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Glenn Diesen about the benefits of a multipolar, Eurasian world order

Reinvent Money | June 16, 2024

Paul Buitink talks to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic and political scientist. He is a professor at the School of Business of the University of South-Eastern Norway. Glenn explains why the current international liberal unipolar world order is in decline. And why a new multipolar Eurasian order is inevitable and how that would benefit the world. He describes Europe’s role and challenge in this new world order. Also Glenn dives into the Russia and Ukraine conflict and why the incremental approach of the West could lead to a boiling frog situation. At the end he also shares his experiences of being a controversial scientist in Norway.

Find more about Glenn Diesen here, including his latest book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-War-Eu…

Follow Paul on X here:   / paulbuitink  

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

House Probes NewsGuard’s ‘Fact-checking’ Operations, Citing Federal Funding

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | June 18, 2024

NewsGuard, a “fact-checking” firm that provides “journalist-produced ratings and ‘Nutrition Labels’ for thousands of news and information websites” to advertisers hoping to steer clear of sites that publish “misinformation,” is under congressional scrutiny for its practices.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability, last week launched an investigation into the fact-checking firm, a recipient of federal funding.

The probe will examine “the impact of NewsGuard on protected First Amendment speech and its potential to serve as a non-transparent agent of censorship campaigns,” the committee said.

In a letter to NewsGuard co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, Comer highlighted federal funding NewsGuard received “and possible actions being taken to suppress accurate information.”

The letter also questions the potential political bias of NewsGuard’s editorial team.

According to a statement accompanying Comer’s letter, “NewsGuard markets its analytical services to businesses, including technology companies and other advertisement advisors, who direct the advertising buys that provide financial support for much of the news media.”

“Questions now surround the influence of NewsGuard’s business relationships and other influences on its ratings process,” the statement adds.

In an interview Thursday, Comer told One America News that NewsGuard “appears to be a very biased, very unfair service that’s getting federal funds.”

“We want to know why they’re doing this, what the basis is for the criteria that they use to determine these grades,” Comer said. “Because then they turn around and they offer their grades to advertisers, and this is a form of, I believe, trying to discourage advertisers from advertising on conservative networks.”

‘Society doesn’t need hall monitors telling us where we can and cannot go’

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in 2021 awarded a contract to NewsGuard. The contract raises questions about the involvement of federal agencies in potential censorship campaigns, according to Comer’s letter.

The $749,387 contract was directed to NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” database. According to NewsGuard, the database is “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

The DOD funding led The Federalist, in a November 2023 article, to report that “NewsGuard is selling its government-funded censorship tool to private companies.”

Also in November 2023, Lee Fang, one of the journalists involved with the “Twitter Files” release called NewsGuard a “surrogate the Feds pay to keep watch on the Internet and be a judge of the truth.”

Although not mentioned in Comer’s letter, other federal agencies also provided support to NewsGuard.

For example, an August 2020 NewsGuard press release states the firm won a “Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.”

The contest, known as the Countering Disinformation Challenge, sought “to offer solutions to hoaxes related to the COVID-19 pandemic” by helping the U.S. Department of State and the DOD “evaluate disinformation narrative themes in near real time” and to flag “hoaxes, narratives, and sources of disinformation as they emerge.”

NewsGuard, which received $25,000 as part of the contest, worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center “to scope and develop a test in support of the DoD’s Cyber National Mission Force.’’

According to a March 2023 “Twitter Files” release, Twitter — now known as X — worked with the Global Engagement Center to brand numerous accounts that posted “legitimate and accurate COVID-19 updates” but which “attacked” U.S. and European politicians as “Russia-linked.”

In December 2023, the State of Texas, The Daily Wire, The Federalist and the New Civil Liberties Alliance sued the State Department, alleging it was using and promoting technology intended to “covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”

In May, a federal judge rejected the State Department’s efforts to dismiss the case.

The Countering Disinformation Challenge also “stressed the need for identifying hoaxes and misinformation in advance — what NewsGuard calls its ‘prebunking’ of hoaxes.”

Twitter began employing the pre-bunking strategy in 2022 before Elon Musk bought the platform.

According to The Daily Wire, one of the “hoaxes” NewsGuard helped the State Department identify “was that COVID might have come from a Chinese lab, a scenario now viewed by U.S. agencies to be likely.”

Bill Rice Jr. is a freelance journalist and blogger who investigated NewsGuard’s operations. He told The Defender, “Four years into our new abnormal, nothing should surprise me.” Yet, he said NewsGuard’s collaboration with government agencies “stuns” him, describing it as “a new level of brazen.”

Although not mentioned in Comer’s letter, NewsGuard also collaborated with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), authors of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” list, which includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense (CHD). CCDH’s sources of funding have been called into question.

Journalist Paul D. Thacker has investigated CCDH for The Disinformation Chronicle. He told The Defender that groups like CCDH and NewsGuard “always censor people on the left and conservatives because their job is to enforce center-left ‘conventional wisdom.’”

Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, agreed. He told The Defender that such groups “are there to censor us … to discredit us, basically. That’s their power, and that’s supposed to make me afraid.”

“These groups work together in a layering fashion, confirming and supporting each other in a web of nonsense,” Thacker said. “These groups add nothing to public discourse except shutting down journalism and silencing people from voicing an opinion. Society doesn’t need hall monitors telling us where we can and cannot go.”

Writing on Substack, Rice noted that NewsGuard has not created “Nutrition Labels” for agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization (WHO), or for figures such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, even after many of their COVID-19-related pronouncements have been proven false.

NewsGuard already had ‘agenda and conclusion’ when reviewing sites

According to Comer’s letter, news outlets have noted frustrations about interactions with NewsGuard representatives over exchanges they “perceive as aiming to suppress information that may challenge widely held views but is not itself inaccurate.”

The letter cited a March 2022 Daily Sceptic article summarizing a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis finding that COVID-19 lockdowns were unnecessary and harmful.

According to the letter, NewsGuard took issue with the story. The Daily Sceptic addressed specific NewsGuard criticisms, but NewsGuard then “reportedly expressed that only retraction would address its concerns” and “subsequently lowered the outlet’s reliability rating shared with advertisers after the outlet chose to stand by its published story on the study.”

Tucker told The Defender he has had similar interactions with NewsGuard:

“NewsGuard has been a constant and censorious annoyance from the very beginning of our operations. At first, I attempted to engage earnestly. I spent hours on the phone with their reporters and researchers and attempted to answer every inquiry. I did this because Brownstone strongly believes in accuracy and truth, whatever it is. So of course, I believed we would pass whatever tests they offered up.

“Over time, it became very clear that they already had their agenda and conclusion. There never really was a point to wasting an instant of time with this organization.”

Tucker referred to NewsGuard and other “fact-checking” sites as “the shallow state.”

“They appear to be these objective organizations that are trying to clean up the internet for misinformation. But then it turns out they’ve got their own sources of funding, and they’ve got strong biases, and their purpose is censorship. That’s their goal. It’s surreptitious censorship, as you know. That’s all they’re about,” he said.

In September 2021, NewsGuard announced it found “more than 500 ‘news’ sites peddling COVID-19 misinformation,” including CHD, in this list. NewsGuard’s statement included praise from a WHO official for “NewsGuard’s tireless efforts to reveal sources of misinformation online.”

‘Who is funding NewsGuard?’

Comer’s letter also addressed concerns about NewsGuard’s most significant corporate backer,” Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. According to the letter, “NewsGuard markets its analytical services to businesses … who direct the advertising buys that provide financial support for much of the news media,” even as Publicis “is itself an advertising holding company.”

“From the beginning, it was ludicrous to think that a ‘fact-checking’ company could be trusted when they are funded by Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR firms on the planet,” Thacker said. Publicis clients include Burger King, Nestlé, Heineken, auto companies and banks, Thacker said.

“What do you think NewsGuard is going to promote: truth, or messaging for these corporations?” Thacker asked.

In his letter, Comer demanded NewsGuard turn over “Complete versions of all current and past contracts with government entities,” “records of all disciplinary or corrective actions” related to staff violations of its own editorial policy, “policy documents and guidance on managing conflicts of interest related to its investors and other outside influences,” and all documents or data “on corrections, retractions, or the changes to news or opinion articles … associated with inquiries made by NewsGuard.”

Some journalists believe Comer’s letter does not go far enough.

“I would have asked for all financial support over their entire existence, as well as all records involving outreach for financial support,” Thacker said. “I want to know what they are offering sponsors.”

“Follow the money. Who is funding NewsGuard? Also, someone needs to show all the claims of NewsGuard that were and are preposterous,” Rice said.

They also called for Comer’s investigation to lead to drastic action.

“If this company is intentionally trying to harm companies or citizens who are practicing free speech, criminal and civil charges should be brought against this company,” Rice said.

“I don’t care whether they offer censorship programs for industry or governments. These groups are dangerous and need to be shut down,” Thacker said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is running as an independent for president of the U.S.

June 18, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis… and Lost

By Ron Paul | June 17, 2024

Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.

To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis announced their policy in response to civilian deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza, but when the US and UK military became involved they announced they would target US and UK shipping as well.

The operation was supposed to be quick and easy. After all, the rag-tag Houthi militia was no match for the mighty US and UK navies. But it didn’t work out that way at all. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”

Meanwhile, the article informed us that a continued US effort to fight the Houthis over Red Sea shipping was “not sustainable.” Perhaps the most revealing part of the article comes from a Washington military expert, Emily Harding of CSIS: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long.”

It is reminiscent of a recollection by Col. Harry G. Summers of a discussion he had with North Vietnamese Col. Tu: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said Summers. Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

Similarly, the US military spent a quarter of a billion dollars building a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to the starving Palestinians even though a land route already existed and would have been far cheaper to use. The project was doomed from the beginning, as days after opening stormy weather broke up the pier and washed part of it up on Israel’s shore. The US military managed to gather the pieces together again, but in total only a few aid trucks managed to use it before, over the weekend, the pier was again disassembled for fear of another weather-related break-up.

The only thing the pier was good for, it seems, was assisting the Israeli military in a Gaza raid on June 8th that killed 270 Palestinian civilians.

As neocons inside the Beltway continue to plot war with China over Taiwan, it seems someone should notice the trouble we have had dealing with Houthis and floating piers. For now, the growth in military spending seems unlimited, but increasing spending bringing diminishing results raises the question of just how much bang are we getting for our bucks?

We have the most expensive military on earth, they say. That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

With Stanford Out, UW Steps Up for 2024 Election “Disinformation” Research

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | June 17, 2024

If it looks like a duck… and in particular, quacks like a duck, it’s highly likely a duck. And so, even though the Stanford Internet Observatory is reportedly getting dissolved, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) continues its activities. But that’s not all.

CIP headed the pro-censorship coalitions the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project with the Stanford Internet Observatory, while the Stanford outfit was set up shortly before the 2020 vote with the goal of “researching misinformation.”

The groups led by both universities would publish their findings in real-time, no doubt, for maximum and immediate impact on voters. For some, what that impact may have been, or was meant to be, requires research and a study of its own. Many, on the other hand, are sure it targeted them.

So much so that the US House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization Select Subcommittee established that EIP collaborated with federal officials and social platforms, in violation of free speech protections.

What has also been revealed is that CIP co-founder and leader is one Kate Starbird – who, as it turned out from ongoing censorship and speech-based legal cases, was once a secret adviser to Big Tech regarding “content moderation policies.”

Considering how that “moderation” was carried out, namely, how it morphed into unprecedented censorship, anyone involved should be considered discredited enough not to try the same this November.

However, even as SIO is shutting down, reports say those associated with its ideas intend to continue tackling what Starbird calls online rumors and disinformation. Moreover, she claims that this work has been ongoing “for over a decade” – apparently implying that these activities are not related to the two past, and one upcoming hotly contested elections.

And yet – “We are currently conducting and plan to continue our ‘rapid’ research — working to identify and rapidly communicate about emergent rumors — during the 2024 election,” Starbird is quoted as stating in an email.

Not only is Starbird not ready to stand down in her crusade against online speech, but reports don’t seem to be able to confirm that the Stanford group is actually getting disbanded, with some referring to the goings on as SIO “effectively” shutting down.

What might be happening is the Stanford Internet Observatory (CIP) becoming a part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. Could the duck just be covering its tracks?

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

West hindering nuclear deal’s revival, blaming Iran for failure: Russia

Press TV – June 17, 2024

A senior Russian diplomat says the three European signatories to the Iran nuclear deal have failed to fulfill their commitments and are now blocking the negotiations to revive the US-abandoned agreement.

Russian Permanent Representative to International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov made the remarks in an interview with Russia’s daily broadsheet newspaper Izvestia.

He said the talks to revive the nuclear deal – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – have so far failed to yield any outcome due to insufficient efforts on the part of the European troika (France, Germany and Britain) as well as the United States.

It is not the Iranians who are blocking the negotiations now as they are ready to resume the talks, he maintained.

The top Russian negotiator added that the three European countries – also known as E3 – are playing a “strange game” but demand full compliance from Iran.

At the same time, the trio blames Russia and Iran for the failure of the JCPOA revival talks, Ulyanov said.

The negotiations to restore the JCPOA began in April 2021, three years after the US unilaterally withdrew from the UNSC-endorsed agreement and began to target Iran’s economy with tough economic sanctions.

Iran has criticized the lack of will on the side of the US and the E3 to revive the deal and has ramped up its nuclear activities in response to their non-compliance.

In a statement issued on Saturday, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany condemned what they called “the latest steps” taken by Iran “to further expand its nuclear program.”

They also accused Iran of taking “further steps in hollowing out the JCPOA, by operating dozens of additional advanced centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment site as well as announcing it will install thousands more centrifuges at both its Fordow and Natanz sites.”

Iran on Sunday strongly condemned the E3 statement as absurd and based on false allegations, saying the country’s nuclear program has a completely peaceful nature and nuclear weapons have no place in the country’s military and defense doctrine.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Texas Political Candidate Charged with Faking Online Racist Harassment Campaign

By John Miles  – Sputnik – 17.06.2024

A Texas political candidate for county commissioner has been charged with faking an online harassment campaign after he spent months sending racist messages to himself on Facebook.

“Whether Republican or Democrat, such tactics should be unequivocally condemned by all who value integrity and accountability in politics,” said local Republican Party chair Bobby Eberle.

Taral Patel, a Democratic Party candidate running in the third precinct of Fort Bend county, was arrested and charged with one third-degree felony count of online impersonation and a Class A misdemeanor charge of misrepresentation of identity after an investigation by the county district attorney’s office revealed he was responsible for a string of online hateful and derogatory comments purportedly directed at himself.

“As your Democratic candidate for County Commissioner, I am always open to criticism of my policy positions and stances on issues,” Patel said in an online post in September, posting a collage of the alleged harassing comments. “However, when my Republican opponents supporters’ [sic] decide to hurl racist, anti-immigrant, Hinduphobic, or otherwise disgusting insults at my family, faith community, colleagues, and me – that crosses a line.”

Patel’s Republican Party opponent incumbent Commissioner Andy Meyers requested an investigation of the comments after recognizing one of the partially-concealed usernames as an account that had previously launched attacks at himself.

The investigation revealed Patel had used an image of an actual local resident as the profile photo for one of the accounts, leading to the online impersonation charge.
Patel paid a total of $22,500 bond to leave county jail Thursday, with his court date scheduled for July 22.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

Sham-ocracy, Scam-ocracy

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.

In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.

Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.

After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)

Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)

Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.

The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.

In Europe, many working people are disturbed by not only the immigration situation and the specter of totalitarian “wokeism” but also the insistence of their current leaders on provoking and prolonging a war with Russia. It does not seem to be a matter of sheer coincidence, for example, that French president Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding electoral blow after having expressed the intention to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia, thus directly endangering the people of France. Macron was also assiduous in excluding swaths of his population, who protested in the streets for months on end, from participation in civil society for what he decreed to be their crime of declining to submit to the experimental mRNA treatment during the height of the Coronapocalypse.

Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.

It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.

In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.

That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”

“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”

“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”

Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.

The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.

Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.

Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.

This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.

Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.

Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.

This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.

The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.

The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Repeated Western narratives of China’s nuclear ‘threat’ are what lead to a dangerous world

Global Times | June 17, 2024

In an interview with The Telegraph published on Sunday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg claimed that the bloc is in talks of taking missiles out of storage and placing them on standby in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China. While giving a stark warning about the threat from China, he said a world where countries like China have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is “a more dangerous world.”

What truly constitutes a dangerous world is the world’s largest war machine hyping a nuclear war that could bring devastating consequences to mankind. Stoltenberg is telling the world that NATO would go beyond being just a conventional combat force, and become a nuclear alliance. He is trying to create an opinion condition favorable for NATO and the US to strengthen their nuclear-sharing capability. At a pre-ministerial press conference of NATO on June 12, Stoltenberg stated that the US is modernizing its nuclear weapons in Europe.

It is worth noting that the warnings of Stoltenberg came against the backdrop of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. The just concluded two-day peace summit in Switzerland did not achieve much to solve the crisis. The US-led West has no will to end the conflict as soon as possible. Instead, it sent out a nuclear deterrence against Russia, which is nothing but adding oil to the fire, according to Zhang Junshe, a Chinese military expert.

Zhang believes that the fundamental reason that the NATO chief made the irresponsible remarks is to coordinate US strategies to suppress its adversaries.

“The Cold War bloc aims to expand its role to the world, including the Asia-Pacific. It acts as a pawn of Washington to contain Russia in Europe and contain China in Asia,” said Zhang.

On June 7, Pranay Vaddi, a senior White House aide, said that the US may have to deploy more strategic nuclear weapons in coming years to deter growing threats from Russia, China and other adversaries.

Coincidentally or not, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Sunday launched its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security, in which it said that China is amid a “significant” expansion of its nuclear capabilities and may have as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as the US or Russia by 2030. The Stockholm-based watchdog also claimed that China is believed to have some warheads on high operational alert for the first time.

Reading through SIPRI’s report, one can feel a strong intention of thwarting China’s development of nuclear weapons, despite the fact that the US has 10 times as many nuclear warheads as China. The report has quickly raised the eyebrows of major Western media outlets which rush to report on China’s “fast-growing” nuclear stockpile.

The fact that nuclear arsenals are being strengthened around the world is the result of global conflicts such as the ones in Ukraine and Gaza and the suppression of Western countries against non-Western countries. “The SIPRI’s report and Western media’s narrative of China’s ‘fast-growing’ nuclear stockpile are deliberate suppression of China and a kind of nuclear blackmail,” Cui Heng, a research fellow from the Center for Russian Studies of East China Normal University, told the Global Times.

Now, the US has ripped off its veil of decency when dealing with China. The competition between China and the US will feature bilateral relations in the long run. Both sides strive to build “guardrails” to prevent relations from going off the track. However, China needs to show its strength. Strength can be best reflected by the nuclear weapons China owns. Nuclear power is the foundation of national security when China faces an increasingly hostile US with 10 times of nuclear warheads that China has.

Zhang, the military expert, noted that China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal is imperative. It will help not only to effectively get by the West’s nuclear blackmail and threat, but also safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and break through the shackles and obstacles created by the West during the process of China’s development.

China is a nuclear power that formally maintains a no-first-use policy. Its nuclear policy is fundamentally different from that of the US and NATO. If the US and NATO do not want to live in a dangerous world, they should start by changing their own perception of China.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

NATO to Control Ukraine Aid to ‘Trump-Proof’ Arms Shipments

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The US took a significant step towards preventing a future American president from curtailing weapon transfers to Ukraine by allowing NATO to coordinate the arms shipments. Washington and some of its allies are concerned that former President Donald Trump will end military aid and seek a diplomatic settlement to the war should he return to office.

The bloc adopted the new policy during a meeting of NATO defense ministers on Friday. “With a command in Wiesbaden, Germany, NATO will coordinate training and equipment donations, with nearly 700 personnel from Allied and partner nations involved in this effort,” a press release from the alliance said. “NATO will also facilitate equipment logistics and provide support to the long-term development of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.”

Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren explained that the bloc took the step as the war may grind on for some time, adding that coordination of arms shipments through Brussels will help prevent any country from altering its policy. “It’s to make it proof to any situation,” she said, observing that Russia’s war “might go on for years – so you want to have something in place that does not depend on specific persons, ministers or whoever.”

One official told AFP that the move was meant to prevent Trump from changing US policy. “it is about Trump-proofing, and that is what Stoltenberg says, protecting it from winds of political change,” the official stated. “Any US president can pull the plug on it tomorrow.”

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to end the war within “24 hours” of returning to office, but has failed to explain how he plans to achieve that promise. Additionally, the former president gave his political support to the $95 billion foreign military aid bill signed in April – which included over $60 billion for Ukraine – helping to break the deadlock in Congress.

Still, Trump’s statements about ending the war have caused concern among NATO members and Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskly recently asserted Trump would become a “loser president” if he ended the conflict and would make America “very weak.”

In addition to agreeing to funnel all arms to Ukraine through NATO, the defense ministers agreed to step up intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, and “discussed the ongoing adaptation of NATO’s nuclear capabilities.” Stoltenberg said, “We are a nuclear Alliance – committed to being responsible and transparent. But clear in our resolve to preserve peace, prevent coercion, and deter aggression.”

While the NATO chief did not provide details about what adaptations the bloc is making, in recent months, Sweden and Poland have expressed interest in hosting NATO nuclear weapons.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

US Boosted Nuclear Arms Spending by 18% in 2023, Record Among Nuclear States – Report

Sputnik – 17.06.2024

The United States last year increased spending on nuclear weapons by 18%, which is the highest rate among all nine countries possessing nuclear weapons, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said on Monday.

US alone spends on nukes more than all other nuclear-armed states, the report read.

“[In 2023] Every country increased the amount it spent on nuclear weapons. The United States had the biggest increase, at nearly 18%. The United States spent more than all the other nuclear-armed states combined, at $51.5 billion. China surpassed Russia as the second-highest spender at $11.9 billion, and Russia came in third, spending $8.3 billion,” the ICAN said in a report, adding that the United Kingdom also significantly increased its nuclear spending for the second year in a row.

In 2023, the US, the UK, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia spent a total of $91.4 billion developing their nuclear arsenals, which is $10.8 billion or 13.4% more than in 2022, the ICAN also said.

“In 2023, twenty companies working on nuclear weapons development and maintenance earned at least $31 billion for this work. There are at least $335 billion in outstanding nuclear weapons contracts to these companies, some of which have continued for more than a decade. In 2023, at least $7.9 billion in new nuclear weapon contracts were awarded,” the report read.

ICAN, a coalition of civil society organizations in over 100 countries, was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2007. The coalition promotes adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In 2017, it received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

Earlier, experts explained to Sputnik that recent Minuteman III launches are a regular audit of the strategic forces rather than nuclear saber-rattling.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Candace Owens and Briahna Joy Gray reveal media ‘red line’ on Israel

If Americans Knew | June 16, 2024

Conservative Candace Owens interviews progressive Briahna Joy Gray about their experiences getting fired because of their criticism of Israel. This clip is from the Candace Show on June 14, 2024.

Background information:

Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti, Glenn Greenwald reveal details of the campaign against her:

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

Biden Team Calls For Social Media “Disinformation” Censorship Action After G7 Mishap Goes Viral

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | June 16, 2024

The Biden administration is grappling with backlash as a video depicting President Joe Biden appearing vacant and wandering off, separating from his G7 peers circulated widely online. The footage, in which Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni directs President Biden back in the right direction for the planned photo opportunity, quickly gained traction and has spurred accusations from the media that conservative outlets are disseminating the clip without adequate context, suggesting a deliberate skewing of Biden’s actions.

In response to the spreading video, Adrienne Elrod, a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign, labeled the footage “disinformation” and has called on social media platforms to remove or limit its distribution.

“Disinformation is alive and well,” she told MSNBC. “… And, look, we’re gonna see more of this. I mean, this is just the reality of campaigning in 2024. So we have to combat that disinformation. We have to hit it hard when it happens and make it clear that these are dirty tactics that MAGA Republicans are using because they can’t run on the issues.”

Elrod also said, “We’re going to do what we can to combat it but it does take the voices of surrogates across the country. It does take the media to call it out.” Elron also called on social media platforms to do something about it, “It does take social media platforms where a lot of Americans are getting their information to point it out as well.”

This move aligns with previous instances where the Biden team has sought to manage narratives, notably during the October 2020 pre-election period when allegations regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the censorship demands of the COVID era.

With Elon Musk’s platform X refusing to censor the content, the Biden camp’s concern has intensified, facing the challenge of countering the narrative without the aid of content suppression on this major social media outlet.

Critics argue that such attempts to control media narratives through censorship are detrimental to public discourse, emphasizing the importance of transparency and the free exchange of ideas, even if they are unfavorable to those in power.

Full video in context:

https://x.com/thevivafrei/status/1801347846974661062

June 16, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

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