’ and a pretext for a US ‘humanitarian ‘invasion
A ‘compromising’ political leadership which pursues political dialogues with adversaries preparing for war.
The freezing of all overseas accounts and closing of all loans and markets which Venezuela continues to depend upon.
Conclusion
Imperialism is a central aspect of US global capitalism. But it cannot accomplish its goals and means whenever and how it wishes. Global and regime shifts in the correlation of forces can thwart and delay imperial success.
Coups can be defeated and converted into radical reforms. Imperialist ambitions can be countered by successful economic policies and strategic alliance.
Latin America has been prone to imperial coups and military interventions. But it is also capable of building regional, class and international alliances.
Unlike other regions and imperial targets, Latin America is terrain for class and anti-imperialist struggles. Economic cycles accompany the rise and fall of classes and as a consequence imperial power advances and retreats.
The US intervention in Venezuela is the longest war of our century– (eighteen years) – exceeding the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The conflict also illustrates how the US relies on regional clients and overseas allies to provide cover for imperial power grabs.
While coups are frequent, their consequences are unstable – clients are weak and the regimes are subject to popular uprising.
US coups against popular regimes lead to bloody massacres which fail to secure long-term large-scale consolidation.
These are the ‘peculiarities’ of Latin America coups.
BRUSSELS — The neoconservative-backed news rating upstart “Newsguard” is now lobbying the European Union to “force the hand” of major U.S.-based tech companies — including Facebook, Google, and Twitter — to integrate its controversial ratings system into the world’s most popular social media platforms and search engines, according to a recent statement made by Newsguard co-CEO Steven Brill during a Tuesday event on “countering online disinformation” hosted by the EU in Brussels.
Brill also announced during his Brussels speech that Newsguard will be fully operational in four EU countries — U.K., Italy, France and Germany — by this April and is hoping to partner with EU-connected and EU-funded fact-checking organizations in order to increase Newsguard’s profits and influence as well as the likelihood of its adoption by major tech companies. Many of those companies have apparently gotten cold feet after concerns were raised about Newsguard’s browser plug-in collecting location and browsing-history information on its users, a practice discovered by independent tech experts who examined the code behind the plug-in. This undisclosed collection of user information was publicly denied by Newsguard despite it clearly being in the code of the plug-in itself.
Newsguard — whose connections to prominent neoconservatives, former government and intelligence officials and powerful PR firms were the subject of a recent MintPress exposé that went viral — has apparently shifted its hopes overseas following domestic backlash within the United States, triggered by critical reporting on the group. Brill, during his brief speech at the EU event on Tuesday, claimed that news sites that have recently criticized Newsguard’s motives — MintPress among them — are “secretly supported” by the Russian government, a claim for which he provided no evidence.
Another consequence of the growing domestic backlash, as evidenced by Brill’s appearance and the content of his speech in Brussels on Tuesday, is that Newsguard is now seeking to partner with the EU bureaucracy in order to pressure social media and other tech companies to pay Newsguard a hefty licensing fee for use of its “nonpartisan” ranking system.
This would not only ensure a steady stream of income for Brill and Newsguard’s other CEO, Louis Gordon Crovitz, but would also ensure the success of Newsguard’s ultimate ambitions of becoming an involuntary part of the internet browsing experience for citizens of the United States, the Europe Union and beyond.
An unexpectedly uphill battle for the giants’ blessing
As MintPress reported earlier this month, Newsguard aims to soon be “running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news” and has been in talks with “online titans” for several months, having already teamed up with Microsoft. Newsguard’s Microsoft partnership is credited with the ranking system, now available only as a browser plug-in, being pushed onto public library systems and even universities throughout the United States.
Newsguard has since used a series of interviews with mainstream outlets (all of which have received high ratings from the company) to promote its “popularity” by citing a Gallup poll that found that “89% of users of social media sites and 83% overall want social media sites and search engines to integrate NewsGuard ratings and reviews into their news feeds and search results.” However, few of the outlets that reported on the poll and Newsguard disclosed that Newsguard itself and one of its top investors funded the poll, that participants were paid to answer questions, and that the poll’s findings “may not be reflective of attitudes of the broader U.S adult population.”
Despite that, for whatever reason, there remains some resistance from social media giants to adopting Newsguard. Such a response was unexpected by the company’s CEOs Brill and Crovitz, however, given that both — when they announced Newsguard’s formation and raising of $6 million in seed funding last March — stated in several interviews that they anticipated near-immediate offers from major tech companies.
For instance, an interview with Business Insider, Crovitz (who is also a board member of Business Insider) had stated that they expected at least one of “the big tech platforms to sign on as a paying customer in a couple of months,” while Brill was quoted in the same article as stating that “We would not have gone forward [with Newsguard]” without at least some interest from these very platforms. Several mainstream reports on Newsguard have noted that if it does not successfully partner with major social media platforms or search engine companies, it is likely to fail.
The tech companies lack of interest could be explained many ways. One possibility is that Newsguard has drawn criticism from big-name, high-traffic websites it has poorly rated, particularly among conservative outlets like the Daily Mail, Breitbart and the news aggregations site Drudge Report, which has resulted in a steady stream of negative reports about the operation since MintPress’ original exposé was first published on January 9.
Such negative reporting has led to a bombardment of negative comments on Newsguard’s Facebook posts and tweets, as well as low ratings for its browser plug-ins. Mozilla, Firefox’s parent company, was recently accused of deleting many of the 1-star ratings for the plug-in, presumably at Newsguard’s request.
In addition, Facebook’s ”third party fact-checking organization” since December 2016 — the Poynter Institute, itself controversial for being heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Open Society Foundations — has openly criticized Newsguard.
In a recent article on Newsguard published in Slate, Alexios Mantzarlis, head of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), stated that — while he “appreciates” what Newsguard is trying to do — he found Newsguard’s red-green rating system “reductive,” adding that “it feels like one of those recipes where the ingredients all look right, but then you follow it closely and the result isn’t great.” Mantzarlis brought up the red rating given to Al Jazeera and the green rating given to Fox News as a glaring example of Newsguard’s questionable rankings of news organizations.
Furthermore, internet privacy activists have raised concerns about Newsguard’s plug-in collecting and storing information on the browser history of its users, along with information on the device on which it is installed and geolocation information, among other data.
Though Newsguard has responded to such criticism by stating that it does not share or store the information it collects (the “Trust Us” response), privacy advocates have noted that collecting such information was a choice the company made, not a technical requirement for the stated purpose of the plug-in. It is worth noting that Newsguard’s Crovitz has repeatedly defended illegal NSA surveillance — and the man who oversaw that surveillance operation for several years, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden, is on Newsguard’s board of advisors.
These factors and others have led some prominent privacy activists and technologists, such as Mozilla co-founder and former CEO Brendan Eich, to call Newsguard “a bad operation all around.” With prominent technologists like Eich and prominent fact-checkers like Mantzarlis lining up against Newsguard, the company’s plans to integrate smoothly into social media aren’t going as planned.
Leveraging the EU
Brill and Crovitz are apparently growing uneasy that large U.S. tech companies are getting cold feet on incorporating Newsguard into their online products and paying Newsguard’s hefty (yet undisclosed) licensing fee, given that licensing fees are the linchpin that would ensure the company’s profitability.
Slate’s recent article on Newsguard, published last Friday, admits as much. Will Oremus, Slate’s senior technology writer, stated that “whether NewsGuard’s shields become ubiquitous or a footnote in the history of online journalism will depend on the willingness of the large tech platforms to license its product.” Oremus then goes on to note that Brill said during an interview that he is confident that “a European Union agreement, little-known stateside, might help to force their hand. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Mozilla (maker of the Firefox browser) have all signed on this year to the European Commission’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which commits them to various measures to tackle false news on their platforms.”
Oremus continues:
If it sounds like an empty bureaucratic gesture, well, it might be. But Brill and Crovitz are counting on it to have teeth, and they’ve been making regular trips [emphasis added] to Brussels to try to persuade these platforms that adopting NewsGuard is their best path toward satisfying the agreement. If this or other arguments fail to convince Big Tech, NewsGuard will fail too.”
Indeed, Newsguard is undeniably looking to the EU to “force the hand” of uneasy tech companies in integrating — and licensing — Newsguard’s ranking system. On Tuesday, Brill made yet another of his “regular trips” to Brussels, this time to participate in an EU-hosted conference titled “Countering online disinformation – Towards a more transparent, credible and diverse digital media ecosystem.” Brill participated in a panel discussion with representatives from European fact-checking organizations, titled “How can the fact-checking community help ensure a fair public debate?”
During his brief speech at the conference (link – speech begins around 5:38:30), Brill used many of the same talking points he has used domestically, touting Newsguard’s ostensible nonpartisanship and “growing popularity” with consumers (yes, he cites only the same aforementioned Gallup poll as evidence).
However, a few minutes into his speech, Brill states the real reason for attending the conference:
I am here to announce that by mid to the end of April, we expect to have hired enough native journalists and enough experienced editors and get the process going so that we will have launched in Italy, Germany, France and the U.K. and will have covered at least 90 percent [of the most visited news websites in those countries].”
In other words, Newsguard Europe is soon to open its doors, showing that the company’s global ambitions are speeding up sooner than many observers had expected.
As Newsguard has done in the U.S., Brill also noted that “we [Newsguard] are now talking to library systems here in Europe” and that Newsguard hoped to partner with “the fact checkers on this stage.” The other fact-checking organizations on that panel included representatives from the Poynter Institute’s IFCN, which, as previously mentioned, has recently criticized Newsguard’s rating system; the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the world’s “largest community of public service [read government-funded] media organizations in the world,” whose members include the BBC, France24 and Deutsche Welle; and the EU government- and Google-funded “disinformation observatory” SOMA.
It is currently unclear whether Newsguard has partnered with any of these organizations or is involved in talks to do so. However, Brill’s stated desire to partner with fact-checkers supported by and also funded by the EU government shows that Newsguard Europe is interested in protecting establishment corporate and state-funded media outlets — much as it has in the United States, where Newsguard has targeted independent media sites, particularly those with an “anti-establishment” leaning.
Obviously not a first choice
Given Brill’s recent announcement and his recent statements regarding Newsguard’s shift across the Atlantic, the question then becomes — will it work? Will Brill and Crovitz be able to use the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation to pressure Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Mozilla — all of whom signed the code last fall — to follow in Microsoft’s footsteps and adopt Newsguard?
On Tuesday, the European Commission commented on the initial reports by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Mozilla on their efforts “to fight fake news.” In a statement, the commission wrote:
There has been some progress, notably in removing fake accounts and limiting the visibility of sites that promote disinformation. However, additional action is needed to ensure full transparency of political ads by the start of the campaign for the European elections in all EU Member States.”
Those elections will take place in May.
As noted by Forbes, the commission will perform a comprehensive assessment at the end of 2019 and “should the results prove unsatisfactory … [the commission] may propose further actions, including of a regulatory nature.” In other words, the commission is threatening tech companies with government regulation if the results of their efforts to fight “fake news” are considered “unsatisfactory” by EU bureaucrats.
If Newsguard is able to partner with groups that are EU-connected and funded like the EBU and SOMA, that conflict of interest alone could be enough to have Newsguard integration promoted by the EU as a “satisfactory” step towards meeting the requirements of the Code. In addition, Newsguard’s ties to one of the largest advertising firms in the world, the French-based Publicis Groupe, could also help it win EU support.
Indeed, Brill showed a subsection of the Code that fits neatly with Newsguard’s stated mission and its description of its own activities during his Tuesday speech. He highlighted the Code’s Commitment 11.D “Empowering Consumers,” which states:
Such transparency should reflect the importance of facilitating the assessment of content through indicators of the trustworthiness of content sources, media ownership and verified identity. These indicators should be based on objective criteria and endorsed by news media associations, in line with journalistic principles and processes.”
Yet, despite EU threats and Brill’s presentation to EU officials and tech company representatives on Tuesday, social media platforms like Facebook seem intent on resisting Newsguard. For example, Facebook, in an effort to pre-empt the commission’s response to its efforts and the “disinformation” conference Tuesday, announced at a Monday press conference in Brussels that it plans to create an “independent content oversight board with the power to overturn company decisions on user posts,” to be composed of 40 “technology and human rights experts free of commercial influences,” who will be selected by Facebook for inaugural three-year terms.
Though it is doubtful that the EU will find Facebook’s new “content oversight board” to be “satisfactory” over the course of the year, it shows that Facebook is willing to try all sorts of alternatives to Newsguard, despite Brill and Crovitz’s heavy lobbying of the popular yet beleaguered social media platform.
Newsguard critics are all Kremlin mouthpieces?
Newsguard’s ambitions seem to be hitting more roadblocks than expected in the U.S., leading the group to turn their attention to unelected EU bureaucrats and to cultivating alliances with establishment media organizations and fact-checkers in Europe in order to pressure U.S.-based tech companies to license its ranking system.
A clear factor in creating this scenario for Newsguard has been initial critical reporting from MintPress and other subsequent reports from various outlets such as RT and Breitbart. Brill, during his Tuesday speech, made his disdain for these reports clear and attempted to write off all critical reporting on Newsguard as being “secretly supported” by the Russian government. During a short Q&A session following his speech on Tuesday, Brill briefly donned his tinfoil hat and lamented “this sustained attack we’ve been getting from RT and Sputnik for the last 10 days and all of the various websites that they kind of secretly support [emphasis added] in the United States.”
RT’s initial report on Newsguard cited MintPress as having broken the story, and Sputnik’s coverage focused on MintPress’ article as well as a radio interview the author of this article did with a Sputnik radio program a few days after the report had been published. As a consequence, Brill implied on Tuesday that MintPress is “secretly supported” by RT and Sputnik, a bold-face lie that had first been circulated in a January 15 report by Folio that had insinuated that MintPress was a “Kremlin-linked outlet.” Folio was eventually forced make the following clarification after being contacted by MintPress Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh:
A social media headline on this story, mentioning “Russian-linked news media,” was a reference to RT and Sputnik News. MintPress News is an independent, Minnesota-based news outlet.”
Newsguard and the establishment media it seeks to protect have now made it clear that not only are they unconcerned with the actual opinions of U.S. adults regarding their platform and ranking system, they are also willing to smear any news outlet that points out their numerous conflicts of interest and troubling ambitions as “Kremlin-linked.” The only “evidence” for that smear is absurdly based on the fact that RT and Sputnik have reported on the topic. The hypocrisy is glaring given that RT and Sputnik both regularly write articles based off of stories that were first published by establishment, “green-rated” U.S. outlets; yet, those outlets are not implied as receiving “secret support” from the Russian government by association.
The absurdity of these smears, along with Newsguard’s push to hammer out a deal with EU bureaucracy over the heads of tech companies and global internet users, show growing concern among Newsguard executives and their investors that their project could fail despite their best efforts. Indeed, if they have already resorted to deleting poor reviews for their browser plug-in, it certainly — as one FireFox user noted — “seems like a desperate move.”
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
The leader of Hezbollah Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah challenged world intelligence services, notably the Israelis, who track him by the hour, during a three hour live broadcast interview with al-Mayadeen TV on Saturday. Nasrallah showed he has the technical ability to broadcast live for this length of time without fear of being located. Even more important, Nasrallah showed the capacity to receive electronic messages via an internet connection in his vicinity, allowing him to take questions and get breaking news from around the world. This is a clear indication that Nasrallah trusts Hezbollah’s technical competence, capable of jamming any interception signal and efficient enough to blind any local or international intelligence services trying to locate him.
Hezbollah seems to enjoy electronic abilities superior to those of many Middle Eastern and other countries. What is unusual is that Nasrallah displayed these abilities, online, to tens of thousands of people watching the interview.
Hezbollah’s electronic capability is not new: Israel tried to physically intercept its fibber optic landlines and to electronically intercept the mobile phones of many officers and leaders. Indeed, Israel’s interception capabilities made it possible, in the past, for the Israeli army to break into Hezbollah’s telephone network, exposing a spider web of connections and leading to the destruction of hundreds of Hezbollah homes, offices and bases during the 2006 war.
It is not a secret that by intercepting one mobile phone, it is possible to identify other mobile phones in the same location and to create a record of the phone’s IMEI even if the user changes his or her SIM card but keeps the same mobile phone.
Hezbollah recognised the mistake of its members and issued a serious warning to all members or leaders preventing them from carrying a mobile phone at work. Failure to follow those instructions caused much of the destruction Hezbollah suffered in the 2006 war.
At the same time, Hezbollah was able to use the same available technology to intercept and capture spies. In 2006 Hezbollah ambushed the Israeli Special Operation Forces (SOF) by creating a false track of the presence of one of their most wanted and top leaders at al-Rasoul al-A’zam, on the Beirut airport road. One of those present revealed at the last minute the plan that could have led to the killing and arrest of many SOF soldiers. The same spy fell into his own trap, a few years later, due to misuse of his mobile phone. The SIM card he uses to contact Israel with was intercepted by Hezbollah when he inserted it, by mistake, into his Lebanese phone. It took him very little time to realise his mistake, but not enough to escape to Israel. Hezbollah’s capability helped in arresting many spies of which some where not exposed overtly.
Far from hiding under the ground–as Israel propaganda tried to portray him for years after the 2006 war–Sayyed Nasrallah spoke very confidently in an elegant flat. In fact, Sayyed Nasrallah meets local politicians, regional officials, and other Hezbollah leaders in various flats in Beirut, never the same ones. This is another indication of his frequent movements, a security procedure in accordance with a figure of his stature on the most wanted list of many countries, including Middle Eastern and European ones collaborating with Israel and the USA.
Nasrallah’s professional security team freely moves him around inside Lebanon and abroad; he travels between Beirut and Damascus on a single long, busy road to meet President Bashar al-Assad. Nasrallah has an electronic media team providing him with all breaking news on the spot and a resumé of all newspapers and media outlets publishing information or articles related to the Middle East.
Hezbollah’s electronic abilities seem to be constantly updated in accordance with the latest technology and security measures needed to face his enemies and to protect his leaders and military capabilities. The battle between Israel and Hezbollah is not merely a military one but also a battle of intelligence and technology.
A study by a Toronto-based consulting and research company has revealed that over the past fifty years mainstream reporting about Israel has been distorted to portray the Jewish state in positive terms while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The media study, based on a computer analysis of 50 years of data, found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine. The slanting in news coverage included subtle manipulations like using word associations favorable to Israel and derogatory to Palestinians as well as persistent publication of stories praising Israel while also avoiding reporting anything supportive of the dispossessed Arab point of view.
The researchers from 416Labs were able to evaluate headlines and articles derived from five major U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal during the time period 1967 to 2017. June 1967 was selected as the starting point to include coverage of the Six Day War and its aftermath, when Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt and Syria to begin its military occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza.
No one should be surprised by media bias in favor of Israel given the dominance of Jewish owners and editors in the major media, but the study just might have gone one step farther and noted, as did Congressman Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out back in 1985, that much of the bias stems from the overseas correspondents covering the Middle East for the U.S. and European media also being overwhelmingly Jewish. And a review of the Israel-philia might have gone back even further in time to the foundation of the state in 1948 to find similar favorable coverage.
Shaping the favorable perception of Israel has also involved the efforts of Zionist-dominated Hollywood movies and television to portray Jewish heroism while also at the same time ignoring the Zionist terrorism directed against both the indigenous Palestinian population and the British Mandate authorities prior to Israel’s statehood. The movie Exodus shaped many Americans’ perceptions of what had occurred in the Middle East, while the steady stream of films related to the so-called holocaust, which ignore the many problems with that standard narrative, perpetuate Jewish suffering and victimhood.
In truth, no one should believe any country’s creation narrative, which, since the time of Virgil’s Aeneid, has been intended to present an idealized portrait that is largely fact-free. Nationalists will inevitably distort the tale to reflect their own vision of what their homeland represents and how it came to be, but Israel’s story is unusual in that it is packed with lies from start to finish. Even before the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists encouraged Jewish emigration from Europe to the then Turkish-controlled Palestine. They coined the expression “a land without people for people without a land,” a flat out lie as Palestine was fully inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs plus a small Jewish minority. This expression has been more recently replaced with another one, i.e. how Israel “made the desert bloom,” as if the land were not being cultivated before large numbers of Jews arrived, making it another lie. And it is, by the way, an expression favored by Zionist presidential aspirant Kamala Harris, a prime example of “progressive except for Israel.”
Israel was founded as a product of terrorism, some would say the “first modern” style terrorism, to include bombings of non-military targets and random massacres of civilians. In a notorious attack on the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, more than two hundred Palestinians may have been slaughtered by Jewish terrorists affiliated with the Irgun and Lehi groups. The exact count of the victims is unknown because a subsequent Zionist clean-up team systematically destroyed many of the bodies.
Given the turmoil in Palestine and the agitation by British Jews, the U.K. was eager to cut its losses, and Harry Truman, a U.S. president who benefited from Jewish financial and political support in his reelection bid, was equally willing to support the creation of a Jewish state as a quid pro quo. Even though Jews were a distinct minority in the new Israel-Palestine, they obtained nearly half of the land in spite of the United Nations mandate that the rights of the indigenous population should not be compromised by the new arrivals.
But the new arrivals from Europe and America disagreed with that even-handed approach. They assassinated the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who had himself saved many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, and started to attack their Arab neighbors, intentionally driving 700,000 from their homes and killing many in the process. By that act of terror and a subsequent war fought against its neighbors, Israel obtained more land before the green line was eventually established as part of a 1949 Armistice Agreement managed by the U.N. to divide Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, which were under the jurisdiction of Jordan and Egypt respectively.
And then there came the miraculous Six Day War of June 1967, regarding which glowing media accounts described how Israel was attacked by Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously but fought back hard and won a decisive victory, occupying in the process the parts of Jerusalem it did not already control as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. The only problem with that story is that Israel started the war, attacking and destroying the Arab air forces without a declaration of war while their planes were on the ground. Denied air cover, the Arab ground forces could not win.
Israel also included in its Six Day War triumph the attempted sinking of the American intelligence gathering ship the U.S.S. Liberty, which was in international waters when it was attacked on June 8th. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 171 wounded in the only attack on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time that was never fully investigated by the Pentagon due to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s unwillingness to offend American Jews. The Israelis and their apologists have claimed the attack was a case of either “fog of war” or “a mistake,” both of which were completely self-serving lies exposed by compelling National Security Agency collected evidence that has surfaced recently. And, by the way, the Israelis continue to receive military assistance from Washington in spite of the killing of American service members, $3.8 billion per annum guaranteed for the next ten years plus special appropriations as needed.
Even when the Israelis are clearly telling lies, much of the media and chattering class has been willing to forgive them their trespasses no matter what they do or say. The whopper level lies about Israel are that it is a democracy and America’s best friend and ally. It is neither. It has more than 50 laws that discriminate against Arabs, is now self-defined as a “Jewish state,” and it has recently legalized banning non-Jews from residential areas and towns. It also occupies Palestinian territories where the original inhabitants have no rights but martial law. And the Jewish state has never been an American ally in practical terms as it is under no obligation to support Washington under any circumstances even though a U.S. Air Force general has declared that his troops are prepared to die for Israel.
Some other recent lies include the propagation of a narrative that the Palestinians do not exist as a people, that Palestine has never been a country and therefore should never become one, and that there is no peace in the Middle East because the Arabs have never accepted the generous offers made by the Israelis to settle problems with the Palestinians, who are, by the way, solely responsible for their unfortunate situation since the expanding Israeli settlements on their land are no obstacle to peace. All lies.
And another big lie concerns how Israel spies on the United States. Israel is the number one “friendly” country when it comes to stealing American secrets, both commercial and military. When Jonathan Pollard stole more U.S. classified information than any spy in history, Israel’s friends rushed to explain that it was all a mistake, that Pollard was just a one-off oddball. And the Israel government agreed to return what he had stolen but did not do so and instead used it to barter with America’s then enemy the Soviet Union in a deal to permit Jews to emigrate.
Another espionage related development which produced a whole battery of Israeli lies and evasions relates to 9/11, where Mossad almost certainly had at a minimum inside knowledge regarding what was about to occur through their illegal massive spying program inside the United States. Remember the cheering Israeli movers in New Jersey as the twin towers went down? Or the hundreds of “art students” selling their work all across the U.S., which was both a scam and part of an espionage network?
More recent lies include repeated assertions that the Iranians have a secret nuclear program, which will produce a bomb in “six months,” something Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising since 1993. And those wily Persians are also developing ballistic missiles that can be used to attack Europe and America, a particularly dangerous lie as it has been picked up and repeated ad nauseam by the buffoonish triumvirate in Washington consisting of Bolton, Pompeo and Pence, which passes for the deep thinking in U.S. foreign policy these days. That allegation could easily lead to United States involvement in a war fought for Israel that it might reasonably avoid as it is not threatened by Iran and has no vital interests supportive of going to war against it.
But the greatest lie of all is the current claim that anti-Semitism is surging all around the world, requiring still more protection of and deference to diaspora Jews as well as to the state of Israel. It is based on a fundamental lie, that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic and ignores the fact that the push-back is based overwhelmingly on how Israel and Netanyahu behave. Israel, whatever its pretensions, is a country and Judaism is a religion. It is in fact particularly dangerous, and damaging to the religion, to combine the two deliberately as is being done by Netanyahu and the many American Jews who are serial apologists for Israel.
Indeed, Israel and its partisans are now using lies to change the way the public views the issue of anti-Semitism and are willing to do so by legislating to enforce how people think, to include the use of legal sanctions consisting of fines and imprisonment to silence critics. If legislation currently in congress is ever implemented fully, it will be the death of freedom of speech in the U.S. That such nonsense has gained currency at all is due to the Israeli corruption of both America’s government and its news media, which is not a lie, but the absolute truth that you won’t find discussed anywhere in your newspaper or on television reporting.
This trend to criminalize criticism of Israel has led Jewish groups and some governments to work together to promulgate “hate crime” statutes and other legal barriers to protect the Israeli wrongdoing. But Israel is not and should not be protected against criticism. It is a country that behaves very badly, and, one might add, dangerously, not only to its neighbors but also to the world as it has the potential in its hands to escalate its involvement in Syria to initiate a nuclear conflagration between the U.S. and Russia. Israel’s lies should be recognized for what they are and it should be boycotted and sanctioned until it comes to its senses or, if it does not, it should be completely shunned.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
It truly is phenomenal. The massive death and destruction from U.S. interventionism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the rest of the Middle East isn’t even over with, and yet interventionist dead-enders are now shifting their sights to Venezuela. One almost gets the impression that the dead-enders are saying to America, “Please, give us one more chance. We promise we’ll get it right this time.”
Obviously, the dead-enders are hoping that Americans forget the unmitigated disasters that interventionism has produced on this side of the world, such as in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, and others.
The time has come for the American people to raise their sights to a higher level, one that involves not only rejecting more interventionism in Venezuela but one that rejects interventionism entirely. It is the only solution to the foreign policy-woes in which interventionist dead-enders have mired our nation.
That necessarily means the following:
Bring home all U.S. troops from everywhere and discharge them into the private sector, since they will no longer be needed.
Abandon all U.S. military bases in foreign countries, including the Pentagon’s and CIA’s torture and prison center in Cuba.
End all foreign aid, including to pro-U.S. dictatorial regimes.
Restore a limited-government republic to our land, which necessarily means the dismantling of the national-security state branch of the federal government (i.e., the Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, and NSA).
If Americans were to do those four things, the United States would be well on its way toward achieving a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, and free society, which, needless to say, would be completely different from the type of society in which we live today, thanks to those interventionist dead-enders.
Think Switzerland. Unlike the U.S. government, the Swiss government is based on the concept of non-interventionism, which, by the way, was the founding foreign policy of the United States. Unlike the U.S. government, the Swiss government hasn’t been imposing sanctions on the Venezuelan people in the hopes of starting a violent revolution that has the potential of killing and injuring untold numbers of people, like in Syria. The Swiss government also hasn’t recognized an alternative president in Venezuela, like the U.S. government has, again in the hopes of inciting a violent revolution.
Instead, the Swiss government takes the position that Venezuela is none of Switzerland’s business. Venezuela is the business of the Venezuelan people. If they wish to start a revolution knowing that there will likely be a high toll in terms of death and destruction, that’s their decision, not that of the Swiss government.
Thus, Switzerland butts out of Venezuela’s turmoil. The Swiss government limits itself to defending Switzerland. And no one, not even the U.S. government, jacks with the Swiss.
That’s the model for the United States. Stop being the world’s buttinski, invader, occupier, assassin, torturer, sanctioner, embargoer, kidnapper, dictator-aider, and regime-changer. Just butt out of everyone else’s wars, problems, conflicts, and hostilities. Instead, restore America’s founding principle of non-interventionism and lead the world to peace, prosperity, harmony, and liberty.
With April’s elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister.
Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some 31 per cent of the Israeli public prefer Gantz to head the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months away from becoming the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history.
Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to change direction after a series of governments under Netanyahu’s leadership have over the past decade shifted Israel ever further to the right.
Like Israel’s former politician generals, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a position of strength.
Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.
But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.
In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.
By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.
The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.
One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.
One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.
This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.
More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.
According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.
Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.
But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.
A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.
Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.
In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.
Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.
It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.
Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.
In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.
In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.
Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.
More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.
French Polynesia comprises a multitude of islands in the center of the Pacific Ocean, which are a part of France. The biggest and the most famous of these is the island of Tahiti. As in other “overseas” territories that remain under France’s dominion since colonial times, there is a powerful movement for independence in French Polynesia. Islanders take special issue with their parent country when it comes to numerous nuclear tests, which France conducted in the region in the second half of the 20th century.
Based on available data, during the period from 1966 to 1998, the French military performed 193 tests of nuclear weaponry in the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa, which comprise the Tuamotu Archipelago. It is public knowledge that 46 tests, conducted from 1966 to 1974, were atmospheric in nature, i.e. nuclear warheads were positioned in special towers on the Earth’s surface, on barges in lagoons, on aerostats in the air, and were also dropped from planes and detonated in the air. It is noteworthy that in 1963, the USSR, the USA and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Moscow, which banned nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, under water and in outer space, but France chose not to participate in this agreement.
The other 147 tests were performed underground from 1975 to 1998, with detonations taking place in 500 to 1,100-meter-deep closed vertical shafts.
It is worth mentioning that both atmospheric and underground nuclear tests were conducted on the two atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa.
It is difficult to say which approach is more harmful to the environment and population’s health. A nuclear detonation in the atmosphere causes a rapid dispersion of radioactive substances over a large area, which soon have an effect on well-being of residents living in this area. After an underground test, a lot of harmful compounds could remain in a shaft, where the detonation took place, for quite a number of years. However with time, these substances, via various routes, such as underground waters, could pollute the surrounding area, and their effect may be more long-lasting and permanent than after-effects following a detonation in the atmosphere, which gradually subside with the help of winds and rains.
Either way, for a long time the French leadership asserted that the tests conducted in the Tuamotu Archipelago had no effect on either the environment or the residents of French Polynesia. However, even in the 1960s, many did not believe this to be true. For decades, the media have published increasingly frightening data about the state of the atoll environment and the fate of people who were in surrounding areas during nuclear testing. It was reported that French politicians and high-ranking military personnel often ignored warnings made by scientists about consequences of nuclear detonations. As a result, residents of near by areas were not evacuated, while French servicemen, who carried out these tests, did not have access to protective gear. In the 1980s the French military leadership attempted to convince the public that it possessed technology of a “clean bomb”, but few believed such statements. Even a stage-managed swim, taken by the French Defence Minister, Paul Quilès, in the lagoon of the Moruroa atoll 5 hours after yet another scheduled test in 1985 did not help matters (interestingly, he is alive and well at present).
In the end, the French Polynesian government managed to receive financial compensation from France, which makes annual payments for damage caused by nuclear testing. This money is a significant contribution to French Polynesia’s budget.
In addition, in 2001 two organizations were established in France. Their aims are to prove that the French government caused harm to a large number of people with its testing and to secure compensation for these people. These organizations are Association des vétérans des essais nucléaires (AVEN, Nuclear Test Veterans Association), which comprises French service personnel who took part in the testing, and Moruroa e tatou (Moruroa and us), which united workers from Moruroa testing sites together. For a number of years these bodies waged an information war against the French government, who continued to assert that the explosions in French Polynesia did not have any serious consequences.
In the end, France was forced to officially admit that thousands of people, including military personnel involved in nuclear testing as well as local residents, contracted serious diseases, including oncological, due to exposure to radiation.
In March 2009, France’s Minister of Defence, Hervé Morin, stated that overall, 150,000 residents of French Polynesia and France were affected by the French nuclear tests. In addition, he informed the public that the French Parliament was in the process of reviewing legislation on making annual targeted compensation payments to people who suffered from radiation exposure. France allocated 10 million euros for these disbursements per year. And individuals who happened to be near a nuclear testing site during detonations were no longer obliged to prove that their health problems stemmed from effects of radiation. The law was approved in 2010, however, according to data as of the end of 2018, only few people have been able to receive this compensation due to red tape. Based on some sources, in French Polynesia the number of such individuals is equivalent to dozens. Hence, the previously mentioned organizations with active support from the Assembly of French Polynesia (AFP, the local parliament) continued waging their battle.
As for the AFP, many of its members are supporters of independence of French Polynesia from France, and the damage sustained by the islands as a result of nuclear testing, is yet another trump card for them. The AFP organized numerous protests and information campaigns which demanded an admission that French Polynesia suffered from the actions taken by French military personnel. One of the key figures in this struggle became Oscar Temaru, a former President of French Polynesia, who held this post on five occasions and was the founder and leader of the party, the Front for the Liberation of Polynesia (FLP), currently known as Tavini Huiraatira (People’s Servant).
In 2013, France’s Ministry of Defence was forced to declassify a number of documents, which were immediately publicized by the media. These reports provide detailed descriptions of the effects of nuclear testing on the environment of the entire French Polynesia. For instance, the documents mention that after a series of nuclear tests, increased radiation levels exceeding safety limits were reported in Tahiti, an island in the center of French Polynesia, which is located more than 1,000 km from Moruroa and happens to be a popular international resort. Other islands of French Polynesia were reported to be in a similar situation. Furthermore, witnesses recall that there were instances when French authorities refused to evacuate residents from some French Polynesian islands that were within the fallout zone.
In November 2014, the AFP announced that it was determined to demand compensation from France for damage caused to the environment of French Polynesia, which it estimated to amount to more than 1 billion US dollars.
In October 2018, at the session of the UN Committee on Decolonization in New York, the previously mentioned politician, Oscar Temaru, affirmed that he and his allies had begun legal proceedings against France at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. France has been accused of crimes against humanity.
The same month, a court ruled to suspend Oscar Temaru from his duties within the AFP for a year as unexpectedly, fraudulent financial irregularities were uncovered during his election campaign. In November 2018, Oscar Temaru was detained for 12 hours in the course of an investigation on fund embezzlement from a local company that sponsored an opposition-friendly radio station. Now, the famous politician is awaiting trial, which will begin in June 2019. Members of the Front for the Liberation of Polynesia assert that evidence against Oscar Temaru was fabricated by the French authorities in order to ruin his reputation as a politician.
Regardless of whether these accusations are true or not, any focus on issues connected to nuclear testing in French Polynesia hurts France. As new facts about the events that transpired emerge, France’s actions in French Polynesia begin to look more and more unsightly. Environment-related crimes are among the most condemned in modern liberal European society. And the fact that France chose its “overseas” territory in the Pacific Ocean for its nuclear testing and failed to take necessary safety measures to protect local residents may be tied to even more deplorable acts, such as colonialism and racism.
Hence, France, long considered to be a bastion of European values, such as tolerance and multiculturalism, will most likely do everything in its power to reduce tensions surrounding Moruroa, Fangataufa and its nuclear program by, among other means, sidelining politicians such as Oscar Temaru.
In addition, it is important for France to dampen the separatist mood in French Polynesia so as not to lose dominion over the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa. After all, in order to accurately assess the environmental consequences of French nuclear testing in French Polynesia, and the potential threat to future generations of Polynesians, scientists need to conduct research in the cursed atolls. They need to determine quantities of harmful substances which remain underground, and to find possible routes that these compounds could use to spread from these two atolls to the rest of the region. Some also think that underground detonations could have resulted in appearance of cracks, which could connect the shafts where the tests were conducted with the ocean. However, scientists have not been able to access Moruroa and Fangataufa since France ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1998. Nuclear test sites have thus been sealed and are protected by armed security personnel who do not allow scientists and employees of environmental organizations to reach these areas.
Various experts have, on numerous occasions, expressed an opinion that France’s unwillingness to allow researchers to access these closed off testing sites is one of the reasons why France is trying to keep French Polynesia in its dominion.
It is well known that keeping these islands under France’s control is a significant expense for the French budget. The region is incapable of supporting itself even through tourism, which accounts for 25% of French Polynesia’s GDP and is a key economic sector for the nation. Paris is compelled to spend billions of euros on French Polynesia, which is why calls for its independence are even periodically echoed in France itself.
In addition, independence supporters who live in French Polynesia think that France is responsible for the region’s economic woes, as it prevents development of local businesses and sets high tariffs on imported and exported goods. Members of forces, opposing French rule, believe that the parent nation uses such means to artificially slow down economic development of French Polynesia for fear that, on gaining financial independence, the region will immediately attain political freedom. Then France will lose control over Moruroa and Fangataufa, and whatever secrets are hidden in these atolls will be revealed by the world media.
Now that the case has been taken to the International Court of Justice, France will need to do its best to maintain control of French Polynesia. If the AFP estimates damages, caused by nuclear testing, at 1 billion US dollars, then, most likely, France will pay this sum out. From now onwards, France will probably start making compensation payments due to veterans, affected by nuclear testing, and to common residents of French Polynesia, in accordance with the 2010 law, with much more effort. However, it is uncertain whether these measures will help France’s case, as this issue has already gained notoriety world-wide. For far too long, France ignored demands from people who suffered from consequences of nuclear tests. Perhaps if it had started making generous compensation payments to these individuals several years earlier, there would not be a court case against France at The Hague. As things stand now, the global community will have to make a legal and environmental assessment of the actions taken by France from 1966 to 1998. And it can not be ruled out that soon France will not only lose control over French Polynesia but its reputation as well.
Sofia Pale, PhD, Research Fellow of the Center for South-East Asia, Australia and Oceania of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Settled science” and BuzzFeed share a fatal commonality. Both are driven by an agenda rather than facts. BuzzFeed learned that lesson yet another time last week. Two years ago, the publication pushed the Clinton-bought phony and unverified Trump Russia dossier, which launched stories of collusion, FISA warrants, and the ongoing Mueller investigation.
In a bit of irony, it was the Mueller team that slapped down BuzzFeed’s latest story accusing President Trump of asking Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. Imagine the fake news media being fact-checked by their hero, Robert Mueller.
So-called settled science faces similar collisions with reality. Driven by a particular agenda, whether financial or political, science becomes blinded to any contrarian views, insisting that the issue is “settled,” shutting off any further inquiry, debate, or honest disagreement. In some areas of science, dissenters are labeled as “deniers” with threats of violence, loss of job, or even imprisonment.
The most prevalent example is climate. From global cooling in the 1970s to global warming in the 2000s, the names have changed, but not the agenda. Since climate models are misbehaving, not providing the desired predictions, the names have morphed into “climate change” or “extreme weather.” But still the science is considered “settled.”
Barack Obama in 2014 told Congress, “The debate is settled, climate change is a fact.”
Someone with a bit more science knowledge than the community organizer from Chicago, physician and author Michael Crichton, said this about settled science: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
The latest bit of unsettled science is something few of us are thinking about in the midst of global warming-induced winter storms and piles of snow – namely, sunscreen.
A recent article in Outside magazine sums it up: “Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests – and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?”
It started with vitamin D.
People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. The vitamin is required for calcium absorption and is thus essential for bone health, but as evidence mounted that lower levels of vitamin D were associated with so many diseases, health experts began suspecting that it was involved in many other biological processes as well.
Why were so many of us low in vitamin D? “Vitamin D is a hormone manufactured by the skin with the help of sunlight. It’s difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities through diet.”
Enter the settled science that sun exposure is bad. Excessive sun exposure, particularly sunburn, increases the risk of skin cancer. Dermatologists recommend absolute protection from the sun, even on cloudy days. Use sunscreen, the higher the SPF rating the better, and apply it multiple times a day, even if you are just going to work and back.
Easy enough. Just take a vitamin D supplement every day, stay out of the sun, and all will be well. Or will it?
“Vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials” according to the Outside article. Five years of high-dose vitamin D had “[n]o impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.”
Maybe simply taking vitamin D as a pill isn’t the same as getting it naturally from sun exposure. Perhaps the low blood levels of vitamin D in the unhealthy weren’t the actual cause of health problems, but instead just a marker.
This is the scientific conundrum of causation versus association. Does having blue hair cause elderly ladies to play bingo, or is this just an association?
The science of sunlight is a bit more complicated. The skin uses sunlight to make nitric oxide, a blood vessel-dilator that lowers blood pressure. This in turn reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke. Vitamin D is produced along the way but may not be preventing actual disease, instead serving as a marker that an individual is receiving enough sun exposure.
But too much sun, particularly sunburn, does increase the risk of skin cancer. Some types, like basal cells, are a cosmetic nuisance, whereas melanoma is deadly.
Much as with climate. One can argue that fossil fuel consumption is a threat to the climate. Yet the benefits of fossil fuel energy production have lifted millions out of poverty, prolonging life spans and quality of life.
A Swedish study tracked 30,000 women over 20 years and found that “[s]un avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.”
What unsettled the science of lathering on sunscreen or avoiding the sun altogether was the finding that “[a]voidance of sun exposure is a risk factor of a similar magnitude as smoking, in terms of life expectancy.”
How else to explain our prehistoric ancestors, wearing minimal, if any, clothing, spending their days in the sun, without becoming extinct? Settled science looks simplistic, much in the way Al Gore’s insistence the CO2 controls the Earth’s thermostat looks simplistic when we consider that the upper Midwest was once covered in a mile-thick sheet of ice when the planet cooled but then melted when the planet warmed.
It seems that sun exposure, in moderation, may not be bad for you. In fact, it may be healthier than avoiding it. Does this sound familiar?
In the annals of settled science, we have heard this song before. Once upon a time, margarine was good and butter was bad. Margarine is a trans fat and now considered unhealthy compared to butter. Dietary fats in general were unhealthy, and people were told to eat carbohydrates instead. This ushered in an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes.
Same with coffee, at one time the cause of all types of nasty diseases, now providing numerous health benefits.
Don’t forget carbon dioxide, which, some say, is killing the planet. Constituting only 0.04% of the atmosphere, does a small increase in CO2 mean the planet is doomed? Or is it beneficial, since CO2 is plant food, necessary for photosynthesis, responsible for “greening” the planet – which in turn leads to more food production?
There’s temperature as well, which fluctuates on the Earth in varying cycles for unclear reasons. Warmer temperatures might raise the sea level a few inches but may also increase the amount of fertile land and provide a longer growing season.
Although we know much about the world, there is plenty we don’t yet understand. It’s the height of hubris to assume we have all the answers and that the science is settled. The sunscreen about-face is just the latest example.
Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The religion of “the Holocaust” is a secular one: it belongs to the lay world; it is profane; in actuality, it has at its disposal the secular arm, that is a temporal authority with dreaded power. It has its dogma, its commandments, its decrees, its prophets and its high priests. As one revisionist has observed, it has its circle of saints, male and female, amongst whom, for example, Saint Anne (Frank), Saint Simon (Wiesenthal) and Saint Elie (Wiesel). It has its holy places, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It has its sacred (and macabre) buildings and its relics (in the form of cakes of soap, shoes, toothbrushes, …). It has its martyrs, its heroes, its miracles and its miraculous survivors (in the millions), its golden legend and its righteous ones. Auschwitz is its Golgotha. For it, God is called Yahweh, protector of his chosen people, who, as said in one of the psalms of David (number 120), recently invoked by a female public prosecutor, Anne de Fontette, during the trial in Paris of a French revisionist, punishes “lying lips” (by, incidentally, sending them the “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper”). For this religion, Satan is called Hitler, condemned, like Jesus in the Talmud, to boil for eternity in excrement. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. It amasses fortunes through blackmail and extortion and acquires unheard-of privileges. It dictates its law to the nations. Its heart beats in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem monument, in a land taken over from the natives; in the shelter of a 26-foot high wall built to protect a people who are the salt of the earth, the companions of the “Holocaust” faith rule over the goy with a system that is the purest expression of militarism, racism and colonialism.
A quite recent religion whose growth has been meteoric
Although it is largely an avatar of the Hebraic religion, the new religion is quite recent and has exhibited meteoric growth. For the historian, the phenomenon is exceptional. Most often a religion of universal scope has its origins in remote and obscure times, a fact that makes the task of historians of religious ideas and institutions rather arduous. However, as luck would have it for that type of historian, in the space of fifty-odd years (1945-2000), right before our eyes, a new religion, that of “the Holocaust”, has suddenly come into being and proceeded to develop with astonishing speed, spreading nearly everywhere. It has conquered the West and intends to impose itself on the rest of the world. Any researcher interested in the historical phenomenon made up by the birth, life and death of religions ought therefore to seize the occasion, never so much as hoped for, thus offered to study from up close the birth and life of this new religion, then calculate its chances of survival and the possibility of its demise. Any specialist of war watching out for indications of a coming conflagration would owe it to himself to survey the risks of a warlike crusade such as the one into which this conquering religion may take us.
A religion that embraces consumerism
As a rule, consumer society places religions and ideologies in difficulty or danger. Each year, growth in both industrial production and business activity creates in peoples’ minds new needs and desires, truly concrete ones, lessening their thirst for the absolute or their aspiration towards an ideal, factors that religions and ideologies feed on. Besides, the progress of scientific thinking makes people more and more sceptical as to the truth of religion’s stories and the promises it gives them. Paradoxically, the only religion to prosper today is the “Holocaust” religion, ruling, so to speak, supreme and having those sceptics who are openly active cast out from the rest of mankind: it labels them “deniers”, whilst they call themselves “revisionists”.
These days the ideas of homeland, nationalism or race, as well as those of communism or even socialism, are in crisis or even on their way to extinction. Equally in crisis are the religions of the Western world, including the Jewish religion, and in their turn but in a less visible manner, so are the non-Western religions, themselves confronted by consumerism’s force of attraction; whatever one may think, the Moslem religion is no exception: the bazaar attracts bigger crowds than the mosque and, in certain oil-rich kingdoms, consumerism in its most outlandish forms poses an ever more insolent challenge to the rules for living laid down by Islam.
Roman Catholicism, for its part, is stricken with anaemia: to use Céline’s phrase, it has become “christianaemic”. Amongst the Catholics whom Benedict XVI addresses, how many still believe in the virginity of Mary, the miracles of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, everlasting life, in heaven, purgatory and hell? The churchmen’s talk is usually limited to trotting out the word that “God is love”. The Protestant religions and those akin to them are diluted, along with their doctrines, in an infinity of sects and variants. The Jewish religion sees its members, more and more reluctant to observe so many peculiar rules and prohibitions, deserting the synagogue and, in ever greater numbers, marrying outside the community.
But whereas Western beliefs or convictions have lost much of their substance, faith in “the Holocaust” has strengthened; it has ended up creating a link – a religion, according to standard etymology at any rate, is a link (religat religio) – that enables disparate sets of communities and nations to share a common faith. All in all, Christians and Jews today cooperate heartily in propagating the holocaustic faith. Even a fair number of agnostics or atheists can be seen lining up with enthusiasm under the “Holocaust” banner. “Auschwitz” is achieving the union of all.
The fact is that this new religion, born in the era where consumerism expanded so rapidly, bears all the hallmarks of consumerism. It has its vigour, cleverness and inventiveness. It exploits all the resources of marketing and communication. The vilest products of Shoah Business are but the secondary effects of a religion that, intrinsically, is itself a sheer fabrication. From a few scraps of a given historical reality, things that were, after all, commonplace in wartime (like the internment of a good part of the European Jews in ghettos or camps), its promoters have built a gigantic historical imposture: the imposture, all at once, of the alleged extermination of the Jews of Europe, of camps allegedly equipped with homicidal gas chambers and, finally, of an alleged six million Jewish victims.
A religion that seems to have found the solution to the Jewish question
Throughout the millennia, the Jews, at first generally well received in the lands that have taken them in, have ended up arousing a phenomenon of rejection leading to their expulsion but, quite often, after leaving through one door, they have re-entered through another door. In several nations of continental Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the phenomenon appeared once more. “The Jewish question” was especially put in Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, Germany and France. Everyone, beginning with the Jews themselves, then set about looking for “a solution” to this “Jewish question”. For the Zionists, long a minority amongst their coreligionists, the solution could only be territorial. The thing to do was to find, with the accord of the imperial powers, a territory that Jewish colonists could settle. This colony might be located, for example, in Palestine, Madagascar, Uganda, South America, Siberia, … Poland and France envisaged the Madagascar solution whilst the Soviet Union created in southern Siberia the autonomous Jewish sector of Birobijan. As for National Socialist Germany, she was to study the possibility of settling the Jews in Palestine but wound up realising, from 1937, the unrealistic nature of the idea and the great wrong to the Palestinians that such a project would entail. Subsequently the 3rd Reich wanted to create a Jewish colony in a part of Poland (the Judenreservat of Nisko, south of Lublin), then in its turn, in 1940, it seriously considered creating a colony in Madagascar (the Madagascar Projekt). Two years later, beset by the necessities of a war to wage on land, sea and in the air and taken up with the more and more distressing concerns of having to save German cities from a deluge of fire, to safeguard the very life of his people, to keep the economy of a whole continent running, a continent so poor in raw materials, Chancellor Hitler made it known to his entourage, notably in the presence of Reichsminister and head of the Reichskanzlerei Hans-Heinrich Lammers, that he intended to “put off solving the Jewish question till after the war”. Constituting within her a population necessarily hostile to a Germany at war, the Jews – in any case a large portion of them – had to be deported and interned. Those able to work were made to do so, the others were confined in concentration camps or transit camps. Never did Hitler either desire or authorise the massacre of Jews and his courts martial went so far as to order the death penalty, even in Soviet territory, for soldiers found guilty of excesses against Jews. Never did the German State envisage anything else, as concerned the Jews, than “a final territorial solution of the Jewish question” (eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and it takes all the dishonesty of our orthodox historians to evoke incessantly “the final solution of the Jewish question” and deliberately evade the adjective “territorial”, so important here. Up to the end of the war, Germany kept on offering to deliver interned Jews to the western Allies, but on condition that they then stay in Britain, for example, and not go and invade Palestine to torment “the noble and valiant Arab people”. There was nothing exceptional about the fate of Europe’s Jews in the general blaze of war. It would have deserved just a mention in the great book of Second World War history. One may therefore quite rightly be astonished that today the fate of the Jews should be considered the essential feature of that war.
After the war it was in the land of Palestine and to the detriment of the Palestinians that the upholders of the “Holocaust” religion found – or believed they’d found – the final territorial solution to the Jewish question.
A religion that, previously, groped along with its sales methods
(Raul Hilberg’s recantation)
I suggest that sociologists undertake a history of the new religion by examining the extremely varied techniques in line with which this “product” was created, launched and sold over the years 1945-2000. They can thus measure the distance between the often clumsy procedures of the beginning and the sophistication, at the end, of the packagings designed by our present-day spin doctors (crooked “com” experts) for their presentations of “the Holocaust”, henceforth a compulsory and kosher mass-consumer product.
In 1961, Raul Hilberg, first of the “Holocaust” historians, “the pope” of exterminationist science, published the first version of his major work, The Destruction of the European Jews. He expressed in doctoral manner the following thesis: Hitler had given orders for an organised massacre of the Jews and all was explained as somehow coming of those orders. This way of displaying the merchandise was to end in a fiasco. With the revisionists asking to see the Hitler orders, Hilberg was compelled to admit that they had never existed. From 1982 to 1985, under the pressure of the same revisionists asking to see just what the magical homicidal gas chambers, in technical reality, looked like, he was led to revise his presentation of the holocaustic product. In 1985, in the “revised and definitive” edition of the same book, instead of taking an assertive, curt stance with the reader-customer, he sought to get round him with all sorts of convoluted phrases, appealing to a supposed taste for the mysteries of parapsychology or the paranormal. He expounded on the history of the destruction of the European Jews without in the least bringing up any order, from Hitler or anyone else, to exterminate the said Jews. He explained everything by a kind of diabolical mystery through which, spontaneously, the German bureaucrats told themselves to kill the Jews to the very last.“Countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” took part in the extermination enterprise by virtue of a “mechanism”, and did so without any “basic plan” (p. 53); these bureaucrats “created an atmosphere in which the formal, written word could gradually be abandoned as a modus operandi” (p. 54); there were “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations”; “it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization”; “no one agency was charged with the whole operation”; “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process” (p. 55). In short, according to Hilberg, this concerted extermination had indeed taken place but there was no possibility of actually demonstrating it with the aid of specific documents. Two years previously, in February 1983, during a conference at Avery Fischer Hall in New York, he had presented this strange and woolly thesis as follows: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”. To sum up, that vast project of destruction was executed, magically, by telepathy and by the diabolical workings of the “Nazi” bureaucratic genius. It can be said that with Hilberg, historical science has thus turned cabalistic or religious.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, at their end, wanted to set off on the same road of fake science when they called upon French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac for assistance. For several years the poor Pressac strove to sell the tainted product in a pseudo-scientific form but, realising the imposture, in 1995 he did a complete turnaround and admitted that, all things considered, the dossier of “the Holocaust” was “rotten” and fit only “for the rubbish bins of history”; such were his own words. The news of his change of heart was to be kept hidden for five years, emerging only in 2000 at the end of a long book by Valérie Igounet, another Shoah peddler, entitled Histoire du négationnisme en France (Seuil, p. 652).
A religion that has at last discovered the up to date sales techniques
It was then that the spin doctors came onto the scene. What with the product having become suspect and potential customers starting to ask questions, the “Holocaust” religion’s management had to steer an altogether different course and give up defending the merchandise with ostensibly scientific arguments: their new approach would be a resolutely “modern” one. It was decided to set only the very least store by efforts at logical argumentation and to replace serious research with appeals to sentiment and emotion, in other words with art: the cinema, theatre, historical novels, shows, story telling (the contemporary art of throwing together an account or framing a “testimony”), the media circus, stage designs in museums, public ceremonies, pilgrimages, worshiping of (false) relics and (false) symbols (symbolic gas chambers, symbolic numbers, symbolic witnesses), incantations, music and even kitsch, the whole thing matched with assorted ways of forcing people to buy it, including various kinds of threats. The filmmaker Steven Spielberg, a specialist in dishevelled and extraterrestrial fiction, has become the leading instigator for holocaustic films as well as for the casting of 50,000 witnesses. In order to sell their tainted product better in the long term, our fake historians and real junk dealers have sought and obtained the primary school “franchise”, with which they instil a taste for “the Holocaust” in the very youngest clientele: for it’s in the earliest years that appetites are acquired, making so that, later on, the customer need hardly be enticed: he’ll demand on his own what he enjoyed as a child, be it sweets or poison. Thus has it come to be that no one involved could care less about history: all serve the sole cause of a certain Remembrance, that is a jumble of legends and slanders that give the public the pleasure of feeling good andrighteous, ready tosing the virtues of the poor Jew and curse the intrinsically wicked “Nazis”, to call for vengeance and spit on the graves of the defeated. At the end it only remains to collect a flood of cold hard cash and receive new privileges. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was but an amateur: in 1979, he had shown himself from the outset to be too basic, too rough in his “Holocaust” promotion. For example, when asked by the revisionists to explain how in blazes, after a gassing operation with hydrogen cyanide (the active ingredient in the insecticide “Zyklon B”), a squad of Jews (Sonderkommando) could enter unharmed into a room still full of that terrible gas, then handle and remove up to a few thousand corpses infused with poison, he, along with 33 other academics, replied that he simply need not provide any explanation. Spielberg, a more skilful man, was to show in a screen drama a “gas chamber” wherein, for once, “by a miracle”, the showerheads sprayed… water and not gas. Subsequently, in his turn, Vidal-Naquet had, quite awkwardly, attempted to answer the revisionists on the scientific level and made a fool of himself. Claude Lanzmann, for his part, in the film Shoah, sought to produce testimonies or confessions, but his result was clumsy, inept and hardly convincing; that said, at least he’d grasped that the main point was to “make movies” and occupy the public forum. Today there is no longer a single “historian” of “the Holocaust” who makes it his business to prove the reality of “the Holocaust” and its magical gas chambers. All of them do like Saul Friedländer in his latest book (L’Allemagne nazie et les juifs / Les années d’extermination, Seuil, 2008): they leave it as understood that it all existed. With them history becomes axiomatic, although their axioms aren’t even drawn up. These new historians proceed with such self-assurance that the reader, taken aback, doesn’t realise the trick being played on him: the smooth talkers go on endlessly about an event whose reality they haven’t established in the first place. And so it is that the customer, believing that he’s bought some goods, has actually bought the smooth talk of the one giving him the sales pitch. Today’s world champion of holocaustic bluff is a shabbos goy, Father Patrick Desbois, one hell of a trickster whose various productions dedicated to “the Holocaust by bullets”, notably in the Ukraine, seem to have reached the very peaks of Judeo-Christian media hype.
A success story of the great powers
A veritable success story in the art of selling, the holocaustic enterprise has acquired the status of an international lobby. This lobby has blended with the American Jewish lobby (whose flagship organisation is the AIPAC) which itself defends, tooth and nail, the interests of the State of Israel, of which “the Holocaust” is the sword and shield. The mightiest nations in the world can hardly allow themselves to annoy such a network of pressure groups which, under a religious veneer, was at first a commercial concern only to become later on military-commercial, constantly pushing for new military adventures. It follows that if other countries, called “emerging”, want to be in good graces with a certain more powerful one, then they would be well advised to bend to its wishes. Without necessarily professing their faith in “the Holocaust”, they will contribute, if need be, to the propagation of “the Holocaust” and to the repression of those who dispute its reality. The Chinese, for example, although they have no use at all for such nonsense themselves, keep well away from any calling into question of the “Jewish Holocaust”; this enables them to pose as the “Jews” of the Japanese during the last war and so point out that they too have been victims of genocide, a formula which, they think, may open the way to financial reparations and political profits, as it has done for the Jews.
A particularly mortal religion
The future trouble for the religion of “the Holocaust” lies in the fact that it is too secular. Here one may well think of the Papacy, which, in centuries past, drew its political and military strength from a temporal power that, in the final analysis, ended up causing its downfall. The new religion is hand in glove with, all together, the State of Israel, the United States, the European Union, NATO, Russia, the big banks (which, as in the case of the Swiss banks, it can force to knuckle under if they show unwillingness to pay out), international racketeering and the arms merchants’ lobbies. This being the case, who can guarantee it a solid base in the future? It has made itself vulnerable by endorsing, de facto, the policies of nations or groups with inordinate appetites, whose spirit of worldwide crusade, as may be particularly noted in the Near and Middle East, has become adventurist.
It has come to pass that religions disappear with the empires where they used to reign. This is because religions, like civilisations, are mortal. That of “the Holocaust” is doubly mortal: it spurs countries to go on warlike crusades and it is rushing to its doom. It will rush to its doom even if, in the last instance, the Jewish State vanishes from the land of Palestine. The Jews then dispersed throughout the world will have only one last resort, that of bewailing this “Second Holocaust”.
***
Translator’s note: The italicised English words are in English in the original.
NB: Already in 1980, in my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (“Statement of case against those who accuse me of falsifying history”, La Vieille Taupe, Paris), I dealt with “the new religion” of “the Holocaust” (p. 261-263). In 2006 I wrote two articles on the subject: “La ‘Mémoire juive’ contre l’Histoire ou l’aversion juive pour toute recherche approfondie sur la Shoah” (“‘Jewish Remembrance’ versus History, or the Jewish aversion to any thorough research on the Shoah”) and “Le prétendu ‘Holocauste’ des juifs se révèle de plus en plus dangereux” (“The Alleged ‘Holocaust’ of the Jews is proving ever more dangerous”).
The second may be found here in English translation.
Hamburg, Germany – I was with Gerd Büntzly, 69, of Herford, in a demonstration in Germany July 17, 2017. So were Steve Baggarly, Susan Crane, and Bonnie Urfer, all of the United States. Ours was a peaceful if covert, night-time occupation of a protected aircraft shelter or bomb bunker far inside the Büchel Air Force Base, near the beautiful Mosel River valley.
We were there to help prevent the unlawful use of the shelter in nuclear attacks or nuclear war preparations. Routine nuclear war planning by US and German Air Force personnel there, using US B61 nuclear bombs (NATO’s so-called “nuclear sharing”), violates the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and several other international treaties, all binding on the United States and Germany.
In spite of our formal complaint to state prosecutors against “selective prosecution” of Gerd, and the violation of his “equal protection” rights, only he was charged, tried, and convicted of trespass and property damage (for clipping fences) in January last year. This Jan. 16, he was in court again appealing the conviction. Susan Crane from California and I travelled to Koblenz to speak on his behalf. Attorneys were quite sure that we two could testify, but ultimately were not allowed.
We wanted to explain that international law has the force of state and federal law in Germany and the United States, a fact recognized by Germany’s Constitution (Art. 25) and the US Constitution (Art. 6). According to Univ. of Illinois Law School Prof. Francis Boyle, writing recently for other nuclear weapons resisters, “International law is not ‘higher’ or separate law; it is part and parcel of the structure of federal law. The Supreme Court so held in the landmark decision in The Paquete Habana (1900), that was recently reaffirmed in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in 2006.”
Contrary to modern military strategists, there is no such thing as a “limited nuclear war.” Nuclear weapons only produce massacres. Beginning with 8 to 10 million degrees at detonation, followed by indiscriminate mass destruction from blast effects, city-size mass fires (firestorms) in which nothing survives, and uncontrollable radiation poisoning that produces genetic damage unlimited by space or time, nuclear weapons are just massacre delivery systems.
International law has prohibited the planning and not just the commission of such massacres since 1946.
Professor Boyle wrote last November 1st: “The Judgment of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal meted out severe punishment in 1946 against individuals who, acting in full compliance with domestic law but in disregard of the limitations of international law, had committed war crimes and crimes against peace as defined in its Charter.”
The Nuremberg Charter and Principles apply to individual civilians like us and oblige individuals to disobey domestic laws that protect government crimes. And Nuremberg prohibits all “planning and preparation” of wars that violate international treaties.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions prohibit indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants, attacks on neutral states, and long-term damage to the environment. The 1907 Hague Conventions forbid the use of poison and poisoned weapons under any circumstances.
Under the 1970 NPT, it is prohibited for Germany to receive nuclear weapons from the United States and for the US to transfer them to Germany. Germany and the United States are both formal state parties to all of these Treaties.
“By implication,” Boyle explains, “the Nuremberg Judgment privileges all citizens of nations engaged in war crimes to act in a measured but effective way to prevent the continuing commission of those crimes. The same Nuremberg Privilege is recognized in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice which has been adopted as a Treaty (the United Nations Charter) by the United States” [and Germany]. In my opinion, such action certainly includes nonviolent exposure and inspection of sites of ongoing war crimes.”
Because nuclear weapons cannot be used without violating these binding international treaties; since Germany and United States at Büchel are planning and preparing war that violates these treaties; and because the Nuremberg Charter and Principles forbid this planning and preparation, and apply to civilians and military personnel alike, and hold citizens individually responsible; and require citizens to disobey illegal orders, to refuse participation in or ignore international crimes, civil resistance at Büchel is no offense but a civic duty, a lawful obligation, and an act of crime prevention.
In the courtroom, crowded with 40 people, the three-person “bench” (two lay volunteers and one criminal court judge) found Gerd guilty — but reduced his fine from 1,200 Euros to 750 — after making a yawning apology for “deterrence.” Prescient as ever, Professor Boyle’s latest book is, “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” (Clarity Press 2013).
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.
According to green fund manager Erik Kobayashi-Solomon a carbon tax is the free market solution to the climate crisis.
Carbon Tax: The Ultimate Free Market Solution To Climate Change
Erik Kobayashi-Solomon | Forbes | January 25, 2019
… Unlike a lot of mush-minded Greenies, I am under no illusion that a tax on carbon emissions will discourage people from burning carbon-based fuel or will serve just retribution on wasteful capitalists. Nor do I think that the taxing authority will use the collected funds for anything other than a typically idiotic boondoggle. In fact, I do not even believe that a carbon tax will do anything to stop the near-term effects of climate change (there is plenty of heat stored in the ocean, and those chickens will take decades to come home to roost).
No. My reasoning is based completely on free market considerations.
Humans do one thing phenomenally well: adapt to obstacles. If there is a mountain in front of us, we’ll climb it, build a tunnel through it, construct a road around it, and throw up a scenic overlook on the side of it.
The pure expression of human adaptability is the free market system. […]
Let’s say that the federal government enacted a levy of $10 per ton of CO2 emitted — a pittance next to the true, non-externalizedcost of carbon.
The fact is that a $10 / ton carbon tax will do nothing or next to nothing to end prices or to the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. However, it will release the adaptive creativity of engineers and business people trying to find ways to help companies extract as much profit after the tax is imposed as they did before. […]
Then, it will be time to raise that tax to $15 / ton so we can watch the same wealth creating process occur once again. … Full article
Some people might find it fascinating to poke an ant’s nest with a big stick, to watch the ants unleash their “adaptive creativity” to repair the damage. But being poked with a big stick is pretty hard on the ants.
Here’s a radical thought Erik – instead of trying to argue the virtues of persuading politicians to coerce the “free market”, instead of celebrating the sacrifice and adaptability people would employ to overcome your artificial carbon tax mountain, how about developing products which people would want to purchase of their own free will?
Former Pfizer chief toxicologist Helmut Sterz presents a critical examination of the development, approval, and global rollout of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—particularly those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech. The Vaccine Mafia details the failure of pharmaceutical companies, regulatory authorities, politicians, and international organizations to follow established scientific and ethical standards during the pandemic. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience in pharmaceutical toxicology, Sterz reveals the many ways the vaccines’ inadequate or omitted preclinical safety testing put the world’s population at risk.
Sterz demonstrates how “emergency” approvals allowed manufacturers to bypass long-standing international guidelines governing toxicity testing, especially with regard to reproductive and cancer risks. They also allowed governments and health authorities to ignore or conceal evidence of serious adverse effects that occurred, including myocarditis, reproductive harm, and other long-term health risks.
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