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The Ultimate Case Against the Churchill Cult

By Keith Knight | The Libertarian Institute | September 7, 2024

According to the National WWII Museum, the Second World War resulted in 45,000,000 civilian deaths, 15,000,000 combat deaths, and 25,000,000 soldiers permanently wounded.

This is what many academics and media influencers refer to as “The Good War.”

Just as we cannot truly understand a court case hearing only the defense, we must also hear the prosecution in order to come to the most accurate conclusion on who is guilty, who is innocent, and how such a tragedy can be avoided in the future.

I want to make the case that the Second World War is in fact a tale of good vs. evil. In short, evil politicians on every side conscripting millions of people and murdering millions of others while the civilians of all countries remain good.

Since there is no shortage of people rightfully vilifying the Japanese Empire and the German National Socialists, I would like to focus primarily on the villainy of a man who Cambridge University reports is the “Greatest Briton”: Winston Churchill.

Exhibit A: Starvation Blockade

Winston Churchill wrote a book titled, The World Crisis, 1911-1918. In this book Churchill summarizes the British naval policy during World War I when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. On page 672, Churchill writes.

“The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population – men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission.”

Notice, Churchill did not say, “This is how we will make the Kaiser suffer and prove we are the good people in this conflict by protecting innocent people. We good men must discriminate between evil Germans and innocent Germans.” The Kaiser was humiliated of course, but was never assassinated, and lived in a mansion in the Netherlands after the war was over, dying in 1941 at the age of 82.

According to historian Martin Gilbert, a man who writes Churchill in a very favorable light in his book The First World War: A Complete History, estimates of the civilian death toll from Britain’s blockade are 762,106.

Many people might have predicted that such protectionist policies would stimulate the German economy since Germany would now have to employ more people domestically, which should produce the multiplier effect of money. But of course, the opposite is true. When any state coercively stops a group of people from engaging in mutually beneficial trades, human beings suffer and frequently die as a result.

Exhibit B: Poison Gas and Biological Warfare

On May 12, 1919, Winston Churchill authored a war office memorandum in which he writes:

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those effected.”

Would you have a friend in your life if he used poison gas against people he deemed uncivilized in order to spread a lively terror? Any one of us would be rightfully imprisoned for assault if we used poison gas against a non-aggressor. Yet, Churchill is still celebrated as a respectable statesman even though none of us would accept this behavior from any other person in our private lives.

In 1942, the United Kingdom’s War Department Experimental station conspired to infect the German civilian population with deadly anthrax by first poisoning animals, in hopes that the German food supply would turn deadly. According to the BBC in an article discussing the “island of death” off the coast of Scotland:

“The truth was that Gruinard Island had been the site of a clandestine attempt by the UK during World War Two to weaponise anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection… The project, called Operation Vegetarian, had started under Paul Fildes, then head of the biology department at Porton Down, a military facility in Wiltshire, England, that still exists today… The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. The cows would eat the cakes and contract anthrax, as would those who ate the infected meat. Anthrax is a naturally occurring but deadly organism… The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous death toll.”

Those fighting on behalf of civilization, truth, and freedom must lead the world in distinguishing themselves from the “bad guys” by explicitly discriminating between guilty and innocent parties. Churchill took no such steps to distinguish between the German civilian population, and the central figures of the national socialist state (Hitler, Hess, Goering, Eichmann, Goebbels, etc).

Exhibit C: De-Housing Policy

As the history of World War II is described in its cartoonish version with the National Socialists being hell bent on taking over planet Earth and killing all non-blue eyed, blond haired people, one can be forgiven for not knowing that it was Churchill’s government which initiated the bombing of civilians in May 1940, while the German bombing of London did not take place until the September 1940 Blitz.

The mastermind behind Winston Churchill’s policy of civilian bombing was German immigrant, physicist, and science advisor Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell. Lindemann established the S-Branch (Statistical Branch), an esoteric group of academics who regularly advised Prime Minister Churchill, and eventually was the catalyst behind Britain’s “Dehousing” policy with regard to the German civilian population.

This “Dehousing” policy was explained by Charles Percy Snow, whose position in Churchill’s cabinet was described by Britannica as “a scientific advisor to the British government” during the Second World War. In 1961, Harvard University published Snow’s Science and Government, a series of lectures Snow gave at Harvard describing the internal workings of British policy from 1939-1945. On page 48 of the lecture’s transcript, Snow claims:

“… [T]he paper on bombing went out to the top government scientists. It described, in quantitative terms, the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942-September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that—given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft—it would be possible, in all larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.”

The strategic bombing policy was also explained by Principal Assistant Secretary of Air Ministry J.M. Spaight in his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated :

“Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany… Yet, because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’… It could have harmed us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to bomb towns.”

In 1979, British journalist and military historian Max Hastings (foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor in chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard ) published Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939-45. On page 127-8, Hastings cites the Cherwell Memorandum (aka Lindemann Memorandum) which he delivered to Prime Minister Churchill in March of 1942. The memorandum reads as follows:

“The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany. Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20-40 dwellings and turns 100-200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on nearly 14 operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be about three tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they will make 4,000-8,000 people homeless.

In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these fifty-eight German towns, the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home.

Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.

Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc., in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.” [Emphasis Added]

Exhibit D: Intentional Provocation of Bombing Britain

The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, who at the time was chairman of the French National Committee, addresses Churchill’s mindset after the British state initiated the bombing of civilians with no German state response for months. From page 104 of his memoirs, de Gaulle writes:

“Among the people many, in their desire to emerge from an almost unbearable tension, went so far as to say out loud that they wished the enemy would risk the attack. Foremost among them, Mr. Churchill found the waiting hard to bear. I can still see him at Chequers, one August day, raising his fists towards the sky as he cried, ‘So they won’t come!’ ‘Are you in such a hurry,’ I said to him, ‘to see your towns smashed to bits?’ ‘You see,’ he replied, ‘the bombing of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury, will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States that they’ll come into the war!’”

Churchill knew the blowback his de-housing policy would create for British civilians, and he still unapologetically pursued them.

Exhibit E: France’s Pearl Harbor aka Operation Catapult

On July 3, 1940 Churchill initiated Operation Catapult, which was Britain’s intentional bombing of French naval ships off the coast of Algeria resulting in the deaths of 1,297 French soldiers.

According to the International Churchill Society:

“In the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill faced a terrible dilemma. France had just surrendered and only the English Channel stood between the Nazi’s and Britain. Germany was poised to seize the entire French fleet, one of the biggest in the world. With these ships in his hands, Hitler’s threat to invade Britain could become a reality. Churchill had to make a choice. He could either trust the promises of the new French government that they would never hand over their ships to Hitler. Or he could make sure that the ships never joined the German navy by destroying them himself.”

Exhibit F: Dresden

Arthur Harris was a British air officer whom whom Britannica credits as the person “who initiated and directed the ‘saturation bombing’ that the Royal Air Force inflicted on Germany during World War II.” In his memoir Bomber Offensive, Harris addresses the Dresden controversy, where the Allies bombed a city of 630,000 Germans, killing roughly 25,000 human beings in two days:

“An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft, bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation—1600 acres—was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light attacks in daylight on the next two days. I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unncessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole… Between one and two thousand acres were devastated in Dresden, Bremen, Duisburg, Essen, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hanover, Munich, Nuremburg, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, and Stuttgart. As an indication of what this means it may be mentioned that London had about 600, Plymouth about 400, and Coventry just over 100 acres destroyed by enemy aircraft during the war.” [Emphasis Added]

Anyone who considers themself to be pro-life must unapologetically oppose the mass murder of civilians and destruction of cities so late in the war (February 1945). Yes, I agree the fetus is a living being, and so are German civilians.

Anyone who claims to oppose ‘inequality’ must recognize there is no greater inequality than a living person murdering another person. Yes, paying a person a low wage is unequal to those with high wages, but the ultimate inequality occurs in the mass murder of civilians in wartime.

Colonel Carla Coulson’s research at Canadian Forces College estimates that:

“600,000 German men, women and children died as a result of the direct bombing of German cities during the war (1939-1945); many thousands more were wounded and mutilated. Millions more were left homeless. In the prosecution of the bombing campaign the British Commonwealth lost 55,573 aircrew, 18% of which were Canadian, and only one man in three could be expected to survive his tour of duty, which equated to 30 missions, with Bomber Command.”

Exhibit G: Undemocratic and Allied with Tyrants

In May 1940, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped down after the “Narvik debacle,” and Winston Churchill was appointed, not by popular vote, but an act of oligarchs in Parliament.

For all we hear about “threats to democracy” from academics and the corporate press, you’d think Churchill’s rule would be met with a little more skepticism.

To recap, the “good side in the good war” was lead by unelected Joseph Stalin, unelected Winston Churchill, unelected Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin Roosevelt, who while elected kidnapped and sent 117,000 people of Japanese ancestry to interment camps and confiscated the nations gold via executive order.

Roosevelt and Harry Truman, frequent heroes of those who proudly boast of supporting democracy, also partook in a mass murder campaign of their own in Japan. According to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his documentary The Fog of War,

“Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50 percent to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.”

To be clear, I’m a libertarian who believes democracy is mob rule by the ignorant. The reason we have good computers, TVs, refrigerators, and NBA players is not because there was a nation-wide referendum on these issues. The reason we have civilization is because people engaged in voluntary contracts, voluntary profit incentives, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy within the division of labor.

The point is, those who center their world view on democracy (neoconservatives and Democrats) being a good in and of itself idolize Winston Churchill.

Exhibit H: Intention of Continental Monopoly

There is good reason courts take intent into account. The mindset of the person in question matters, for example: Did a person accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian with their car (involuntary manslaughter), or did they plan for months to murder someone by hitting them with their car (intentional homicide)?

What were Churchill’s intentions during this war? To save civilization from barbarism (by allying with Joseph Stalin, who killed millions in the 1930s Ukrainian Holodomor) or to increase his own institutional power?

In a book titled Churchill: A Life by historian Martin Gilbert, the author quotes Churchill in an exchange with Lord Londonderry—Leader of the House of Lords—on May 4, 1935:

Londonderry: “I should like to get out of your mind what appears to be a strong anti-german obsession.”

Churchill: “[You are] mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession… British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt who it is now. But if France set up to claim the over-lordship of Europe, I should equally endeavor to oppose them. It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power.”

Churchill’s private position was not that the National Socialists were a unique evil, but that he would wage war on any competitor to British power, even if it comes at the cost of millions of innocent people being conscripted and killed. Churchill embraced real world tyranny in order to fight a hypothetical tyranny. Churchill was the crazy ex-boyfriend who would rather kill his ex-girlfriend than see her with another man.

Exhibit I: Results

On September 1, 1939, the National Socialist regime invaded Poland after a dispute over the city of Danzig which had been stripped from Germany twenty years prior at Versailles. The population of that coastal city was 95% German, and we have every reason to believe those people would have prefered to be reunified with Germany as opposed to remaining a minority in Poland.

Here is the text of Neville Chamberlain’s September 3, 1939 declaration of war against Germany two days afterwards:

“This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

The war waged on behalf of Polish independence ended with 7.1 million dead Poles, and Poland under Soviet occupation.

There was never a true war guarantee for Poland, since the Bolshevik regime invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, and Britain didn’t declare war against Moscow. It was a promise to wage war against only Germany, the biggest rival of Churchill’s empire.

Many will claim, “The lesson from World War II is never appease! That’s what Chamberlain did at Munich when he refused to declare war against National Socialism for invading the Sudetenland.”

The Sudetenland was roughly one fifth of the area in the newly created country of Czechoslovakia, mostly consisting of Germanic peoples. After the Second World War, all of Czechoslovakia was under Soviet occupation. We must declare war if one fifth of a country’s independence has been violated, but when the entire country’s independence is violated, we can apparently appease.

There are multiple lessons one can draw from the example of World War II, ones which organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will never acknowledge. They include:

  1. War guarantees incentivize small groups of people to provoke wars since a few oligarchs can benefit from war at the expense of the population they claim to be protecting. Consider how the power, prestige, and social status of Volodymyr Zelensky has risen drastically while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have had to suffer. The very people you claim to help (like Poles) can suffer most as a result.
  2. The ultimate check and balance in a civilized society is the freedom to disassociate with bad actors. The governments of every combat zone did not face such a constraint. They used enslaved soldiers (conscripts) and funded their operations with taxation and money printed by a central bank. This means that people who opposed the mass murder conflicts provoked by government had to serve by law, and had to fund the operations lest they be jailed. If governments truly represent us, they should gladly allow our financing of them to be as voluntary like our funding of Amazon or the Catholic Church.
  3. Empires fall from expansion. The world wars saw the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Czarist Empire, two German empires (Kaiser and Hitler), Hirohito’s Japanese Empire, and the British Empire. As empires expand their reach, their obligations expand, and they must tax more or print more to sustain themselves. They become “spread too thin,” so to speak, misallocate military personnel, lose support via public opinion, and cease to exist.
  4. We can talk to the bad guys. The Allies shook hands with the Bolshevik leader Joesph Stalin at Yalta and Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Zedong in China, but people say with a straight face that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping cannot be spoken with to reach détente. Notice how whenever the government of the United States violates the freedoms of the American people, we must always stay calm and not get riled up. But when an alleged foreign government potentially violates our freedoms we must advocate mass conscription and mass bombings of civilians to protect our way of life.
  5. We are always told about the cost of “appeasement” or not engaging in mass murder of innocent life. But consider all the downsides of war: mass death, enslavement (conscription), dismemberment, PTSD, military occupation, and property damage on an unimaginable scale.
  6. Wars are naturally chaotic and their results cannot often be predicted. Few soldiers and civilians could have foreseen an outcome where half of Europe would be occupied by the Bolshevik regime for forty-five years, initiating a Cold War where people walked on eggshells terrified of a nuclear exchange and fighting mass death proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America.

A Gift

Psychology Today defines a cult leader as “A charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship beyond any meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group as its source of truth, power, and authority.”

If a guy in a cabin orders you to murder an innocent person on his behalf, he is rightfully seen as a psychopathic lunatic. But for some reason—maybe the fact that governments monopolize compulsory education—when military commanders order their underlings to go commit mass murder of innocent people it is seldom met with skepticism, and even often admired.

The unwillingness or inability for people to see Winston Churchill as a cult leader who committed horrific crimes qualifies him as a cult leader if there ever was one. We seldom even get an intellectual defense by Churchill supporters addressing my above points. Instead we’re treated to typical cult-like emotional responses like “You must love Hitler,” or “Churchill saved the West, yes one man!” or the classic, “We’d all be speaking German if you were in charge.”

For the Churchill supporters, I give the gift which they so often yearn for: a disavowal of National Socialism:

National Socialism involves institutionalized aggression against private property and contracts between consenting adults while judging people on arbitrary characteristics and is thus evil down to its foundational principles.

In practice, the National Socialists bombed civilians in Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London, then declared war on America on December 11, 1941. Here is how evil one of their leading figures was. On March 26, 1942, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:

“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.”

National Socialists justified the mass murder and enslavement of innocent people while bombing cities which took centuries to build, thus violating the non-aggression principle. They are indisputably villains of history.

A Way Forward

While I am very pleased to hear people disavow Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces for their killing of innocent people, we inheritors of Western civilization must reject double standards and equally oppose the mass indiscriminate murder of civilians. Yes, the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were unjustifiable and destructive, but nothing compares to the crimes of states with militaries which have a legally recognized monopoly on violence.

Every crime of the West (slavery, Native American massacres, segregation, etc) is immoral because it involves one person or group of people initiating violence against non-aggressors. Too often the focus of these atrocities is the race or nationality of the victim or perpetrator as opposed to the actions being immoral insofar as they initiate violence against non-aggressors.

The heroes of history are not politicians who claim the right to rule millions of strangers, but entrepreneurs and workers who used the voluntary sector to improve the lives of everyday people. Cornelius Vanderbilt drastically lowered the price of travel by steamship from $7 to six cents, giving the average person access his ancestors never could have fathomed. Steve Jobs and Apple employees played a central role in giving the average person access to more freely available communication with people across the globe while empowering people to educate themselves using this easy to grasp technology. The Wright Brothers gave the average person the ability to see parts of the world kings and queens of the past never could have imagined visiting.

Let us not be primitive moral relativists, only using morality when it suits us. Let us reject double standards on violence and embrace a genuine pro-life and antiwar position unapologetically.

September 7, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

France arrests nurse who volunteered in Gaza

Imane Maarifi
MEMO | September 6, 2024

France yesterday arrested then released nurse Imane Maarifi who spent 15 days volunteering as a medic in the Gaza Strip.

Lawyer Rafik Chekkat, founder of the Islamophobia platform, said Maarifi was arrested in the morning at her home and taken into custody.

He criticised the arrest and said it took place at a time when French soldiers who fought in Gaza “enjoy total impunity.”

Thomas Portes, a lawmaker from the La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed (LFI) party, wrote that Maarifi has been released from custody.

“The search of the home in front of the family leaves no doubt about the desire to intimidate the voices that are raised to support the Palestinian people and demand an immediate ceasefire,” he wrote on X.

Maarifi attended pro-Palestinian rallies in France to share her testimony about the crippling situation in Gaza.

She has also expressed her demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and a boycott of companies supporting Israel.

Maarifi spent 15 days volunteering as a medic at the European hospital in Khan Yunis.

September 6, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli army kills US citizen during demonstration in Beita, Nablus

International Solidarity Movement | September 6, 2024

During the weekly demonstration in Beita, Palestine, on the morning of September 6th, 2024, the Israeli army shot and killed an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer. The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with force from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. Initially, the army fired a large amount of tear gas and then began using live ammunition. The volunteer, who we consider a martyr in the struggle, was the 18th demonstrator to be killed in Beita since 2020. She was an American citizen of Turkish descent.

The Israeli forces intentionally fired two live rounds. One hit a Palestinian man in the leg, injuring him. The other round was fired at international volunteers who were observing the demonstration, striking a human rights activist in the head. The volunteer died shortly after being transported to a local hospital in Nablus.

Fellow ISM volunteer Mariam Dag (a pseudonymn) was on the scene, and witnessed the fatal injury of her comrade. She said:

“We were peacefully demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the colonisation of their land, and the illegal settlement of Evyatar. The situation escalated when the Israeli army began to fire tear gas and live ammunition, forcing us to retreat. We were standing on the road, about 200 meters from the soldiers, with a sniper clearly visible on the roof. Our fellow volunteer was standing a bit further back, near an olive tree with some other activists. Despite this, the army intentionally shot her in the head.

This is just another example of the decades of impunity granted to the Israeli government and army, bolstered by the support of the US and European governments, who are complicit in enabling genocide in Gaza. Palestinians have suffered far too long under the weight of colonization. We will continue to stand in solidarity and honor the martyrs until Palestine is free.”

E.N, who is a friend of the slain activist and fellow volunteer with the ISM said:

“I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I wish I could [say] something eloquent, but I can’t through my sobbing tears…. my friend, comrade and travel partner to Palestine, was just shot in the head and murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces. May she rest in power. She is now one of many martyrs in this struggle.”

Beita, is a village in the West Bank where just weeks ago Amado Sison, another American volunteer, was struck by live ammunition in the back of the leg. Beita has a long history of resistance against Israeli occupation and has been a focal point of violence directed towards Palestinian residents by Israeli forces. Located near several illegal Israeli settlements, the village holds regular demonstrations. Due to escalating aggression by the Israeli forces, residents are currently refraining from marching or chanting, instead gathering together on the land and praying.

In recent years, Beita has seen ongoing demonstrations, particularly against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts on the lands of the village. For example Evyatar outpost, on Sabih Mountain, has been established on Palestinian land. In June, the Israeli security cabinet approved the ‘legalization’ of Evyatar, causing the people of Beita to strengthen their popular resistance.

Residents of Beita recently restarted weekly Friday demonstrations to resist the further theft of their land. While protests had nearly ceased since October 7th 2023, due to escalating violence from Israeli occupation forces, there was a renewed push on July 5th 2024, when dozens of Palestinians, accompanied by international and Israeli activists, marched from the adjacent mountain, through the valley, and towards the outpost.

In recent months, international activists have experienced a sharp increase in violence from Israeli forces and the occupation must be held accountable for this. The woman martyred today was an activist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization that provides protective presence and solidarity in the West Bank. The ISM was founded in 2002, and has maintained a steady presence in Palestine ever since, supporting the Palestinian popular struggle against the occupation.

Our comrade is added to the 17 Palestinian protesters already slain in Beita:

Palestinians martyred at demonstrations in Beita:
– Mohammed Hamayyel, 15 (March 11, 2020)
– Islam Dwikat, 22 (April 9, 2020)
– Karam Amin Dwikat, 17 (October 15, 2023)
– Issa Sliman Barham, 40 (May 14, 2021)
– Tareq Ommar Snobar, 27 (May 16, 2021)
– Zakaria Maher Hamayyel, 25 (May 28, 2021)
– Mohammed Said Hamayyel, 15 (June 11, 2021)
– Ahmad Zahi Bani Shamsa, 15 (June 16, 2021)
– Shadi Ommar Sharafa, 41 (July 27, 2021)
– Imad Ali Dwikat, 38 (August 6, 2021)
– Mohammed Ali Khbeissa, 27 (September 24, 2021)
– Jamil Jamal Abu Ayyash, 32 (December 1, 2021)
– Fawaz Ahmad Hamayyel, 47 (April 13, 2022)
– Immad Jareh Bani Shamsa, 16 (October 9, 2023)
– Mohammed Ibrahim Adili, 13 (November 23, 2023)
– Maath Ashraf Bani Shamsa, 17 (February 9, 2024)
– Ameed Ghaleb Said al-Jaroub, 34 (March 22, 2024, died of a bullet wound injury to the head sustained on August 21, 2023)

At this time, the family is not granting any interviews. Please contact ISM for media requests.

September 6, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

American universities rolling out BANS on anti-Israel protests; any criticism of Zionism to be considered “hate speech”

By Ethan Huff | News Target | September 4, 2024

Following the lead of New York University (NYU), American colleges and universities are imposing new rules to ban all criticism of Israel as “hate speech” and “antisemitism.”

At least 17 schools, including NYU, have already altered their policies to punish students and faculty for disagreeing with Israel’s war on Gaza. Some are prohibiting all Israel-related protests while others are going so far as to ban entire student organizations on campus.

In more extreme cases, schools are prohibiting students and faculty from protesting even online while others are expanding their conduct codes to basically keep quiet about Zionism or else face a school tribunal, of sorts, for punishment.

Indiana University, for instance, changed its “expressive activity” policy to ban all protests within 25 feet of university buildings and demonstrations that block “any building, facility, driveway, parking lot or parking ramp.”

The University of South Florida is banning all protests after 5 p.m., as well as during the entire final two weeks of every semester. If USF students want to set up a tent or canopy on campus, they will now be required to first get approval – and under no circumstances can anything be left out overnight without prior authorization.

(Related: Some teachers and preachers of prophecy, including Amir Tsarfati, want to justify genocide by claiming that the mass killing of Palestinians is God’s will for Israel.)

Zuckerberg, a true Zionist lapdog

At Vanderbilt University, all demonstrations that “require individuals to sleep or gather overnight” are now strictly prohibited. All on-campus displays from now on must also be during daylight hours only, and for no longer than three consecutive days at a time.

The University of California (UC) system says that encampments are no longer allowed on any of its 10 campuses. Protesters are also strictly prohibited from wearing masks or otherwise disguising their identity now that the people doing it are protesting Israel rather than destroying property in solidary with George Floyd.

The California State University (CSU) has implemented the same new rules as the UC system at its 23 statewide campuses.

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, the entire chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prohibited from the campus until July 2025, which is the same thing George Washington University did except that GWU also kicked out Jewish Voices for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization.

At Columbia University, SJP is permanently banned from having an Instagram account. The school is so involved in making this new rule stick that it convinced Meta to send a notice to its SJP chapter informing members that their group’s account “doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines.”

The list goes on and on as the Zionist contingent in America makes its moves trying to silence all of their critics. They are really playing their hand now and showing just how many schools, government agencies, corporations and other institutions are under their thumb, hence the systematic abolition of free speech we are witnessing.

It turns out that one of the first entities to start doing all this was Facebook (Meta), which has been working on trying to silence anti-Zionist speech on its platform since at least 2020 when Mark Zuckerberg issued new speech codes banning all Holocaust denial and other content that depicts “Jewish people running the world or controlling major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government.”

“The idea of banning content that promotes stereotypes of Jewish global control came up a year ago, in a meeting with several Jewish groups convened by Facebook, and was pushed primarily by the World Jewish Congress,” The Jewish Daily Forward reported at the time.

September 6, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Unions condemn British police for arresting independent journalist

RT | September 5, 2024

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) have condemned the recent arrest in the UK of independent reporter Richard Medhurst. In a joint letter addressed to New Scotland Yard anti-terrorism head Matt Jukes and dated Tuesday, the unions said they were “shocked” and “concerned” over what they consider “efforts to stifle press freedom.”

A British citizen of Syrian descent, Medhurst was arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport on August 15. According to his own account provided to several media outlets, he was pulled off a plane and taken to a police station, where he was held for over 24 hours. His phone and work equipment were seized, while Medhurst himself was subjected to a search and a questioning.

He was told he was arrested under Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 on charges of “expressing an opinion or a belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.” He was eventually let go, but said he does not yet know whether he will be charged with any offense.

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, and Anthony Bellanger, IFJ general secretary, said Medhurst’s arrest “will likely have a chilling effect on journalists in the UK and worldwide,” as they would now fear arrest by UK authorities “simply for carrying out their work.”

“Both the NUJ and IFJ are shocked at the increased use of terrorism legislation by the British police in this manner. Journalism is not a crime,” they stated, arguing that the “powers contained in anti-terror legislation must be deployed proportionately – not wielded against journalists in ways that inevitably stifle press freedom.” They requested a meeting with Jukes, urging UK authorities to provide “clarity” on Medhurst’s case.

The Terrorism Act 2000 gives police wide powers to prosecute and punish offenses linked with terrorism. Its Section 12 criminalizes anyone who “invites support” for an organization designated as terrorist or “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive” of it. A person found guilty of an offense under this section could face imprisonment for up to 14 years and a hefty fine.

Medhurst told the Anadolu news agency that he was never given a clear reason for his detention, but said it was likely linked to his reporting on the war in Gaza. The journalist is a vocal supporter of Palestine and its militant group Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the UK government.

He also warned that his arrest could set a dangerous precedent, noting that London is increasingly using the Terrorism Act “not against terrorists, but against political dissidents.”

Medhurst covers international affairs on his YouTube channel and hosts a program on Iran’s Press TV, while also publishing opinion pieces in other outlets. He previously contributed several articles to RT.

September 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Scott Ritter Says Ending Cooperation With RT, Sputnik Due to US Sanctions

Sputnik – 05.09.2024

The US Department of the Treasury issued a statement on Wednesday to announce sanctions against the Rossiya Segodnya media group, RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik and Ruptly. The sanctions affected Rossiya Segodnya and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and a number of other senior executives.

“The actions by the Department of the Treasury in levying new sanctions against RT, Sputnik, and other Russian media organizations has made it impossible for me to continue my work as an outside contributor for RT and Sputnik, as well as participating in interviews and other collaborations with other Russian media,” Ritter said on X.

He said his work with Russian media organizations was legitimate journalism.

“I reject the notion that the work I have done over the past years with the newly sanctioned Russian media organizations has been anything other than legitimate journalism, the content of which has been factually correct and analytically sound, and always of my own creation,” Ritter said.

However, he said, he is committed to obeying US laws.

“Nonetheless, I am fully committed to obeying US law, and as such will be terminating all contractual relationships with both RT and Sputnik effective immediately, as well as suspending my participation in any and all media interaction with sanctioned individuals and organizations until which time it is deemed lawful to do so by US authorities,” Ritter said.

He said he will continue to exercise his free speech rights.

“I am deeply grateful for the professionalism of all of my Russian colleagues over the past several years, and am proud to have made their acquaintance. I regret the actions of my government in silencing legitimate journalistic outlets, and look forward to the day when freedom of speech and a free press is not constrained by a dubious ‘Russian exception’ that is violative of Constitutional norms and values,” Ritter said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on the US sanctions imposed against the Rossiya Segodnya media group, told Sputnik that attacks on Russian media are the result of operations by Western security services to “sterilize” the information space.

September 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

US becoming ‘neoliberal dictatorship’ – Moscow

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova © Aleksandr Kryazhev / RIA Novosti
RT | September 5, 2024

Repeated sanctions to limit the freedom of Russian media in the US point to the erosion of democratic values in Washington, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

The spokeswoman made the comments to RIA Novosti on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Wednesday, just hours after the US rolled out a new round of sanctions.

Washington has imposed severe restrictions on Russian media in the past, Zakharova noted. The imposition of these new sanctions “testifies to the irreversible degradation of the democratic state in the United States and its transformation into a totalitarian neoliberal dictatorship,” she said, adding that news outlets have become a “bargaining chip in partisan disputes, and the public is deliberately misled by insinuations about mythical interference in ‘democratic processes.’”

The attacks on Russian media are “the result of carefully thought-out operations” planned by intelligence services and coordinated with mainstream media outlets, Zakharova said. The goal, she claimed, is to “to sterilize the national and – in the future – global information space from any forms of dissenting opinion.” This new “witch hunt” is aimed at keeping “the populace in a state of permanent stress,” as well as building up the image of “an external foe” – in this case, Russia, she went on to say.

Despite this, there is a demand for media coverage by RT and other Russian news resources, Zakharova added.

On Wednesday, the Justice, State, and Treasury Departments announced a joint effort to target with sanctions and criminal charges Russian media – including RT – and individuals which the administration of US President Joe Biden claim are Russian “government-sponsored attempts to manipulate US public opinion” ahead of the presidential election this November. The new designations “complement law enforcement actions” such as visa restrictions, as well as a ‘Rewards for Justice’ offer of up to $10 million for “information pertaining to foreign interference in a US election.” They claim that RT used a front company to disguise its own involvement or the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence US audiences.

These actions by the US “directly contravene their obligations to ensure free access to information and media pluralism” and will not go unanswered, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

September 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Persecution of Sputnik, RT Contributors Highlights US Hypocrisy – Ex-CIA Analyst

By John Miles – Sputnik – September 5, 2024

The United States’ persecution campaign against journalists and political dissidents with ties to Russian media accelerated Wednesday when new repressive measures were announced against several entities.

New sanctions were announced against 10 individuals and two organizations under the umbrella of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, including RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik and Ruptly. The sanctions target these entities for alleged “hostile interference in the presidential elections,” the US Treasury Department claimed. The measures also target editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya and RT Margarita Simonyan and several top managers at RT.

Ex-CIA analyst and former State Department counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson spoke with Sputnik Wednesday about the startling development, the latest attempt by the Biden administration to shape political discourse online and in the media.

“The latest stunt pulled by the Biden Department of Justice to declare all of these sanctions on Russia for alleged interference in the US political system is a level of hypocrisy that is staggering in its magnitude and in its foulness,” Johnson said.

“Let’s be clear about one thing: the one country in the world that has been involved with more interference in the internal political affairs of every other country is the United States. During the reign of President Eisenhower in the 1950s, there were 170 different covert actions carried out against other countries.”

“This year [the US has] allocated almost $4 billion to interfere or meddle in the political affairs of other countries,” he continued. “$315 million of that goes to the National Endowment for Democracy. $300 million is specifically what they call counter-Russian influence. And another $2.9 billion is for ‘democracy’ programs. And these have been used basically to run propaganda, to pay people, to organize ‘democracy’ programs in places like Georgia.”

The US frequently funds pro-Western media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in foreign countries it targets for regime change to pave the way for a pro-US government to come to power. Author and journalist William Blum documented over 50 examples of significant US interference in other countries since World War II in his classic book Killing Hope, largely based on the shocking revelations of ex-CIA agent Philip Agee.

More recently the US has interfered in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Ukraine, paving the way for the latter country’s extremist anti-Russia government through its support for the Euromaidan coup in 2014.

“I don’t know how many millions of dollars are allocated to the Central Intelligence Agency for additional covert actions designed to plant stories in media, to create electronic media, to influence social networks across the board,” Johnson continued. “It’s the United States that’s meddling. With respect to the entire bogus claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, we now know without a doubt that that was a Democrat operation led by Hillary Clinton and her team,” he added.

“Everything we were told about Donald Trump and the Russians was a lie. I was one of the few writing about it at the time to call it out… The notion that RT is manipulating and influencing the presidential election is beyond laughable,” he claimed, noting that the Russian television channel’s app is banned from many app stores in the West while its content has been removed from YouTube and other websites.

“How is a news network that’s not allowed to broadcast and that’s shut [out] of social media in the United States supposed to influence [the election]? … It just goes across the board that they’re going to try to attack any kind of alternative voice in the media.”

Johnson noted that he has been subjected to a “pre-interview” with most television news outlets he has appeared on, such as the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS and the CBC, during which employees for each outlet attempted to ascertain what he would say when interviewed live on air. RT was one of only two outlets that never subjected him to the practice, he said.

“It’s the so-called ‘free democracies’ that want to run that litmus test,” he said.

Johnson said the recent persecution of figures connected to RT and Sputnik is merely another attempt to run the “Russiagate” playbook, attempting to discredit alternative media outlets that critique US foreign policy. “Electoral interference” continues to take place, Johnson claimed, but it is not the Russians but the US government that is engaged in an attempt to influence and control the popular narrative for its own benefit.

September 5, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

MASSACHUSETTS COUNTIES URGE LOCKDOWN OVER RARE MOSQUITO-BORNE ILLNESS

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | August 28, 2024

Four counties in Massachusetts have initiated a voluntary curfew to mitigate a rare mosquito-borne illness known as EEE. Officials have resorted to widespread spraying of pesticides with known harmful effects on humans. But, locals are pushing back.

September 4, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

What options has the Israeli occupation left for the Palestinians?

By Suhail Kewan | MEMO | September 4, 2024

What has happened in the Gaza Strip could easily happen in the West Bank, in terms of the destruction of its refugee camps and cities, collective punishments and huge numbers of Palestinians killed and wounded. All the signs are that the occupation state is ready and willing to do this. It will, to a large extent, be up to the Palestinians to decide if and how to challenge this.

What is happening in the West Bank at the moment is that Israel is forcing people to defend themselves and is leaving them with only two options: complete and unconditional surrender to the extremist settlers; or defending themselves and their property. Both options are very costly, and the occupation state has not left a middle option.

The confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank started decades ago and is ongoing. More than 1,200 land confiscation orders have been issued since 1969 under various pretexts, including classifying land as military zones, national parks and areas of public interest. The act of confiscation is accompanied by harassment of the owners and shooting at them, whether at checkpoints or elsewhere such as on their farms and even in their homes. Crops and livestock are also targeted, and more restrictions are imposed on their movement, making Palestinian villages and cities large prisons, with people scared of moving between them.

The permanent and “flying” checkpoints mean that Palestinians are forced to stand for ages in lines that are hundreds of metres long, or even a kilometre or so. Anyone who visits the West Bank gets the sense that they are in a large prison, exposed to danger and humiliation all the time. If someone goes half a metre beyond the red line at the checkpoint, they may be killed; this has happened on many occasions.

Ready-made justifications are always available: they tried to run over or stab soldiers, so they were shot.

The West Bank was not calm before October 2023; it’s wrong to suggest otherwise. Hundreds of settlements and outposts have been established and expanded, housing half a million settlers, with occupied Jerusalem housing around 220,000. All of Israel’s settlements and settlers are illegal under international law, which is treated with contempt by the apartheid state.

Palestinians are humiliated on a daily basis, even if they have permits to work in Israel. Those without permits risk their lives to sneak into the occupation state in the search for a job to earn a living. There are videos available showing Palestinians being fired on after they were arrested, or facing savage guard dogs.

More than 40 per cent of the West Bank area has become under the direct control of the settlements. Separate roads have been built for use by settlers only, taking yet more Palestinian land to make travel as easy as possible for them. Palestinian towns and villages, meanwhile, are basically open prisons, and travel is made as difficult as possible, even within built-up areas.

Palestinians risk their lives just by going to work in their fields, as they may be confronted and attacked by settlers. While Israeli soldiers look on — and protect the settlers if necessary — the Palestinians are beaten and harassed, and crops and livestock are destroyed and stolen.

With the stroke of a pen, Israel can declare Palestinian land to be “state land” and thus out of bounds for Palestinians. Displacements are common as homes and farms are torn down by the occupiers. Since the beginning of this year alone, Israel has confiscated almost 30 square kilometres of West Bank land, and even more if the Jordan Valley is taken into account. Ministers in this far-right government have called for the establishment of a new settlement for every country that recognises the state of Palestine.

Israel and its settlers control water sources and sell water to municipalities and villages in the West Bank at prices determined by the national water company, which can cut off supplies at any moment. We have seen what has happened in the Gaza Strip when this was done. Moreover, most of the electricity supplies come directly or indirectly by the Israel Electricity Company. Sewage from the settlements is usually channelled through Palestinian land and towns. Pollution is a major environmental problem, as are the landfills used by the settlers.

All of this is happening in full view of the world and with the support of the West, especially the US. The Palestinian Authority is a public relations exercise on a large scale. Agreements signed with the PA are ignored.

Only the Palestinians are expected to make concessions; Israel never is, and never does.

The situation of the Palestinians before October 2023 was not good, and not a single Palestinian could claim that they were free in their homeland, neither in the West Bank areas, including the Ramallah “bubble”, nor in the Gaza Strip, nor as citizens of the occupation state within the Green Line.

Israeli governments have achieved what they aspired to, especially in the past two decades, which is to make the two-state solution impossible. This has become a reality. The so-called “peace process” is dead and buried.

No Israeli leader is going to evacuate three-quarters of a million settlers from the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem. No Israeli leader is going to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians as the capital of two independent states. No Israeli leader will restore Palestinian control over any part of their land and allow them to expand their urban areas naturally.

The possibility of a two-state solution no longer exists, even if the whole world supports it in theory. Israeli officials from the prime minister down have declared that the land “from the river to the sea” belongs to Israel, and only Israel.

Every illegal Israeli settlement is a war crime, to which can now be added the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza Strip, and the decades-long siege and repression that preceded 7 October. Palestinians have been left with no option but to accept colonial occupation and oppression, or to resist. Legitimate resistance to the occupation of the land is not the cause of the unrest in occupied Palestine. Cause and effect are very easy to determine. Resistance didn’t start the issue; it is a response to the occupation; a legitimate response.

The people in the West and in Israel itself need to understand and accept this, and then act accordingly. If they don’t, then the responsibility for the bloodshed and insecurity across the region lies with Israel and its supporters, especially the US, not with the Palestinians in occupied Palestine and in the diaspora.

This article first appeared in Arab48 on 2 September 2024

September 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Retaliatory measures by occupation authorities lead to scabies outbreak among prisoners

Palestinian Information Center – September 4, 2024

RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Prisoner Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees said in a joint statement that the widespread outbreak of scabies among Palestinian prisoners, in Israeli prisons — namely in Negev, Megiddo, Nafha, and Ramon — is due to the retaliatory measures imposed by the prison administration on prisoners and detainees after October 7. Among those affected are child prisoners in Megiddo prison.

The joint report highlighted that the spread of scabies among the prisoners was exacerbated by depriving them of necessary cleaning materials, including those used for personal hygiene.

Additionally, the reduction in the amount of water available, the limited time allotted for prisoners to bathe, and the confiscation of clothing from prisoners have led to a situation where most inmates rely on a single change of clothes. Some have been wearing the same clothes for long periods, forcing them to wash and wear them while still wet, which has contributed to the spread of the disease.

The report mentioned that the severe overcrowding in the cells and sections, resulting from the escalation of daily arrest campaigns and poor ventilation, along with isolating prisoners in cells devoid of sunlight, has also caused the spread of scabies among prisoners.

The deliberate transfer of infected prisoners from one section to another, instead of isolating them or delaying their isolation intentionally, has accelerated the spread of the infection among the inmates.

According to prisoners’ organizations, the Israeli occupation forces continue to carry out systematic arrest campaigns as one of their main established policies, which have escalated unprecedentedly since the start of the ongoing extermination war in Gaza. This escalation is evident not only in the number of detainees but also in the level of crimes being committed, alongside raids on the homes of detainees’ families, which are accompanied by widespread destruction and damage.

The Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 10,400 citizens from the West Bank, including Jerusalem, since the beginning of the ongoing war of genocide on Gaza on October 7 last year.

September 4, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

The American Way of War

By Thomas DiLorenzo | Lew Rockwell | August 31, 2024

The purpose of the war is “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.”

  • Letter from General Sherman to Mrs. Sherman, July 31, 1862

“[H]ad the Confederates somehow won . . . they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”

  • Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign, p. 286.

“Distinguished military historian B.H. Liddell Hart observed that the code of civilized warfare which had ruled Europe for over two hundred years was first broken by Lincoln’s policy of directing the destruction of civilian life in the South.”

  • Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, p. 116.

In When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession Charles Adams wrote of how the first Geneva Convention on War took place in 1863, followed by three more, with the last one being in 1949.  The 1863 convention codified the laws of war as were understood at the time to say: 1) Attacking defenseless cities and towns was a war crime; 2) Plundering and wantonly destroying civilian property was a war crime; and 3) Only necessities could be taken from a civilian population, and they had to be paid for.  Some historians, Adams wrote, claimed that these laws were the laws of war for four centuries and that they were all broken by the Lincoln regime. The lawlessness of the Lincoln regime, in other words, set the stage for the military atrocities of the twentieth century.

Most Americans have been taught to ignore the Lincoln regime’s war crimes by repeating Sherman’s CYA quip, “war is hell.” But there is a clear historical record of rape, murder, torture, arson, and the bombing of civilian occupied cities by the Union army. See for example War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco; The Civil War by Shelby Foote; Union Terror by Jeffrey Addicott; and South Carolina Citizens in Sherman’s Path by Karen Stokes for starters.

There you will learn that there was so much murder, arson and theft in Missouri that vast sections of the entire state were uninhabited by the war’s end. Entire towns, including my former town of Bluffton, South Carolina, were burned to the ground with every private residence set ablaze by U.S. Army “soldiers.” The Union Army was an army of pyromaniacs, rapists, and thieves.

In August of 1863 Charleston, South Carolina was not defended by Confederate forces when a six-month bombardment of the city commenced, exploding more than 22,000 artillery shells in the city. Unexploded shells were still being found a century later.

Sherman ordered the four-day bombardment of Atlanta in the Fall of 1864 when it was only occupied by women, children, infants, and elderly men, with his artillerists targeting homes where they spotted human habitation.  As many as 5,000 artillery shells rained down on Atlanta’s civilian population in a single day. Corpses littered the streets, something that Sherman called “a beautiful sight.” Thousands of surviving residents were homeless at the onset of winter.

Such war crimes were committed by Lincoln’s army, with his direction and full knowledge, for the duration of the war. It is said that when the Prussian military invited Sherman’s sidekick, General Phil Sheridan, to present a lecture on the American way of war the Prussians – no shrinking violets – were shocked and disgusted by how he described the murder, rape, plunder, and arson that occurred under his command in the Shenandoah Valley.

Just three months after Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia General Sherman was put in charge of the “Military District of the Missouri,” which was all land west of the Mississippi River. His orders were to essentially wage a campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians, which he did for the next twenty-five years, killing some 45,000 of them, women and children included, and placing the rest in concentration camps called “reservations.” In 1891, the year of his death, Sherman expressed his regrets that his army did not kill every last Indian. He is famously associated with the genocidal quip, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” He did all this, he once said, “to make way for the [government-subsidized] railroads,” of which he was a major stockholder.

During the Philippine Insurrection (1889) the U.S. Army killed some 200,000 Filipinos, with some estimates that a million civilians were killed. That was after the Spanish-American War also massacred thousands of civilians.

All of this was brought to mind when I recently ran across a 2010 book entitled Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 by Thomas Goodrich. (There is also a YouTube video, “Hellstorm: The Genocide of Germany”). It is a hard book to read because it describes the results of the American way of war (imitated by the Russians, British, and Germans as well) combined with twentieth century military technology.

Goodrich starts by writing of how Hitler’s 1925 Mein Kampf promised to rid Germany of all “Jewish influence” if he were to ever obtain political power. This naturally “alarmed Jews worldwide . . .” Influential Jewish businessmen first organized an international boycott of the German economy and of course denounced the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis). That quickly turned into what the organizer of the boycott called a “holy war” against “cruel and savage beasts,” i.e., all Germans.

Goodrich quotes Hollywood script writer Ben Hecht as writing that a “cancer” flourishes in the world in the form of “Germany, Germanism, and Germans.” They are “murderers, foul and wanton,” said the Hollywood movie script writer. “Germany must perish,” added Theodore Kaufman in a book of that title. He argued that, after the war, “all German men and women should be sterilized” to eliminate the disease of “Germanism and its carriers.” The New York Times praised this as “A Sensational Idea” while the Washington Post labeled it “A provocative theory.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt made these calls for “extermination” and genocide official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan,” named after his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.  The plan called for the complete destruction of Germany after the war by the dismantling of all industry and the confiscation of massive amounts of land, among other things.  The plan estimated that the result would be death by starvation of some 50 million Germans. Their hope was that “within two generations Germany would cease to exist.” When others expressed shock at such a barbaric proposal, Morgenthau snapped, “They asked for it. Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?”  Morgenthau obviously wasn’t worried about what might happen to him in the afterlife.

Winston Churchill also endorsed the plan and, it goes without saying, so did Stalin. Goodrich claims that Hitler considered the war to be a war against “Jewish Bolshevism” since “Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Russian [communist] revolutionaries were Jewish.”

Hellscape vividly describes the carpet bombing of civilian-occupied Dresden, Germany, where tons and tons of bombs were dropped by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the U.S. Airforce on the defenseless city. Literally thousands of bombers dropped phosphorous bombs on the city, creating a hellish inferno that melted bodies almost instantly, literally broiling them alive. The entire city was described as “one huge glowing wave.” There were thousands of dead bodies everywhere and the stench of burnt, decaying flesh was nauseating, said survivors. The animals in the Dresden zoo were incinerated along with everyone else caught above ground.

Knowing that people would flee to a large public park outside of the city the RAF dropped tons of high explosive bombs there. American bombers followed up by strafing the civilians in the park with their machine guns. This whole scene was repeated day after day as though the objective was to murder every last human being in Dresden. Goodrich cites estimates of some 400,000 civilians killed in Dresden alone.

This mass murder of defenseless citizens was gleefully and fiendishly repeated in Hamburg and many other German cities near the end of the war when there was little or no military resistance. “What had taken the German nation over two millennia to build, had taken its enemies a mere six years to destroy,” Goodrich concludes.

Goodrich writes of how Stalin considered Russian prisoners of war to be traitors since his order was to fight to the death.  The American authorities after the war helped Stalin enforce his rule with “operation keelhaul,” which returned thousands of Russian prisoners of war back to Stalin. “[T]he entire Cossack nation had been delivered to the Soviets.  Within days, most were either dead or bolted into cattle cars for the one-way ride to Siberia” and slave labor. Over five million Soviet citizens were returned to Stalin and “delivered to torture and slavery.” General Eisenhower supervised all of this with a collection of concentration camps that held the prisoners before handing them over to Stalin. Thousands of them were intentionally starved to death in the camps, writes Goodrich.

Stalin wasn’t the only newly-anointed slave owner. “When France requested slaves as part of its war booty, Eisenhower transferred over 600,000 Germans east.” And “like the Americans, the French starved their prisoners.” Several hundred thousand prisoners in Great Britain “were transformed into virtual slaves” as well. Eventually, “at least 800,000 German prisoners died in the American and French death camps” after the war.

One of the more sickening sections of Hellstorm is the description of the massive rape of German women and girls that occurred for several years. I will spare the reader of the gory stories and details. The Russians were the primary perpetrators, while American soldiers boasted that rape was not necessary; it was easy to bribe starving and destitute German women with a mere candy bar or a few slices of bread. “A bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary,” an American soldier is quoted as saying very matter-of-factly. “By the summer of 1945, Germany had become the world’s greatest slave market where sex was the new medium of exchange.”

As I said, this is a hard book to stomach, but it is also a necessary book to read to understand the realities of the American way of war that was introduced the world in the 1860s and which, because of its “success,” was imitated by murderous tyrants – and their propaganda mouthpieces — the world over during the twentieth century. War crimes and their “ends-justify -the-means” rationales are so routine today that propagandists for the current Israeli war of genocide in Gaza have nonchalantly advocated the “Dresdenizing” of Gaza and the subsequent murder of thousands of women, children, and infants.

September 4, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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