#russian support for the war in ukraine seems about where american support for the iraq war was in 2003

[tanadrin]

The You’re Wrong About episode on the Dixie Chicks reminded me of something I was really only half-aware of in 2003; I was in my mid-teens, thought the Iraq War was a bad idea, but for reasons I had a lot of trouble articulating, and I won’t claim that my position was super well thought out or nuanced (though the passage of time did vindicate it). But the level of support for Bush in that era, and the bipartisan support for the war, was truly insanely high; Natalie Maines’ very mild rebuke of Bush, in terms of political discourse nowadays, prompted the entire country to basically go apeshit on her, for the band to temporarily become pariahs, and for some pundits to seriously suggest that criticizing the president on a London stage amounted to actual treason. Given the egregious transgression of international law the Iraq War represented, the transparent deception used to justify it, and the absolute disaster it proved to be for the people of Iraq, it is easy to forget just how rabidly pro-war the whole country was at that time. And this is in a country that is relatively prosperous, has a pretty free press, a two-party system, and had only spent a couple of years being terrorized by propaganda about the People Coming To Get You.

[mariacallous]

That Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would fire his top general, Valerii Zaluzhny, was rumored for months, leaked and officially denied last week, and finally confirmed yesterday, when Zelensky replaced Zaluzhny with General Oleksandr Syrsky.

The leaks and denials seem to have reflected political maneuverings behind the scenes. Zaluzhny, who is charismatic and popular with both the public and the troops, is widely thought to have political ambitions. The notion that Zelensky might have been about to fire him because he felt threatened by the general’s popularity helped stir public sentiment in Zaluzhny’s favor.

But Zelensky countered adroitly with a different narrative: Two years into the war—after the counteroffensive Zaluzhny designed and led had stalled out—the president sought to refresh his national-security team. Zelensky asked for Zaluzhny’s resignation, but the general refused, requiring the president to fire him. The president then offered the general other prominent positions in the national-security apparatus, but Zaluzhny declined them. When Zelensky brought down the axe, he did it gracefully and thanked Zaluzhny for his contributions to the country.

Syrsky is a less popular figure. He led the bruising campaign in Bakhmut, where Ukraine took terrible losses in order to impose even greater losses on Russia. Ukrainian troops reportedly call him “the Butcher.” But he is also, by Zelensky’s description, Ukraine’s most experienced commander. He will now be under enormous pressure to live up to Zaluzhny’s performance: Any sign that the war effort is faltering as a result of Zelensky’s decision to replace the top general will become a political liability to the president.

Whatever one may think of Zelensky’s decision, it is a sign that some things are working as they should in Ukraine’s battle-weary democracy. In civil-military relations, the answers to two questions determine whether a country’s military is safely subordinate to its elected leadership. The first is whether the president can fire anyone in uniform. Doing so needn’t be costless—in fact, civilian leaders can pay a considerable political price for relieving popular military leaders. When President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, he worried that MacArthur might become the Republican nominee in the 1952 election (as he had sought to be in 1948). President Abraham Lincoln dismissed General George McClellan and actually did have to run against him for president in 1864.

Zelensky will likewise pay a price for firing Zaluzhny. The Ukrainian president may well have unleashed a political rival who will now feel at liberty to criticize him and his policies. If Syrsky proves less capable than his predecessor, or if a dip in morale interferes with recruiting or saps the fighting spirit of Ukrainian forces, the public will blame Zelensky. And any suggestion that politicking in Kyiv is damaging the war effort could put American support, already faltering, in further jeopardy.

The second question is whether the military will carry out policies its leaders disagree with. Many in the American military leadership had grave doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, about the resourcing of the war in Afghanistan, and certainly about the conduct of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. But in a free society, the military doesn’t get to choose political objectives or determine how much blood, treasure, and national effort to commit to the wars it fights. Only the president gets to make those decisions, because the president, unlike military leaders, is accountable to the public via elections.

Zaluzhny seems to have had differences with Zelensky over the resources necessary to accomplish the government’s war aim of driving Russian forces out of Ukraine. The general was apparently pressing the president to mobilize an additional 500,000 soldiers—and he publicly pitched this view to prestigious Western media outlets, reportedly to presidential irritation.

Zaluzhny’s professional military judgment evidently clashed with the president’s professional political and economic judgment of what the country could bear. Both sides in such a dispute can be right; when civil-military relations function well, the parties work toward compromise. If the relationship becomes too brittle for that, a president may have reason to fire his military commander.

Elected leaders in free societies have a right to work with military leaders whom they trust to share their priorities and appreciate the political constraints they work within. To the extent that Zaluzhny seems to have lost Zelensky’s trust, it was Zelensky’s prerogative to replace him. But the move could be costly. The war is bogging down, and Zaluzhny was popular both with troops and with the foreign militaries whose support is crucial to Ukraine’s survival. Kyiv certainly can’t afford for its allies to wonder whether petty politics are interfering with its war effort—and it might have done better to endure a difficult relationship than take the risk of alienating either domestic or international support.

[theculturedmarxist]

A Waning Military Superpower

The sections of the book on American military prowess are where Martyanov’s expertise really shines through. Martyanov claims that a revolution in military affairs has already destroyed the foundation of American post–World War II hegemony and that America simply has not yet awakened to this reality. This is due to the fact, Martyanov says, that the United States has “lost both its competitive edge and its competences in some crucial fields such as building complex machines, commercial aerospace, and shipbuilding.” Effectively, he argues, the United States has already lost the arms race. Martyanov compares the efficacy of America’s Tomahawk missile with Russia’s Kalibr. He argues that both weapons have seen ample usage in recent years, and Russia’s missile is far more effective against missile defense. He points out that 70 percent of Tomahawks launched at Syria in April 2018 were shot down.

But this is not Martyanov’s core critique, which is that the American military is simply not tailored to the needs of today’s world. It is structured for incursions against much weaker opponents—such as Iraq in 1991 and 2003. But it is not in a position of strength when faced with a peer that can compete in terms of troop deployment and firepower.

Critical in this respect is America’s continued reliance on aircraft carriers to project power across the globe. “The American super-carrier died as a viable weapon system designed for modern war with the arrival of the long-range supersonic anti-shipping missile,” Martyanov writes. This renders “the 100,000-ton displacement mastodons of the US Navy obsolete and very expensive sacrificial lambs in any real war. Modern Russian hypersonic missiles such as the Mach-9 capable aero-ballistic Kinzhal have a range of 2000 kilometres and are not interceptable by existing US anti-missile systems.” In fact, if an advanced enemy decided to sink a U.S. carrier battle group, it could do so with the push of a few buttons. These missiles cost a few million dollars to make in countries, like Russia, with low labor costs. A carrier battle group, by contrast, costs about $30 billion and has around 6,700 hands on deck. Martyanov seems genuinely concerned that the Pentagon does not recognize the scale of this problem and could deploy a carrier battle group against a competitive peer in the near future. The enormous, immediate losses that would result might force the United States to use nuclear weapons in response.

Finally, Martyanov points to the shortcomings of U.S. missile and air defense systems when measured against their Russian equivalents. He notes that this makes America’s military increasingly vulnerable against even smaller nations like Iran, reminding readers of the September 2019 attack against Saudi Aramco oil refineries where Western-made missile defense systems failed to protect the infrastructure.

Martyanov traces the failures of U.S. military technologies back to the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex. He reminds readers that this is effectively a for-profit enterprise, and so what ends up being built is not always what is best in terms of defense capabilities, but rather what will make the most money for commercial actors.

Now that we have a large-scale land war, how has Martyanov’s anal­ysis played out? Martyanov’s prediction that the structure of America’s military is only suited to relatively small wars against far weaker powers appears accurate in retrospect. Western weaponry and covert intelligence support has certainly helped Ukraine achieve some real successes on the battlefield. But as the war drags on and artillery capacity becomes decisive, the situation appears far more perilous.

Alex Vershinin at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute has estimated that the Russian military has been using around 7,176 artillery shells a day. He then compares this with American productive capacity. His conclusions are stark: “US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine,” he writes. “If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.”1

In June, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, Vadym Skibitsky, admitted the gravity of the material challenges. “This is an artillery war now,” he said, “Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery prices. . . . We are losing in terms of artillery.” Skib­itsky then asked that more munitions be sent from the West, but as Vershinin’s analysis shows, it is likely that we simply do not have them in sufficient supply and cannot produce them. As early as April, Germa­ny’s defense minister Christine Lambrecht admitted as much: “In the case of deliveries from Bundeswehr stocks, I have to be honest, we have now reached a limit,” she said.

Vershinin believes that the United States no longer has the arms manufacturing capacity to act as the “arsenal of democracy.” The Russo-Ukrainian war, like World Wars I and II, has been fought on an indus­trial scale. To fight it, the resources of a strong industrial economy must be deployed. Needless to say, the West has allowed its industrial capacity to erode considerably, having outsourced much of its manufacturing to poorer regions of the world. This is also visible in another surprising recent development. After putting a great deal of effort into lobbying the Australian government to buy submarines from the United States under the aukus deal, it was recently revealed to Congress that the United States does not actually possess the manufacturing capacity to produce these submarines in a timely fashion. Martyanov argues that the structure of America’s post­industrial military reflects its postindustrial economy. It is to this that we now turn.

A Hollow Economy

The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western sanc­tions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.

Martyanov, reflecting his Soviet materialist education, starts by discussing the food supply. He recalls the limited food options available in the old Soviet Union and how impressed émigrés were by the “over­flowing abundance” of the American convenience store. But Martyanov notes that today such abundance is only the preserve of the rich and powerful. He references a 2020 study by the Brookings Institution which found that “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And while some of this was driven by the pandemic, the number was 15.1 percent in 2018. Martyanov makes the case that these numbers reflect an economy that is poorly organized and teetering on the edge. In the summer of 2022, when the food component of the CPI is increasing at over 10 percent a year and rising fast, Martyanov’s chapter looks prophetic.

Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen. During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in domestic indus­trial production, which has been stagnant in nominal terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”

Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production “China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia, which has a population less than half the size of that of the United States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”

Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack sub­marine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia is pro­ducing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the Russians are getting.

A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.

Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is heavily dependent on high oil prices.

Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.

Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling manu­facturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad. But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture domi­nated by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes, “especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic on the assembly line.”

Rotting from the Head Down

Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has not dominated the personality of either the American people or their leaders, he says. Rather, the Ameri­can people remain today “very nice folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.

Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly over­estimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game; the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for self-assured­ness and self-interestedness.

This creates an echo chamber in the halls of power. The elite incentive structure does not allow for self-correction when error is detected. Rather, when mistakes are made, they are ignored and forgot­ten. To illustrate this phenomenon, Martyanov recalls the popularity of the phrase “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone” on Wall Street in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Since the incentives are set up for people to focus wholly on themselves and their own careers, there is no reference to any common good to be defended, and so anyone who points out mistakes risks career suicide. Ensuring that the mechanism securing elite individual gain is upheld and insulated from criticism is more important than ensuring that it works. As with late Communism, most effort is expended on producing self-reinforcing narratives that justify the sys­tem itself, and there is little energy left for addressing genuine problems.

Martyanov posits that this is how American leaders are viewed in much of the rest of the world, where he contends that leaders are selected along more genuinely meritocratic lines. “American [public] intellectuals come across as feeble and unconvincing, if not laughably incompetent and trite,” he writes, “when measured against the best minds from Russia, China, Iran or many other regions of the globe.”

Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Martyanov’s assess­ment of the American elite, his view has explanatory power if it is widely shared outside of the West and especially in Russia. Given that Russia, China, India, Brazil, and most of the Global South appear to have broken with the West in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, we can infer that their leaders share at least some of Martyanov’s views of Western elites.

[blueiskewl]

Javelin missile: Made by the US, wielded by Ukraine, feared by Russia

From the time Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” on Feb. 24, 2022, his target, Ukraine, proved to be anything but low-hanging fruit. Ferocious though their resistance was, however, it would not have lasted as long as it did — three months and still counting, as of May 2022 — had it not been the vital weaponry and ammunition provided to the Ukrainians from numerous foreign supporters through what has amounted to a 21st century form of World War II’s Lend-Lease program.

Among the most noticeable weapons credited with standing up to overwhelming waves of Russian tanks has been a state-of-the-art, infantry-operated guided missile. The Americans who produced it call it the FGM-148 AAWS-M (for “Advanced Antitank Weapon System-Medium”), but many of its current users have come to call it “Saint Javelin, Protector of Ukraine.”

What is the Javelin?

The FGM-148 entered service in 1996 as a replacement for the M47 Dragoon. The latest model is the FGM-148F, and an upgraded FGM-148G is in the works.

Weighing 49 pounds, the Javelin has advanced electronics that have progressively improved to afford the operator fire-and-forget capability. Using the attached Command Launch Unit, the operator aims and fires, the missile being spring-ejected before igniting and traveling on toward the target at a rate of 1,000 feet every seven seconds, guided by an infrared seeker in the nose.

Upon contact, the foremost of two tandem high-explosive antitank, or HEAT, warheads explodes against the reactive armor, clearing the way for the second warhead to reach the tank’s main armor. The Javelin’s warheads can penetrate steel up to 23.5 inches to 31.5 inches thick. With an effective range over 1.5 miles, the Javelin’s warhead travels 213 feet before it arms — but it does produce a backblast that the user must take into account.

Though its range falls below the 2.3-mile effective range of the BGM-71 tube-launched, optically guided, wire-guided, or TOW missile, the Javelin is much lighter and handier for operation by a single trained infantryman. Like the TOW, however, it can be mounted on a vehicle if one is available.

How accurate is the Javelin?

The United States has claimed that of the first 112 Javelins it used, 100 hit the targets, both directly and on trajectories from above, where tank armor is thinner and more vulnerable to penetration.

The Command Launch Unit, which can magnify targets up to four times, can be removed from the weapon system and used as a lightweight optical device and night sight.

Who uses the Javelin?

Javelins have been sold to military services all over the world, and U.S. Army, U.S. Marine and Australian forces have used them to good effect in Iraq and Afghanistan, where its accuracy at greater ranges than other weapons made it useful against enemy strongpoints as well as moving vehicles.

Although it has seen its share of combat since its introduction to service, it has been in Ukraine that the Javelin has attained legendary status. The country had already purchased 210 missiles and 37 launchers in March 2018, for $47 million, followed by another order in June 2020 for $150 million more.

These came swiftly into play when Putin sent in the tanks, making the Russian advance a costly one on all fronts. The Ukrainians have claimed more than 230 tanks and armored vehicles destroyed thus far, although it should be noted that they have other antitank weapons that may have contributed to that statistic, as well.

Nor is the Javelin without its weaknesses, particularly its vulnerability to losing the contrast necessary for a missile lock at dawn or dusk, or if the target shoots off clouds of infrared-blocking smoke.

The principal complaint from Ukrainians about the Javelins, however, is that there never seem to be enough of them. They have already received more than 5,500 missiles, and the United States and other allies have pledged to send more, but they are expensive and time consuming to produce — 6,840 per year at $176,000 per system. In aiding the Ukrainians, the U.S. has sent off as much as two-thirds of its existing arsenal, which cannot be immediately replaced.

Fortunately for the Ukrainians, they do have a supplement of other effective light infantry anti-armor weapons and have become experienced in making every shot count. For the time being, though, the Javelin has acquired so literarily iconic a place in the Ukrainian arsenal that reports have come in of a local artist creating a piece of mock traditional religious art depicting Mary Magdalene holding a Javelin. Newborn Ukrainian babies have reportedly been christened “Javelin” or “Javelina.”

By Jon Guttman.

[xtruss]

'F**k This Guy': Ex-Bernie Supporters Slam US Lawmaker for Spouting ‘Neocon Propaganda’ About Russia

Many said they regretted having given their time and money to Sanders’ presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 after his aggressive statements.

Former supporters of US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took to social media Friday to express their disgust after the former peace candidate expressed support for the Biden administration’s anti-Russian stance.

The outrage came in response to comments Sanders made in a recent BBC interview held amid his ongoing book tour.

When asked whether the US should “send F-16s” to the Ukrainian regime, Sanders replied: “It’s not an issue that I’ve been heavily involved in, but I support what the president is doing.”

“The United States” and NATO “cannot sit back and allow” what he called “Russia’s aggression” to go unanswered, he insisted.

Social media users were quick to call out the aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric by the supposed peace candidate.

”My spouse and I gave our time and money to support this man, and this is what he tells us now?” asked one. “Disgusting.”

“F*ck this guy,” added another, who couldn’t believe “I campaigned & organized a few hundred hours for this bastard that is joining Biden in the push toward nuclear war.”

“The most ‘progressive anti-war’ Democrat spouting neocon propaganda and protecting Biden and the neocon cabal as they push us towards WW3,” said a third, adding: “and you still think you can reform that party from within?”

On Twitter, journalist Glenn Greenwood expressed incredulity at the statement, noting Sanders has become “one of America's most vocal and steadfast advocates for supporting Joe Biden's war policies in Ukraine.

“He voted to send $40 billion to Raytheon and CIA ‘for Ukraine,’ and when asked if the US should send F-16 *fighter jets*, he seems not just ready but eager to send much more,” Greenwald noted.

He argued Sanders’ comments show the senator “deceived millions” of Americans when he promised a “‘political revolution’ against the [Democrat] establishment.”

Sanders was once considered a leading anti-war figure in the United States. Opponents of American imperialism found much to appreciate in his criticisms of “endless war” and the military industrial complex, and he clearly and vocally opposed the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq months before it began in 2003.

At a time when few were willing to publicly oppose the US-backed overthrow of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, Sanders made waves by condemning the ouster as a “coup” on live television during the presidential debates in 2019.

Now, after two failed presidential bids, during which the Democratic Party openly manipulated the process to disadvantage him on multiple occasions, many former supporters now see Sanders as little more than a shadow of his former self.

However, it’s not just Ukraine, there are other areas where it seems Bernie has lost his mojo — or perhaps never had it at all. Last December, Sanders “abandoned his plan on Tuesday to introduce the resolution to end US involvement in ‘hostilities’ alongside the Saudi-led coalition,” a major US outlet noted.

— Wyatt Reed | Sputnik International | March 03, 2023

[lol-jackles]

I'm from Russia. And I am against any war. Especially against the war with the fraternal people. Russians and Ukrainians are too closely intertwined, we have a common history and common troubles and common horrors.

But it's funny to me to read the reasoning of Americans about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. And I'm sick of double standards.

Aggressor Russia defends its interests from a position of strength (Crimea, Ukraine, Ossetia and others). Aggressor US defends its interests from a position of strength (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and others).

This is fucking politics. This is the fucking world we live in. Let's remember Yugoslavia, which NATO troops bombed in front of the whole of Europe.

Don't be a hypocrite. There are no "white and fluffy" states in this world. They're all covered in shit.

Ps: I'm reading your blog because I love Jared.

Pps: Russians respect Trump

Very true, Western governments are selective and often hypocritical in their self-righteous adherence to the principles of self-determination when the end result was the West expanding at Russia's expense. So it's not hard to understand why Russia's leaders might feel aggrieved at the various changes in the status quo, especially if those changes are perceived to have arisen from underhanded tactics and moving goal posts. The West should have been far more realistic about its military capabilities and willingness to fight, and not mindlessly expand an alliance system to include countries that U.S, Germany, France, and the U.K are not truly willing to send their citizens to die for.

Ah yes, the double standards. Like when the U.S demanded Soviet missiles be removed from Cuba, which was there in the first place because Moscow was worried about U.S nuclear weapons being positioned in Turkey. The U.S has enforced the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere for generations just out of prerogative for its own security; and invade any country it determines to be a threat to their security (Afghanistan, Iraq) and to launch air strikes against foreign cities where there are rebels or insurgencies it deems worthy of supporting (Libya, Syria).

Of course whataboutism doesn’t excuse Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but it doesn't hurt to try to understand the other side as the media here in the U.S seems to be focused solely on the "deranged" Putin, but that clearly isn’t telling the whole story as there's lots of precedent leading up to what we're seeing now.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Migration has plummeted during the pandemic (Economist) If there is one thing that people remember about the covid-19 pandemic, it is the experience of sheltering in place. Those looking to move abroad have had little choice but to stay put, too. A new report from the OECD, a think-tank, shows that travel restrictions introduced in response to the pandemic caused migration to rich countries to fall by half in the first half of the year, compared with 2019. The sharpest declines occurred in East Asia and Oceania. Rich countries there have succeeded better than most at stopping the spread of covid-19. This is in part because they were quick to recognise the threat and institute strict travel restrictions. Some countries in the region, including Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have just about stopped accepting new immigrants entirely.

Couples doing fine (Washington Post) While lots of the early pandemic and quarantine led to speculation about a spike in divorces that would ensue following couples being crammed into close quarters for extended periods, couples are actually doing pretty okay according to the latest edition of the American Family Survey: 58 percent of married men and women aged 18 to 55 said the pandemic made them appreciate their spouse more; while 8 percent said that the pandemic weakened their commitment to one another, 51 percent said it’d deepened it. The numbers bear it out too: five states report divorce stats in real time, and on balance filings are down for 2020. Year-to-date, divorce filings are down 19 percent in Florida, 13 percent in Rhode Island, 12 percent in Oregon and 9 percent in Missouri. Only Arizona, as of now, is up.

Faulty password security (Foreign Policy) A Dutch “white hat”—or ethical hacker—claims to have logged in to the Twitter account of U.S. President Donald Trump … simply by guessing his password. Victor Gevers, a security researcher, discovered the vulnerability last Friday before alerting U.S. security authorities. Gevers allegedly gained access using the password “maga2020!” but did not succumb to the temptation of tweeting to the president’s 87 million followers. Gevers attributes the lack of account security to Trump’s age. “‘Trump is over 70—elderly people often switch off two-step verification because they find it too complicated. My own mother, for instance.”

IMF concerned over post-COVID social unrest across Latin America (Reuters) The International Monetary Fund is concerned that social unrest will make a comeback in “lots of countries” across Latin America once the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, a top IMF official said on Thursday. Economies across Latin America and the Caribbean are forecast to contract as a group by 8.1% this year, with an uneven 2021 bounce at just 3.6%, and most countries are not seen returning to pre-COVID output levels until 2023, the Fund said earlier on Thursday. “Some of the determinants of social unease are going to worsen and that generates our concern for the region, for lots of countries in the region,” Alejandro Werner, the Fund’s director for the Western Hemisphere, said in an interview with Reuters. “Coming out of the pandemic, we will have a level of economic activity and employment that will be much lower than before, a level of poverty and income distribution that is worse,” he added. Protests that sometimes turned violent rocked countries including Chile, Ecuador and Colombia even before the pandemic hit, fueled by anger over inequality, corruption and government austerity policies.

In hard-hit Peru, worry mounts over both COVID-19 and dengue (AP) PUCALLPA, Peru—Two of Lidia Choque’s close family members had already gotten sick with the new coronavirus when the mosquitos arrived. The 53-year-old woman lives in a wooden house near the airport of a Peruvian city in the Amazon rainforest. City fumigators usually visit several times during the rainy season to eliminate the pests, but this year, because of the pandemic, they were absent. When she went to a hospital after coming down with a fever and body aches, doctors delivered a double diagnosis: COVID-19 and dengue. “I couldn’t even walk,” she said. As Peru grapples with one the world’s worst SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks, another virus is starting to raise alarm: dengue. Health officials have reported over 35,000 cases this year, concentrated largely in the Amazon. The rise comes amid an overall dip in the number of new daily coronavirus infections, though authorities worry a second wave could strike as dengue cases rise.

French PM says 2nd virus wave is here, vastly extends curfew (AP) French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Thursday a vast extension of the nightly curfew that is intended to curb the spiraling spread of the coronavirus, saying “the second wave is here.” The curfew imposed in eight regions of France last week, including Paris and its suburbs, is being extended to 38 more regions and Polynesia starting Friday at midnight, Castex said. It is likely to last six weeks before a review, he said. The extension means that 46 million of France’s 67 million people will be under 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfews that prohibit them from being out and about during those hours except for limited reasons, such as walking a dog, traveling to and from work and catching a train or flight.

Putin: Russia-China military alliance can’t be ruled out (AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday there is no need for a Russia-China military alliance now, but noted it could be forged in the future. Putin’s statement signaled deepening ties between Moscow and Beijing amid growing tensions in their relations with the United States. The Russian leader also made a strong call for extending the last remaining arms control pact between Moscow and Washington. Asked during a video conference with international foreign policy experts Thursday whether a military union between Moscow and Beijing was possible, Putin replied that “we don’t need it, but, theoretically, it’s quite possible to imagine it.” Russia and China have hailed their “strategic partnership,” but so far rejected any talk about the possibility of their forming a military alliance. Russia has sought to develop stronger ties with China as its relations with the West sank to post-Cold War lows over Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and other rifts.

China hopes for change if Biden wins, but little likely (AP) Chinese leaders hope Washington will tone down conflicts over trade, technology and security if Joe Biden wins the Nov. 3 presidential election. But any shift is likely to be in style, not substance, as frustration with Beijing increases across the American political spectrum. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and their constituents seem disinclined to adopt a softer approach toward China, possibly presaging more strife ahead, regardless of the election’s outcome. U.S.-Chinese relations have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid an array of conflicts over the coronavirus pandemic, technology, trade, security and spying. Despite discord on so many other fronts, both parties are critical of Beijing’s trade record and stance toward Hong Kong, Taiwan and religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the ruling Communist Party has detained Muslims in political re-education camps. The American public is equally negative. Two-thirds of people surveyed in March by the Pew Research Center had “unfavorable views” of China, the highest since Pew started asking in 2005.

Myanmar’s second lockdown drives hunger in city slums (Reuters) After the first wave of coronavirus hit Myanmar in March, 36-year-old Ma Suu closed her salad stall and pawned her jewelry and gold to buy food to eat. During the second wave, when the government issued a stay-home order in September for Yangon, Ma Suu shut her stall again and sold her clothes, plates and pots. With nothing left to sell, her husband, an out of work construction laborer, has resorted to hunting for food in the open drains by the slum where they live on the outskirts of Myanmar’s largest city. “People are eating rats and snakes,” Ma Suu said through tears. “Without an income, they need to eat like that to feed their children.”

Bloated public salaries at heart of Iraq’s economic woes (AP) BAGHDAD—Long-time Iraqi civil servant Qusay Abdul-Amma panicked when his monthly salary was delayed. Days of waiting turned to weeks. He defaulted on rent and other bills. A graphic designer for the Health Ministry, he uses about half his salary to pay his rent of nearly 450,000 Iraqi dinars a month, roughly $400. If he fails to pay twice in a row his landlord will evict him and his family, he fears. Iraq’s government is struggling to pay the salaries of the ever-swelling ranks of public sector employees amid an unprecedented liquidity crisis caused by low oil prices. September’s salaries were delayed for weeks, and October’s still haven’t been paid as the government tries to borrow once again from Iraq’s currency reserves. The crisis has fueled fears of instability ahead of mass demonstrations this week. The political elite have used the patronage system to entrench their power. A major part of that patronage is handing out state jobs in return for support. The result has been a threefold increase in public workers since 2004. The government pays 400% more in salaries than it did 15 years ago. Around three quarters of the state’s expenditures in 2020 go to paying for the public sector—a massive drain on dwindling finances. “Now the situation is very dangerous,” said Mohammed al-Daraji, a lawmaker on parliament’s Finance Committee.

Israel warms to Sudan (Foreign Policy) An Israeli government delegation visited Sudan on Thursday, in the latest sign of warming ties between the two countries. Israeli officials reportedly met with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s head of state during its transitional government. Reuters reported on Thursday that Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok is ready to normalize relations with Israel as long as the country’s parliament approves the move. That approval may be some time in coming, as Sudan has yet to form a transitional parliament.

Gunfire and barricades in Guinea as President heads for third term (Reuters) Gunfire rang out across Guinea’s capital Conakry on Friday and security forces dispersed protestors after results showed President Alpha Conde winning re-election in a poll that the opposition says was unconstitutional. Conde won around twice as many votes as his nearest rival, opposition candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo, with 37 of 38 districts counted, preliminary results from the election commission showed on Thursday night. The president’s decision to run for a third term has sparked repeated protests over the past year, resulting in dozens of deaths, including at least 17 in skirmishes since Sunday’s vote. Conde says a constitutional referendum in March reset his two-term limit, but his opponents say he is breaking the law by holding onto power. Diallo’s camp said it has found evidence of fraud and will contest the result in the constitutional court.

Resentment, smoke linger in Nigeria’s streets after unrest (AP) Resentment lingered with the smell of charred tires Friday in Nigeria’s relatively calm streets after days of protests over police abuses, as authorities barely acknowledged reports of the military killing at least 12 peaceful demonstrators earlier this week. President Muhammadu Buhari in his first comments on the unrest didn’t mention the shootings that sparked international outrage, instead warning protesters against being used by “subversive elements” and “undermining national security and law and order” during a national address Thursday night. Soldiers remained in parts of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, on Friday. A 24-hour curfew had not yet been lifted. The protests turned violent Wednesday after the shooting as mobs vandalized and burned police stations, courthouses, TV stations and a hotel. Police battled angry crowds with tear gas and gunfire. The looting, gunfire, and street blockades continued Thursday.

[alexsmitposts]

Joseph Goebbels’ Followers Shaping Policy in Washington Recent events clearly show that, owing to efforts of the current US political elite, teachings of Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany, Doctor Paul Joseph Goebbels, have taken root in the United States and are being actively propagated in various spheres of work and life. And there are numerous examples of this! The author is referring to the stoking of racial tensions and hatred in the past decades in the United States, and to CIA’s “black sites” all over the world, where, just as in Nazi Germany, detainees were tortured and perhaps continue to be tortured to extract “confessions that authorities wish to hear”. In addition, the United States has been using targeted killings of political opponents as a tool. The widely-publicized assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq is one of the most recent examples. The US could also be on the brink of a revolution, which the current political elites stand to benefit from. After all, protests, possibly orchestrated by intelligence agencies, to show people’s disillusionment with former national heroes are still ongoing and so is the tearing down of historical monuments. Perhaps, the burning of books deemed as subversive is next, just as during a campaign conducted by the German social-democrats in 1933. Nowadays, USA’s once powerful and sophisticated weapons no longer seem threatening. After all, in all the conflicts that Washington has been involved in, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has repeatedly failed to reach its goals and sustained losses, which include the lives of thousands of American servicemen as well as billions of dollars, and damage to the US image. In this climate, the current US leadership, in a last ditch effort to stay in power, has resorted to Goebbels-style propaganda. Back in the 1930s, Doctor Goebbels formulated the core principles behind such war-time and political propaganda. The key is to capture the popular imagination, which is the main aim of any disinformation campaign, and to make sure the propaganda is effective by any means necessary. The bigger the lie is, the more believable it is and the faster it spreads. In order to bring Goebbels’ teachings to life while conducting psychological operations (PSYOP), in June 2010, the US Department of Defense renamed them to Military Information Support Operations (MISO), which the Pentagon and the CIA are actively involved in. The CIA and various think tanks, possibly infiltrated by intelligence agents, are actively involved in the creation of numerous propaganda campaigns, which social media and easily influenced media outlets then become a part of. And since everyone involved needs to be paid substantial sums of money, more and more funds are being allocated to information warfare with the help of politicians who are lobbied to support such activities. It has been reported that the US House Armed Services Committee, headed by Chairman Adam Smith, proposed allocating $3.8 billion to fund the European Containment Initiative program aimed at containing Russia in its draft 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, the name of a US federal law specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the US Department of Defense). And only for 2019-2020 over $12.4 billion had already been allocated for this program. A layman may wonder what such vast sums of money would be spent on during Washington’s disinformation campaigns. By whipping up a propaganda frenzy about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election (which saw Donald Trump elected), an allegation supported by a report documenting the findings and conclusions of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s and his team’s investigation (first initiated by the FBI), Washington is trying to actively accuse other countries of interfering with the US internal affairs. In fact, by conducting its own disinformation campaigns, the United States is interfering with internal affairs of other countries. And there are too many examples of this: in nations of the Middle East, Latin America, the post-Soviet space, and most recently in Russia, during its national referendum on amendments to the Constitution. According to senator on the Federation Council Andrei Klimov, by June 25, twenty videos aimed at discrediting Russia’s leadership were meant to be posted online with the help of the “Net” (“No”) movement, whose propaganda campaigns are purportedly shaped by the US Department of State. It has been reported that on the day voting on the amendments to the constitution began, i.e. June 25, a car with US diplomatic license plates was spotted outside anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in Kostroma. And the day before the referendum began, the same vehicle had been seen near an office of the Movement for Defense of Voters’ Rights “Golos”. Recently, the United States actively focused its propaganda efforts targeting Russia on the conflict in Libya. According to several media outlets, including Ukrainian ones, Moscow sent at least 12 combat jets to Libya. However, Russian politicians and news sources have contradicted such reports. Then hundreds of fighters from the Wagner Group (a Russian private military company) were accused of operating in Libya, but Russia has repeatedly denied these allegations as another fake news from Washington. In order to appear more credible, the stories were published by reputable news services, such as Deutsche Welle, a broadcaster that, as of recent, has repeatedly proven to be a propaganda outlet in Moscow’s eyes. Russia suspects the CIA is behind yet another propaganda operation – The New York Times and other news outlets reported a few days ago that Russia had allegedly offered secret bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill US troops in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation justly responded to the latest accusations from Washington: “This unsophisticated plant clearly illustrates the low intellectual abilities of the propagandists of American intelligence services that, instead of inventing something more plausible, have to make up this nonsense. Nevertheless, what else could be expected from the intelligence agency that has failed miserably in the 20-year-long war in Afghanistan.” In their efforts to bring Goebbels’ teachings to life, certain political circles in the United States appear to be filling the media space with misinformation, lies, nonsense and distorted facts, as part of their aggressive propaganda campaigns. Individuals are deliberately overloaded with untrustworthy information, and this could lead to erosion of moral values. And currently, specialized agencies in the United States are not the only ones engaged in the aforementioned activities. Informational-Psychological Operations Centers (IPSYOP) of Special Operations Command (a branch of the Armed Forces of Ukraine) as well as 103rd CIMIC/PSYOPS Center of the Czech Army are also at the forefront of the disinformation campaigns. The operations of these special forces units are overseen and directed by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga; NATO CCD COE (the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence); USSOCOM (US Special Operations Command) and the US Army’s 4th PSYOP Group (formerly the 4th Military Information Support Operations Group). In order to coordinate such activities, special training exercises are conducted on a regular basis. Drills that have taken place in Eastern Europe in the past three years are indicative of the nature of these operations. For instance, some of the largest-scale exercises for the Czech SOF (special operations forces) were reported to have been conducted in 2017: Dark Shadow 2017, Flying Shadow and Repair Exercise Dark Shadow. They involved special forces, INFOOPS and PSYOPS units. Owing to Washington’s efforts, the number of followers of Goebbels’s teachings is growing. However, it is important to remember what fate Nazi Germany and its ideology faced in the end.

[ebola-kun]

Lifting of US Propaganda Ban Gives New Meaning to Old Song

Though its ostensible purpose is to fund the U.S. military over a one year period, the National Defense Authorization Act, better known as the NDAA, has had numerous provisions tucked into it over the years that have targeted American civil liberties. The most well-known of these include allowing the government to wiretap American citizens without a warrant and, even more disturbingly, indefinitely imprison an American citizen without charge in the name of “national security.”

One of the lesser-known provisions that have snuck their way into the NDAA over the years was a small piece of legislation tacked onto the NDAA for fiscal year 2013, signed into law in that same year by then-President Barack Obama. Named “The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012,” it completely lifted the long-existing ban on the domestic dissemination of U.S. government-produced propaganda.

For decades, the U.S. government had been allowed to produce and disseminate propaganda abroad in order to drum up support for its foreign wars but had been banned from distributing it domestically after the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. However, the Modernization Act’s co-authors, Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA, no relation to the Smith of the 1948 act), removing the domestic ban was necessary in order to combat “al-Qaeda’s and other violent extremists’ influence among populations.”

Thornberry  that removing the ban was necessary because it had tied “the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others, by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way.” Yet, given that Thornberry is one of the  of weapon manufacturers’ campaign contributions, the real intent — to skeptics at least — seemed more likely related to an effort to ramp up domestic support for U.S. military adventurism abroad following the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Libya.

Read more by Whitney Webb

Five years later, the effects of the lifting of the ban have turned what was once covert manipulation of the media by the government into a transparent “revolving door” between the media and the government. Robbie Martin — documentary filmmaker and media analyst whose documentary series,  “A Very Heavy Agenda,” explores the relationships between neoconservative think tanks and media — told MintPress, that this revolving door “has never been more clear than it is right now” as a result of the ban’s absence.

In the age of legal, weaponized propaganda directed at the American people, false narratives have become so commonplace in the mainstream and even alternative media that these falsehoods have essentially become normalized, leading to the era of “fake news” and “alternative facts.”

Those who create such news, regardless of the damage it causes or the demonstrably false nature of its claims, face little to no accountability, as long as those lies are of service to U.S. interests. Meanwhile, media outlets that provide dissenting perspectives are being silenced at an alarming rate.

The effects of lifting the ban examined

Vice founders Shane Smith, left, and Suroosh Alvi, attend the Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in New York. The formerly independent Vice News saw a precipitous uptick in citations of BBG sources after securing corporate funding.

Since 2013, newsrooms across the country, of both the mainstream and “alternative” variety, have been notably skewed towards the official government narrative, with few outside a handful of independently-funded media outlets bothering to question those narratives’ veracity. While this has long been a reality for the Western media (see John Pilger’s 2011 documentary “The War You Don’t See”), the use of government-approved narratives and sources from government-funded groups have become much more overt than in years past.

From Syria to Ukraine, U.S.-backed coups and U.S.-driven conflicts have been painted as locally driven movements that desperately need U.S. support in order to “help” the citizens of those countries — even though that “help” has led to the near destruction of those countries and, in the case of  Ukraine, an attempted genocide. In these cases, many of the sources were organizations funded directly by the U.S. government or allied governments, such as the White Helmets and Aleppo Media Centre (largely funded by the U.S. and U.K. governments) in the case of Syria, and pro-Kiev journalists with Nazi ties (including Bogdan Boutkevitch, who called for the “extermination” of Ukrainians of Russian descent on live TV) in the case of Ukraine, among other examples. Such glaring conflicts of interests are, however, rarely — if ever — disclosed when referenced in these reports.

More recently, North Korea has been painted as presenting an imminent threat to the United States. Recent reports on this “threat” have been based on classified intelligence reports that claim that North Korea can produce a new nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks, including a recent article from the New York Times. However, those same reports have admitted that this claim is purely speculative, as it is “impossible to verify until experts get beyond the limited access to North Korean facilities that ended years ago.” In other words, the article was based entirely on unverified claims from the U.S. intelligence community that were treated as compelling.

As Martin told MintPress, many of these government-friendly narratives first began at U.S.-funded media organizations overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) — an extension of the U.S. state department.

Martin noted that U.S.-funded media, like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe (RFE), were among the first to use a State Department-influenced narrative aimed at “inflaming hostilities with Russia before it soaked into mainstream reporting.” Of course, now, this narrative — with its origins in the U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence community — has come to dominate headlines in the corporate media and even some “alternative” media outlets in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election.

This is no coincidence. As Martin noted, “after the ban was lifted, things changed drastically here in the United States,” resulting in what was tantamount to a “propaganda media coup” where the State Department, and other government agencies that had earlier shaped the narrative at the BBG, used their influence on mainstream media outlets to shape those narratives as well.

A key example of this, as Martin pointed out, was the influence of the new think-tank “The Alliance for Securing Democracy,” whose advisory council and staff are loaded with neocons, such as the National Review’s Bill Kristol, and former U.S. intelligence and State Department officials like former CIA Director Michael Morell. The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Russia-focused offshoot, “Hamilton 68,” is frequently cited by media outlets — mainstream and alternative — as an impartial, reliable tracker of Russian “meddling” efforts on social media.

Martin remarked that he had “never seen a think tank before have such a great influence over the media so quickly,” noting that it “would have been hard to see [such influence on reporters] without the lifting of the ban,” especially given the fact that media organizations that cite Hamilton 68 do not mention its ties to former government officials and neoconservatives.

The ridiculous, opaque joke from Bill Kristol & Democratic hawks called "Hamilton 68" – mindlessly treated as Gospel by US media – claims that unnamed Russian bots & pro-Russia accounts spent yesterday talking about Ronald Reagan and Antonin Scalia. pic.twitter.com/IKmoNyxt00

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 7, 2018

In addition, using VOA or other BBG-funded media has become much more common than it was prior to the ban, an indication that state-crafted information originally intended for a foreign audience is now being used domestically. Martin noted that this has become particularly common at some “pseudo-alternative” media organizations — i.e., formerly independent media outlets that now enjoy corporate funding. Among these, Martin made the case that VICE News stands out.

After the propaganda ban was lifted, Martin noticed that VICE’s citations of BBG sources “spiked.” He continued:

One of the things I immediately noticed was that they [VICE news] were so quick to call out other countries’ media outlets, but yet — in every instance I looked up of them citing BBG sources — they never mentioned where the funding came from or what it was and they would very briefly mention it [information from BBG sources] like these were any other media outlets.”

He added that, in many of these cases, journalists at VICE were unaware that references to VOA or other BBG sources appeared in their articles. This was an indication that “there is some editorial staff [at VICE News] that is putting this in from the top down.”

Furthermore, Martin noted that, soon after the ban was lifted, “VICE’s coverage mirrored the type of coverage that BBG was doing across the world in general,” which in Martin’s view indicated “there was definitely some coordination between the State Department and VICE.” This coordination was also intimated by BBG’s overwhelmingly positive opinion of VICE in their auditing reports, in which the BBG “seemed more excited about VICE than any other media outlet” — especially since VICE was able to use BBG organizations as sources while maintaining its reputation as a “rebel” media outlet.

Watch | VICE’s Fall From Counterculture Hipster Rag To Neoliberal Mouthpiece

Martin notes that these troubling trends have been greatly enabled by the lifting of the ban. He opined that the ban was likely lifted “in case someone’s cover [in spreading government propaganda disguised as journalism] was blown,” in which case “it wouldn’t be seen as illegal.” He continued:

For example, if a CIA agent at the Washington Post is directly piping in U.S. government propaganda or a reporter is working the U.S. government to pipe in propaganda, it wouldn’t be seen as a violation of the law. Even though it could have happened before the ban, it’s under more legal protection now.”

Under normal circumstances, failing to disclose conflicts of interests of key sources and failing to question government narratives would be considered acts of journalistic malice. However, in the age of legal propaganda, these derelictions matter much less. Propaganda is not intended to be factual or impartial — it is intended to serve a specific purpose, namely influencing public opinion in a way that serves U.S. government interests. As Karl Rove, the former advisor and deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, once said, the U.S. “is an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This “reality” is defined not by facts but by its service to empire.

Meanwhile, counter-narratives, however fact-based they may be, are simultaneously derided as conspiracy theories or “fake news,” especially if they question or go against government narratives.

The revolving door

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan appear on CNN to discuss allegations of Russian influence in the presidential elections. (CNN Screenshot)

Another major consequence of the ban being lifted goes a step further than merely influencing narratives. In recent years, there has been the growing trend of hiring former government officials, including former U.S. intelligence directors and other psyops veterans, in positions once reserved for journalists. In their new capacity as talking heads on mainstream media reports, they repeat the stance of the U.S. intelligence community to millions of Americans, with their statements and views unchallenged.

For instance, last year, CNN hired former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper, a key architect of RussiaGate, has committed perjury by lying to Congress and more recently lied about the Trump campaign being wiretapped through a FISA request. He has also mad racist, Russophobic comments on national television. Now, however, he is an expert analyst for “the most trusted name in news.” CNN last year also hired Michael Hayden, who is a former Director of both the CIA and the NSA, and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

Former top US officials who now are analysts for CNN: —Michael Hayden, director of CIA/NSA —John Kirby, State Dept spox, Pentagon press secretary —James Clapper, DNI —Lisa Monaco, homeland security advisor —Spider Marks, head of US Army Intelligence Centerhttps://t.co/7AejlAfi8p

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 8, 2018

CNN isn’t alone. NBC/MSNBC recently hired former CIA director John Brennan — another key architect of RussiaGate and the man who greenlighted (and lied about) CIA spying on Congress — as a contributor and “senior national security and intelligence analyst.” NBC also employs Jeremy Bash, former CIA and DoD Chief of Staff, as a national security analyst, as well as reporter Ken Dilanian, who is known for his “collaborative relationship” with the CIA.

Stand by for propaganda! NBC hires CIA director!https://t.co/HTcD5xIYRQ

— Defectio.com (@DefectioLive) February 7, 2018

Remember when new NBC analyst John Brennan blatantly lied to NBC's Andrea Mitchell about using the CIA to spy on Democratic staffers investigating torture? https://t.co/ZaetE53gcshttps://t.co/y7fybCi3Dt

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) February 2, 2018

This “revolving door” doesn’t stop there. After the BBG was restructured by the 2016 NDAA, the “board” for which the organization was named was dissolved, making BBG’s CEO — a presidential appointee — all powerful. BBG’s current CEO is John Lansing, who – prior to taking the top post at the BBG – was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), a marketing association comprised of 90 of the top U.S. and Canadian cable companies and television programmers. Lansing’s connection to U.S. cable news companies is just one example of how this revolving door opens both ways.

Media-government coordination out of the shadows

Defense Secretary James Mattis chats with Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos , during a visit to west coast tech and defense companies. (Jeff Bezos/Twitter)

Such collusion between mainstream media and the U.S. government is hardly new. It has only become more overt since the Smith-Mundt ban was lifted.

For instance, the CIA, through Operation Mockingbird, started recruiting mainstream journalists and media outlets as far back as the 1960s in order to covertly influence the American public by disguising propaganda as news. The CIA even worked with top journalism schools to change their curricula in order to produce a new generation of journalists that would better suit the U.S. government’s interests. Yet the CIA effort to manipulate the media was born out of the longstanding view in government that influencing the American public through propaganda was not only useful, but necessary.

Indeed, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who also worked closely with the government in the creation and dissemination of propaganda, once wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

While this was once an “invisible” phenomenon, it is quickly becoming more obvious. Now, Silicon Valley oligarchs with ties to the U.S. government have bought mainstream and pseudo-alternative media outlets and former CIA directors are given prominent analyst positions on cable news programs. The goal is to manufacture support at home for the U.S.’ numerous conflicts around the world, which are only likely to grow as the Pentagon takes aim at “competing states” like Russia and China in an increasingly desperate protection of American hegemony.

With the propaganda ban now a relic, the once-covert propaganda machine long used to justify war after war is now operating out in the open and out of control.

Top Photo | “U.S. Official War Pictures”, propaganda poster by Louis D. Fancher circa 1917. (Public Domain)

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, and 21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.

The post Lifting of US Propaganda Ban Gives New Meaning to Old Song appeared first on MintPress News.

This content was originally published here.

[didanawisgi]

“The intervention was questionable in the first place, and the reasons for staying are murky.

Donald Trump is looking to make a precipitate exit from Syria. His advisers, most of the leading opinion writers in the country, and all the great and the good of America’s foreign-policy elite are crying out at the blunder they anticipate it will be. The president is handing a gift to Vladimir Putin and Iran. The president is betraying our allies. Disaster.

I don’t think so.

You may remember that the U.S. Congress refused to authorize intervention in Syria in 2013, when President Obama kicked the question to them. They refused to do so because of polls showing that Americans opposed intervention overwhelmingly, roughly 70–30. And support for intervention tends to go down over time. However, U.S. forces had already been active in Syria, and in Syria’s civil war, for at least a year by that point, working with the CIA to arm and train Sunnis fighting the government. Alas, in our scramble to find “moderate rebels,” we often ended up arming Al Nusra, the franchise of al-Qaeda that is native to Syria.

More U.S. forces came into Syria in 2014 and 2015 to combat ISIS, which had formed its burgeoning statelet in the chaos of western Iraq and eastern Syria. They did so under the dubiously reinterpreted congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force from 2001.

As refugees and migrants flowed out of Syria, every great power, regional power, or freelancing wannabe flowed in. The United States, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most of the Gulf states, Russia, and lately even China have tried to get involved in one or another aspect of the fight. Even the persecuted Uighur minority of western China, improbable as it sounds, has fighters involved in northwest Syria.

In the midst of this, you might ask, what are Americans trying to accomplish in Syria? For laymen, it certainly is confusing. Advocates for staying in Syria are sometimes specific and sometimes vague. One commentator will say we have to stay in order to defeat ISIS, another will say we have to stay to honor and protect the Kurds because their militias helped us defeat ISIS. Another will say that we are there, joined in the struggle to secure a post-war order in Syria. Still others will say that the mission is to prevent Russia from achieving greater influence in the region.

American policymakers have mostly given up on the mission of helping rebels topple the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, partly because it would be very difficult to dislodge him. Intervention remains unpopular, and Russia proved willing to intervene dramatically. Of course it did; it naturally wants to protect naval assets hosted by a longtime regional ally, especially at a time when it considers other naval assets in Ukraine to be under pressure.

America turned its fire on the Islamic State and destroyed the burgeoning caliphate. That burgeoning statelet has been annihilated. But there are still thousands of ISIS fighters in the region, mostly in northern Syria, many of them among the rebel forces that occasionally excite American sympathy. This is why the president and experts seem to say that ISIS is defeated in one breath, and ISIS is still a threat in the next. But Syria is not the only place where ISIS can be found. ISIS also has places to operate in western Iraq, which is still barely reconciled to the government in Baghdad. And “affiliate” groups exist throughout much of North Africa.

In the fight against ISIS, we’ve worked closely with left-wing Kurdish militia, who are a thorn in the side of our NATO ally Turkey. Kurdish-controlled zones tend to be more religiously tolerant than neighboring ones, though they are also considered a security threat by Erdogan and Assad. The fights between Kurds and Turks should give readers an idea of how “entangled” our alliances have become in the Middle East.

So in this situation, commentators argue against leaving because it would abandon our Kurdish allies on the ground to the tender mercies of our Turkish allies. This would ruin our credibility when we intervene elsewhere. It would give Putin a “gift” and we would lose leverage in a post-war Syrian settlement.

Much of that is true. There are always costs to abandoning a bad investment. And yet these costs are preferable to an endless, ever-evolving mission that has no popular support or mandate. What critics of withdrawal refuse to do is describe the actual sustainable ends they want to achieve with America’s military in Syria.

What would a post-war Syria that is acceptable to America look like, and how can America bring it about at a cost Americans are willing to accept? We are not told. What are the conditions we hope to achieve before the mission can end? This question is also met with silence.

It is as if the downsides of leaving are cited only because staying keeps American soldiers and matériel near the ongoing disaster in Syria, a disaster that may yet yield an international outrage that will motivate Americans to expand the mission to include regime change. Every few months, as Assad’s government reclaims more territory, media outlets dutifully relay the messages of rebels ahead of their latest evacuations. So far public opinion has refused to satisfy the foreign-policy hawks.

As for Russian prestige, is it so enhanced? As in eastern Ukraine, so in Syria: The United States placed a gamble on a people-powered movement that would have the effect of depriving Russia of an ally that hosts vital Russian naval assets, and Russia eventually scrambled to avoid this major loss. It is not so much a gift as the successful and costly prevention of a theft.

If Russia’s prestige has been enhanced in the Middle East, perhaps it is not so much the fecklessness of American intervention and the resolution of Putin, but that Russia simply had the more viable strategy. Russia has intervened on behalf of traditional state actors, Iran and Syria. The United States, since the Arab Spring, has fitfully allied itself with demotic and even revolutionary Sunni movements. The relationships of these movements to Sunni terrorist movements such as Al Nusra and ISIS has been rather fluid.

In fact, Russia’s reentry into the Middle East has been made much easier by U.S. failures in the region, in the exact same way that increased Iranian influence follows American failure. The Iraq War increased the polarization of Sunni and Shia across the region, and Russia has simply sided with those who have more reason than ever to resent American involvement in the region. Russia could even advert to its own people and to the world that it was returning to its role as a protector of Christian religious minorities. It can make this ruse almost believable, because America’s and Saudi Arabia’s actions support, directly and sometimes indirectly, Sunni movements that are fantastically intolerant. If Syria is a gift to the Russians, let them have it — just as we took the “gift” of Afghanistan, only to discover how unhappy it has made us.

My friend Noah Rothman writes in Commentary, “Political commentators and anti-interventionist ideologues will note that withdrawing America’s modest footprint from Syria is popular with the public. But what would you expect? Precisely no one in the political class is making a case for sustained and substantial American intervention in this conflict zone.”

Are we sure that we have cause and effect in correct order? At the height of anger and outrage at Bashar Assad’s government, most of the press, most of the U.S. Senate, and the president himself were making a case for intervention against Assad. They did so on the limited basis of enforcing norms against the use of chemical weapons, though the war aims would surely be wider, just as a few years earlier the mission in Libya went from protecting human life to decapitating the regime. Americans were against such an intervention in Syria nearly four to one. The Parliament of the United Kingdom opposed it. Then the U.S. Congress dropped it. The wisdom of putting the power of war in the people’s house is that democracies cannot fight successful wars without popular support.

As for credibility with our allies, the Kurds allied with us, as did others, because we are powerful and rich. They are capable of remembering how George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis and Kurds to rise up against Saddam in the early 1990s, only to extricate ourselves. They knew the risks. They also know who is president of the United States, and have started talks about guaranteeing a tolerable order with the Syrian government.

When the U.S. embarked on its bid to transform Iraq, it did so while touting a “democratic domino theory.” A free Iraq would be an example that weakens the grip of authoritarians and despots across the Arab and Muslim world. So we were told.

And we did set the dominos in motion. But instead of stable democracies, what spread was chaos, Sunni radicalism, and an intensifying of the Sunni–Shia conflict across the Islamic world. Knocking over Iraq’s government put Baghdad in the grasp of Iran-sympathetic Shia, whose misgovernance encouraged a revolt across Iraq’s Sunni triangle and eventually in Syria. Similar Sunni radicalisms swept over Libya and Egypt. The results have been the destruction of minority religious communities of Christians and Yezidis and an ongoing refugee and migration crisis that has destabilized politics across almost the entirety of Europe.

We were told that we have to fight them over there, so that we do not have to fight them at home. But instead, we went to fight them over there, and find we are fighting them everywhere.

America has been conducting its terrorism fight according to the logic that obtains in imperial orders, where the great power at the center maintains an expansive, world-bestriding reign and tries to pick its fights along the permeable periphery of that order. Christmas markets and major public buildings at the centers of that order are reinforced and protected by concrete barriers.

But the unpopularity of intervention in Syria shows that Americans still have a small-r republican streak. Instead of trying to construct barriers to terrorism around Syria, and around a few important buildings in our cities, they would prefer barriers at the national border. It would be a shame if we ever gave up entirely on this republican spirit. Certainly nothing the hawks promise we’ll find in Syria seems worth sacrificing it.”

MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY — Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

[autodidact-adventures]

World War I (Part 75): After the War

About 9.5 million soldiers were killed during WW1 (4 million of them from the Central Powers).  There were 1.8 million Russians killed, nearly 1.4 million French, 800,000 Turks, 723,000 British, 578,000 Italians, and 114,000 Americans.  Romania & Serbia each lost over twice as many men as America.

2 million Germans had been killed, and a million Austro-Hungarians. Germany had lost, on average, 55 men every hour – 130 every day.  1/50 of Austria-Hungary's citizens had been killed.

And that didn't even include the millions of civilians who died. There were also over 15 million men wounded, and nearly 9 million taken POW.

There was no peace in Russia – a massive civil war lasted for years, killing more of its people than WW1 did.  It would even draw in troops from Western Europe and America, and it would end with the Bolsheviks firmly in control.

Weeks after the armistice, there was an uprising in Berlin that wanted to establish something like a Bolshevik regim.  It was bloodily suppressed by rough paramilitary “Free Corps” made up of demobilized soldiers who were unwilling to lay down their arms.

In Budapest & Munich, Communist governments briefly seized power. There was fighting over territory in the new nations of Poland & Czechoslovakia; in Transylvania, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the disputed borderland between Turkey & Greece.  The American Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in April 1919, “Central Europe is aflame with anarchy.  The people see no hope.”

The Allied soldiers did not want to get involved in all of this.  Troops based near Folkestone (Britain) mutinied when they learned of plans to send them to Russia.  French crews in the Black Sea did the same thing for the same reason.

The Paris Peace Conference (January 18th, 1919 – January 21st, 1920)

Dozens of nations were invited to the conference, but it was clear that the decisions would be made by a very small number of them.  A Council of Ten dominated the proceedings at first – it was made up of the heads of government & foreign ministers of Britain, France, Italy, America and Japan.  But the group was too large for secrecy to be maintained, so the foreign ministers were excluded.

Japan was only interested in issues related to Asia and the Pacific. Italy eventually walked out because it didn't get everything it wanted.  In the end, the conference was dominated by Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson.

Lenin's Moscow government didn't attend – the Allies refused to recognize it and supported its White Russian enemies.  Germany was excluded as an outlaw nation, which was a major break from tradition – for example, France had been given an important part in the Treaty of Vienna after Napoléon's final defeat.

The Austro-Hungarian & Ottoman Empires no longer existed, and Austria & Turkey hardly seemed even to matter.  New countries were emerging – Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Yugoslavia (forming around Serbia).  They would soon be joined by Estonia & Latvia in the Balkans, and Lebanon & Syria in the Middle East.  All of them had to wait on the sidelines (often while still fighting with their neighbours) while the great powers decided their fates.

Meanwhile, the great powers had their own agendas.  Britain had already achieved its primary goals – Belgium was saved, Germany's naval threat was eliminated, and they'd made impressive gains in the Middle East, where Russia's collapse had got rid of their longtime rival.  Lloyd George's coalition government had returned to office after the December election, and it had few major goals apart from protecting the British Empire's gains, restoring some kind of balance of power on the continent, and punishing Germany enough to satisfy popular demand.  This last objective, however, couldn't be taken too far – Britain also wanted to keep Germany as a buffer against Communist Russia and as a future trading partner.

In France, though, the situation was different.  Germany was still larger than France and had more people; and France no longer had Russia as an ally to balance things out.  Clemenceau (and France in general) wanted to make sure that Germany was incapable of being a threat, maybe even by dismantling the country.

Woodrow Wilson saw himself as a neutral mediator free of the cynical & selfish calculations of Europe.  He wanted to not only end WW1, but to set up a League of Nations to end war entirely; also to implement his Fourteen Points to make the world “safe for democracy” (although he would gradually lose interest in them).

It is rather ironic that the first of his Fourteen Points demanded “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”  The Allies redrew the map of the world in great secrecy.  The Fourteen Points talked about the right to national self-determination, but Britain, France, Italy & Japan were taking whole regions all around the world. Wilson refused to support Ireland's demands for separation from Britain, which outraged Irish-Americans.  Other ethnic groups felt betrayed as well.

Wilson eventually abandoned his Fourteen Points (even the pretence of championing them), probably to keep ahold of some degree of influence with Lloyd George & Clemenceau.  He became as vengeful towards Germany as Clemenceau, and accused Americans who questioned his ideas for the League of Nations of being “pro-German”.

Neither Italy nor Japan had contributed much towards Germany's defeat (Japan had contributed essentially nothing).  But both gained more than any other country at the conference, and left feeling alienated and dissatisfied.

Italy was given more territory than they'd been promised by the 1915 Treaty of London (Wilson complained that America hadn't signed that agreement & was not bound by it, but he did agree to it).  They absorbed Alpine regions in which 100,000's of ethnically German Austrians lived.  But the Allies wouldn't give them Fiume (Croatia), so the delegates left in indignation.

Italy had been dominated by Vienna for centuries, but now the empire was gone, and Austria was merely a small, landlocked, poor country of 7 million people (and they petitioned to be absorbed into Germany). So Italy was the strongest it had ever been since the fall of the Roman Empire, with no neighbours to be feared, and saw no need to remain on friendly terms with Britain or France.  Struggles for power in Rome had greatly compromised Italy's young democracy, and the way was cleared for the emergence of Mussolini.

Japan had sold industrial products and raw materials to the West during the war, greatly prospering in doing so.  Now it gained Germany's North Pacific colonies; it had control of China's Shantung Province (China's protests were ignored); and had great ambitions on the Asian mainland.

With their conquests ratified, Japan now asked for the League's covenant to include an “equality clause” that would declare racial discrimination to be unacceptable.  They didn't even ask for enforcement provisions – it was just symbolic, to show that they were accepted as equals by Europe & America.

But Wilson offered no support (America didn't allow Asian immigration, and the western states were determined not to change that).  Australia objected for similar reasons.  So Japan, like Italy, gave up on the West – they were dominant in East Asia and didn't need their former allies anymore.

Up until now, Turkey had quietly accepted the loss of its empire. But the French government wanted to strengthen their position in the Balkans, so they insisted that Turkey give the Aegean port city of Smyrna to Greece.  Anger rose up in Constantinople, leading to the rise of a nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal.  The Greco-Turkish war broke out on May 15th, 1919, and would continue until October 1922, when they recaptured Smyrna.

In the south, Britain & France disagreed on how to divide up their Middle Eastern conquests.  Britain took Palestine and opened it up to European Jewish immigration, under the Balfour Declaration. They suppressed a revolt in Mesopotamia, and then created the new puppet kingdom of Iraq, with Kurdish, Shia and Sunni populations thrown together.  France was allowed to have Lebanon and Syria (the latter despite Britain's reluctance).

As for Germany, Clemenceau suggested breaking it up: he was eager to exploit the separatist movements that had sprung up in Bavaria and the Rhineland.  Lloyd George refused, so Clemenceau's next suggestion was to turn Germany's Rhineland regions into an independent ministrate that would really be a French dependency.  This was also refused.

While all this was going on, the Allied naval blockade was still in place.  Perhaps 250,000 German civilians died because of this. Herbert Hoover (who would be president from 1929-33) was in charge of European relief operations.  He begged for permission to send food to Germany, but even Wilson rebuffed him.

The Allies refused to be bound by the terms of the November armistice.  Clemenceau & Lloyd George disliked Wilson and didn't respect him, and happily joined him in forgetting the Fourteen Points.  Reparations now became the central issue.

Britain & France had both borrowed great sums of money from America, and they'd hoped that the loans would be forgiven after the war.  Wilson refused, so both turned to German reparations to solve the problem.  Huge amounts of money were suggested – enough to cover all the damage to French & Belgian property, the costs incurred by the Allies in fighting the war, and their veteran pensions.  The question of how much money it should be, and when it should be paid, became incredibly complicated.

Lloyd George didn't want to push Germany too hard, in case it fell to the Communists.  Clemenceau, though, wanted to drain Germany to prevent a military resurgence.  Both wanted to put Wilhelm on trial for war crimes, but Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands refused to hand him over.

Wilson had once been an advocate for peace without victory, but had greatly changed his tune.  He now believed Germany was undeserving of even the slightest consideration.  None of the three men realized that accepting the new Weimar Republic into the family of nations might have been a good step to take, now that the imperial regime was gone.

In May, the Weimar government was ordered to send a delegation to Paris.  The delegation was confined behind barbed wire, and not allowed any contact with anyone.  They were summoned to appear before the Allies on June 7th, and presented with what would eventually be called the Treaty of Versailles.  The terms were draconian.

Germany had to acknowledge that it was solely & entirely responsible for the war.  They were excluded from the League of Nations.

They were to return Alsace & Lorraine to France (without a plebiscite), and give small amounts of German territory to Belgium. France would occupy Germany's coal-rich Saar region for 15yrs, and after that a plebiscite would be held to determine where it went.

The Allies would occupy all German territory west of the Rhine for the next 15yrs.  Austria was forbidden from uniting with Germany.

The Sudetenland (a region whose population was mostly German) was given to the new Czechoslovakia.  The new Poland would be given German port cities on the Baltic, creating a “Polish corridor” that would actually cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany.

Upper Silesia (which had long been a part of Germany) was given to Poland, and northern Schleswig was given to Denmark.

The German army was limited to 100,000 volunteers.  The general staff & air force were to be dissolved, and all U-boats were to be destroyed, as well as all but 6 of her battleships.

Germany was to pay reparations, but the exact amount & time of payment were left unspecified, which Clemenceau was pleased with.  He hoped that Germany would be either unwilling or unable to pay, and then France could stay on the Rhine indefinitely, and the occupied territories might eventually choose to become part of France.

The head of the German delegation summed up his interpretation of the treaty in four words: “Germany renounces its existence.”

The treaty actually caused the warring factions of German society to unite.  Weimar officials complained that Germany had been deceived and betrayed, and that the Allies were ignoring the armistice terms and Wilson's Fourteen Points.  But the Allies threatened to invade, and Germany had to give in and sign.

Another problem was that the Allies had decided to deal only with the Weimar government, not with the military.  This led to claims that the army had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly and traitorous liberal politicians.  (At the time of the armistice, the army hadn't actually surrendered, and still held vast amounts of captured territory.)  The Germans were given an excuse to hate the new government.

The People

The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28th, 1919. By then, many of the important figures of the war were dead.  Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra and their five children had been executed by their Bolshevik captors in Siberia.  Istvá Tisza (the Hungarian Prime Minister from 1903-05 and 1913-17) was assassinated by Communists on October 31st, 1918.  Gavrilo Princip died of tuberculosis in jail in April 1918, regretting only that he'd also killed the archduke's innocent wife.

Others died not long afterwards.  Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (Germany Chancellor from 1909-17) died in retirement in 1921.  Henry Wilson, who left the British army to become an Ulster MP, was shot dead on the doorstep of his home by an IRA gunman.

The Austrian Emperor Karl I had been deposed but refused to abdicate; he died of pneumonia in exile on April 1st, 1922, at the age of 35yrs old.  Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was rejected by the Senate; he left the White House in poor health in 1921, and died in 1924.  Lenin was disabled by cerebral haemorrhages and died in 1924.

Many of the old soldiers & generals slowly faded away.  Nivelle finished his career in North Africa, and was heard of no more. William Robertson commanded the British occupation troops in the Rhineland from 1919-20, was made a Field Marshal and a Baronet, and retured.  Alexei Brusilov served the Bolsheviks until 1924.

Foch was made a Marshal of France, and received many honours; he then withdrew from the world stage.  Luigi Cadorna was in disgrace after the terrible failure at Caporetto, but Mussolini rehabilitated him, and he was made a Field Marshal in 1924.  Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf moved to Germany and spent the rest of his life writing self-serving memoirs of little historical value.

Douglas Haig was made an Earl, and Parliament voted to gift him £100,000 at the end of the war.  But he was too controversial, and too hated by Lloyd George, to be appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff.  He raised money for needy veterans until he died in 1928.

John Monash stayed in Europe long enough to oversee the return of his troops, and establish educational programs to help prepare them for civilian careers.  He became an Australian national hero, and the Monash University was founded in 1958 and named after him.

Arthur Currie was given a cold welcome by Canadian political leaders. When a journalist accused him, in print, of squandering the lives of his troops at Passchendaele, he filed a suit and won it; he was then put in a carriage and paraded through the streets by crowds of cheering veterans.  He became the Vice Chancellor of McGill University, but faded into obscurity.

Mustafa Kemal was the only WW1 general who played a major role in the post-war world.  He took the name Atatürk (meaning “father of the people”), became president of Turkey in 1924, and began turning it into a secular, westernized state.

King George V died on January 20th, 1936.  His last years were troubled by his eldest son's scandal with Wallis Simpson.

Kaiser Wilhelm lived quietly on a small Dutch estate until he died on June 4th, 1941.  During the first two years of WW2, he followed Germany's progress by putting pins in maps.

Georges Clemenceau was already in his late seventies.  He was resented by many French politicians for how he'd managed the war in its last year, and the negotiations that followed.  He ran for president in 1920 but lost, and resigned as premier.  After that, he travelled the world, hunting tigers in India; he wrote books, and toured America to warn of the dangers of their indifference to European politics.  He never lost his hatred of Germany, and died in Paris in 1929.

In 1922, the Conservative Party left Lloyd George's coalition and took power independently, and Lloyd George lost the position of Prime Minister.  His Liberal Party had declined by then, and Labour was now the most important opposition party.  He stayed in Parliament for more than 20yrs, but was a marginal figure without a power base, and never held office again.  He died on March 26th, 1945.

When Ludendorff returned from exile in Sweden, he became involved in the darkest elements in German poolitics.  He was involved in attempts to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1920 & 1923 (the second time with Hitler).  He ran (unsuccessfully) for president of the republic in 1925, and divorced his wife Margarethe.

His second wife encouraged him in a very strange campaign to rid Germany of Christians, Jews and Freemasons.  He ended up isolated from everything progressive, and even from the Nazis & the Junker officer corps.  He died in 1937, and in the months before his death, he finally began to see sense and tried to raise the alarm about the dangers of Hitler's dictatorship, but no-one was listening to him.

Leon Trotsky lost out in a power struggle with Stalin after Lenin's death.  He was expelled from the Russian Communist Party in 1927, exiled to Central Asia in 1928, and finally expelled from the USSR in 1929.  Stalin's agents followed him, though, and he moved to Turkey, France, Norway, and finally in 1936 to Mexico.  He was assassinated on August 21st, 1940, by an axe blow to the back of the skull.

Hindenburg was in his seventies, and he retired from the German army after the war.  He was a strong monarchist with no respect for the new republic, but agreed to run for President in 1925, and was elected (he was still an national hero).  In 1932, he was an even more passive figurehead than he'd been in the war, but he agreed to run for re-election because there seemed to be no alternative to Hitler.  He was again successful.

In 1933 he was persuaded to appoint Hitler as Chancellor – his associates assured him that once Hitler was in office, he'd be easily contained.  This, of course, turned out to be completely untrue.  He died on August 2nd, 1934.

Pétain was made a Marshal of France, and Commander-in-Chief of the French armies.  He remained on active duty even though he was in his sixties, and moved from one important position to another.  When Germany invaded France in 1940, he was 84yrs old, and asked to form a government.  When the Germans conquered 2/3 of France, he arranged an armistice, and the Vichy government named him chief of state, with nearly unlimited powers.

Pétain remained in office during the occupation out of fear that leaving would leave to worse Nazi outrages.  He tried in many ways to obstruct the Nazis.  After liberation, the new government put him on trial and condemned him to death.  However, his former protégé Charles de Gaulle reduced his sentence to life imprisonment, and he died in confinement on an island off the Atlantic Coast in 1951.

Churchill did well in the decade following the Treaty of Versailles. He was Secretary of State for War (1919-21), Colonial Secretary (1921-22), and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-29).

He'd originally been a member of the Conservative Party, but switched to the Liberals in 1904.  In 1924, he switched back again, but the Conservatives never forgave him for it.  From 1929 onwards, he was consigned to the “political wilderness”, warning about Germany's rearmament with few people taking him seriously.

[militant-holy-knight]

Is Christian Terrorism Comparable to Islamic Terrorism?

Terrorism is terrorism regardless of ideology, but we need to have a realistic perspective.

Since the Christchurch mosque attacks, I’ve seen certain people (news outlets and pages on Youtube) now saying Christians fundamentalists are actually more dangerous than Muslim fundamentalists. Having watched the footage myself, I was completely disgusted at the massacre and I can safely say those were the actions of a complete monster. However, I need to address some false equivalences made by people who totally have no agenda to push.

The first false equivalence we see it being made is the Crusades, whose name was first sullied by Protestant Christians attacking Catholicism, then by Enlightenment philosophers and has since being co-opted by liberals at large to bash Christians for their violence. What is interesting is that everytime you hear the Crusades being used as an argument, they tend to ignore the rapid advance that Islam took over North Africa and the Middle-East, both of which had a significant Christian presence before being conquered by Muslims. In under one century, the three Christian outposts of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria fell to Islamic rule with only Constantinople remaining (before its eventual fall to the Ottoman Turks) and Rome itself (which still stands to this day), which were under attack before the Crusades were even called.

The purpose of the Crusades was initially to assist the Roman Emperor Alexios I Comnenos against the Seljuk Turks, but it later evolved into retaking the Holy Land which was taken over by invaders centuries ago. Let me ask you this: three important Christian seats were invaded with no provocation. How many times has Mecca and Medina being invaded during the Crusades? Or ever in time by Christians? And no, American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia’s border to Iraq in the Gulf War does not count since the Saudis invited the Americans to guard them from invading Iraqi forces, which Osama bin Laden loved to pretend that the Arabian Penisula and the two mosques of Mecca and Medina (which they were nowhere near close to) were “under occupation”.

The second false equivalence is pointing out the existence of the KKK as if they are somehow just as bad as ISIS. I want to stress I am in no way a sympathizer to the KKK since I am a Roman Catholic and a Brazilian, and I want to add that at some point in the past the KKK was actually very dangerous, ironically not because it was considered a terrorist organization, but because it was viewed as an legitimate and respectable organization. Many people don’t know this but in 1997, they attempted to blow up an oil refinery in Fort Worth. Admittedly this was not racially-motivated, but actually an distraction so they could rob an bank, but if one of their members did not got cold feet at the last minute, the death toll would have easily topped 9/11 with some estimates going as far as 30,000. The key difference is that the KKK has been largely defanged, has less than 500 active members while ISIS could extend their threat as far way from their borders in Syria and Iraq into the Philippines and Russia.

A third false equivalence that is even more baffling is comparing the United States in general as being a terrorist state because of its interventionist policies. Now you can shit on the USA for many valid reasons, but accusing them of being some Christian empire that is waging war on Islam is nonsense. Unlike what jihadists like to believe, its not in the USA interest to “force Christianity down on Muslims”, but rather “democracy” (a secular concept) as the meme goes, which in theory should be an stable government that works towards normalizing and healing their country but in practice, its just placing their stooges into power that will play ball with them. And that is when law and order break down into chaos, sectarianism or mafia rule as seen with Iraq or Libya. 

Here is an reality check for you: as of the most recent Global Terrorist Index, the top four more dangerous terrorist groups are: ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and Taliban. All of these groups are Islamist in nature. The report indicates they have been in decline because of counter-jihadist activities, but back in 2015, there was an 80% of increase in terrorism (which incidentally coincides where ISIS was at the peak of their power in Syria). Nevertheless, they still remains a dangerous threat that still left a lasting impact in civil society. The series of attacks they also carried out in 2015 in Western Europe were practically nothing compared to what the top countries like Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

With all that said about Islamic terrorism I also acknowledge that Christian terrorism is no less of an threat, specially by those targeted by it. These groups do exist right now, though sadly very few in the West are actually aware of them because they are locked into local conflicts that hasn’t received much attention by the media. I want to name three examples of Christian terrorist groups operating right now that I believe come close to committing atrocities in the same scale as their Islamic counterparts:

The Russian Orthodox Army

Arguably the closest Christian equivalent to ISIS, they are a militant group operating in Ukraine that makes up part of the Donbass separatists and are backed by Russia (much like ISIS is financed by several donors in the Gulf States). Much like ISIS follow Wahhabi Islam which persecutes all other religions and Islamic denominations like Shias, Sufis and Alawites, this group obviously only recognizes the Russian Patriarchate and persecutes other Christian denominations including Ukrainian and Greek Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants because they are viewed as obstacles to uniting with Russia. As of the time of writing, the War in Donbass still persists and this group is still active.

The Lord’s Resistance Army

Arguably the most well-known example considering their exposure by the internet campaign Kony 2012. Founded by Catholic altar boy Joseph Kony, the LRA is an heterodox Christian group that seeks to establish an theonomy in Uganda based on the Ten Commandments, though many observers have questioned the group’s actual ideology, if they could actually were actually Christian fundamentalists or Acholi nationalists. This group is infamous for kidnapping children to be either child soldiers or sex slaves, and Kony himself is believed to have an harem of 50 wives, engaged in cannibalism and many more horrid things. Fortunately, the LRA has been largely neutralized and while Kony himself is still at large and could have been anywhere in South and North Sudan or the Central African Republic, he is down to what is believed to 100 soldiers and no longer represents a threat to Uganda.

The anti-Balaka in Central African Republic

A loose coalition of Christians that originally created self-defense groups after the CAR’s President Françoise Bozize was ousted by the Islamist rebels known as the Séleka lead by Michael Djtodia, who became the country’s first Muslim president. Though Djotdia tried to settle the transition peacefully by dissolving the Séleka, his men refused to disband and began butchering and raping their way across the country targeting their Christian population, who were sedentary due to their status as farmers unlike the Muslims who were nomadic. With Djotodia unable to make his men stand down, the Christians formed self-defense militias known as the anti-balaka coordinated by Levy Yakete. The anti-balaka began carrying out a series of attacks against the Muslim population in retaliation for the violence against their people with one Christian eating the leg of his Muslim victim. Their most recent deadliest attack happened in May 2017 when anti-balaka assailants killed over 107 Muslims in Bagassou, with this attack actually making it in the last position of the Top 10 terrorist attacks in the Global Terrorism Index report of 2018.

While all of these examples are horrific in their own right, one difference I observed between Christian and Islamic terrorism: the former tends to be more isolated and focused in their own domains while Islamic terrorism tends to extend their reach outside their area of operations. While Islamists are compelled to wage violent jihad against the infidel wherever they are and they target Westerners because they are viewed as aggressors, Christian terrorists seem more grounded in nationalism (such as the ROA and the LRA) or expel the “occupiers” out of their lands (such as the anti-balaka) - even the LRA didn’t seem interested in expanding their Christian theocracy like ISIS would have done. This isn’t me trying to rationalize or justify their actions: I am merely explaining this is a reason why you are more likely to fear an ISIS attack than an LRA attack, specially if you are an Westerner. The problem why Islamic terrorism is such insidious threat can be summed up in three reasons:

Many of these groups are backed by foreigner supporters, if not outright state sponsored to fight a proxy war against their rivals. Whether if its Saudi Arabia financing ISIS to fight against Shia militants backed by Iran, Turkey backing the FSA to destroy the Kurds and the Assad government or Pakistan financing both the Taliban or Kashmir terrorists to fight against Afghanistan or India. This guarantees the region will be a hotspot for terrorist activity. 

Islamic countries don’t have the means to put down terrorism by themselves. The Afghan government has been fighting a forever war with the Taliban and the key reason why the USA hasn’t pulled out yet is because they will collapse allowing the Taliban to take power again, making all their effort for nothing. Saudi Arabia has been intervening in Yemen for a long time to oust the Houthi rebels, but they are nowhere near close to winning. It was only by outside intervention that the Iraqi and Syrian governments managed to survive collapsing under ISIS. I will admit this isn’t exclusive to Islamic countries, but the Third World in general since it took decades for Uganda to put down the LRA.

In the eyes of many observers, both Muslims and Westerners, they appear justified. Either because they portray themselves as the brave mujhadeen for standing up against their oppressors, an alternative to failed governments or an offer at redemption for Muslims that lost their way. Of course, anyone reading this can denounce them individually, but remember that the people of the Gaza Strip voted Hamas into power and that there people who will defend the Taliban because they oppose the USA.

This video also shows something really depressing that out of the richest terrorist organizations in the world, only two of them are non-Islamic and some of the ones that do are financed by states like Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and others. Compared to the Christian examples I listed, the only one backed by a foreign country is the Russian Orthodox Army just like all the separatists are backed by the Putin government. Even though as of the time of writing, ISIS has since declined into power and will begin its insurgency campaign in earnest as other militant groups like al-Nusra are still operating in Syria and share the same twisted ideology as ISIS, though never managed to gain territory as fast as they had, I am pretty sure they are ready to continue fighting so long as Turkey insists in forcing a regime change in the Levant. 

As for the NZ terrorist himself, I have to really question his allegiance to Christianity. He used several historical references of clashes between Christianity and Islam, but he admitted being uncertain about being a Christian himself in his manifesto - what kind of fundamentalist is this? I’d expect at least to have picked out the most violent passages of the Bible to have actually made his point, but no - what he picked instead was an speech made by Pope Urban II calling for the First Crusade. He was more of an Cultural Christian - one that isn’t really religious, but still identifies with Christianity’s cultural heritage - which was incidentally something that Anders Brehvik identified himself as before changing his religion to an Odinist. 

What happened in New Zealand was an anomaly and the work of an madman, but lets not even pretend that justifies the UK government turning down an Iranian former Muslim turned Christian because “Christianity is a violent religion” in their view. And finally to close this off, call me when there is actually an ecumenical Christian equivalent of ISIS composed of Whites, Black, Asians and Latinos whose aim is to revive the Roman Empire like the caliphates that ISIS, al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab dreams of reviving.

[usebigwordslikesanguine]

stuff

So i just watched Obama's final farewell speech, and it made me think a lot about not just Obama's reign as president, but how the political landscape has changed drastically over the course of several years.

Undoubtedly Obama did a whole host of good. Ended a recession, led an international climate change agreement which included china, legalized same-sex marriage, the Iran deal, restored relations with Cuba, ended the war in Iraq and Afghanistan whilst killing Bin Laden, regulated the banks. Hell, he’s been one of the only presidents who’s genuinely tried to extinguish lax gun laws. Obama has been well meaning, and has made some meaningful changes. Oh, on top of that he also received a Nobel prize for peace.

At the same time, one cannot ignore that despite the good Obama has done, and despite his trendiness and impressive oratory skills, the Obama regime still has it downfalls. They have bombed more countries than his war-mongering predecessor, George bush, despite his pacifist demeanor (7 countries) and popularity with liberals. Civil liberties have been eroded, I’m talking a 34% increase in wiretapping within his first 2 years of office, introducing indefinite military detention without trial or cause, The renewing of the patriot act in 2011 (which grants american intelligence agencies the power and impunity to spy and monitor on private citizens).and a FISA extension which allows federal agencies to eavesdrop on communications and review email without following an open and public warrant process, and worryingly the first president to have an official “Kill list” of targets for his extensive overseas drone campaign. Like Obama's list of accomplishments, i could go on and on about this too.

But interestingly, a president who remains popular at the end of his presidency, is about to swap seats with a man completely antithesis to himself.

I remember thinking the world was boring, and politics was boring. 10 years ago, all that was happening is we had invaded a couple of middle eastern countries and that was it. Compared to the 1930’s, where half of Europe was communist, half of them fascist, and a few democracies, i always felt that we would never go back to a world of such political extremes.

Oh how i was wrong.

Now i’m not saying half of Europe will turn communist and american fascist, but the political landscape has changed drastically and is much more unstable now, than it was a few years ago.

Russia is truly a dictatorship, and annexed part of a sovereign country. In Europe, in the 21st century. I really want that to sink in for you. Firstly it was Georgia in 2008, and recently it was the Crimea in Ukraine. If you were to say this would have happened 10 years ago, nobody would have believed you. Parallels to Hitler's Anschluss and Sudetenland anybody?,

The Eu is disintegrating. Britain voted to leave. Austria almost voted in a far right party. Greece did vote in a far left party. The far right are rising and in vast numbers all across Europe, from marine le pen to Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. There is a real possibility that the EU will capitulate, and member states, if given referendums, will vote to leave.

For the first time since the fall of the ottoman empire, a terrorist organization has had enough strength and guile to form a hard-line Islamic caliphate, which at its peak controlled 10 million people and amassed more landmass than Britain. Think about when al-Qaeda struck the twin towers (If you don’t believe they did, then just think about one of their numerous terrorist attacks). The apex of al-Qaeda's power was striking a blow on the american heartland, killing 3000 people. Islamic state owned land larger than countries in Europe, with millions of people under their control. If somebody was to say to you in 2001 than al-Qaeda would almost be redundant in 14 years time, to be surpassed by an organization labelled extreme by even them, would you have believed them?

The EU capitulation will be catalyzed by the refugee crisis. And it won’t go away this year, or the year before that. Question for you. If there is an open door policy to refugees in Europe, like Germany had, and the Islamic state loses all its territory in Iraq and Syria, which by the way it is currently happening, where do you think they will go?

We’ve already seen terrorist attacks by supposed refugees who have come from Syria. Terrorist attacks are likely to amplify dramatically in the coming years.

As a consequence of increased terrorist attacks on mainland Europe and even America, more civil liberties will be eroded. It’s a compromise, right? The less liberty you have, the safer you are, supposedly. And there’s no doubt in my mind Donald trump, who wants to do a lot of things which are questionable, for example his total rejection of climate change and advocate of torture, renegading on the iran deal, dismantling Obamacare etc etc, will erode civil liberties even more.

The problem is that given how the political climate has shifted, the left and right are now more divisive than ever before. Take the UK, for example. We have the main opposition party’s leader advocating for a wage cap,dismantling of the armed forces, and an open immigration policy, along with a whole host of other socialist ideas. A wage cap is dangerously close to communism. Again, look back at 1997 when tony Blair's new Labour were elected, a centre-left party in disguise (arguably they weren’t left at all) who were by far the most successful Labour government of all time. It's almost inconceivable to say that the Labour party would be as left wing as they are now. Given that Gordon brown was more left than Blair, and then Ed Miliband was more left than Gordon Brown, Jeremy Corbyn blew them all out of the water.

We are transcending away from moderate politics. Even the conservative party has drifted to the right, viciously attacking welfare, huge public cuts, zero hour contracts and facilitating the economic disparity in the UK. The problem is they can do this, as there is no alternative opposition. Given far left Labour and an increasingly stringent conservative party, the Tories will win every time.

Without dwelling too much into UK politics, I am highlighting how across the whole world politics has become increasingly divisive. It puts someone like me, a young, middle class white male, in a precarious position. Am i supposed to support a party which quite simply has deserted the white working class? Am i supposed to support a party with utter ludicrous, unpragmatic policies? How anyone with monetary ambitions can support a party advocating wage caps, dismantling of the armed forces, unlimited borrowing in total disregard to the reality of debt? Alternatively, should i vote for a party which cares little for young people, who are more than happy to see me on zero hour contracts with no labour rights and a pseudo living-wage?

The establishment, especially Labour, has totally abandoned white working class Britain,, and were forced to reap the consequences of that in the wake of Brexit. Likewise, white america rose up loud and clear. Regardless of how much of an impotent, uncharismatic leader Hilary is, for America to vote in a president who advocated a ban on Muslims entering America, claiming that climate change is a hoax, and a plethora of insensitive and controversial comments, shows the political turmoil in America and indeed the world. For god sake, America voted in a president who was recording talking about women “grab them by the pussy”. Could you imagine if Obama had said that?

At the time of writing this, there are allegations that Trump had clandestine meetings with Russian officials, who are also reported to have hacked and swayed the American election. Again i ask you, could you fucking imagine if 10 years ago somebody would tell you that Russia would hack a US election? You’d have said, no i don’t, the cold war was over years ago.

And yet it seems almost like a weird second cold war. America has sent troops and tanks to Baltic states to assure them and to fend of Russian expansion aspirations. We have a US president about to be elected, with no political experience and allegations of collaborations with the Russians and political espionage, who may well be impeached before he even gets elected.

And don’t even get me fucking started on the shambles that is Syria

You have KKK membership on the rise

You have police brutality on blacks at an all time high, or at least modern technology has advanced so that any brutality is made public.

Divisions from Race haven’t been this bad for a very long time. Trump was only elected because of the White vote. His rhetoric on Mexicans and on black lives matters have further increased hate crime. On both sides. (Just like Brexit did, after the vote, there was a sharp rise in hate crime). Trumps comments on black lives matter “THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS RACISM ANYMORE. WE’VE HAD A BLACK PRESIDENT SO IT’S NOT A QUESTION ANYMORE. ARE THEY SAYING BLACK LIVES SHOULD MATTER MORE THAN WHITE LIVES OR ASIAN LIVES? IF BLACK LIVES MATTER, THEN GO BACK TO AFRICA? WE’LL SEE HOW MUCH THEY MATTER THERE”

In no way am i saying that ww3 is around the corner. In fact, a good relationship between Russia and USA is a good thing.

What am i saying then, after all of that? ( and yes I've probably missed loads, its 7am)

The division between the left and right is more bitter and extreme than it has been in years. Racial division is at its worst than it has been in years. Political integrity and veracity are a thing of the past, if it was ever there at all. The capitulation of the EU is looking exceedingly likely Terrorist attacks are will occur more often and with more fatalities in mainland Europe and America Civil liberties will continue to be eroded Far-right and far-left political parties with extreme ideologies are going to be increasingly elected, due to the omission of centre ground parties A constant flow of refugees to mainland Europe, increasing tension and the demographic makeup of European countries Increasing economic disparity

Anyway, happy 2017 everyone.

[fughtopia]

Justin Raimondo, February 03, 2017

The headline was alarming: “Trump to Mexico: Take Care of ‘Bad Hombres,’ or  US Might.” The Associated Press story went on to report:

“President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart  that he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop "bad hombres down there"  unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt  of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press….’You have  a bunch of bad hombres down there,’ Trump told Pena Nieto, according to the  excerpt given to AP. ‘You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military  is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of  it.’

“A person with access to the official transcript of the phone call provided  only that portion of the conversation to The Associated Press. The person gave  it on condition of anonymity because the administration did not make the details  of the call public.

“The Mexican website Aristegui Noticias on Tuesday  published a similar account of the phone call, based on the reporting of journalist  Dolia Estevez. The report described Trump as humiliating Pena Nieto in a confrontational  conversation….

“Americans may recognize Trump’s signature bombast in the comments, but  the remarks may carry more weight in Mexico.”

While the denials of the Mexican government were interspersed throughout the  text, the context clearly framed their statements as self-serving: after all,  who wants to admit to being humiliated? Certainly not Nieto, whose approval  ratings are in the mid-teens.

So, is Trump getting ready to invade Mexico?

No way, Jose: the AP story turned out to be fake news, just as I  said it was. As none other than Jake Tapper of CNN, hardly a Trump fan,  reported a  few hours later:

“According to an excerpt of the transcript of the call with Peña Nieto provided  to CNN, Trump said, ‘You have some pretty tough hombres in Mexico that you may  need help with. We are willing to help with that big-league, but they have be  knocked out and you have not done a good job knocking them out.’

“Trump made an offer to help Peña Nieto with the drug cartels. The excerpt  of the transcript obtained by CNN differs with an official internal readout  of the call that wrongly suggested Trump was contemplating sending troops to  the border in a hostile way.

“The Associated Press report said Trump threatened to send  US troops to stop criminals in Mexico unless the government did more to control  them, but both the US and Mexican governments denied details from the story.  Sources described the AP’s reporting as being based upon a readout  –  written  by aides  –  not a transcript.”

Quite a difference between the AP story and the reality.  One wonders how many people still believe the AP version. My guess: quite a  few. Once fake news gets out there, it’s hard to reel it back in. After all,  there are still people who believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Which goes to show that fake news isn’t new, and  yet one could make a good case that, ever since Trump won the White House, it’s  turned into a pandemic. Just off the top of my head, here’s five recent examples:

The New York Times story that cooked up a nonexistent presidential executive order reinstating CIA  “black sites” – false!

The “news”  that Trump had moved the bust of Martin Luther King out of the Oval Office  – fake!

Politico’s allegation that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin foreclosed on the home of an elderly widow for 27 cents – wrong!

The much retweeted tweet that had Trump blowing a kiss to FBI director James Comey at a  White House reception (the implication being that Trump was thanking him for releasing information on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails)  – untrue!

The story  that a Russian bank was directly connected to the Trump campaign via computer,  presumably in order to transmit Putin’s cash (and orders) directly to his “puppet” – debunked!

I could go on, but you get the idea. A veritable  tsunami of unverified (and unverifiable)”news” about Trump and his administration  has spewed forth from the open spigot of the “mainstream” media on a daily basis,  only to be disproved shortly afterwards. The corrections, when they are printed,  often come too late to undo the damage – and that’s the whole point. The effect  is to create a penumbra of disaster and dark menace around the Trump White House,  and one can’t help but think that this is what is intended.

And then there’s a more sinister development, exemplified by the  latest news about the Special Forces raid carried out against an alleged  al-Qaeda target in Yemen, in which a large number of civilians were killed in  addition to one US soldier (four others were injured).

What we are hearing now  is that al-Qaeda  had foreknowledge of the raid, either because drones were flying much lower  prior to the raid or for other reasons: in any case, their redoubt was fortified,  and the terrorists were ready and waiting.

On the way to their target, the Special  Forces team realized all this, but decided to go ahead anyway. The result was  a slaughter: an entire village was wiped out, we sustained losses (including  a crashed helicopter) and the mission, in retrospect, seems like it was a disaster.  We are also hearing that the mission was disapproved at least twice by the Obama  administration, and that Trump approved it when it was brought up again. Which  raises the question: why was the military reiterating this proposal when it  had already been rejected at least twice? Presidents don’t make these decisions  in a vacuum. One has to assume that the military said they had intelligence  that augured success rather than what actually occurred.

And intelligence is the key word here. Who is responsible for supplying  the President with intelligence in situations like this? Why, it’s the same  “intelligence community” that has been conducting a rather open  war on Donald J. Trump.

Which brings to mind Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s ominous  warning to Trump: “You take on the intelligence community, they have six  ways from Sunday to get back at you.”

In short, this whole incident screams “set up”: do  the Never Trumpers in the CIA have blood on their hands?

From fake news to fake intelligence – this is the  world we find ourselves in. And the problem is compounded by a systematic campaign  against alleged fake news by those who are doing the most to generate it – the  “mainstream” media.

We here at Antiwar.com have been among the targets of this campaign: the professional  witch-hunters  at “PropOrNot” (in  tandem with the Washington Post) putting us on their list of “Russian  propaganda” sites, and the much-touted “fake news” list  put out by Melissa Zimdars, a media professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts,  which labels us as “biased” and “unreliable.” Marcy  Wheeler does a good job of debunking Zimdars’ methodology, but one has to  wonder how one of the only news outlets to accurately predict that the Iraq  war was based on a lie, and warn that it would turn into an utter disaster could  be dubbed “unreliable.”

This collapse of the journalistic profession couldn’t  have come at a worse moment. We are heading into uncharted waters with the Trump  administration, and the media’s constant barrage aimed at him actually undermines  any real scrutiny: they’ve cried “Wolf!” so many times that when the real wolf  is at the door they’ll have lost all credibility. This is particularly true  in the international arena, where the threat of war is looming large: from the  Persian Gulf (Yemen, Iran) to Ukraine (where Kiev is engaging in dangerous provocations),  to the South China Sea, the arc of crisis is getting bigger and more volatile  by the day.

Yet the “news” media is so busy bickering with the new administration over  such burning issues as the crowd size at the Inauguration that they have little  time or use for such trivial matters as war and peace. And when they do concern  themselves with such questions, their bad case of Trump  Derangement Syndrome prevents them from seeing – and telling us – what’s  really going on.

This presents us here at Antiwar.com with a difficult  problem: we rely on reporting from other media to give our readers an accurate  picture of events as they unfold. However, our job is made much harder if a  large section of the media has simply given up reporting the facts. The solution,  if there is one, is to be very careful about what we report as news: to check  and re-check, without jumping to conclusions, and then check again.

In short, we are doing our best to navigate these  troubled waters, and I can say unequivocally that we are absolutely committed  to reporting the truth rather than merely repeating the conventional wisdom.  I am pledging to our readers right here and now that we aren’t letting our biases  take precedence over factual reporting.

Yes, Professor Zimdars is correct, at least to some  extent: we do have a bias in favor of peace. But that doesn’t mean that  the information we impart to our readers is “unreliable.” The reason for this  is simple: our readers aren’t stupid. Once burned, lesson learned: we  would soon lose all credibility if we took to reporting only what seemed to  conform to our ideological preferences. Our readers would find that neither  convincing nor worth supporting – and we do depend on our readers for the resources  we need to keep this web site going.

We’ve been bringing you the news of the world, from  an anti-interventionist perspective, for over fifteen year now, but I have to  say we’ve never faced challenges quite like this in all the time we’ve been  online. The air is thick with propaganda, and – worse – hysteria, on both sides  of the spectrum. In the face of all this, we are doing our best to pursue the  straight and narrow path of truth before ideology, avoiding both the Scylla  of confirmation bias and the Charybdis of groupthink.

Wish us luck: we’re going to need it.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets  are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist  of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here  is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming  the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with  an Introduction by Prof. George  W. Carey, a Foreword  by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott  Richert and David  Gordon (ISI  Books, 2008).

[alexsmitposts]

US Denial of Sovereignty – Unipolarism Laid Bare “With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a fraud I try to be a fraud and a half. ~ Otto von Bismark, Prussian statesman who dominated German and European affairs from the 1860s until 1890. American Unipolarism may seem like a Trump-inspired creation, but it has deeper roots. As a concept, Unipolarism was created long before Trump took center stage. He has just taken it to a new level, telling country after country that if they do not do what he says, he will punish them via a variety of sanction tools, or even military force if he so desires. Paul Wolfowitz, in his infamous 1992 Defense Planning Guidance paper, promoted the need for Washington to “account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our [US] leadership or seeking to overturn the established economic and political order.” How ironic to watch Trump take a wrecking ball to the established economic order with his sanctions jihad, as he raises the bar for chaos theory. Unipolarism comes out of the closet From The Guardian back in 2007 we have, “The problem with the US hegemony is that it’s hegemonic, not that it’s American.” The Guardian went on to say, “The intervention in Iraq has strengthened the very forces of extremism and violence it was meant to weaken, with the result that we are in much greater danger.” Recently, we saw sudden mass uprisings in Iraq timed with the start of their big religious pilgrimage, apparently because Iraq had been working to get trade with Syria cranked up again, and with militarily wiping out the last remnants of ISIS in the border areas. Historically, these demonstrations have happened in July during the summer heat, and so, the smell of another regime overthrow effort is in the Iraqi air. President Putin characterized the hegemony issue in his 2007 historic Munich Security Conference address, which has become a classic, where he stated that the unipolar model is inherently flawed, “…Because it concentrates power in ways that are unhealthy and undemocratic…The United States, in contrast, is in favor of interference in other countries on principle: because it seeks a Unipolar world, with a single democratic system, and considers itself the final authority as to which regime a country should have and how it should run its affairs”. Syria is still unipolarism’s ground zero? Putin’s words are as true today as they were twelve years ago. But now we have the king of unipolarism with us in Mr. Trump having taken his flamboyant reality TV show style into the Whitehouse, issuing orders about who must do what, or else suffer the consequences. Today Trump casually stated that, … “While we only had 50 soldiers remaining in that section of Syria, and they have been removed, any unforced or unnecessary fighting by Turkey will be devastating to their economy and to their very fragile currency,” Turkey has its own unipolar game going on in Syria The Turkish Air Force bombed the Rabia border crossing in Syria’s Hasakah Province, the main Kurdish supply line for war materials that have been going into the SDF Kurds from US bases inside Iraq. Mr. Trump stated today that those supplies, along with paying the Kurds, had cost a huge amount of money. Turkey claims it has been shelling People’s Protection Units (YPG) in al-Malikiyh town, northern Hasakah. The Kurds of course have put in a quick call to Damascus − the expected, “Hey, we made a big mistake, the Americans are leaving us to be pounded by the Turkish Army, we want to come back.” They claim to have contacted Russia for possible support in fighting off the pending Turkish offensive against them. This “second” Trump Syrian pullout is as confusing as the first one There is confusion about what areas the US pullout extends to. The US troops that had been patrolling around the north Syrian border could be shuffled over to Deir Ezzor province; for how long we don’t know, because the Russians and Syrians are building a bridge at Deir Ezzor. So, the troop movements there would indicate Trump is not bringing them home as he stated initially. The Pentagon says it was caught totally by surprise and the Russians have indicated that new with the Syrian Constitutional Committee set up that all parties must avoid any actions that would impede their work. The US’ low-key British partners in the SDF area said they only learned about the pullout from the mainstream news, and then had to scramble to get their people out − although Trump said, “I consulted everybody, I always consult people.” Some of Trump’s language indicated a complete pullout; but we don’t really know, because not even Trump may know. And we know from experience, he can change his mind in a minute. Can Damascus maintain control of recaptured territory and confront Turkey? Since the first phase of the SAA campaign to retake Idlib and taking back all of northern Hama, no major efforts have been made to go further north. It seemed strange for the Syrian Arab Army and Russians to stop their combined efforts, as they have been an effective team. Recent Idlib fighting has centered around destroying jihadi war infrastructure and also trying to push those in the West farther away from the Russian airbase. I had been thinking that Damascus wanted to save its combat forces and was waiting to see what was going to happen with the Turkey-US shotgun marriage in north Syria, and how long it would last. It ended today. The tactical combat map in Syria has been shifting. As Netanyahu struggles to stay out of jail on corruption charges, IDF bombing raids into Syria have dropped off. Even the commercial Syria-Iraq border crossing at al-Bakumal opened last week; it has not been bombed by “unknown forces”, despite the Iranians rebuilding their base just a few miles east of the crossing after two earlier precision drone strikes. The US supervised terror at the Al-Tanf refugee camp on the Jordan border should be internationally sanctioned. US jihadi proxies ruthlessly exploit the refugees there − stealing their humanitarian aid, charging them for water − all while performing light infantry patrol duty for their US masters who seem to stay inside the wire. ISIS cells have infiltrated back into the Daraa area south of Damascus, the scene of endless bloody fighting. They are launching IED attacks on road traffic there once again, killing Syrian soldiers. A partial list of unipolar target updates US economic sanctions extend to Asia, where India is threatened with US sanctions if it proceeds with its purchase of a Russian S400 system, a sanction which seem off the rails because after what happened to the Saudi Aramco facilities, who would want to bet their lives on the US Patriot system? Merkel has been told repeatedly by Trump that Germany should walk away from the new Russian Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, despite the fact its economy has almost flat-lined. Keeping gas prices low with a dependable supply is not a luxury for the Germans, but an economic national security. Venezuela remains economically encircled by a South American version of a Gulf-states coalition, in which members pledge to take a targeted country down. Despite claims by the US that civilians are not being targeted, they have been dying due to shortages of medicals supplies that US sanctions block via payment restrictions. North Korea is getting tired of the song and dance show that US negotiators are doing, saying that no progress is being made and the US delegation just seems to be putting on a show so Trump can get more brinkmanship press coverage. We all expected from the beginning that the only feasible way for any North Korea de-escalation was for the US to ease of sanctions in stages reciprocating NK’s denuclearization steps. To date we are still stuck on stupid with Trump’s position that NK must dismantle its entire nuclear program before ANY sanctions are removed. North Korea would never do that, hence, we seem to have a fake negotiation going on. Libya continues to be carved up like a pizza via a number of countries supporting mercenary groups fighting the Tripoli government. Some suspect that the internal Libyan turmoil is kept cooking to distract it from hunting down all the Libyan wealth stolen after Gaddafi went down. In Hong Kong, the smell of the CIA is in the streets, as civilian protesters display some of the creative mayhem talents that you would expect of trained Special Ops military people creating regime change circumstances. Iraq is looking into a repeat of the Madain coup in Ukraine where mercenary snipers were brought in to shoot both police and protesters during their recent violent protests. Iraqi police were only firing rubber bullets so who shot the protesters? Qatar is losing its big US airbase, and − you guessed it! − is sanctioned by the US. Fortunately, Qatar does not need the income from the base lease. Can you imagine what a hoot it would be if Qatar leased the base to Iran to use, and then Trump had to own that during next year’s election season? Trump has doubled-down on the EU with new sanctions − and legal ones, too − because the World Trade Organization approved them due to the EU having subsidized the AirBus flight program to the detriment of Boeing. Regardless of the WTO’s approval, the EU has declared it will roll out counter sanctions. Trump’s claim to have complete immunity gets sanctioned by US Appeals Court Trump’s own personal ‘sovereignty’ is at risk, since an appeals court threw out his case to stop the New York State Attorney General obtaining eight years of the Trump organization’s tax returns. Insiders say the current Ukraine impeachment effort will pale in comparison to what is expected to be in those returns. Mr. Trump has been busy with his Twitter, denouncing Democratic leaders as traitors and asking China to investigate Mr. Biden, then claiming there is nothing wrong with that. China has responded that it would not investigate, so it will probably get more sanctions. Mitt Romney is already being mentioned as a Republican primary challenger to “save the Republican party” from destruction by Trump’s free wheeling actions. We are going to see an incredible political battle fought in the US, while Trump’s geopolitical one rages on in tandem.