The “Alt-Right” Label: What’s Real, What’s Fake, And Why It Matters



horiz-long grey

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a full retraction and apology for a bizarre screed it published last week lumping anti-war leftists in with fascists and Nazis. As of this writing two other articles by the same author, Alexander Reid Ross, have also been pulled by the Southern Poverty Law Center “pending further review”.

Full disclosure I have a slight history with Ross. In September I attacked a shockingly awful Intercept article which quoted him extensively in a highly strained effort to conflate opposition to interventionism in Syria with Nazism. Since that time Ross has participated in the ongoing “Caitlin Johnstone is a secret Nazi” smear campaign, and one of his removed-pending-review articles was cited in a recent conspiratorial smear piece about me.

The retracted article is worth reading in light of the fact that the SPLC is unwilling to stand by its claims, so here’s an archive if you’re curious. It’s full of weird arrow graphs that would look more at home on an Illuminati conspiracy website and academic jargon like “Atlanticist”, “fascist engagées“, “Duginists”, “LaRouchite” and “Eurasianist” that most normal people don’t use or understand. Ross weaves that mess into a barely decipherable conspiracy theory about a “red-brown populist collaboration” to advance fascist regimes against American hegemony, making the anti-imperialist left “a willing accomplice” to fascism.

Right. Gotcha. It can’t possibly be that antiwar leftists recognize that US military violence is literally always disastrous and literally never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It can’t possibly be that the far right objects to American lives and resources being spent on pointless wars that create refugee crises. It can’t possibly be that for those two reasons the antiwar left and anti-interventionist right often find themselves on the same side of the debate on issues like Syria. It’s that they both secretly love the idea of fascist foreign governments rising to power in a multipolar world. If you squint at it just right through Ross’ convoluted, conspiratorial reality tunnel, it almost kinda sorta makes sense.

Among those caught up in the article’s accusatory ramblings were Vanessa Beeley (who Ross hilariously labels a “conspiracy theorist”), the Ron Paul Institute’s brilliantly lucid anti-war conservative Daniel McAdams, the always excellent Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report, Ben Norton (who ironically has on more than one occasion used his platform to falsely smear me in exactly the same way Ross falsely smeared him), Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek.

A lot has already been written about the latter crew, including an article by Buzzfeed, and they all have large platforms on which they are capably defending themselves. I don’t feel any need to further point out the obvious fact that antiwar leftists oppose US interventionism because it unleashes deadly horrors and unfathomable suffering upon the innocent for the benefit of the wealthy and the powerful, not because they love fascism. But I would like to say a bit about a part of this drama which isn’t getting much attention on the left.

The one error that Ross has conceded he might possibly have made in the article was his baseless and easily disproven claim that journalist Tim Pool had once attended a conference for Holocaust deniers in Iran. Unlike the Southern Poverty Law Center, however, Ross has not conceded that he also inaccurately labeled Pool as an “Alt Right journalist” while reporting his false claim about the Iran conference, which greatly offended Pool.

The confusion around the label alt-right is one of those things that makes it abundantly clear how thick the walls of the political social media echo chambers are. While you will see leftists routinely pinning that label on everyone from Pool to Donald Trump to Laura Ingraham to Cassandra Fairbanks (who was also wrongly called alt-right in the SPLC article), and even to unabashed antiwar leftists like myself, everyone on the political right seems to be crystal clear about what that label actually refers to and what it doesn’t.

In an informative interview with TYT’s Michael Tracey, Kill All Normies author Angela Nagle describes how her research for the book showed her that the meaning of the term alt-right was somewhat nebulous after its creation, but in recent years has come to refer specifically to white ethnonationalism of the sort described by the creator of the term, Richard Spencer.

“The problem, I suppose, is that the definition of alt-right was kind of very unsettled,” Nagle told Tracey. “I think now it’s much more settled, and the group of people that are now accurately described as the alt-right are pretty small.”

Interestingly, this understanding of the definition of alt-right is the same one used by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is one of the top results that comes up in a Google search for the term.

“Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value,” the SPLC says.

This understanding of the term is in line with that of those who label themselves alt-right, as well as conservatives and Trump supporters who reject white nationalism. From what I’ve seen, everyone under the Trump umbrella is crystal clear that alt-right refers to white ethnonationalism, and the different factions which oppose it routinely have knock-down, drag-out online debates with those who promote it. Whereas lefties often aren’t even clear about what white nationalism actually is.

So let’s be very clear about this: alt-right refers to those who embrace white nationalism, also known as white ethnonationalism. White nationalism is a disgusting ideology with the stated agenda of creating an all-white ethnostate, i.e. a nation with no people of non-white races in it. These were the primary groups that were involved in Charlottesville.

And that’s it. That’s the full meaning. Unless you see someone advocating the creation of an all-white ethnostate, as people like Richard Spencer and David Duke do, it’s inaccurate to label them alt-right. Many conservatives in America want stricter policies against illegal immigration, whine a lot about white people having it too hard, have misguided ideas about Black Lives Matter, think political correctness is ruining the world, and are opposed to notions like gay marriage and gender fluidity. That doesn’t make them alt-right, it just makes them conservative.

 

I am not defending conservatism here, and I am not being pedantic. These distinctions matter, because the confusion around them is being exploited in a very toxic way.

Think about it: you’ve got Group A (white nationalists) saying “Yeah, hi, we’re alt-right,” you’ve got Group B (the much larger group of Trump supporters who aren’t white nationalists) saying “Those guys over there saying they’re alt-right are alt-right, but we’re not alt-right,” but then you’ve got Group C (leftists and centrists) coming in rejecting those clear definitions and saying “actually you’re all alt-right,” which is saying they’re all white nationalists, which is saying they’re all actively pursuing the creation of an all-white ethnostate.

Doesn’t that sound a bit fishy? Almost like a manipulation that was cooked up in some DC think tank?

In August of 2016 a widely circulated article titled “What Is The ‘Alt-Right’? A Guide To The White Nationalist Movement Now Leading Conservative Media” was published by Media Matters, a Democratic party-aligned propaganda firm headed by the Clinton campaign’s David Brock, who Bernie Sanders once charitably referred to as “the scum of the earth”. The article mentions Richard Spencer and the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, but it also lists people like Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Mike Cernovich, who have all said some gross things in their time but have never been advocates of white separatism or the creation of a white ethnostate. They might be far-right, and on many issues they might also be far-wrong, but they are not alt-right.

On the same day the Media Matters article was released, Hillary Clinton drove this notion into mainstream consciousness with a speech warning that the alt-right “has effectively taken over the Republican Party.”

What this deliberate conflation did is allow any figure remotely associated with Trump support to be painted as alt-right, effectively creating the “everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton on any issue is an actual, literal Nazi” mind virus that is still wedging Americans apart today. I myself have been called a Nazi many, many times just for my willingness to interact with Trump supporters on issues of mutual interest. Left Twitter is still to this day shrieking about an article I wrote nine months ago in which I stated I was fine with collaborating with the MAGA crowd on issues of convergence, despite my explicitly rejecting the possibility of collaborating with Richard Spencer and his ideology in the same article.

Do you see how that works? These manipulators are simultaneously broadening the definition of alt-right to include all Trump supporters while narrowing that large and diverse group of opinions into actual Nazism. I can’t even count how many people I’ve tried to explain my position only to be cut off with “No, you want to collaborate with Nazis! With people who want to kill me! Fuck you!” Me saying I don’t mind some social media overlap with Trump supporters became me saying I support the alt-right, which became me saying I support Nazism, which became me saying I support the murder of minorities.

Someone’s profiting from this divisive dynamic, and it ain’t you. If the entire right side of the political spectrum can be so effectively painted with the brush of Nazism, there’s no chance of the people uniting against the actual real-life fascism which has already taken hold of America.

And that’s why this is so important. While people like Alexander Reid Ross worry about secret fascists and double-secret fascist collaborators, America has had its democratic system completely undermined by an Orwellian corporatist oligarchy which keeps people poor and stupid with mass media propaganda and spends people’s medicine money dropping bombs on brown-skinned people overseas. While elitist academics write conspiratorial screeds about a “red-brown alliance” to strengthen fascism, actualfascism tightens the noose.

Now here we are with Trump continuing and expanding the same Orwellian, bloodthirsty, exploitative agendas as his predecessors, advancing a virulent war hawk to Secretary of State while elevating an actual torturer to CIA Director, and we’re all too fragmented and afraid of each other to unite against it. All objections to establishment horrors receive a fraction of their possible visibility because the left thinks the right are Nazis and the right are sick and tired of being called fucking Nazis by the left.

Worse still, even lefties won’t unite with lefties. Read the comments underneath any article where I try to talk about this denouncing me as a secret-secret Nazi who can’t be trusted on any issue for examples.

As for myself, I insist on remaining open to people on both the right and the left to whatever extent they are willing to stand against the ecocidal, omnicidal oppressors who have seized control of the most powerful government on earth and its allies. If you really want to know what kind of collaboration my article nine months ago was talking about, you’ve got nine months of my history to look back on. I get published in the Ron Paul Institute periodically, my antiwar stuff gets retweeted by Fairbanks and Cernovich sometimes, I promote the work of people like Daniel McAdams and Ben Swann, and I have a sizable conservative audience because I don’t reject them. I have never once compromised on my leftist principles, I have never led a single socialist to embrace Nazism, and I have never supported white nationalism. What I have done is inject some healthy ideas from a lefty perspective into the MAGA mainstream. I think that’s a good thing.

I insist that we’ve got to learn to interact with each other if we’re ever going to have a shot at winning this thing. This means learning a bit about the other side instead of believing what Media Matters and Hillary Clinton tell us about them. Basically, it means being a normal adult and interacting with people of differing opinions, just like you do in the rest of your life when you’re not staring at a screen beating up on people for likes and retweets.

We are capable of this. The debate between socialism and capitalism absolutely matters, and in my opinion unchecked capitalism is what got us into this place in the first place. But right now we’ve got a security/intelligence complex collaborating with an alliance of plutocrats to escalate tensions between two nuclear superpowers, and anything could go wrong at any second. This is not the time to reject all helping hands that aren’t perfectly in alignment with our ideology, this is the time to turn against our true oppressors so that one day we may have the luxury of a meaningful debate about political ideology in a political environment that isn’t fully controlled by the iron fist of Orwellian oligarchy.

__________________________________

Thanks for reading! My daily articles are entirely reader-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, bookmarking my website, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Z

About the Author
 
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 

 Creative Commons License  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

horiz-long grey

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

 

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 

black-horizontal



NOOSE OF TRUTH IS TIGHTENING AROUND MILTON LEITENBERG & CO.S’ COLLECTIVE NECK.

 

 .  

Dateline: March 12, 2018

Pictured above and entitled “The only thing they respect or fear”, this is a wonderful Thomas Nast political cartoon back in the glory days when Harper’s Weekly brilliantly captured America’s sociopolitical zeitgeist, for better and for worst. This cartoon cover, dated October 21st, 1871, is taking down the egregiously corrupt members of New York City’s Tammany Hall government. Boss Tweed and Co. should have gone to the gallows, but they didn’t.

However, the noose of truth is tightening around Milton Leitenberg & Co.’s collective neck. They can only offer far-fetched, cockamamie CIA concocted stories and too-good-to-be-true fake evidence that no one has ever seen, supposedly countering the overwhelming proof of the United States’ horrific use of germ warfare during the Korean War. Our American Bioweapons Truth Commission (ABTC) has already blown their laughable faux fables to smithereens, and we’ve just gotten started.

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), as well as being syndicated on iTunes and Stitcher Radio (links below),

Public notice: we are still looking for all documents, in any language, related to America’s and Japan’s use of bioweapons in China and Korea. We are especially looking for the PDF files of the ISCR in languages other than English and Chinese, which we already have. Below are the names of the ISCR in several languages. If you find any of these or any other related documents in electronic or print form, please contact me at jeff@brownlanglois.com. If you’d like to be recognized, we will have an acknowledgments page when our global ABTC online library is officially launched for all the world to access and use. 

ISCR complete name in various languages:

Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (with appendices)

调查在朝鲜和中国的细菌战事实国际科学委员会报告书及附件

Rapport de la Commission scientifique internationale chargée d’examiner les faits concernant la guerre bactériologique en Corée et en Chine (avec Annexes).

한국과 중국의 박테리아 전쟁에 관한 사실 조사를위한 국제 과학위원회 보고서 (부록 첨부)

Доклад Международной научной комиссии по расследованию фактов, касающихсябактериальной войны в Корее и Китае (с приложениями)

Informe de la Comisión Científica Internacional para la Investigación de los Hechos Concernientes a la Guerra Bacteriana en Corea y China (con apéndices)

韓国と中国の細菌兵器に関する事実調査のための国際科学委員会報告書（付録付）

Today, I am pleased and honored to give the world all the exciting updates on the American Bioweapons Truth Commission (ABTC) and our ABTC Global Online Library.

Over the last several months, an amazing alignment of people committed to speaking truth to power and demanding justice, has coalesced into a dynamic research and document collection center for all of humankind.

It all started when someone sent me a link to a Tom Powell article about America’s use of bacterial warfare during the Korean War (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08854300.2016.1265859). I was miffed, because in Book #2 of The China Trilogy, China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (https://ganxy.com/i/113798/jeff-j-brown/china-rising-capitalist-roads-socialist-destinations) I wrote what I thought was a very complete and well researched chapter about the West, especially the US, having a long, sordid, evil history of using chemical and biological weapons, not only on non-Westerners, but even on their own citizens, countless times, especially poor and dark-skinned people.

Yet, Tom’s article showed me that I had missed America’s blatant bacterial warfare in Korea. Why? As I later learned, there was a reason. It is one of the most ferociously suppressed and censored crimes against humanity, with a tsunami of Western propaganda, cranked out by so-called “researchers” providing fake evidence and preposterous Alice in Wonderland stories about how they purportedly came across these bogus documents, which no one has ever seen, except them. Very Kafkaesque isn’t it? We have the evidence to prove you wrong and we will use it in the court of public opinion to destroy you, but no one can see the evidence except us.

So, I contacted Tom Powell and invited him on my China Rising Radio Sinoland show. We immediately hit it off and I was amazed at everything he recounted during our talk together (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/07/29/americas-big-lie-about-bioweapon-crimes-in-korea-tom-powell-on-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170729/). It really is a must-hear interview.

Tom talked about the mysterious, long lost International Scientific Commission Report (ISCR), that was published in 1952 and headed up by one of the most distinguished 20th century researchers and Sinologists, Dr. Joseph Needham, from Britain. At the same time, I had just finished reading Needham’s biography, The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester. Tom pointed out how Winchester went out of his way to discredit Needham, by portraying him – yes, as a brilliant genius, but also as an eccentric nut job, to set him up Needham to be the bumbling dupe for agreeing to head up the ISCR. Tom also revealed to me that Winchester lied in his book, by suggesting that Needham had recanted his insistence that the evidence of the ISCR clearly demonstrated that the United States used bacterial warfare in China and Korea. In fact, he never did until his last dying breath and wrote that as far as he knew, none of the other ISC members recanted either.

The ISCR was relentlessly attacked by Western propaganda and Needham’s great name and lifelong scientific and anthropological successes were vilified by these same media jack boots, in order to try to trash the bulletproof evidence in the report. At the same time, the West’s Langley-Vauxhill Cross spooks began gathering up every print copy they could find, to the point that one copy was found in a used book store in the UK and sold at auction(http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/08/19/japan-admits-bio-and-chemical-weapons-use-in-wwii-when-will-the-us-come-clean-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170819/) . You can safely assume that the spooks paid whatever it took to keep it from public scrutiny. They probably used its book pages to start several barbeques at home. They love to do those kinds of symbolic acts.

What is even more devious is that Western propaganda can say that the ISCR is readily available – the 50-page executive summary that is, which can be found online if you look hard enough. But what made the West’s spies and their media Myrmidons shit in their drawers was not the summary, but the 600+ pages of appendices, chock block full of all the open and shut evidence, many testimonies, detailed lab analyses, maps, flight patterns, photo plates of bacteria vectors, infected insects and rodents, bomb casings and numerous tables of data. You want a smoking gun in the hand of the accused? It’s the ISCR’s appendices that are the neutron bomb of case-closed evidence and truth. You cannot read it come to any other conclusion: the US actively used bacterial weapons on the Chinese and Koreans during the war. No wonder Dr. Needham stuck to his guns. He was a man of great integrity and one of the best scientists in his day. Likewise, no wonder the shameless West has spent untold amounts of time, money and resources to send the full 667-page ISCR down the Orwellian Memory Hole, never to be seen again – history denied, de-written and expunged forever – until now.

I learned that the ISCR was also published in Chinese, Korean, French and Russian. Living in China and reading the language, I decided to see if I could find the Chinese version, via antique book dealers. Amazingly, I found two copies and immediately scooped them up. They cost me about $50 each, I’m sure much less than what the CIA-MI6 paid for that auctioned copy sold.

It was really cool to see all the photo plates, maps, tables, flight patterns and the rest. But, the infamous and elusive English version was still not in our hands. Godfree Roberts, whom I’ve interviewed a number of times on my show, is one of the best online researchers on Planet Earth, so I contacted him and told him the story. Using connections at a well-known East Coast university, where he used to teach, Godfree was able to get behind the public’s firewall and sift through the school’s database reserved for professors and researchers.

Incredibly, Godfree found the 667-page English language ISCR in these archives, in downloadable PDF format. What a revelation! We now had in our hands the electronic version of one of the most suppressed and censored books in the history of modern publishing, going back almost 70 years.

PDF is great, but for research, journalism and writing, a document needs to be in text format, for copying, pasting, editing, word search, etc. Godfree found a guy who did just that, so we can now offer to the whole wide world the complete 667-page PDF ISCR book and appendices, as well as all of the same in text format, in English and Chinese. Here they are, free to humanity:

ISCR PDF in English: http://tbf.me/a/quZgG

ISCR Text in English: http://tbf.me/a/B2QLR6

ISCR PDF in Chinese: http://tbf.me/a/rxxJJ

ISCR Text in Chinese: http://tbf.me/a/H2QlA

Today, we are also including our files to date in English, Russian and Chinese for the Khabarovsk Trials, 1950, to try those members of Japan’s infamous biochemical Unit 731, based in Harbin, China, since the 1930s – at least those the United States did not sneak back home to teach the Yanks how to weaponize germs.

Khabarovsk Trials, 1950, in English, Russian and Chinese: http://tbf.me/a/CTtv4d

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Our official ABTC Global Online Library will have hundreds of files and audiovisual media for the whole world to freely access, uncensored, exposing one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

Up to this point a trio, Tom Powell contacted George Burchett. His father, journalist Wilfred Burchett exposed America’s barbaric crimes against humanity in Korea, as had Tom’s mother and father, John and Sylvia Powell. All three of them, like Joseph Needham, were harassed, persecuted and vilified by Western propaganda for many years, for speaking truth to power and demanding justice. George is fluent in Russian and has quickly added hundreds of pages of documentation to the ABTC library. Russian translates beautifully into English, so all of these documents are in English as well. We were now a quartet.

At the same time, via The Greanville Post, I met David Pear and given his knowledge and experience in Korea, I invited him on my show (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/01/28/david-pear-talks-with-jeff-j-brown-on-the-hair-trigger-tinderbox-in-korea-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180128/) and he quickly joined our ABTC. David’s interview on my show is another must-listen podcast. We were now a quintet.

I then read Jeff Kaye’s articles on the subject, which are listed below. Tom Powell reached out to him and he has recently joined up, lending valuable expertise about the US pilots’ testimonies and the effects of torture. He has added several critical documents to the ABTC Global Online Library. The truth commission is now a solid sextet.

For Milton Leitenberg and the other propaganda dissimulators, symbolic rope burns must be cutting deeper, as the noose of truth and justice is already rapidly tightening around their collective neck, with each document we add to the ABTC Online Library. We will have documents never before seen by Westerners. Working with antique dealers in China, I recently bought several books totaling almost 700 pages, all originals from the Korean War era. Like the two copies of the ISCR in Chinese, it’s a rush of blood to the head, to be holding 65-year old books in my hands, volumes that will help rectify terrible injustices and outrageous lies in world history. I’ve already scanned them into Chinese PDF and we will get them transcribed into text and translated in English.

I still get goosebumps when I look through these 1952 ISCR books. And now, like their English homologues, they are for the entire Chinese speaking world to use and report on, in PDF and text from.

In any case, the 667-page ISCR is more than enough to demolish Leitenberg & Co.’s wild, unsubstantiated claims about fake documents that no one except them, have supposedly ever seen. These CIA-MI6 minions are just as ridiculous and derisory as me saying that I really do have Jesus Christ’s Holy Grail, but you can’t see it, you just have to take my word for it. Honest. I really am telling the truth, trust me, said the Mad Hatter.

Pictured above is Johnny Depp made up as Milton Leitenberg & Co. The latter have spent the last 65 years accusing honorable, honest people like Dr. Joseph Needham, Wilfred Burchett and John and Sylvia Powell of being nut job dupes, for exposing America’s heinous bioweapons attacks on the Koreans and Chinese during that war. How? By telling us they have evidence, but no one except them can see it – it’s top secret you know – yet we are supposed to trust this character in the picture above. No more rabbit holes, Mad Hatter Leitenberg. We are launching the American Bioweapons Truth Commission Global Online Library and are screaming truth to power at the top of our lungs, demanding justice for all the victims. We are your worst nightmare, a relentless, unstoppable force.

Today, I was working on this article. Out of thousands of CDs on my hard drive, I randomly chose Cast’s album, Mother Nature Calls, which I had never heard before. Tapping away on the keyboard, all of sudden, I’m hearing a song called, you guessed it, Mad Hatter! I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up. Call it serendipity. I think it’s a sign, and a bad one at that for Milton and his gang of propaganda puppets. So, I dedicate this song to all you fake news dissimulators. It’s got your names written all over it. I bet if we played it backwards, we would hear your monikers being repeated over and over again, Beatles Revolution #9 style…

Mad Hatter, by Cast.

On the contrary, the ABTC Global Online Library will be have no hidden documents. Everything we acquire will be available to all of humanity for education, research, book writing, journalism, speaking truth to power and seeking justice.

For such exciting and revelatory news, we need to musically celebrate, and what better thematic song than Gallows Pole. Led Zeppelin (like many songs from their first three albums) stole it from the original (giving no credit until years later), which was recorded by Leadbelly, before Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were even born. I’ll take the mother lode any day. Leadbelly saw many of his fellow black American brethren hung like dogs from trees, walls and gallows across the US. No member of any modern rock/pop group can say that.


Can’t access YouTube? Here is the studio version, from the album Led Zeppelin III, which I listened to a thousand times in high school!

Gallows Pole, by Led Zeppelin.



If you find China Rising Radio Sinoland‘s work useful and appreciate its quality, please consider making a donation. Money is spent to pay for Internet costs, maintenance, the upgrade of our computer network, and development of the site.



Lizard

Screen Shot 2015-08-05 at 6.19.17 PM

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

jeffBusyatDesktop

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).

The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on SoundCloud, YouTube, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.
In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm and Capital M Literary Festivals, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and various international schools and universities. Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, much of it on a family farm, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whetted his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. He lives in China with his wife. Jeff is a dual national French-American, being a member of the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the International Workers of the World (IWW).

Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.


 Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

CHINA RISING BOOKS & OUTLETS CLICK HERE

BOOKS
• China Is Communist, Dammit! Dawn of the Red Dynasty

• "China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations" by Jeff J. Brown on Ganxy!function(d,s,i){var j,e=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(i)){j=d.createElement(s);j.id=i;j.async=true;j.src="https://ganxy.com/b.js";e.parentNode.insertBefore(j,e);}}(document,"script","ganxy-js-2");

• "44 Days Backpacking in China- The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass" by Jeff J. Brown @ www.44days.net on Ganxy!function(d,s,i){var j,e=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(i)){j=d.createElement(s);j.id=i;j.async=true;j.src="https://ganxy.com/b.js";e.parentNode.insertBefore(j,e);}}(document,"script","ganxy-js-2");

RADIO
Sound Cloud: https://soundcloud.com/44-days
Stitcher Radio: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/44-days-publishing-jeff-j-brown/radio-sinoland?refid=stpr
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/cn/podcast/44-days-radio-sinoland/id1018764065?l=en
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS4h04KASXUQdMLQObRSCNA

SOCIAL MEDIA

Digg: http://digg.com/u/00bdf33170ad4160b4b1fdf2bb86d846/deeper
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/44DaysPublishing
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/113187076@N05/
Google+: https://plus.google.com/110361195277784155542
Linkedin: https://cn.linkedin.com/in/jeff-j-brown-0517477
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/jeffjb/
Sinaweibo (for Jeff’s ongoing photos and comments on daily life in China, in both English and Chinese): http://weibo.com/u/5859194018
Stumbleupon: http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/jjbzaibeijing
Tumblr: http://jjbzaibeijing.tumblr.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/44_Days
Website: http://www.chinarising.puntopress.com
Wechat group: search the phone number +8618618144837, friend request and ask Jeff to join the China Rising Radio Sinoland Wechat group. He will add you as a member, so you can join in the ongoing discussion.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]


Blaming the Victim, American Style 

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Media misdirection in the service of empire

Orientalism, author Edward Said famously depicted the western perceptions of Asians as largely stereotypical. He posited a kind of binary relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in which the East represented an exotic, savage, estranged ‘other.’ By labeling the East as lazy, irrational, primitive, and cruel, the colonizing West reverse labeled itself as hardworking, logical, civilized, and magnanimous. The West universalized its virtues, assuming that only those countries that agreed with it and emulated it comprised the true ‘international community.’ Everything that didn’t mirror western virtues was alien and due for a corrective intervention.

In Said’s wake, postcolonial studies luminary Homi K. Bhaba suggested that these stereotypes were no more about the ‘other’ than about the creators of the stereotypes themselves. Echoing Freudian projection, Bhaba thought the stereotyper was unconsciously projecting onto the other what he feared in himself. If to us Iran is an intractable theocracy, is it because we are a rigid theocracy ourselves, slavishly devoted to the secular religion of imperial capitalism? If we think Bashar al-Assad compulsively drops chemical weapons on urban neighborhoods, do we think this because we saturated the streets of Fallujah with white phosphorous, a war crime that has produced hideous defects in the birth population? (1)

It is NATO that has moved aggressively toward Russia, not the other way around. In fact, it has been marching eastward with indefatigable menace since Gorbachev shredded the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s. This is unsurprising, considering that NATO is little more than a flimsy facade behind which the beltway deep state manipulates European foreign policy.

A Laundry List of Ego Projections

There are plenty of examples that lend credence to Bhaba’s concept. Many of these narratives are in perpetual state of evolution. For instance, the Russiagate storyline has evolved in ever diminishing accusations. First it was hacking the DNC and state elections. Then it was simply subverting the demos on social media (done daily by the FBI). Now it was down to the pathetically vague ‘meddling.’ The goalposts must shift in order to keep the narrative from sinking below the already low threshold of believability. Yet these accusations, like others, are just reflections of what the American government does itself.   

Clamoring About Russian Interference   

Russiagate is the most absurd and repulsive form of projection in recent memory. Vladimir Putin supposedly ‘sows discord’ in America that imperils our nonexistent democracy. But of course there’s hardly a scintilla of evidence that evil Vlad has sought to or succeeded in imperiling our precious right to choose between two billionaire criminals. On the other hand, we have evidence from the Snowden files that the FBI spends millions of dollars to “manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations” on social media using sock puppets to demonize and distract average citizens. How is this not sowing discord among the population? Unless you think that silencing all dissent somehow helps democracy, which some people seem to imply. And the Pentagon just airdropped $40M more on the State Department to expand its media propaganda programs. A Carnegie study found that we’ve interfered in 81 elections since the end of WWII.

Accusing Syria of War Crimes

In the same vein, Russians and Syrians are decried for the bombing of Aleppo and East Ghouta despite having established humanitarian corridors and pauses to allow citizens to flee. Of course these often fail because the jihadi terrorists that control the target territory--with our tireless backing--refuse to let people leave, steal humanitarian supplies, and use people as human shields. But the media barely bothers to report on the incineration of Mosul by American fighter jets. Nor did it seem concerned with the indiscriminate slaughter in Raqqa. Why? Because both of these battles featured U.S. bombing campaigns. The numbers suggest plenty more civilians died in Mosul than Aleppo. You can’t feign horror over dead civilians when the enemy kills them, but brush it aside when our side does it. At least not while maintaining a shred of credibility. It becomes obvious your sympathies are little more than political theater designed to push a narrative. A narrative that just happens to be imperial conquest.

Hysterical Claims that North Korea Wants to Bomb Us

“North Koreans are denigrated daily for attempts to prop up a missile deterrent to evade another ferocious U.S. attack, something like the one we inflicted on the Koreans in the Fifties that slaughtered 20 percent of their population. That’s one in five. Think of the trauma this country suffered from 9/11, then imagine the Korean War happening here. There would be no end to the psychological dysfunction that followed the cessation of that conflict. Remember General Curtis Lemay famously celebrating the fact that we tried to burn down all the villages in the country? But I suppose if you’re goal is global hegemony, having a bloodthirsty psychopath in charge is smart policy. Yet we accuse Pyongyang of wanting to hit the west coast, while plenty of beltway savages are clamoring for another Korean War (or technically a resumption of the one that has never officially ended).

Calling Russia Imperialist

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are endless hints from the massively credentialed cowards in NATO that Russia is threatening to overrun Europe. It occasionally stages war games inside its own borders and moves troops around in provocative gestures of competence. Despite the fact that Moscow has largely turned East and started cutting deals with China and its Eurasian allies, finally recognizing that not only is Europe a sociopathic basket case, but it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. Europe is still occupied by American forces, after all, tens of thousands of which never left after the Soviets won the Second World War. They stayed behind as a hedge against Russian encroachment in western Europe, but also to help subdue and eliminate the anti-fascist left across southern Europe. The U.S. state always prefers to rub out leftist rebellions rather than right-wing uprisings. Fascism has always been a friend to capital, socialism not so much.

SIDEBAR 

In October 2017 the New York Times ran the above photo, illustrating Russia's "Zapad" military exercise. This was perfectly logical considering NATO's undeniable provocations on her borders, the nonstop warmongering in Washington, and the setting up of a neofascist russophobic puppet regime in Ukraine. Such irrefutable facts apparently meant nothing to the Times editors, who used the  drill—modest, by international standards—to  insinuate that Moscow had had the audacity to stage such exercises near the borders with NATO (!), which the innocent West now could not fail to classify as "threatening" Europe. In case some laggards did not get the poison, the paper added: "The military exercise, planned for many months, was part of a larger effort by President Vladimir V. Putin to showcase Russia’s military prowess as it tries to reassert itself as a world power. Beyond Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election in support of the Trump campaign, its military has in recent years dispatched troops to Syria, captured Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine, rattled the Baltic States with snap exercises and buzzed NATO planes and ships." This paragraph alone carries no less than 5 enormous lies (see if you can spot them) all inserted in the passage as unquestionable fact, and all designed to further demonise Russia and her leadership in complete violation of any elementary rules of fairness, let alone professional journalism. Dripping smug exceptionalism, the NYTimes' not-too-subtle cue was quickly picked up by the rest of the media pack, papers, radio and television, and regurgitated almost verbatim. The fact that systemic propaganda, the equivalent of state propaganda, is dished out every day by private entities in the US maintains the illusion that Americans enjoy a truly diverse and free press.  —PG

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is NATO that has moved aggressively toward Russia, not the other way around. In fact, it has been marching eastward with indefatigable menace since Gorbachev shredded the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s. This is unsurprising, considering that NATO is little more than a flimsy facade behind which the beltway deep state manipulates European foreign policy. Under Obama it moved thousands of troops to Russia’s borders, imported hundreds of tons of heavy weaponry with which to provide chest-thumping shows of strength (long road trips across eastern Europe, in one lame publicity stunt). Romania has nuclear capable missiles now. Montenegro has just joined the ever-expanding NATO. Ukraine has been given upgraded status in its western-backed bid to join NATO. The modestly pro-Russian government in Ukraine was toppled with five billion dollars-worth of street violence and cheap fascist propaganda. Naturally, this money is cloaked in the regalia of democracy building, but research has long shown the regime-change objectives of the NED and USAID and its labyrinthine distribution network. Now Donald Trump has signed off on delivering “lethal” aid to Kiev. Obama supplied everything but guns and is hailed as a pacifist by compare. Legions of former administration employees have now come forward, with their sage hindsight, and declared that their former idol simply didn’t do enough to counter Russian meddling. Is it any wonder NATO generals have nightmares of the Russian bear rolling its tanks across the European plain? Nothing like swallowing your own lies. But that is a staple of every good propagandist: The first person they deceive is themselves.

Accusing Caracas of Election Fraud

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e perennially refuse to certify Venezuelan elections, largely because Hugo Chavez won 16 of 17 elections, and his B-List successor Rafael Maduro even fumbled his way to victory. Despite former President Jimmy Carter (so liberal now that he’s out of office) calling Venezuelan electoral system the best in the world, we’ve now gone even farther in announcing we won’t certify results even before the elections take place. But naturally we’re happy to lend our dodgy imprimatur to horrendous Honduran elections in which obvious cheating occurred by the neoliberal candidates. We were equally pleased to anoint a coup government in Tegucigalpa in the name of stability (pleasingly purred to hypnotized media by sleepy eyed Obama). But, of course, we know for a fact that twice in this century U.S. elections have crowned the wrong candidate, due to a mix of Supreme Court shenanigans, racist purges of the voter rolls, machine chicanery, and use of such anti-populist backstops as super-delegates and the vile electoral college. That’s not even to note the principal hurdle to candidacy: the ability to raise a billion dollars from Wall Street capitalists and military-industrial conglomerates. Tall order for a socialist. 

The Inversion Technique 

Is there really any contesting Bhaba’s conclusion about western stereotypes being projections of our own fears? Not really. We are led by an amoral transnational plutocracy huddled in gated communities, which is served by a pathologically deranged deep state hidden in Langley, who are served in turn by a servile mainstream press that has cast its dragnet of groupthink over our heads thanks to the inescapable reach of mass media. We are the vassals of a vast imperial system, delusional in our faith that we alone hoist the flag of democracy on the world stage. But if that were true, why is every onlooker outside our borders cackling with contempt?

George Orwell wrote that we are made through media to think that ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery.’ Call it Orwellian inversion. But Bhaba is talking about another kind of inversion that doesn’t confine itself to switching the meaning of words. This isn’t a case of, “We’re trying to establish peace by destroying Iraq.” Rather this is a case of inverting the roles of the principals in the media narrative itself. From a class perspective, the protagonist (often the demonized socialist) is transformed into the antagonist (accused of war crimes) while the antagonist (the imperial power) is refashioned as the protagonist (said to be preventing the very crimes it commits). The astute French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who deconstructed media deceits in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, put it more plainly, “The propagandist will never accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intentions he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.”

Ellul goes a step farther than Bhaba, arguing that the stereotypes we perpetuate through propaganda aren’t just occasionally projections of our own repressed impulses, but are always expressions of crimes we have, will, or want to commit. Given this premise, one way of reading mainstream news is to see what crime it is accusing some miscreant nation of, and then looking for evidence that the U.S. government is guilty of the same crime. Oftener than not it is, and just as frequently one will find that the accused is either not guilty or its crimes have been wildly overblown or mischaracterized. In other words, the West is deflecting attention from its own crimes by calling its victim the perpetrator. Use this inversion technique next time you digest some mainstream gruel. You might finds some surprising evidence of psychopathic projection, or maybe just a steady stream of plain old hypocrisy. Either way, welcome to blaming the victim, American style.

About the Author
 The Sins of Empire: Unmasking American Imperialism. He lives in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.  

Appendix
Notes

(1) Prof. Craig Considine, a sociologist at Rice University,  filed a report on the effects of depleted uranium used in Iraq by US military, especially in Fallujah.  The article appeared in the Huffington Post. Below an excerpt:

other governments, used depleted uranium in the Gulf and Iraq War. A simple Google search of this topic can produce dozens and dozens of credible reports or stories to confirm these war crimes. For example, an important report on Harvard University’s website discusses the fallout of depleted uranium contamination in Iraq. Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi, who authored the report after the Gulf War, wrote that:

“Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry has been used against Iraq for the first time in the history of recent wars. The magnitude of the complications and damage related to the use of such radioactive and toxic weapons on the environment and the human population mostly results from the intended concealment, denial and misleading information released by the Pentagon about the quantities, characteristics and the area’s in Iraq, in which these weapons have been used.”

reported in an interview with Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail, “the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus.” Democracy Now! wrote:

“Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: ‘They’re extremely hard to bear witness to. But it’s something that we all need to pay attention to … What this has generated is, from 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were d’ pped on at the end of World War II.’”

“The Suffering of Fallujah” gives us an idea of the immense impact that depleted uranium has had on Iraqi civilians:

“Thus last November, a group of British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the U.N. to investigate the alarming rise in birth defects at Fallujah’s hospitals. ‘Young women in Fallujah,’ they wrote … are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.’”

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 

window.newShareCountsAuto="smart";



OpEds: When dealing with a bear, hubris is suicidal

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. AVOIDANCE OF NUCLEAR WAR DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By The Saker

The empire of murder, rape and hypocrisy hides behind the most blatantly Orwellian machinery of reality control the world has ever seen. 

Nikki Haley, the sociopath sent by the Empire as envoy to the UN smugly massacring the truth in connection with Syria. We thought no one could top Samantha Power in sheer vileness, but then came Haley. The bowing and scraping to this woman by UNO officials is in itself revolting.

Assuming mankind finds a way not to destroy itself in the near future and assuming that there will still be historians in the 22nd or 23rd centuries, I bet you that they will look at the AngloZionist Empire and see the four following characteristics as some of its core features: lies, willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and hysterics. To illustrate my point I will use the recent “Skripal nerve-gas assassination” story as it really encompasses all of these characteristics.

I won’t even bother debunking the official nonsense here as others have done a very good job of pointing out the idiocy of the official narrative. If you are truly capable of believing that “Putin” (that is the current collective designator for the Evil Empire of Mordor currently threatening all of western civilization) would order the murder of a man whom a Russian military court sentenced to only 13 years in jail (as opposed to life or death) and who was subsequently released as part of a swap with the USA, you can stop reading right now and go back to watching TV. I personally have neither the energy nor the inclination to even discuss such a self-evidently absurd theory. No, what I do want to do is use this story as a perfect illustration of the kind of society we now all live in looked at from a moral point of view. I realize that we live in a largely value-free society where moral norms have been replaced by ideological orthodoxy [at the service of the bases ends], but that is just one more reason for me to write about what is taking place precisely focusing on the moral dimensions of current events.

Lies and the unapologetic denial of reality:

In a 2015 article entitled “A society of sexually frustrated Pinocchios” I wrote the following:

I see a direct cause and effect relationship between the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can’t prove that, of course, but here is my thesis: Almost from day one, early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important first step. With “principles” such as the end justifies the means and the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all “for the greater glory of God” western civilization got cozy with the idea that there was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10 centuries or so and we end up with the modern “Gayropa” (as Europe is now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared ‘dead’ and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as “cultural”, but even objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political expediency and ideological imperatives.

I went on to quote George Orwell by reminding how he defined “doublethink” in his book 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality“

and I concluded by saying that “The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality”.

This is exactly what we are observing; not only in the silly Skripal nerve-gas assassination story but also in all the rest of the Russophobic nonsense produced by the AngloZionist propaganda machine including the “Litvinenko polonium murder” and the “Yushchenko dioxin poisoning“. The fact that neither nerve-gas, nor polonium nor dioxin are in any way effective murder weapons does not matter in the least: a simple drive-by shooting, street-stabbing or, better, any “accident” is both easier to arrange and impossible to trace. Fancy assassination methods are used when access to the target is very hard or impossible (as was the case with Ibn al-Khattab, whose assassination the Russians were more than happy to take credit for; this might also have been the case with the death of Yasser Arafat). But the best way of murdering somebody is to simply make the body disappear, making any subsequent investigation almost impossible. Finally, you can always subcontract the assassination to somebody else like, for example, when the CIA tried and failed, to murder Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah by subcontracting his bombing to its local “Christian” allies, killing over 80 innocent people in the process. There is plenty of common crime in the UK and to get somebody to rob and stab Skripal would have probably been the easiest version. That’s assuming that the Russians had any reason to want him dead, which they self-evidently didn’t.

But here is the important thing: every single criminal or intelligence specialist in the West understands all of the above. But that does not stop the Ziomedia from publishing articles like this one “A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison” which also lists people poisoned by Russians:

  • Skripal by nerve gas
  • Litvinenko by polonium
  • Kara-Murza poisoned not once, but TWICE, by an unknown poison, he survived!
  • Markov poisoned by ricin and the Bulgarians with “speculated KGB assistance”
  • Khattab by sarin or a sarin-derivative
  • Yushchenko by dioxin
  • Perepilichny by “a rare, toxic flower, gelsemium” (I kid you not, check the article!)
  • Moskalenko by mercury
  • Politkovskaya who was shot, but who once felt “ill after drinking some tea that she believed contained poison”

The only possible conclusion from this list is this: there is some kind of secret lab in Russia where completely incompetent chemists try every poison known to man, not on rats or on mice, but on high profile AngloZionist-supported political activists, preferably before an important political event.

Right.

By the way, the gas allegedly used in the attack, “Novichok”, was manufactured in Uzbekistan and the cleanup of the factory producing it was made by, you guessed it, a US company. Just saying…

Groll: fancy schmanzy university titles aside, the man's chosen career is one of disinformation. Maybe he believes his own lies.

In any halfway honest and halfway educated society, those kind of articles should result in the idiot writing it being summarily fired for gross incompetence and the paper/journal posting it being discredited forever. But in our world, the clown who wrote that nonsense (Elias Groll, a Harvard graduate and – listen to this – a specialist of “cyberspace and its conflicts and controversies” (sic)) is a staff writer of the award-winning Foreign Policy magazine.

So what does it tell us, and future historians, when this kind of crap is written by a staff writer of an “award winning” media outlet? Does it not show that our society has now reached a stage in its decay (I can’t call that “development”) where lies become the norm? Not only are even grotesque and prima facie absurd lies accepted, they are expected (if only because they reinforce the current ideological Zeitgeist). The result? Our society is now packed with first, zombified ideological drones who actually believe any type of officially proclaimed of nonsense and, second, by cowards who lack the basic courage to denounce even that which they themselves know to be false.

Lies, however ridiculous and self-evidently stupid, have become the main ingredient of the modern political discourse. Everybody knows this and nobody cares. When challenged on this, the typical defense used is always the same: “you are the only person saying this – I sure never heard this before!”.

Willful ignorance as a universal cop-out

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e all know the type. You tell somebody that his/her theory makes absolutely no sense or is not supported by facts and the reply you get is some vaguely worded refusal to engage in an disputation. Initially, you might be tempted to believe that, indeed, your interlocutor is not too bright and not too well read, but eventually you realize that there is something very different happening: modern man actually makes a very determined effort not to be capable of logical thought and not to be informed of the basic facts of the case. And what is true for specific individuals is even more true of our society as a whole. Let’s take one simple example: Operation Gladio:

The Bologna massacre was a Gladio attack perpetrated to blame the left. Gladio was and remains a subterranean terrorist tool of NATO. Google Operation Gladio today and see the filth that comes up.

“Gladio” is really an open secret by now. Excellent books and videos have been written and produced about this and even the BBC has made a two and a half hour long video about it. There is even an entire website dedicated to the story of this huge, continent-wide, terrorist organization specializing in false flag operations. That’s right: a NATO-run terrorist network in western Europe involved in false flag massacres like the infamous Bologna train station bombing. No, not the Soviet KGB backing the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades in Italy. No, the USA and West European governments organizing, funding and operating a terrorist network directed at the people of Western, not Eastern, Europe. Yes, at their own people! In theory, everybody should know about this, the information is available everywhere, even on the hyper-politically correct Wikipedia. But, again, nobody cares.

The end of the Cold War was marked by a seemingly endless series of events which all provided a pretext for AngloZionist interventions (from the Markale massacres in Bosnia, to the Srebrenica “genocide”, to the Racak massacre Kosovo, to the “best” and biggest one of them all, 9/11 of course). Yet almost nobody wondered if the same people or, at least, the same kind of people who committed all the Gladio crimes might be involved. Quite the opposite: each one of these events was accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign mindlessly endorsing and even promoting the official narrative, even when it self-evidently made no sense whatsoever (like 2 aircraft burning down 3 steel towers). As for Gladio, it was conveniently “forgotten”.

There is a simple principle in psychology, including, and especially in criminal psychology which I would like to prominently restate here:

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior

Every criminalist knows that and this is why criminal investigators place so much importance on the “modus operandi”, i.e. the particular way or method a suspect or a criminal chooses in the course of the execution of his/her crimes. That is also something which everybody knows. So let’s summarize this in a simple thesis:

Western regimes have a long and well-established track record of regularly executing bloody false-flag operations in pursuit of political objectives, especially those providing them with a pretext to justify an illegal military aggression.

Frankly, I submit that the thesis above is really established not only by a preponderance of evidence but beyond a reasonable doubt. Right?

Maybe. But that is also completely irrelevant because nobody gives a damn! Not the reporters who lie for a living nor, even less so, the brainwashed zombies who read their nonsense and take it seriously. The CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 600 times – who cares?! All we know is that the good folks at Langley would never, ever, kill a Russian in the UK, out of respect for international law, probably…

That willful ignorance easily defeats history, facts or logic.

Here is a simple question a journalist could ask: “would the type of people who had no problems blowing up a large train station, or bringing down three buildings in downtown New York, have any hesitation in using a goofy method to try and kill a useless Russian ex-spy if that could justify further hostile actions against a country which they desperately need to demonize to justify and preserve the current AngloZionist world order?”. The answer I think is self-evident. The question shall therefore not be asked. Instead, soy-boys from Foreign Policy mag will tell us about how the Russians use exotic flowers to kill high visibility opponents whose death would serve no conceivable political goal.

Hypocrisy as a core attribute of the modern man

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]illful ignorance is important, of course, but it is not enough. For one thing, being ignorant, while useful to dismiss a fact-based and/or logical argument, is not something useful to establish your moral superiority or the legality of your actions. The Empire requires much more than just obedience from its subject: what is also absolutely indispensable is a very strong sense of superiority which can be relied upon when committing a hostile action against the other guy. And nothing is as solid a foundation for a sense of superiority than the unapologetic reliance on brazen hypocrisy. Let’s take a fresh example: the latest US threats to attack Syria (again).

Irrespective of the fact that the USA themselves have certified Syria free of chemical weapons and irrespective of the fact that US officials are still saying that they have no evidence that the Syrian government was involved in any chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, the USA is now preparing to strike Syria again in “response” to future chemical attacks! Yes, you read that right. The AngloZionists are now announcing their false flags in advance! In fact, by the time this analysis is published the attack will probably already have occurred. The “best” part of this all is that Nikki Haley has now announced to the UN Security Council that the US will act without any UN Security Council approval. What the USA is declaring is this: “we reserve the right to violate international law at any time and for any reason we deem sufficient”. In the very same statement, Nikki Haley also called the Syrian government an “outlaw regime”. This is not a joke, check it out for yourself. The reaction in “democratic” Europe: declaring that *Russia* (not the US) is a rogue state. QED.

As tacitly understood between London and Washington, with the British ruling class as junior partners in global imperial mayhem (and the fruits thereof) remorseless hypocrite Theresa May is the natural point man for the charge against the Russians in Europe, a position for which she's exquisitely qualified.

This entire circus is only made possible by the fact that the western elites have all turned into “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” (to use the wonderful words of Boris Johnson) and that absolutely nobody has the courage, or decency, to call all this what it really is: an obscene display of total hypocrisy and wholesale violation of all norms of international law. The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern “journalists are either unemployed or prostitutes” (he spoke about the French media – un journaliste français c’est soit une pute soit un chômeur – but this fully applies to all the western media). Except that I would extend it to the entire Western Establishment.

I would further argue that foreign aggression and hypocrisy have become the two essential pillars for the survival of the AngloZionist empire: the first one being an economic and political imperative, the 2nd one being the prerequisite for the public justification of the first one. But sometimes even that is not enough, especially when the lies are self-evidently absurd. Then the final, quasi-miraculous element is always brought in: hysterics.

Hysteria as the highest form of (pseudo-)liberalism

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] don’t particularly care for the distinction usually made between liberals and conservatives, at least not unless the context and these terms is carefully and accurately defined. I certainly don’t place myself on that continuum nor do find it analytically helpful.

The theoretical meaning of these concepts is, however, quite different from what is mostly understood under these labels, especially when people use them to identify themselves. That is to say that while I am not at all sure that those who think of themselves as, say, liberals are in any way truly liberal, I do think that people who would identify themselves as “liberals” often (mostly?) share a number of characteristics, the foremost of which is a very strong propensity to function at, and engage in, an hysterical mode of discourse and action.

The Google definition of hysteria is “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people (…) whose symptoms include conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms (somatization), selective amnesia, shallow volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior”. Is that not a perfect description of US politicians, especially the (putatively) “liberal” ones? Just think of the way US Democrats have capitalized on such (non-)issues as “Russian interference” (externally) or “gun control” (internally) and you will see that the so-called “liberals” never get off a high-emotional pitch. The best example of all, really, is their reaction to the election of Donald Trump instead of their cult-leader Hillary: it has been over a year since Trump has been elected and yet the liberal ziomedia and its consumers are still in full-blown hysteria mode (with “pussyhats”, “sky-screams” and all). In a conversation you can literally drown such a liberal with facts, statistics, expert testimonies, etc. and achieve absolutely no result whatsoever because the liberal lives in an ideological comfort zone which he/she is categorically unwilling and, in fact, unable, to abandon, even temporarily. This is what makes liberals such a *perfect* audience for false-flag operations: they simply won’t process the narrative presented to them in a logical manner but will immediately react to it in a strongly emotional manner, usually with the urge to immediately “do something”.

That “do something” is usually expressed in the application of violence (externally) and the imposition of bans/restrictions/regulations (internally). You can try to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Russians would ever want to do is to use a stupid method to try to kill a person who is of absolutely no interest to them, or to explain to that liberal that the very last thing the Syrian government would ever do in the course of its successful liberation of its national territory from “good terrorists” would be to use chemical weapons of any kind – but you would never achieve anything: Trump must be impeached, the Russians sanctioned and the Syrians bombed, end of argument.

I am quite aware that there are a lot of self-described “conservatives” who have fully joined this chorus of hysterical liberals in all their demands, but these “conservatives” are not only acting out of character, they are simply caving in to the social pressure of the day, being the “great supine protoplasmic invertebrate jellies” mentioned above. Again, I am not discussing real liberals or real conservatives here (regardless of what these terms really mean), I am talking about those who, for whatever reason, choose to place that label upon themselves even if they personally have only a very vague idea of what this label is supposed to mean.

So there we have it: an Empire built (and maintained) on lies, accepted on the basis ignorance, justified by hypocrisy and energized by hysterics. This is what the “Western world” stands for nowadays. And while there is definitely a vocal minority of “resisters” (from the Left and the Right – also two categories I don’t find analytically helpful – and from many other schools of political thought), the sad reality is that the vast majority of people around us accept this and see no reason to denounce it, never mind doing anything about it. That is why “they” got away with 9/11 and why “they” will continue to get away with future false-flags because the people lied to, realize, at least on some level, that they are being lied to and yet they simply don’t care. Truly, the Orwellian slogans of 1984 “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” perfectly fit our world. However, when dealing with the proverbial Russian bear, there is one lesson of history which western leaders really should never forget and which they should also turn into a slogan: when dealing with a bear, hubris is suicidal.

—The Saker   


[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

black-horizontal

ABOUT THE SAKER
THE SAKER  is the nom de guerre of a former Russian-born military and geopolitical analyst, working at one point for the West. He has described his former career as that of "the proverbial 'armchair strategist', with all the flaws which derive from that situation.  Explaining his transformation, he states: "Before the war in Bosnia I had heard the phrase "truth is the first casualty of war" but I had never imagined that this could be quite so literally true. Frankly, this war changed my entire life and resulted in a process of soul-searching which ended up pretty much changing my politics 180 degrees. This is a long and very painful story which I do not want to discuss here, but I just want to say that this difference between what I was reading in the press and in the UNPROFOR reports ended up making a huge difference in my entire life. Again, NOT A SINGLE ASPECT OF THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE WAS TRUE, not one. You would get much closer to the truth if you basically did a 'negative' of the official narrative.”  Like The Greanville Post, with which it is now allied in his war against official disinformation, the Saker's site, VINEYARD OF THE SAKER, is the hub of an international network of sites devoted to fighting the "billion-dollar deception machinery" supporting the empire's wars against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and any other independent nation opposing or standing in the way of Washington's drive for global hegemony.  The Saker is published in more than half a dozen languages. A Saker is a very large falcon, native to Europe and Asia. 



Will Russia Wake Up?

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Why do the Russians think the British government cares a hoot about law or evidence? Are the Russians really this brainwashed about the West?

Just like almost all Americans remain totally ignorant about the appalling dangers their ruling class is putting them in, most Russians, including in government, fail to fully grasp the degree of sociopathy they're dealing with in Washington and its clique of fellow crooks and murderers in the NATO gang.

Russians are having a difficult time comprehending their Western enemy or even understanding that Russia has an enemy that seeks the destruction of Russia.

Has it occurred to Russia that it is very strange that the UK, a country of no military significance, a country that could be completely destroyed forever in a few minutes by Russia, would concoct false charges against the Russian government, announce these charges publicly without providing any evidence whatsoever, bring the unsupported charges to the UN, issue an ultimatum to Russia, dispel Russian diplomats and seize Russian assets on the basis of mere allegations, all the while refusing any evidence and any cooperation with Russia, as required by law, in the investigation of the charges?

Russians, both government, media and youth brainwashed by American propaganda and the Washington-funded NGOS that the Russian government permits to operate against itself in Russia, seem to think that the many accusations and threats issued against Russia are some kind of mistake that can be rectified by recourse to evidence and law. Apparently, after all these years the Russians still do not understand that Washington and its vassals have no interest whatsoever in facts or law.

At the UN the Russian ambassador, in response to the evidence-free accusation by the UK prime minister that the Russian government had used a military-grade nerve agent to attempt to kill two people on an English park bench, went through all the legal reasons, including the requirement of collaboration with Russia in examining the evidence, to establish that the UK accusation was in violation of law and unsupported by any evidence.

Why do the Russians think the British government cares a hoot about law or evidence? Are the Russians really this brainwashed about the West?

RUSSIANS CAN BE EXASPERATINGLY NAIVE ABOUT WESTERN METHODS AND INTENTIONS.

The British government of Tony Blair cooperated with the George W. Bush regime in propagating the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” This lie was used to invade and to destroy Iraq and to leave the country 15 years later in chaos.

The Russian government simply does not understand that Washington regards Russian appeals to diplomacy, law, facts, evidence, as signs of extreme weakness and lack of confidence. Washington and its puppet states do not need any facts. They have an agenda. By calling for facts, the Russians show their weakness.

The British government also supported the lies about Gaddafi in Libya and participated in overthrowing the Libyan government. The British government also supported the lie that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. There was never any evidence, but evidence was of no interest. An agenda was in motion, and the agenda was independent of evidence.

Although the British Parliament voted down British participation in Obama’s planned invasion of Syria, the current British government supports the lie that Assad is using chemical weapons “against his own people.”

By now one would think that Russians, both government, media, and public, would understand that all the West is capable of is to lie. The purpose of the lies is to demonize Russia and to set up Russia for military attack.

But somehow Russians can’t get the message. Russians think it is all some kind of mistake that facts and legal processes and diplomacy can clear up. “Please just listen to us, we can clear up all the misconceptions!” As if the West cares. Washington wants “the misconceptions.” That is why Washington creates them.

The inability of Russians to understand the West, which Russia stupidly wants to join, is the reason that World War 3 is near at hand.

What if, instead of reciting the legal process and the law governing it that the UK PM refused to follow before publicly accusing Russia without the presentation of any evidence, the Russian UN Ambassador had simply said: “If the UK exists tomorrow, it will be due entirely to the forbearance of the Russian government.”

By relying on law, about which no Western country gives a hoot, the Russian UN ambassador permitted Washington’s French puppet and other of Washington’s European puppet states to say that they supported the British charges against Russia despite the absence of evidence. Perhaps the Russians noticed that none of those European governments required any evidence that Russia was responsible. All that was required was the accusation.

In the exceptional, indispensable Western World ruled by Washington, accusation alone is proof of Russian mendacity. When British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn asked PM May if she actually had any real evidence that Russia had tried to kill the former British double-agent, Corbyn was shouted down not only by the corrupt Conservatives but also by members of the Labour Party that he heads. How much more evidence does Russia need that facts are not important to the West?

Is Putin really fully aware of the dangers implicit in conciliating an empire that heeds no law or reason except its own compulsive aggrandisement? Or is Russia's desire to "join the West" a result of its still virulent circle of oligarchs in the composition of the top sectors of the nation? It's clear that at this point an autarkic, socialist Russia would be much safer, firmer and clearer in its international stance.

Will Russia wake up? Or will its demented desire to be part of the West leave Russians unprepared for Washington’s nuclear strike, which is coming.

What if the Russian government simply told Washington: “If you or your terrorist mercenaries attack Syrian forces, we will eliminate your presence in the Middle East and Israel as well.” This is something that Russia can do at the drop of a hat.

What would the British and Washington do, other than wet their pants? Clearly, they would get the message and decide that peace is a better idea.

The Russian government simply does not understand that Washington regards Russian appeals to diplomacy, law, facts, evidence, as signs of extreme weakness and lack of confidence. Washington and its puppet states do not need any facts. They have an agenda. By calling for facts, the Russians show their weakness.

The Russian display of weakness encourages Washington’s aggression. Does Russia’s desire to be a part of the West exceed its desire for national survival?

PCR with his feline children.

About the Author
  Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

 

 

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

 Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found