Weary men, what reap ye?—Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?— human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger–stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
There’s a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door?
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping— would to God that we were dead;
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
— “Speranza” (Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde)
Last Wednesday I attended a preview for a forthcoming Irish film, Black 47 (Director Lance Daly), about the worst year of the catastrophic Irish famine and is set in the west of Ireland in 1847.
The story centers around an Irish soldier, Feeney (James Frecheville), returning from serving the British Army in Afghanistan only to find most of his family have perished in the Famine or An Gorta Mor (the Great Hunger) as it is known in Gaelic.
The English and Irish terms for Ireland’s greatest tragedy are infused with different ideological approaches to the disaster. By emphasising the failure of the potato crop only, the impression is given that there was no food to be had on the island when the opposite was true – there were many other crops which did not fail but were not accessible to the vast majority of the people – hence, the Great Hunger.
Feeney (James Frecheville), Black 47 (Director Lance Daly)
In Black 47, the colonised fight back as Feeney puts the skills he has learned abroad with the British army to effective use in Ireland. He kills or executes the various people involved in the British colonial system he blames for the starvation and death of his family: from the bailiff to the judge to the colonial landlord. Moreover, Feeney goes a step further as he refuses to speak English to those in power before he kills them, reflecting back to them an immediate understanding of the powerlessness of those without the linguistic tools to negotiate compromises (as was seen in the film when a monolingual Irish speaker gets tough justice for ‘refusing’ to speak English in court).
Back in the late 1980s a book entitled ‘The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures‘ [1989] showed how the language and literature of the empire, English, was used by colonised peoples in the creation of a radical culture to aid their resistance to the hegemony of imperial power. However, now with many of his family dead, Feeney has ceased to be a Caliban profiting on the language of his masters and becomes a powerfully drawn hero who is uncompromising in his insistence that the Irish language and culture will be a respected equal to the imposed English language and culture of the colonists.
In the film the ruling class and their hierarchy of supporters are flush with food and the army is used to transport harvested crops to the coast and exportation. This fact is displayed symbolically when one of Feeney’s victims is literally ‘drowned’ in food, as he is found head first in a sack of wheat.
The international aspect of the Black 47 narrative hints at the geopolitics of the day with Feeney’s return from Afghanistan and the concurrent mass emigration to the United States from Ireland. Feeney’s indignation at finding out how his masters have treated his own family and compatriots as he risked his life for them abroad is similar to the treatment of the African-American soldiers of the Vietnam war on their return to the United States.
But this is not a black and white, Irish versus the Brits, movie. There is complexity as some of the British show empathy for the desperate Irish and pay the ultimate price or go on the run.
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
— Francis Bacon
Black 47 is a revenge movie which is cathartic for an audience feeling the utter helplessness of the victims living in a brutal system without real justice, where what should have been their protectors (the law, the state, the army, etc.) became their attackers and betrayed them. In previous food crises, according to Christine Kenealy:
The closure of ports was a traditional, short-term response to food shortages. It had been used to great effect during the subsistence crisis of 1782-4 when, despite the opposition of the grain merchants, ports had been closed and bounties offered to merchants who imported food to the country. During the subsistence crisis of 1799-1800, the government had placed a temporary embargo on the export of potatoes from Ireland. In 1816 and 1821, the British government had organised the shipment of grain into areas in the west of Ireland where there were food shortages. The grain was then sold on at low prices. Similar intervention and market regulation occurred in Britain.
Unfortunately for Ireland, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886), a British civil servant and colonial administrator, was put in charge of administering famine relief. Trevelyan was a student of the economist Thomas Malthus and a believer in laissez faire economics and the free hand of the market. Trevelyan described the famine as an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” as well as “the judgement of God”.
With this change in attitude on the part of the British government towards food shortages, the crisis was doomed from the beginning. Kinealy states:
In 1847 alone, the worst year of the Famine, almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the major ports of Britain, that is, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. Over half of these ships went to Liverpool, the main port both for emigration and for cargo.
Ultimately, one million people starved to death and one million emigrated reducing the population by about 20% – 25%.
Black 47 is an uncompromising film that depicts the harrowing results of a crop failure combined with an ultra exploitative system that knew no moral or legal boundaries. Sure, attempts were made by well-meaning people to alleviate the crisis but the failure of the state to end the crisis on a macro level resulted in an unprecedented disaster for the Irish people. It will go on general release in September.
Further research:
For those interested in finding out more about the Great Hunger, here is a select list of material covering different aspects.
Art
The preview showing of Black 47 was to complement a concurrent exhibtion of art in Dublin Castle showing at the Coach House Gallery until June 30. The exhibition, titled ‘Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger‘, is an exhibition of the world’s largest collection of Famine-related art.
The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy by Tim Pat Coogan
The Graves are Walking by John Kelly
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine edited by J. Crowley, W. J. Smith and M.Murphy.
(Massive hardback volume covering almost all aspects of the famine throughout Ireland, lavishly illustrated.)
National Famine Commemoration Committee
The National Famine Commemoration Committee was first established in 2008 following a Government decision to commemorate the Great Irish Famine with an annual national famine memorial day.
Film Ireland 1848 – ‘An experimental documentary of the Great Irish Famine. Shot as a film might have been shot in 1848 fifty years before the cinema was invented.’
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country at http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/.
WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump is pushing for a broader military offensive in Syria but Defense Secretary James Mattis has resisted for fear of sparking a clash with Russia, media reported citing White House officials.
Trump in meetings with Mattis has pushed for an attack that would also hurt Russia and Iran in addition to the Syrian government in response to an alleged chemical attack in Duma, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters earlier that the National Security Council would be meeting on Friday afternoon to discuss plans for responding to the incident in Syria.
Earlier on Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said during a press briefing that Moscow has substantial evidence confirming that the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Duma on April 7 was a provocation staged with direct involvement of the United Kingdom. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that Russia should get ready for new and “smart” missiles that would be coming to Syria.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Thus spake Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Government of George W. Bush.
I do wish people would study Rove’s words more carefully. Judiciously study them. If they did, then whenever the next alleged atrocity occurs and the United States, together with its coalition of supine vassals, starts yelling and hollering 10 minutes later for action to be taken, on the basis of a test-tube full of washing powder, or pictures of injured women and children in a war zone, and the entire media of dutiful stenographers shrieks that “something must be done”, then perhaps we might pause and wonder if we are being played. Instead of falling into an emotional spasm, maybe we would instead reject the deafening drumbeats of war – wars that have a habit of killing immeasurably more women and children than the alleged incidents on which they are based, by the way — and ask ourselves whether “Rove’s Law” has come into play.
As an aside, the West’s interventionist wars remind me of that wonderfully cynical exchange in the film, The Man With Two Brains:
Dr. Hfuhruhurr: “The only time we doctors should accept death is when it’s caused by our own incompetence!”
Dr. Necessiter: “Nonsense! If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it!”
Here’s Dr. Necessiter selling us into war in Iraq: “Nonsense! If it costs us the deaths of 500,000 people to topple the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, it will have been worth it!”
Here he is selling us bombs on Libya: “Nonsense! If turning Libya into a failed state, a terrorist’s playground, and causing a mass exodus of refugees is the price for getting rid of Gaddafi, it will have been worth it.”
And here’s Dr Necessiter again, this time trying to sell us into bombing Syria: “Nonsense! Risking a catastrophic clash with a country armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is worth it in order to respond to the alleged deaths of less than a hundred people in a totally unproven chemical weapons attack.”
Behold, the “logic” of the interventionists!
But back to Rove. What was he saying? Three things:
Number one: We – that is the Globalist Deep State, centred in Washington DC – are sovereign over the entire globe and we will do as we please.
Number two: That we don’t follow reality, we create it.
Number three: That we are prepared to do things that will make your jaws drop, your hair stand on end, and your eyes boggle as you wonder what is going on, and while your jaws, your hair and your eyes are busy doing their thing, we will have moved on to create our next reality.
In other words – we are God – and not a kind and merciful God, but a God who lords it over all peoples’, nations and tongues, who tells lies, and then tells more lies to cover up those lies and – when you poor saps are trying to work out what it is we’re really up to – before you know what has happened, those lies and those lies to cover up lies will have become the new reality. We’ll have moved on and the world with it, and the narrative we have created will have been written in the history books, which we ourselves shall write.
The cases of Sergei Skripal and the alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta seem somehow to represent the zenith of this ideology.
I do not know who poisoned Sergei Skripal or for what reason. It could be that the Russian Government was behind it, although this would mean accepting the highly improbable thesis that they decided to target a has-been MI6 spy, who they released from prison eight years ago, using perhaps the dumbest assassination method in the history of the world – an ineffective, slow-operating, “military-grade” nerve agent, which could be traced back to them, and which they smeared on a door handle in rainy Salisbury –, a week or so before a Presidential election, and less than 100 days before they are due to host the World Cup. In other words, the official narrative does not rest on accepting that the Russian state is the epitome of pure evil; it rests on accepting that it is the epitome of insanity and bumbling incompetence.
I do not know what happened in Eastern Ghouta. It could be that the Syrian Government was behind what is alleged to have happened (if it indeed did happen), but this would mean having to accept the thesis that just 24 hours away from completely liberating the last pocket of resistance in Damascus, after the US, the UK and France had all warned that they would attack if chemical weapons were used, just a week or so after the US President, Donald J. Swamp, announced that the US would be pulling out of Syria (which they occupied illegally, by the way), they made the decision to use a weapon that gave them no military advantage whatsoever, but which was practically guaranteed to be used as a pretext for airstrikes against them. In other words, like the Skripal case, the theory does not stand on accepting that the Syrian state is the epitome of pure evil; it stands on accepting that it is the epitome of self-defeating stupidity on an epic scale.
But you see what I’ve done? I’ve fallen right into Karl Rove’s trap, haven’t I? I’m asking questions about whether the narratives in these cases stack up. In the Skripal case, I’ve been judiciously studying reality by asking lots of questions that ought to have occurred to anyone with a keen interest in arriving at the truth (here and here, for instance). I could do the same with the Syrian case, if I had the time.
Yet while I’m doing so, the narrative is moving on. I’m falling into exactly the trap that Karl and his disciples have laid. They want two sorts of people: those who just blindly accept that it was the Russians wot did it, or that it was Assad wot did it; and those who spend their time asking questions about the official explanations. The first group call the second group conspiracy theorists and nutters. The second group call the first group dumb sheeple. And the Globalist Deep State laughs and laughs and laughs as the two groups battle it out to make sense of what has happened, leaving it free to march on to create the next reality. Truly I tell you, these Bolsheviks have learnt their Hegelian Dialectics well.
Now, this is not to rule out that in the Salisbury and Eastern Ghouta cases the official narratives might – just might – be the correct ones. That both Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be the Laurel and Hardy of Geopolitics. Yet it has to be said that whatever else you think about them, neither of them tends to come across in interviews as being what you might call dumb or inept. Nor do either of them give the impression that they have sudden insane impulses to do things which have absolutely no benefit to them, but which hand their enemies massive PR victories.
But this is beside the point. The point is not whether these particular incidents are what the official narrative says they are, or whether they are provocations. It suffices for the “new reality creators” to create their realities on occasion, or perhaps to distort occurrences which they didn’t create, and before you know it you have your two groups battling over events which may be real or fake: the conspiracists – who are studying every event to try to work out the details and the inconsistencies – and the sheeple – who believe that their Government is full of good hearted, white hatted chaps and lasses who would never, ever do anything bad – unlike those orcs over in Mordor.
Rove and Co have basically created a “reality” where truth is no longer discernible, where assertions of guilt are taken as fact, and where holes in these kinds of incidents only serve to divide the people further, so that the Globalist Deep State can move on to create their next reality.
But let’s not get gloomy. The good news is that although they clearly think they can get away with it indefinitely, they can’t. No kingdom or empire built on a mountain of lies can stand indefinitely. They all fall. And can’t you start to sense the signs that the empire’s “new realities” – or what are known as lies in laymen’s terms – are reaching boiling point? Don’t you sense that they have just got too confident and in doing so have begun to get careless? They are making mistakes. And as they do, they are having to resort to bigger and bigger lies to cover up the ones they’ve already told.
Sadly for Rove and Co, but happily for the rest of us, the world doesn’t actually work the way they think it does. Reality — I mean real reality, rather than the phony reality they have created — will catch up sooner or later. I sense that it’s on its way even now. And when it finally comes, the whole rotten edifice that these “history’s actors” have tried to create will crash and burn. Bringing much rejoicing.
The Russian Defense Ministry has criticized the Western-led coalition for creating a sanitation emergency in Raqqa after it took the Syrian city from Islamic State, but failed to organize a clean-up or rebuild.
“The epidemiological situation in Raqqa remains very grave. There are still thousands of corpses rotting underneath the debris,” said Russian Ministry of Defense spokesman Igor Konashenkov, during a press briefing in Moscow.
The official outlined the difference between the reconstruction efforts in cities taken back by government forces, such as Aleppo, where “schools, hospitals and markets have reopened” and those like Raqqa, which have largely been left to their own devices.
Over two-thirds of Raqqa, the city Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) once designated its unofficial capital, was destroyed during a four-month battle that ended in October 2017. The majority of the damage, according to Konashenkov, was inflicted by US airstrikes on the city, which was previously home to around 300,000 people and is now under the loose control of Kurdish militias.
Members of the first UN Humanitarian Mission sent to the city in recent weeks wrote that they “were shocked by the level of destruction, which exceeded anything they had ever seen before.” Noting that “public services barely exist and there is no safe water or electricity,” the mission was alarmed by “widespread presence of explosive hazards, including unexploded ordnance, landmines and improvised explosive devices,” abandoned by Islamic State, and a cause of over 130 deaths between October 2017 and February 2018.
A location report from AP, published last week, said that only one bulldozer was available for excavating bodies, and that “the stench of death rises from crushed buildings” as insects swarm the streets. Locals also told the newspaper that violent crime goes unchecked, and that former IS militants are allowed to live freely among the population.
The ever excellent Campaign Against the Arms Trade is back in the English High Court again today in its continuing attempts to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia. It is against UK law to sell arms to a country which is likely to use them in breach of international humanitarian law, and that Saudi Arabia consistently and regularly uses British weapons to bomb schools, hospitals and civilians is indisputable.
Unfortunately the courts are an instrument of power and control for the 1%, not an impartial resort for justice, so I fear CAAT will not succeed despite the fact their case is undeniably correct.
Part of the British Government’s defence is the close military support it gives to Saudi Arabia, which it claims minimises civilian deaths (it plainly does no such thing). Thousands of children have died in the Yemeni war, most killed by the Saudis and their allies. These war crimes have been documented by the United Nations despite concerted UK and US diplomacy at the UN aimed at downplaying the Saudi crimes. Cluster bombs, white phosphorous and other illegal weapons have frequently been used.
Yemeni dead children very seldom make in into the mainstream media, whereas Syrian children do. But not all Syrian children – those children killed by the jihadist head-choppers the West and its Saudi allies have armed, funded and “advised” do not make the corporate and state media either. Only children allegedly – and the word needs repeating, allegedly – gassed by the Syrian armed forces are apparently worth our attention.
If we really attack because we care about the children, we would be attacking Saudi Arabia to halt its atrocities in Yemen. Instead we are allying with Saudi Arabia – the child killers, UK military support to whom is today being stressed in the High Court – to attack Syria.
Anybody who believes this is anything to do with “humanitarian intervention” is a complete fool.
The world is being pushed to the brink of catastrophic war. US President Trump and his French and British counterparts are threatening to launch military strikes on Syria in the coming days.
Donald Trump has bragged about “smart” missiles coming. French President Emmanuel Macron says “we will strike at a time of our choosing”. Who are these madmen? What right have they to threaten world peace?
It could be all just bravado, but even the mere use of threat is completely intolerable and criminal.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has warned that any such action will precipitate a region-wide war. With Saudi Arabia and Israel saying that they will join in the actions of the above NATO trio to attack Syria, Assad’s warning of mayhem is a grimly accurate prognosis.
Iran has said it will defend its ally Syria if it comes under attack. Russia has also given notice that any US-led intervention will be responded to with force. We are thus on the cusp of an explosive war if the US and its allies proceed with their threats to launch military strikes. The risk of a devastating escalation is a clear and present danger.
American, French and British warships and warplanes are converging in the East Mediterranean within striking distance of Syria.
Russia has beseeched the NATO powers to come to their senses and back off from their war plans.
France’s President Macron says that he does not want an escalation of violence. Macron is either cynical or deluded. If the NATO powers follow through with their threats to launch strikes on Syria, then escalation is almost inevitable.
Lest we forget, the US, France and Britain are already acting illegally by their past four years of “low-level” bombing of Syria. A case can be made that the governments of these three NATO powers are already in breach of international law from their aerial bombing campaigns in Syria. Regardless of their hollow claims of fighting terrorism in that country, they stand accused of war crimes. The American destruction of the Syrian city of Raqqa last year with thousands of casualties is sufficient evidence of massive criminality.
Then there is the incontrovertible evidence that the US, Britain and France have for the past seven years covertly ransacked Syria with their clandestine support of terrorist proxies – the very groups whom they mendaciously claim to be fighting against.
The Syrian war has been all about a criminal covert war for regime change, orchestrated and fomented by the US and its allies. The fact that the terror proxies for regime change have been defeated by the Syrian army along with its allies Russia, Iran and Hezbollah is being distorted by Western media propaganda. Instead of acknowledging this historic victory, Western governments are rushing to create a pretext for direct intervention.
This week sees the Syrian army and Russia finally recapturing the last bastion of the Western-backed terror proxies in the Eastern Ghouta suburb near the capital Damascus. The war is over, or should be over. But the US and its allies are pushing for a last-ditch excuse to launch a full-on war against Syria.
And if these powers do proceed with their strike plan, it is on the back of an outrageous false-flag provocation involving alleged chemical weapons.
The UN inspectors have not even begun to carry out their investigation into what happened last weekend in Eastern Ghouta where the last-remaining terrorist groups claimed that Syrian government forces carried out a chemical weapons attack on civilians. There is no evidence of such an attack, except for videos of very dubious provenance sourced from the terror groups.
Syrian and Russian forces say there is no evidence of a chemical attack. Red Crescent medics on the ground have also said there is no evidence. The entire episode is a dubious claim sourced from dubious sources and given the usual Western media saturated, unverified coverage.
France’s Macron upped the ante this week, stating that he has “proof” that chemical weapons were used by the Syrian “regime”. Macron is recklessly raising the stakes for a joint military attack on Syria by the US, Britain and France.
But where is Macron’s “proof”. He doesn’t show any. This is typical of the illegal conduct of Western governments who make sensational claims without any substantiation. If the Syrian and Russian authorities are correct in their assessment, then Macon is a deluded liar.
The French leader – who has plenty of political woes at home with nationwide industrial strikes – is said to be goading Trump to take military action.
For the past two decades, the US, British and French have been on a bombing spree around the world, killing millions of innocents in their Neo-imperialist intrigues. The Middle East and Africa has been devastated from their illegal wars.
Yemen, to mention just one country, is being subjected to a genocidal war in which millions of children are starving from a barbaric blockade of that country by Saudi Arabia, armed and fuelled by the US, Britain and France. Yemen is a monumental war crime. And yet, grotesquely, the world is told by the war-criminal governments of the US, Britain and France that they are going to bomb Syria to “protect civilians” on the back of a lie.
World peace is being threatened by despicable rogue regimes that are telling lies with sanctimonious smirks.
Russia is right to hold firm. The rogue regimes of the US, Britain and France must not be allowed to hold the world hostage with their rampant state-sponsored terrorism. The Western powers like to talk about “red lines”. They have crossed many red lines already with the blood of millions splattered over the globe. Bombing Syria is a final red line.
Facing down Western aggression in Syria is only the beginning. The Western public must follow up by bringing their war criminals in high office to justice.
Jaysh al-Islam militants leaving Douma under the framework of an evacuation agreement were forced to give up their weapons, including Israeli-made sniper rifles and Belgian-made rockets and machineguns, a security source has told Sputnik Arabic.
3,792 people, including 1,384 militants and members of their families, are being evacuated from Douma and taken to the town of Jarabulus in northeastern Aleppo, northern Syria on 85 buses, with the withdrawal expected to stretch out over two days. Militants have also agreed to give up their heavy weapons by Thursday.
Late last month, Douma residents took to the streets urging militants to join the ceasefire. This week, civilians took over several warehouses previously used by militants to hoard food, fuel, and other supplies as a means of controlling the population.
Russian military police forces have entered the town to help ensure law and order as reconstruction begins.
The Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation confirmed Thursday that the Syrian operation launched in mid-February to free Eastern Ghouta from a collection of Islamist groups has officially wrapped up.
“Today, a landmark event in the history of the Syrian Arab Republic took place. The state flag flown over a building… in the city of Douma marked the regained control over this settlement, and consequently over the entirety of Eastern Ghouta,” Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, head of Russia’s center for Syrian reconciliation, told reporters.
The Syrian Army launched Operation Damascus Steel on February 18 to clear the militant-held Eastern Ghouta pocket following years of militant shelling into the Syrian capital. Prior to its liberation, the region had been held by Jaysh al-Islam, the Al-Rahman Legion, Ahrar al-Sham, and the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.
In the course of Operation Damascus Steel, the Syrian military has been finding large stocks of small arms, artillery shells, anti-tank missiles, and other supplies made in Israel, the US, and other NATO countries.
Americans desperate for news from the Syrian front, where an alleged chemical attack has prompted the Trump administration to consider a military strike against Damascus, are in for a real disappointment. Any balanced discussion of a possible military offensive against Syria, which Moscow has warned would have “grave consequences,” has been swept clean from the news slate.
On Wednesday morning, in an apparent state of wishful thinking mixed with a dash of masochism, I consulted multiple US news sites to see how the Syrian crisis was being reported. Expecting to find large-font headlines warning of a possible military offensive, not to mention World War 3, I was greeted instead with multi-layered stories on former porn star, Stormy Daniels, and her 10-year old affair with Donald Trump. I’m guessing there was a Russian connection to that salacious story somewhere, but exactly where I could not immediately say.
The lead story in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, for example, was headlined, “Investigators sought Trump lawyer’s records on two women who alleged affairs with president.” Next to that salacious piece of bozo journalism was another nothing burger, at least as far as the Syrian crisis is concerned, which discussed the current trials and tribulations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (“Zuckerberg apologizes, promises reform during hours-long Senate grilling over Facebook’s failings”). While that may seem like important news to some, it pales in comparison with the prospect of the US launching an attack on the Syrian government.
Buried deep below that media debris and detritus was a single story devoted to Syria, headlined: “Nerve gas in Syria attack, leaving victims ‘foaming at the mouth,’ evidence suggests.” This glaringly one-sided narrative, much like the one used last month in the Salisbury ‘chemical attack’ that allegedly sickened Sergey Skripal and his daughter, is tenuous at best, a bald-faced lie at worst. Indeed, judging by an examination of the site carried out by Russian experts and the Syrian Red Cross, no trace of chemical weapons could be found.
A switch to CNN provided a near duplicate of The Post’s paucity of pickings, albeit with a slightly different twist. “Trump considering firing Rosenstein, sources say,” was the headline of the main story, which shows that the ‘Russiagate’ show trial is beginning to eat its tail, yet the media – after almost two years – just can’t resist reporting on it. Next to that show-stopper, US media consumers are provided yet another cure for insomnia with riveting details on Zuckerberg’s 5-hour grilling by the US Senate.
Finally, a CNNarticle on Syria. Yet the headline says everything we need to know as far as what the American consumer of mainstream media fare is permitted to think: “Haley says Russia chose ‘protecting a monster’ over Syrian people” (Incidentally, this is same way US political elections are carried out. There is freedom, but only a severely limited freedom that allows the populace to ‘freely’ choose between candidates that have already been carefully selected by the powers-that-be).
Below that gratuitous bugle blast for war is an open letter to the US leader, entitled, “President Trump, now is not the time for half-baked military action.” Translation: “President Trump, now is the time for full-blown military action”
Here is CNN opinionator Sam Kiley inveighing against the Syrian government, using cheap emotional imagery as a substitute for hardnosed facts: “Outrage over the images of children frozen in death, their mouths gagged with foam as the alleged victims of another Syrian government gas attack on its own people, has led Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, to call the perpetrator behind the attack “a monster.”
“Such passionate intensity is understandable,” Kiley continues, building up momentum for a hysterical Hitler analogy. “There’s something visceral about killing with gas. It recalls the Holocaust. It conjures up almost identical photographs of Saddam Hussein’s attack on the Kurds of Halabja.”
Ah, yes. The sweet sound of impartial journalism. What is so deplorable about this brand of so-called reporting is that it refuses to consider the very high probability that it was not the Syrian government that resorted to chemical weapons in Douma, but rather the rebel forces, who were suffering on every military front up until that point. Would President Bashar Assad really be so reckless to risk a chemical attack at the very moment he was bringing to an end an 8-year struggle against terrorist-infiltrated militants in his country? Common sense would say no.
It’s not that the American people are inherently stupid to believe such absurd claims; it’s that they are woefully misinformed by a media machine that is marching in lockstep – sometimes even owned – by the military industrial complex. Mark Twain summed up the Catch-22 situation confronting Americans: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
And it is not just the run-of-the-mill news sources that are serving as cheerleaders for imperialistic regime change operations. The purportedly intelligent ‘thinking man’ publications are also peddling a shameless pro-war stance, which takes the government line for granted.
In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, for example, investigative journalism is reduced to roadkill in the rush to war. In an article entitled, “The Logic of Assad’s Brutality,” it is obvious that the magazine has already predetermined Assad’s guilt. Yet the UN weapons inspectors have not even reached Syria to begin their investigative work? What kind of journalist could put his name on an article that could only be called an elaborate piece of pro-war propaganda?
And then there is the ‘conservative’ journal Foreign Policy, which argued in an article entitled ‘Macron needs to Attack Syria’: “It’s not clear whether France can count on the United States to commit to the enforcement of any red lines against the Assad regime. But this should only concentrate Macron’s mind. If the United States abstains, he should prepare, for the sake of not only his personal credibility, but French national interests, to strike alone.”
No call for restraint, no call for evidence, no suggestion that the terrorists may have been to blame. Just a reckless gunshot from the hip to settle matters, and who cares if it may trigger a global conflagration.
This only serves to prove that the United States, and its people, learned absolutely nothing from the Iraq War, which saw the same brazen disregard for legal precedent by launching an attack against Saddam Hussein in 2003, the consequences of which we are experiencing to this day. As the UN weapon inspectors were on the ground, practically screaming that they could not locate weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration shrugged off these uncomfortable truths and carried out its diabolical designs anyways.
In reality, the US did learn one valuable lesson from the Iraq War. It learned it can manipulate the opinions of the people to an astonishing degree. By using the entire media leviathan to coordinate a hate campaign against one state leader, in this case Bashar Assad, it can make the people forget legal precedent, not to mention common sense.
There is a vast industry in the United States that wants a hot war with Syria and Iran as well as increased confrontation with Russia and China. It is appropriate to refer to it as an industry because it has many components and is largely driven by money, much of which itself comes from Wall Street and major corporations that profit from war related business. Some prefer to refer to this monster as the Military Industrial Complex, but since that phrase was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, it has grown enormously, developing a political dimension that includes a majority of congressmen who are addicted to receiving a tithe from the profits from the war economy to finance their own campaigns, permitting them to stay in office indefinitely and retire comfortably to a lobbying position or corporate directorship.
The defense industry also has spawned hundreds of so-called think-tanks whose sole business is promoting war. Some, like the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, have a clear agenda, but the most powerful rely on euphemisms to conceal what they are doing. They include the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, both of which promote a hard-line foreign policy directed against Iran and Russia, to include intensified confrontation with both in Syria.
The national media, which also benefits from the same food chain, is also complicit in the process, knowing that the public can easily be deceived by pronouncements coming from alleged experts in Washington. Leading politicians like Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain lead the pack but there is no shortage of lesser known congressmen to also raise the cry about foreign threats to national security. Regarding developments in Syria, Graham advised last weekend that Trump must attack and destroy the Syrian Air Force or “look weak” while McCain said White House talk of pulling troops out of the country had “emboldened” al-Assad.
Unenlightened self-interest prevails in the White House over the formulation of policy, with the public interest completely lost from sight as high officials jockey in support of the agendas being promoted by those with money and access to those in power. There is no other explanation for the astonishing performance last weekend, which pushed the United States closer to a new war in spite of Trump’s earlier expressed claims that he wants to exit from Syria, a comment that he quickly backed away from under pressure from the Israelis and Congress.
But now we have a dubious narrative of a horrible new chemical weapon attack in Syria and the Israelis, who have spent the past two weeks shooting two thousand unarmed demonstrators, have attacked a Syrian airbase, killing 14, pretending that they care about civilian casualties when all they really want to do is jumpstart a seven-year war which has been winding down.
Anyone could see there was something not quite right about this latest “chemical attack,” supposedly implemented by Bashar al-Assad just as his troops are about to finish off the last rebels near Damascus. But Donald Trump apparently could not appreciate that the Syrian government had no motive to use chemical weapons, while the rebels, who control the space where the attack supposedly took place, have every reason to motivate an international coalition to attack the Syrian Army.
At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning the President of the United States sent out this tweet:
Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay…
Donald Trump could not have possibly known who staged the gas attack so soon after it occurred, but he felt compelled to tweet something anyway. And it was not as if other observers hadn’t suspected that a big lie was coming. Days before the staged attack, the Russian Defense Ministry warned that a false flag incident was being prepared.
One hour later, the Sunday morning talk shows in the US were full of reports about the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. No one contradicted that narrative and the news was soon headlined in the late editions of the Sunday newspapers. “Fake news” had won out again, in spite of a complete lack or evidence or credibility. This is completely crazy. There is something very wrong with what is going on currently in the United States.
Referring to President Trump’s condemnation of the Justice Department’s violation of attorney-client privilege with its subpoena on Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, the New York Times writes in an editorial today, “Anyway, one might ask, if … Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the privilege in the first place?”
Of course, one has to ask why the Times doesn’t address the same question to the CIA with respect to the upcoming April 26 deadline for the release of official records relating to the JFK assassination: If the CIA has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does it care whether the National Archives releases the records that the CIA has been keeping secret for more than 50 years? Why does it continue fighting the release of those long secret records?
Trump would probably respond to the Times by saying: The principle of the attorney-client privilege is such an important part of a free society that it is worth fighting to preserve even if someone has nothing to hide.
The CIA, on the other hand, can’t make the same type of argument. The best it can do is come up with the standard “national-security” justification for continued secrecy, which, as everyone knows, has been used to cover up all sorts of official crimes and other wrongdoing ever since the federal government was converted into a national-security state after World War II.
After all, let’s state the patently obvious: If the National Archives complies with the JFK Records Act and releases the CIA’s long-secret JFK assassination-related records, the United States is not going to fall into the ocean and the federal government is not going to fall to the communists.
In other words, no matter what definition is placed on that nebulous term “national security,” the United States and the federal government will continue to exist.
After all, think of all the secret records that the JFK Records Act and the Assassination Records Review Board succeeded in getting disclosed back in the 1990s. The CIA, the Pentagon, the Secret Service, the FBI, and other federal agencies had succeeded in keeping those records secret for some 30 years, on grounds of “national security.” When they were released, nothing happened. The United States continued standing.
After the lapse of 50 years, even the old tried-and-true justification for secrecy — that somebody might retaliate against some CIA assassin — doesn’t hold muster. That’s because CIA assassins in the 1960s are either dead or sitting in some retirement home waiting to die.
There is only one conceivable reason for the CIA’s wish for continued secrecy in the JFK assassination: It does have something illegal and untoward to hide: that it conspired to effect a domestic regime-change operation against President Kennedy, the president that decided to go to war against the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the U.S. national security establishment over the future direction of the United States. (See JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)
That’s why “national security” and secrecy surrounded the JFK assassination from the get-go. Secrecy was absolutely essential to the success of the plot and the cover-up.
Think about the official story: A lone-nut assassin suddenly decides to kill the president. He in turn is killed two days later. End of story. The investigation is quickly shut down. Everything is shrouded in secrecy. Even the Warren Commission hearings are held in secret. “National security” is cited.
Does any of that make sense? If it’s just some lone nut that has killed the president, why any secrecy at all? How could “national security” apply to a random murder?
In fact, as one begins to critically analyze the evidence in the case, a mosaic begins forming: Everything is just too pat. As it would be in a frame-up and cover-up.
Indeed, as the circumstantial evidence in the case has slowly been released over the decades, especially in the 1990s, it has overwhelmingly pointed in the direction of a frame-up of Lee Harvey Oswald, the purported assassin.
For one thing, no motive. Proponents of the lone-nut theory have always maintained that Oswald killed Kennedy because Oswald was a little man who wanted to kill a big man. Really? Then why did he deny having committed the offense?
In fact, Oswald did more than deny it. He himself alleged that he was being framed. That’s what he meant when he called himself a “patsy.”
The circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact that Oswald was working in some capacity for U.S. intelligence, either CIA, FBI, or Naval Intelligence. After all, he was a U.S. Marine. How many communist Marines have you ever heard of? Why would a genuine communist even join the Marines, especially in the 1950s when Marines could easily be sent back to Korea or to Vietnam to kill communists? It makes no sense.
But if you have an intelligence agent whose job it is to pose as a communist, then you have a perfect patsy to frame, especially because no one outside a very tight intelligence circle would know that Oswald was, in fact, an intelligence agent or informant.
As former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley has discovered from an investigation and close examination of long-secret CIA records, the CIA, contrary to what it has stated ever since the assassination, was closely monitoring Oswald ever since he left the Marines and moved to the Soviet Union. That tight surveillance continued all the way up to the weeks preceding the assassination.
There are two possible reasons for the surveillance.
One possibility is because they considered Oswald to be a threat to “national security.” But if that was the case, why not indict, harass, and abuse him, like they were doing to suspected communists like Martin Luther King? And why not advise the FBI and Dallas authorities prior to JFK’s visit to Dallas? And why keep the existence of that surveillance secret for decades?
The other possibility: They were monitoring their intelligence agent and then, later, setting him up as a patsy in the JFK assassination. A frame-up would have required keeping the patsy under close watch, not only to place him in a position to be framed but also to make sure that he didn’t figure out what they were doing to him.
There were two major things that pointed to Oswald’s supposed bona fides as a communist after the assassination: his activities in New Orleans and his trip to Mexico City, both of which, interestingly enough, have connections to the CIA.
In New Orleans, Oswald was pamphleteering for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the CIA and the FBI were intent on destroying. While engaged in that activity, Oswald made contact with an organization named the DRE, which, as it turns out, was being secretly funded and supervised by the CIA.
That’s another thing that Morley uncovered: that a CIA agent named George Joannides was the CIA’s liaison with the DRE. The CIA knowingly and intentionally kept that fact secret from threee different official organizations that investigated the JFK assassination: the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee, and the ARRB.
Why the secrecy regarding Joannides? Because the DRE was the very first organization that began advertising Oswald’s communist bona fides immediately after the assassination, with the support of Joannides and the CIA. The CIA didn’t want anyone to know that they were behind the DRE’s post-assassination advertising campaign.
To this day, the CIA steadfastly refuses to release its files relating to Joannides. Such files are apparently not even part of the CIA records that are set to be released on April 26. The CIA never turned over its Joannides records at all to the National Archives, notwithstanding the fact that the JFK Records Act required it to do so.
What’s the CIA hiding and why?
Oswald’s trip to Mexico City was also intended to show that he was a genuine communist. Instead, however, the official investigation into that trip was quickly shut down and today it is still shrouded in mystery. Perhaps the reason is because everything that could go wrong with that part of the operation did.
The CIA’s records relating to Mexico City are part of the records that the National Archives is set to release on April 26. My prediction: Those records will never see the light of day. The American people will not — cannot — be permitted to view them. There can be only one reason for that — no, not “national security” — but rather because the records show that the CIA has something to hide — its participation in the assassination of president Kennedy and its cover-up involving the framing of a U.S. intelligence agent who had been trained to pose as a communist.
When the JFK Records Act was enacted, it was the last thing the U.S. national-security establishment wanted. As far as they were concerned, they wanted everything to remain secret forever. But they did get a 25-year extension for secrecy, which must have felt like an eternity to CIA officials back then.
That 25-year period expired last October. When it arrived, the CIA pleaded for President Trump for more time and more secrecy. Trump gave them 6 more months, which expires on April 26. My prediction: The CIA will plead for even more time and more secrecy. It really has no other choice. That’s because it really does have something to hide. My other prediction: that for some reason Trump will give them what they want, which will ensure that the JFK cover-up will continue.
Yaser Murtaja was a Palestinian journalist acting in his professional capacity when he was murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). He was covering the second Great Return March in Gaza and was clearly identified as press when an Israeli sniper fired a fatal shot.
Yaser Murtaja should not be forgotten. His death must be uppermost in our minds when the Syrian government is accused of deliberately murdering a journalist and is sued for $300 million in a United States court. Marie Colvin was covering the Syrian war in 2012 for the British newspaper The Sunday Times. She was killed when the Syrian army shelled the building where she and others were embedded with the Free Syrian Army, a group committed to regime change. The court filing claims that the Syrian government tracked Colvin’s movement and assassinated her. Ordinarily foreign governments can’t be sued in United States courts but as a designated “terrorist” state the rule does not apply to Syria.
War propaganda is the order of the day in the ongoing effort to continue war in Syria. President Bashar Assad has been accused of carrying out chemical weapons attacks against his people ever since the American backed effort began in 2011. We are told to believe that he would carry out these attacks on the same day that United Nations inspectors arrive or whenever he is winning on the battlefield.
The real issue is that Assad is still the president of Syria with the help of his Russian and Iranian allies. He has defeated the terrorists sent to unseat him and he and his allies are forces to be reckoned with. NATO governments know that their people will not support war against his country unless they believe that he is an evil dictator who gasses babies every day.
His opponents are armed with money and contacts at the highest levels of the American and European governments. There is an entire media industry devoted to disparaging him and in so doing making the case for continued war. The White Helmets are a fiction, a creation of al Qaeda, an organization we are otherwise told to hate and fear. Far from being disinterested rescuers the White Helmets are part of the terror network that has nearly destroyed Syria and killed thousands of people. They routinely stage footage of their rescues and of gas attacks but only the leftist media dare to point out that easily provable fact.
The White Helmets are not alone. Every anti-Assad lie comes with the seal of approval from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Despite the grandiose name the SOHR is just one man living in the U.K. named Rami Abdel Rahman. Rahman is a native Syrian who actually hasn’t been inside his homeland in 16 years.
This week the SOHR reports chlorine gas attacks carried out against the civilian population by the Assad government. The moment is very opportune but there is no evidence that the latest reported attack took place at all. The terrorists use these charges to regroup and to be given safe passage so that they may attack another day. The lies are not just propagandistic. They are tools for continuing this horrible conflict.
The corporate media share in the culpability. They have chosen sides and repeat verbatim every outlandish fiction that will make the case for imperialism. None of them allow a counter narrative to see the light of day. There are many knowledgeable people whose expertise would call into question charges of gas attacks and assassinated reporters. But they are disappeared from discourse and casual followers of the news have no idea that they exist.
The lawsuit in the Marie Colvin case is nothing but war propaganda. Her family will never collect from the Syrian government but that isn’t the point of this case. Is it meant to create a compliant population who will believe anything they are told and not ask questions when the United States starts a hot war with Syria and its Russian and Iranian allies.
Who will file a lawsuit on behalf of Yaser Murtaja? He died covering protests that Palestinians have a right to hold according to international law. But Israel doesn’t need to respect the law because of American financial and military support. If there were justice both of those governments would be sued or better yet their leaders would be tried at the Hague as war criminals.
The Israelis brag that they “know where every bullet lands.” This ghoulish statement is a confession that they knowingly shot and killed a member of the press corps. His family will have no right to sue that government or its patron the United States. There is no hand wringing for Murtaja in the corporate media or from liberals who think themselves humanitarian.
Marie Colvin was killed because she was covering a war zone and was embedded with a group devoted to Assad’s overthrow. Ms. Colvin had already lost the sight in one eye after covering another war in Sri Lanka. She knew the risks of her profession and continued to take them. There is no comparison between her death and Murtaja, a man who was trapped in Gaza with 2 million other people and who devoted himself to chronicling their oppression.
Some victims are considered worthy and others are thought to be unworthy. Some are ignored and others are elevated so that the rulers can get away with advocating evil deeds. Of course no one would have died in Syria if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton hadn’t joined with NATO and monarchy states to destroy another nation after their gruesome success in Libya. Perhaps the next lawsuit should target them and their cronies. That would be true justice.
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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