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The 9/11 Lessons We Have Never Learned
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![]() ![]() The 9/11 Lessons We Have Never Learned Click on the headline to read the full story from
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![]() ![]() ![]() The July military coup in the west African country of Niger has once again brought attention to the fact that the US government runs a global military empire that serves Washington’s special interests, and not the national interest. Before the coup made news headlines, most Americans - including many serving in Congress - had no idea the US government maintains more than 1,000 troops stationed on several US bases in Niger. But it’s even worse than that. A recent report in The Intercept suggests the Pentagon repeatedly misled Congress about the extent and the cost of the US presence in Niger. According to The Intercept, “in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of US Africa Command described Air Base 201 (in Niger) as ‘minimal’ and ‘low cost.’” In fact the US government has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the base since construction began in 2016. So when did Congress declare war so as to legalize US military operations in Niger? They didn’t. But as Kelley Vlahos writes in Responsible Statecraft, US troops have been “training” the military in Niger since 2013 and the US government has constructed a number of military bases to “fight terrorism” in the country and region. Does that mean that the Pentagon is operating in Niger under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) meant to track down those who attacked the US on 9/11? It’s a good question and thankfully one being asked by Sen. Rand Paul in a recent letter sent to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Senator Paul first pointed out in the letter, “the Administration’s limitless interpretation of the 9/11 AUMF and frequent use of Title 10 authorities results in military operations abroad conducted with little Congressional oversight and even less public scrutiny.” Such actions “undermine our Constitution,” he writes as he asks, “in how many countries are US forces conducting operations authorized by the 2001 AUMF.” Ironically - or maybe not - one of the coup leaders in NIger had been trained by the Pentagon at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. What is the US government training foreign military officers to do, exactly? Overthrow their own governments? Whatever the case, it appears the coup government in Niger may be seeking a withdrawal of foreign military on its soil. Mass protests against French military presence has led the French government to begin talks with the coup government on withdrawal. There are rumors that the coup government may next request US troops to leave the country. We should pre-empt their possible request by withdrawing all US troops immediately from Niger (and the rest of Africa) and closing all military bases. The claim that the US government is fighting terrorism in the area is doubtful. After all, in both Libya and in Syria the US government backed terrorist groups against governments it sought to overthrow. President Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan famously wrote to his then-boss Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 that, “in Syria, al-Qaeda is on our side.” Congress must step up and exercise its oversight authority to end the counter-productive US military presence in Africa. Our military empire is bankrupting us and turning the rest of the world against us. Why Are We in Niger? Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity ![]() ![]() ![]() Years before emerging as Kiev’s top private weapons trafficker, ex-legislator Serhiy Pashinsky played a key role in the 2014 US-backed coup which toppled Ukraine’s democratically-elected president and set the stage for a devastating civil war. Though the notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian parliamentarian was condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “criminal” as recently as 2019, a lengthy exposéby the New York Times has now identified Pashinsky as the Ukrainian government’s “biggest private arms supplier.” Perhaps predictably, the report makes no mention of evidence implicating Pashinsky in the 2014 massacre of 70 anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square, an incident which pro-Western forces used to consummate their coup d’etat against then-President Viktor Yanukovych. In an August 12 report on Ukraine’s new weapons-sourcing strategy, the New York Times alleged that “out of desperation,” Kiev had no option but to adopt increasingly amoral tactics. The shift, they say, has driven up prices of lethal imports at an exponential rate, “and added layer upon layer of profit-making” for the benefit of unscrupulous speculators like Pashinsky. According to the Times, the strategy is simple: Pashinksy “buys and sells grenades, artillery shells and rockets through a trans-European network of middlemen,” then “sells them, then buys them again and sells them once more”: “With each transaction, prices rise – as do the profits of Mr. Pashinsky’s associates – until the final buyer, Ukraine’s military, pays the most,” the Times explained, adding that while using multiple brokers may technically be legal, “it is a time-tested way to inflate profits.” As the seemingly endless supply of cash from Western taxpayers provides a bonanza for arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, it similarly benefits war profiteers like Pashinsky. His company, Ukrainian Armored Technology, “reported its best year ever last year, with sales totaling more than $350 million” — a whopping 12,500% increase from its $2.8 million in sales the year before the war. Pashinsky is not the only racketeer benefitting from the elimination of anti-corruption measures in wartime Ukraine. Several suppliers previously placed on an official blacklist after they “ripped off the military” are now free to sell again, according to the Times investigation. The outlet downplayed this as an unfortunate, but ultimately necessary measure. “In the name of rushing weapons to the front line, leaders have resurrected figures from Ukraine’s rough-and-tumble past and undone, at least temporarily, years of anticorruption [sic] policies,” the Times asserted, describing “the re-emergence of figures like Mr. Pashinsky” as “one reason the American and British governments are buying ammunition for Ukraine rather than simply handing over money”: “European and American officials are loath to discuss Mr. Pashinsky, for fear of playing into Russia’s narrative that Ukraine’s government is hopelessly corrupt and must be replaced.” However, even the seemingly critical Times report overlooks a key aspect of Pashinsky’s unsavory biography. Conspicuously absent from the coverage was any explanation of his role in carrying out the infamous massacre of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014. A defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, the death of 70 at the hands of mysterious snipers triggered an avalanche of international outrage that led directly to the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Even today, these killings officially remain unsolved However, firsthand testimony by individuals who claimed to have helped carry out the false flag attack suggest Kiev’s most prolific gun runner was intimately involved in the grisly affair. Maidan massacre organizer ‘takes no prisoners’ In November 2017, Italy’s Matrix TV channel published eyewitness accounts by three Georgians who say they were ordered to kill protesters by Mamuka Mamulashvili. Then the top-ranking military aide to Georgian president Mikhael Saakashvili, Mamulashvili later founded the infamous mercenary brigade known as the Georgian Legion, whose fighters were widely condemned after they published a gruesome video of themselves gleefully executing unarmed and bound Russian soldiers in April 2022. The documentary, “Ukraine: The Hidden Truth,” features an Italian journalist’s interviews with three Georgian fighters allegedly sent to orchestrate the coup. All described Pashinsky as a key organizer and executor of the Maidan massacre, even alleging the corrupt arms dealers provided weapons and selected specific targets. The film also featured footage of him personally evacuating a shooter from the Square, after they had been caught with a rifle and a scope by protesters and surrounded. One of the Georgian fighters recalled how he and his two associates arrived in Kiev in January, “to arrange provocations to push the police to charge the crowd.” For almost a month, however, “there were not many weapons around,” and “molotov [cocktails], shields and sticks were used to the maximum.” This changed around mid-February, they said, when Mamualashvili personally visited them alongside a US soldier named Brian Christopher Boyenger, a former officer and sniper in the 101st Airborne Division, who personally gave them orders they “had to follow.” ![]() A documentary by Italy’s Matrix channel contains eyewitness testimony implicating an American military instructor in Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan massacre. Pashinky then personally moved them along with sniper rifles and ammunition to buildings overlooking Maidan Square, they alleged. At that point, Mamualashvili reportedly insisted that “we have to start shooting, so much, to sow some chaos.” So it was that the Georgian fighters “started shooting two or three shots at a time” into the crowd below, having been ordered to “shoot the Berkut, the police, and the demonstrators, no matter what.” Once the killing was over, Boyenger moved to the Donbas front to fight in the ranks of the Georgian Legion, which Mamulashvili commands to this day. In the meantime, Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Boiko, who headed the civic council of the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine after Maidan, has alleged that in order to obscure his role, Pashinsky personally hand-picked the figures leading the official investigation into the massacre, and even bribed the prosecutor who headed it. Despite these shocking claims, Pashinsky’s involvement in the Maidan massacre has never been officially investigated, let alone punished, and his most recent experiences with the Ukrainian judicial system suggest it is unlikely to be heavily scrutinized by officials in Kiev. While a member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, he was arrested for shooting and wounding a pedestrian in a traffic-related dispute, but was ultimately acquitted in 2021. When Israeli journalists confronted Pashinsky about his role in the Maidan massacre, the arms dealer warned that they would be tracked down in their home country, where his associates would “tear them apart.” They could be forgiven for believing it was not an idle threat; there is a troubling tendency for Pashinky’s detractors to end up viciously beaten or shot dead in the street. Reprinted with permission from The Grayzone. Support The Grayzone here. Ukraine’s ‘biggest arms supplier’ orchestrated 2014 Maidan massacre, witnesses say Click on the headline to read the full story from ![]() ![]() ![]() This week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, to 22 years in jail for the crime of “sedition” arising out of the January 6 protests at the Capitol. It wasn’t the first time that the judge, Timothy Kelly, meted out a high jail sentence for the sedition offense. Last week, he handed out an 18-year sentence to Ethan Nordean, one of Tarrio’s co-defendants. Last May, another D.C. federal judge, Amit P. Mehta, sentenced leader of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, to 18 years for the federal crime of “sedition.” Those high jail sentences for what amounts to a protest gone awry are so ridiculous that they serve as an excellent advertisement for the abolition of sedition laws, which have no place in a genuinely free society. The federal crime of “sedition” is akin to the local crime of “disorderly conduct.” It is designed to give federal authorities the ability to severely punish people who have committed no real crime to justify severe punishment. The website of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University defines sedition as “language intended to incite insurrection against the governing authority.” The website points out:
The federal statute under which Tarrio and Kelly were convicted and sentenced, 18 U.S.C. Section 2384, states as follows:
How did Kelly arrive at 22 years for Tarrio when the law expressly limits sentences to 20 years? He used some sort of enhancement provision relating to terrorism law, even though Tarrio was convicted of “sedition,” not “terrorism.” If that’s not strange legal reasoning, I don’t know what is. Abolish Sedition Laws Click on the headline to read the full story from ![]() ![]() ![]() The Musk vs ADL (and the censorship industrial complex) battle escalated further this morning with the X/Twitter owner highlighting a new article from Newsweek saying that "ADL Has Lost Its Way": "The ADL taught me that nastygrams from Jew haters were just the price we pay for liberty, worthy of being filed and forgotten," writes Ron Coleman in the op-ed. "This is not Weimar Germany; it is America. We have a First Amendment, we have civil rights, we have a working democracy. That is part of the good we have done. ![]() "But" Coleman explains, "the ADL no longer believes this..." "It has become part of a great online censorship machine that is being exposed day after day as an anti-free speech enterprise."The following clip suggests just that... As Coleman concludes: "The ADL's efforts to censor Twitter confirms what we have known for years: Not only is today's ADL not doing the world some good. It is doing something much worse. How much longer will we be allowed to say so?"Greenblatt then appeared on CNBC this morning to respond to Musk's threats. He got his initial talking points in without much push back from the anchors:
But then things turned just a little more contemptuous as Andrew Ross Sorkin dropped a bombshell and asked the ADL CEO:
“Were you seeking to have some kind of either role at Twitter or any kind of donations made or other things?”"No..." Greenblatt exclaimed. "I only say that because there have been folks who’ve looked at these situations and felt they were being shaken down,” Sorkin said.To which Greenblatt immediately played a 'card': "Look, I think, let me be honest about that. I think it is [a] sort of anti-Semitic trope to suggest when Jewish people express a degree of outrage over antisemitism, that somehow that's a shakedown because Jews are greedy. That sounds to me... I'm not saying you believe that..."Sorkin swiftly interrupted to defend himself... "I'm Jewish, so I’m not even trying to..." Sorkin said.Greenblatt then dropped the biggest load of bullshit yet: “I hear that, but my view on all of this, we talked about this before on the show... I don’t believe in cancel culture, I believe in counsel culture... What we’ve tried to do over the years with Twitter, with YouTube, with Facebook and all of its platforms, with Reddit, with Discord, I can go on and on, is to work with them, to make those platforms better,” Greenblatt said."Better" by who's defintion? "Better" by having voices silenced that do not fit the establishment narrative (and that have nothing at all to do with anti-semitism)? “I’m trying to understand what led to this - whatever is happening here. That was why I asked that question,” Sorkin asked. “Well, I think Elon’s a complicated person, I can’t explain what prompted those tweets,” Greenblatt said, adding that “Jewish people are vulnerable” and that Twitter should not be “amplifying or intensifying anti-Jewish hate.”Watch the full interview below: Michael Shellenberger was quick to point out the ADL CEO's propaganda...
And here is @MarioNawful debunking some of Greenblatt's lies:
Doesn’t seem like the meeting with X CEO Linda Yaccarino went as well as Greenblatt is making it out to be. As InformationLiberation.com's Chris Menahan detailed earlier, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Tuesday responded to Twitter/X owner Elon Musk's criticism of their aggressive pro-censorship ad boycott campaigns by accusing him of "engaging with a highly toxic antisemitic campaign" which will incite violence against Jewish people.
From Haaretz, "ADL Hits Back at Elon Musk for Engaging With 'Highly Toxic Antisemitic Campaign' ":
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Tuesday issued his first public comments after an antisemitic social media campaign spearheaded by X chairman Elon Musk targeted his organization.Musk can probably add this inflammatory rhetoric to his lawsuit against the ADL. Without a doubt, the time when the most "unprecedented spikes in antisemitism targeting Jewish institutions" occurred was in 2017 after Trump's election when over 245 bomb threats were called into Jewish community centers throughout America. The ADL used the threats to harangue President Trump for "emboldening anti-Semites" and legislation was passed as a result of lobbying from the ADL to increase funding and security grants to Jewish groups. It turned out nearly all of the JCC bomb threats were carried out by "18 year old" Israeli-American Michael Ron David Kadar, who was found to have a bitcoin wallet worth millions of shekels (a few copycat threats were called in by African-American Juan Thompson). <Zero photographs of Kadar's face were ever released. Kadar was found guilty in Israel in June 2018 for the bomb threats and sentenced to ten years in prison. In 2019, evidence was dug up by geneticist Franklin Stahl, Ph.D., a member of the National Academy of Science, suggesting that Kadar's Israeli mother, Dr. Tamar Kadar, who is a chemical weapons researcher at the Mossad-operated Israeli Institute for Biological Research, may have been the real culprit behind the calls. Stahl reported that Kadar, who evidence indicates was actually 27 years old and not 18 years old at the time of his arrest, was nothing more than a fall guy. Additionally, Kadar appears to have been freed from prison by Israel and allowed to travel back to America only to be arrested and jailed on a weapons charge in Illinois. Kadar's story completely fell off the map shortly after it was uncritically reported in 2017 and the ADL refused to remove his hoax calls from their list of "anti-Semitic incidents" for 2017. The ADL never apologized to Trump or his supporters for smearing them for supposedly inciting these (hoax) bomb threats and never offered to give back the money they got from Congress due to hyping the threats. "The new information does not change our view that the bomb threats against Jewish institutions were anti-Semitic and harmful to the communities targeted," the ADL said in a press release after Kadar's arrest.This battle - between Musk and the activist censors - is far from over. Reprinted with permission from ZeroHedge. 'I Don't Believe In Cancel Culture' - ADL CEO Fumes At Suggestion He Was 'Shaking Down' Musk For Money Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity ![]() ![]() ![]() Laws to ban disinformation and misinformation are being introduced across the West, with the partial exception being the US, which has the First Amendment so the techniques to censor have had to be more clandestine. In Europe, the UK, and Australia, where free speech is not as overtly protected, governments have legislated directly. The EU Commission is now applying the ‘Digital Services Act’ (DSA), a thinly disguised censorship law. In Australia the government is seeking to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation.” One effective response to these oppressive laws may come from a surprising source: literary criticism. The words being used, which are prefixes added to the word “information,” are a sly misdirection. Information, whether in a book, article or post is a passive artefact. It cannot do anything, so it cannot break a law. The Nazis burned books, but they didn’t arrest them and put them in jail. So when legislators seek to ban “disinformation,” they cannot mean the information itself. Rather, they are targeting the creation of meaning. The authorities use variants of the word “information” to create the impression that what is at issue is objective truth but that is not the focus. Do these laws, for example, apply to the forecasts of economists or financial analysts, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Of course not. Yet economic or financial forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people. The laws are instead designed to attack the intent of the writers to create meanings that are not congruent with the governments’ official position. ‘Disinformation’ is defined in dictionaries as information that is intended to mislead and to cause harm. ‘Misinformation’ has no such intent and is just an error, but even then that means determining what is in the author’s mind. ‘Mal-information’ is considered to be something that is true, but that there is an intention to cause harm. Determining a writer’s intent is extremely problematic because we cannot get into another person’s mind; we can only speculate on the basis of their behaviour. That is largely why in literary criticism there is a notion called the Intentional Fallacy, which says that the meaning of a text cannot be limited to the intention of the author, nor is it possible to know definitively what that intention is from the work. The meanings derived from Shakespeare’s works, for example, are so multifarious that many of them cannot possibly have been in the Bard’s mind when he wrote the plays 400 years ago. How do we know, for example, that there is no irony, double meaning, pretence or other artifice in a social media post or article? My former supervisor, a world expert on irony, used to walk around the university campus wearing a T-shirt saying: “How do you know I am being ironic?” The point was that you can never know what is actually in a person’s mind, which is why intent is so difficult to prove in a court of law. That is the first problem. The second one is that, if the creation of meaning is the target of the proposed law – to proscribe meanings considered unacceptable by the authorities – how do we know what meaning the recipients will get? A literary theory, broadly under the umbrella term ‘deconstructionism,’ claims that there are as many meanings from a text as there are readers and that “the author is dead.” While this is an exaggeration, it is indisputable that different readers get different meanings from the same texts. Some people reading this article, for example, might be persuaded while others might consider it evidence of a sinister agenda. As a career journalist I have always been shocked at the variability of reader’s responses to even the most simple of articles. Glance at the comments on social media posts and you will see an extreme array of views, ranging from positive to intense hostility. To state the obvious, we all think for ourselves and inevitably form different views, and see different meanings. Anti-disinformation legislation, which is justified as protecting people from bad influences for the common good, is not merely patronising and infantilising, it treats citizens as mere machines ingesting data – robots, not humans. That is simply wrong. Governments often make incorrect claims, and made many during Covid. In Australia the authorities said lockdowns would only last a few weeks to “flatten the curve.” In the event they were imposed for over a year and there never was a “curve.” According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020 and 2021 had the lowest levels of deaths from respiratory illness since records have been kept. Governments will not apply the same standards to themselves, though, because governments always intend well (that comment may or may not be intended to be ironic; I leave it up to the reader to decide). There is reason to think these laws will fail to achieve the desired result. The censorship regimes have a quantitative bias. They operate on the assumption that if a sufficient proportion of social media and other types of “information” is skewed towards pushing state propaganda, then the audience will inevitably be persuaded to believe the authorities. But what is at issue is meaning, not the amount of messaging. Repetitious expressions of the government’s preferred narrative, especially ad hominem attacks like accusing anyone asking questions of being a conspiracy theorist, eventually become meaningless. By contrast just one well-researched and well-argued post or article can permanently persuade readers to an anti-government view because it is more meaningful. I can recall reading pieces about Covid, including on Brownstone, that led inexorably to the conclusion that the authorities were lying and that something was very wrong. As a consequence the voluminous, mass media coverage supporting the government line just appeared to be meaningless noise. It was only of interest in exposing how the authorities were trying to manipulate the “narrative” – a debased word was once mainly used in a literary context – to cover their malfeasance. In their push to cancel unapproved content, out-of-control governments are seeking to penalise what George Orwell called “thought crimes.” But they will never be able to truly stop people thinking for themselves, nor will they ever definitively know either the writer’s intent or what meaning people will ultimately derive. It is bad law, and it will eventually fail because it is, in itself, predicated on disinformation. Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute. The Global War on Thought Crime Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity ![]() ![]() ![]() Is Covid-19 back for real this time? Is the “Eris” variant the real deal. These kind of questions keep coming up again and again, and it’s all by design. “The goal is an endless war, not a successful war” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange once said of the long Afghanistan war. That comment perfectly captures the cycle of Covid hysteria, too. In order to answer this question, it’s important to reach an understandable framework for how we define Covid and reach a premise to build upon. What is this thing we all call Covid or Covid-19? First of all, it’s important to shake out the pseudoscientific blather built up in our minds that we’ve accumulated from cable news, Government Health bureaucrats, and the legacy media. All of these forces have been horrifically incompetent and negligent over the course of the corona hysteria years, routinely insisting that you inject yourself with poison and ruin your lives to combat “the virus.” These forces are much more dangerous to your health than a respiratory illness that they have so poorly defined. To understand what Covid truly is, we must first pledge to turn off the TV. Here in reality, outside of the accepted ruling class framework, Covid is best understood as nothing more than a merger of what people commonly referred to prior to 2020 as the cold and flu. These two closely related diagnoses were then rebranded into a scary sounding disease called Covid-19. Nobody gets the cold anymore. Nobody gets the flu anymore. Sometimes, people now get RSV, but that’s because Pfizer has a new “vaccine” to sell for that! Essentially, post-2019 anything resembling the sniffles is now Covid. And now that we’ve turned off the TV and reset our minds, it’s time to briefly discuss the etymological roots of respiratory illness. The name ‘cold’ dates back to the 16th century, and it was used due to the sniffles coming at a time when people were exposed to cold weather. Cold is a catch all diagnosis for mild respiratory symptoms. The name ‘flu’ is short for the Italian word influenza, which comes from the medieval Latin influentia, which means 'visitation' or 'influence'. Remember, prior to the Covid era, influenza was largely diagnosed by a spot diagnosis, and rarely a test for evidence of an influenza virus. A flu diagnosis is as simple as determining a respiratory illness that is worse than a cold. Given the symptom portfolio in relation to the flu and the common cold, we’ve already established that there is nothing particularly novel about the disease we call Covid-19. The only distinguishing characteristic is built in the theory that the virus that supposedly causes it is a novel virus. Yet epidemiology and virology are “sciences” full of so much gobbledygook jargon, and there is still no real evidence that there was ever a novel virus spawned via a lab leak or natural spillover event in the first place. And the aforementioned statement, regardless of if you agree or disagree, doesn’t really even matter anyway, because the disease is not at all threatening to our civilization, nor is there any working cure for the disease, nor is there any practical means to mitigate its spread. Sorry, Government Health and the TV lied to you. There are no magic cures for the sniffles. Think of it this way: Verizon, the popular telecommunications company, was a creation of the merger of two companies: Bell Atlantic Corp. and GTE Corp. Bell Atlantic is the cold. GTE Corp is the flu. Verizon is Covid-19. Today, there is only Verizon. Bell and GTE are relics of the past. ![]() Verizon will remain with us until the company goes under or it merges and/or rebrands. The same goes for Covid-19. The cold/flu merger and rebrand called Covid-19 will remain with us until the people in power decide to name it something else. It is not a perfect analogy, but I hope that it paints an understandable visual. Welcome to the perpetual hysteria cycle. Reprinted with permission from The Dossier. Subscribe and support here. The Covid-19 "crisis" is back, until it rebrands into something else Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity ![]() ![]() ![]() A version of this presentation was given to the Ron Paul Institute's Scholars Seminar on Sept. 1st in Washington, DC. Today it’s hard for anyone under the age of 50 to appreciate how genuine and pervasive was fear of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War between the US- and Soviet-led blocs. Books, movies, and TV both reflected and stoked popular anxiety about the possible “end of civilization as we know it.” The heyday for this was in the 1950s and 1960s, with books like The Long Tomorrow(1955) and On the Beach (1957, with a 1959 film adaptation), and films like Fail Safe, Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove (all in 1964, while the real-life scare of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was fresh in people’s minds). There appeared to be a bit of a lull during the 1970s era of US-Soviet détente under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, perhaps also reflecting elite sympathy for socialism and an expected future convergence between the ideological groupings, which on a basic level shared the same globalist, materialist values. But nuclear terror returned with a vengeance in the 1980s – for example, The Day After (1983) and the animated When the Wind Blows (1986). And who can forget (certainly no male person!) the delightful Nena’s 1983 music video Neunundneunzig Luftballons. The Left, both in the United States and worldwide, was unanimous that Ronald Reagan, a self-confessed anti-communist, was a reckless cowboy who wanted to blow up the planet. As that great philosopher, Sting, put it in his 1985 song, “The Russians”: There is no historical precedentThe irony is that Reagan’s own views were hardly different from the ones the song sought to promote. As he stated jointly with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that very same year, 1985: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” a view that prevailed until the USSR imploded just a few years later. We live in a very different world now, where the prospect of nuclear annihilation barely registers with anyone. Just as big earthquakes are often preceded by foreshocks, major wars are frequently heralded by smaller conflicts. Before World War One: the Franco-German Morocco crises (1906 and 1911), the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12), the two Balkan Wars (1912, 1913). Before World War Two: the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-37) and, the most famous pre-conflagration rumble of them all, the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Today, we are looking at a possible regional war in West Africa, centering on American and French demands that “democracy” be restored in Niger. (As one Indian publication put it, “Death follows Victoria Nuland”) Then, of course, there’s China/Taiwan. But the obvious Spanish Civil War-rank conflict of the moment is Ukraine. I don’t think we need to go into all the details of how we got here, but just in brief:
Personally, I don’t think that will happen. Nobody cares about Afghanistan but the Afghans, but if Washington walks away from Ukraine it’s effectively conceding that the US, through NATO, no longer is the security hegemon of Europe. That means the effective end of NATO, in fact if not in name; and where NATO goes, its concubine, the European Union, won’t be far behind. More to the point, though, the notion that this will soon end with a whimper misses the whole point. None of this is really about Ukraine, which is just an expendable tool to hurt Russia. (Maybe the Poles or Lithuanians or Romanians are eager to volunteer for the job once we’re fresh out of Ukrainians.) Ukraine is just a variable; the constant isRuthenia delenda est. Russia must be destroyed. Gilbert Doctorow, a noted observer of Russian affairs, likens the current situation to that of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign depicted by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. Today as then, what happens next will be less due to this or that policymaker making this or that bad decision. Rather, “the precondition for war is the near universal acceptance of the logic of the coming war.” What is that logic today? It’s simple: the ruling circles in the United States (needless to add, with their sock puppets in western capitals) are utterly, unselfconsciously convinced that they are the living embodiment of all virtue, truth, and progress in what Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described as the “replication of the experience of Bolshevism and Trotskyism” – to cite Reagan, morphing ourselves into a new Evil Empire in place of the old one. As neocon kingpins William Kristol and Robert Kagan put it in their 1996 manifesto, the policy of the United States in the coming era must be one of “benevolent global hegemony” intended to last – well, forever. Its moral content is exemplified, on the one hand, by US support for subjugation of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and, on the other, the spectacle of a transgender US serviceperson acting as a PR official for the Ukrainian military declaring that “we’re human,” and the Russians “most definitely aren’t.” As I like to say: there’s no Transatlanticism without transgenderism. Unsurprisingly, regarding their alleged lack of human-ness, the Russians disagree. But who cares what they think? Our leaders see not only Putin but Russians in general as an obstacle to the radiant future, where every knee will bow before the sacred rainbow flag. Sun Tzu says “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” The Russians more or less know themselves. They kind of know us, but not as well as they think they do, with rather a tendency to project normalcy onto fundamentally abnormal people. On the other hand, our rulers – dangerous people whose levels of arrogance and ignorance defies description: monkeys with nuclear hand grenades – know neither themselves nor the Russians. On top of that, as Doctorow further observes, the mechanisms that lent some stability and restraint to the US-Soviet standoff are now all but gone, rendering the once-“unthinkable” of the 1950s’ nuke horror films all-too-thinkable today: ‘… no one wants war, neither Washington nor Moscow. However, the step-by-step dismantling of the channels of communication, of the symbolic projects for cooperation across a wide array of domains, and now dismantling of all the arms limitation agreements that took decades to negotiate and ratify, plus the incoming new weapons systems that leave both sides with under 10 minutes to decide how to respond to alarms of incoming missiles—all of this prepares the way for the Accident to end all Accidents. Such false alarms occurred in the Cold War but some slight measure of mutual trust prompted restraint. That is all gone now and if something goes awry, we are all dead ducks.’“No one wants war.” A similar thought was expressed by Hermann Göring, when he was on trial at Nuremberg: Of course the people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. … But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.So I guess Doctorow is a bit off the mark in suggesting that “no one wants war.” Clearly, somebody wants war. A lot of very important “somebodies” wanted this war in Ukraine. They wanted war in the Balkans in the 1990s. They wanted war in Afghanistan, Iraq (twice!), Libya, Yemen, Syria, and a dozen places in Africa where we have almost no idea what’s going on. “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked…” I can’t help but think of the meme with two blank-face NPCs, one wearing a pink knit hat mindlessly repeating “Russia! Russia! Russia!,” the other with a red MAGA hat chanting “China! China! China!” Between them is the seal of the CIA with the eagle saying, “Yes, yes, my pretties. That’s it. That’s it.” Here we are, 60 years after the fact, with the growing recognition by even the most spoon-fed normies that the CIA had something to do with the assassination of Jack Kennedy. In fact, we have here today perhaps the foremost authority on the topic, Mr. Jacob Hornberger. Yet doubting our rulers’ truthiness still is treated as a thought crime. A little while ago, Vivek Ramaswamy was the target of a media hate fest for (in the words of The New Republic) “spout[ing] conspiracy theories about January 6 and 9/11.” Oh no! “Conspiracy theories”! (Or, as they are known when they turn out to be true, “spoiler alerts.”) The heretic Ramaswamy evidently believes – shocking as this sounds – that our government has not been entirely honest about these matters. He must be a dupe for the Russians! Or for the Chinese! – which The New Republic also implies. You may have heard some people compare the “lawfare” being directed against Donald Trump, with the evident aim of eliminating the likely opponent next year of the desiccated-husk-of-Hunter-Biden’s-dad (assuming ol’ Joe will be the Democratic nominee, which I don’t), to the behavior of a banana republic. This is a gratuitous insult to the friendly spider-infested nations to our south! I recently suggested to a sober observer of public affairs that the strategic goal is keeping Trump off the ballot in one or more must-win states for him, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, to which he responded: “That’s a recipe for civil war.” (I tried to imagine what Republicans taking to the streets would look like. A mob of decrepit Boomers rolling their motorized wheelchairs down to the corner and burning down the post office?) Anyway, taking him out via lawfare seems to be Plan A. If that fails – well, Plan B would get us into Mr. Hornberger’s area of expertise. The term “cold” civil war, a war that might possibly turn “hot,” has become a commonplace in American discourse. So has the expression “national divorce.” In 1861 Americans both North and South worshipped the same God, read the same Bible, honored the same Founding Fathers, claimed fidelity to the same Constitution. In today’s America, we can’t even agree on our pronouns or on what a “woman” is, much less on what it means to be an American. We are moral aliens to one another, indeed enemies. What actually holds the former American republic together? “Muh Constitution”? “Muh democracy”? Keep in mind, we’re not talking about a mere political crisis that will get solved in an election or two. Not even about political and constitutional collapse, or even a financial and economic calamity – that’s coming too, in part because of the impact of the Ukraine war on the dollar-denominated global system – but a fundamental challenge to the social fabric itself, and not just in the United States. A watershed was passed with covid and the measures – the lockdowns, the masks, social distancing and monitoring, the clot shot, censorship of dissent, all combined with a pervasive, inescapable external and internal panopticon: as the troubadour of transhumanism Yuval Harari writes, “we are seeing a change in the nature of surveillance from over the skin surveillance to under the skin surveillance” – supposedly intended to deal with a virus, accomplishing within a few short months what decades of climate hysteria could not, summed up under the moniker “the Great Reset” and its ubiquitous slogan “Build Back Better.”’ Taken together what we’re experiencing has all the appearance of a controlled demolition of all established human interactions in anticipation of their replacement by something we are assured by our betters will be an improvement. The contours of the “new normal” in the post-American America hurtling in our direction have already become so familiar as to need little elaboration:
These so-called “values” – which, remember, are effectively the official ideology of the West, which we seek “benevolently” to impose on the rest of the world, by force if necessary – in turn accelerate longstanding trends towards infertility and demographic collapse pointing to thinning the human herd and replacement via post-human society, transhumanism, and bio-engineering. This is not just “political” but a strike at the heart of human existence: the spiritual, moral, and even biological basis for marriage, family formation, and production of the next generation. In a word: depopulation. The idea of the death of mankind—not the death of specific people but literally the end of the human race—evokes a response in the human psyche. It arouses and attracts people, albeit with differing intensity in different epochs and in different individuals. The scope of influence of this idea causes us to suppose that every individual is affected by it to a greater or lesser degree and that it is a universal trait of the human psyche. With the failure of the Ukrainian offensive, Moscow now faces a dilemma. Do they move decisively to impose a military solution that ends the war, or do they continue to show restraint in the hopes that somebody, somewhere – Kiev, Washington, London, Brussels – decides it’s time to sue for peace? Keen not to take a precipitous step that might bring about a direct clash of NATO and Russian forces, so far they’ve opted for the latter – I repeat: so far. The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Extinction Itself Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity ![]() ![]() ![]() As I have noted on multiple occasions, I pledge allegiance to no political party on the face of the earth. None speak for me. I am a devout monarchist. That said, I will watch the 2024 US presidential campaign with great interest. It may very well be the last one we see with the United States in its present form. One thing is increasingly clear: despite his apparent popularity with a substantial plurality of the American electorate, the powers-that-be in the empire will do “whatever it takes” to prevent Donald Trump from even getting on the ballot, let alone actually win again. Of course, Trump’s supporters believe he is the answer to America’s woes. They believed that in 2016, too. And yet the woes not only continued, they became more severe. Although he paid much lip service to the notion, Trump did nothing whatsoever to threaten the omnipotence of the so-called “Swamp” in Washington. He wrapped himself and his administration in its tentacles. Many will reflexively reply, “But he didn’t start a war!” And yet all during his term in office the empire greatly accelerated its preparations for the war against Russia now raging in Ukraine — a war whose consequences will include the end of NATO as a credible military/political alliance, and the end of the European Union as a functioning political/monetary alliance. Meanwhile, wars against Iran and China continue to simmer on the back burner — conflicts which the Trump tenure as president greatly exacerbated, and which the Biden administration has aggravated even further. The trajectory of events is not amenable to the voice of the people. The Empire At All Costs cult is calling the shots, and war remains their only recourse to the relinquishment of hegemony. Representative democracy in the United States is irredeemably corrupted. The sprawling permanent apparatus of empire in Washington has become an irreversibly metastasized malignancy on the American body politic, and an existential threat to the world. Many believe it can be cured by finding and electing “the right people”. I’m sorry folks, but we’re far past that. The people for whom you are permitted to vote are individually and collectively powerless against the real potentates who rule and reign in America. On November 6, 2024, the American public will be informed that someone has been elected President of the United States of America. Whoever it is, you will be assured that the majority of the electorate voted for him or her. But it won’t be Donald Trump and it won’t be Robert Kennedy, Jr. I seriously doubt it will even be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Of one thing only can we be absolutely certain: whoever it is, it will not be an agent of change for the better. As Alexis de Tocqueville presciently foresaw way back in the 1830s, American democracy would inevitably lead to a massive permanent state, impervious to the will of the people: The democratic tendency … leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons ... often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse ... men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them."This is where we are, and there will be no turning back. To whatever extent it ever truly was, America will never be made great again. Something great may eventually rise from its ashes … but the ashes will come first. Reprinted with permission from imetatronink. Subscribe and support here. The Ashes Will Come First Click on the headline to read the full story from ![]() ![]() ![]() August 23rd was a big news day all over the world. The western media’s focus on the events of that day was solidly on the unproven claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the sabotage or shooting down of an executive jet that killed his former associate Yevgeny Prigozhin. In reality, however, there was a far more important story that was coming out of South Africa. In fact, Putin had a far more important job to do on that day due to his desire to make progress in stripping the United States of its dollar hegemony. Putin was engaged by videolink in the discussions taking place in Johannesburg regarding expanding the so-called BRICS monetary union, in part to include measures that would diminish the dominance of the dollar in the world economy. That objective would have been damaged severely if Putin had been implicated in the spectacular public assassination of a rival on the same day as the BRICS meeting that would have been not only an embarrassment but also very damaging vis-a-vis his credibility as a statesman. If Putin had really wanted to kill Prigozhin, there were less politically damaging ways to do so and as of this writing the cause of the airplane crash remains unknow. By one theory, the death of Prigozhin was carried out by an airplane bomb planted by US or British intelligence working with Ukrainian agents inside Russia to discredit the Russian leader, knowing that even if he were innocent he would be blamed for the killing, which is precisely how the story has been developing in the US and Europe. The name BRICS comes from an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill reportedly coined the term BRIC (without South Africa) in 2001 and the group was set up a few years later using the acronym. Recently, the drive to expand BRICS has gained momentum as a result of the completely avoidable Ukraine war. The venerable status quo for international finance was developed in the wake of the Second World War at Bretton-Woods, where the instruments of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created, to include endorsing the dollar as the de facto world reserve currency for many transactions. The entire structure is, by design, managed by a transatlantic capitalist cabal based in Washington. Is the Almighty US Dollar About to Take a Fall? Click on the headline to read the full story from |
Ron Paul
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