Category: AMERICAN BRAINWASH - The Greanville Post

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

By Craig Murray
Source: The author's website
Dateline: Mar 16 2018

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the “Novichok” programme a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilisers. This substance is a “novichok” in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China.To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days. The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation “of a type developed by Russia” was used by Theresa May in parliament, used by the UK at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, “of a type developed by Russia” is the precise phrase used in the joint communique issued by the UK, USA, France and Germany yesterday:

This use of a military-grade nerve agent, of a type developed by Russia, constitutes the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

When the same extremely careful phrasing is never deviated from, you know it is the result of a very delicate Whitehall compromise. My FCO source, like me, remembers the extreme pressure put on FCO staff and other civil servants to sign off the dirty dossier on Iraqi WMD, some of which pressure I recount in my memoir Murder in Samarkand. She volunteered the comparison to what is happening now, particularly at Porton Down, with no prompting from me.

Meanwhile, you can rest assured that none of the major news organisations in the West will be beating a path to the author's door, seeking more information, or putting him in front of the cameras. Such is the travesty of corporate media "journalism" in our epoch of totalitarian hypocrisy.—The Editor

Separately I have written to the media office at OPCW to ask them to confirm that there has never been any physical evidence of the existence of Russian Novichoks, and the programme of inspection and destruction of Russian chemical weapons was completed last year.

Did you know these interesting facts?

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray with his book, Murder in Samarkand in London Monday July 17, 2006. (AP Photo/Simon Dawson)

OPCW inspectors have had full access to all known Russian chemical weapons facilities for over a decade – including those identified by the “Novichok” alleged whistleblower Mirzayanov – and last year OPCW inspectors completed the destruction of the last of 40,000 tonnes of Russian chemical weapons

By contrast the programme of destruction of US chemical weapons stocks still has five years to run.

Israel has extensive stocks of chemical weapons but has always refused to declare any of them to the OPCW. Israel is not a state party to the Chemical Weapons Convention nor a member of the OPCW. Israel signed in 1993 but refused to ratify as this would mean inspection and destruction of its chemical weapons. Israel undoubtedly has as much technical capacity as any state to synthesise “Novichoks”.

Until this week, the near universal belief among chemical weapons experts, and the official position of the OPCW, was that “Novichoks” were at most a theoretical research programme which the Russians had never succeeded in actually synthesising and manufacturing. That is why they are not on the OPCW list of banned chemical weapons.

Porton Down is still not certain it is the Russians who have apparently synthesised a “Novichok”. Hence “Of a type developed by Russia”. Note developed, not made, produced or manufactured.

It is very carefully worded propaganda. Of a type developed by liars.

UPDATE

This post prompted another old colleague to get in touch. On the bright side, the FCO have persuaded Boris he has to let the OPCW investigate a sample. But not just yet. The expectation is the inquiry committee will be chaired by a Chinese delegate. The Boris plan is to get the OPCW also to sign up to the “as developed by Russia” formula, and diplomacy to this end is being undertaken in Beijing right now.

I don’t suppose there is any sign of the BBC doing any actual journalism on this?

—CM

PS/ Read the first report on this topic below.

The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam

As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK’s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.

In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, ‘Novichoks’ (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the ‘Foliant’ programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)

Robin Black. (2016) Development, Historical Use and Properties of Chemical Warfare Agents. Royal Society of Chemistry

Yet now, the British Government is claiming to be able instantly to identify a substance which its only biological weapons research centre has never seen before and was unsure of its existence. Worse, it claims to be able not only to identify it, but to pinpoint its origin. Given Dr Black’s publication, it is plain that claim cannot be true.

The world’s international chemical weapons experts share Dr Black’s opinion. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is a UN body based in the Hague. In 2013 this was the report of its Scientific Advisory Board, which included US, French, German and Russian government representatives and on which Dr Black was the UK representative:

[The SAB] emphasised that the definition of toxic chemicals in the Convention would cover all potential candidate chemicals that might be utilised as chemical weapons. Regarding new toxic chemicals not listed in the Annex on Chemicals but which may nevertheless pose a risk to the Convention, the SAB makes reference to “Novichoks”. The name “Novichok” is used in a publication of a former Soviet scientist who reported investigating a new class of nerve agents suitable for use as binary chemical weapons. The SAB states that it has insufficient information to comment on the existence or properties of “Novichoks”. (OPCW, 2013)

OPCW: Report of the Scientific Advisory Board on developments in science and technology for the Third Review Conference 27 March 2013

Indeed the OPCW was so sceptical of the viability of “novichoks” that it decided – with US and UK agreement – not to add them nor their alleged precursors to its banned list. In short, the scientific community broadly accepts Mirzayanov was working on “novichoks” but doubts he succeeded.

Given that the OPCW has taken the view the evidence for the existence of “Novichoks” is dubious, if the UK actually has a sample of one it is extremely important the UK presents that sample to the OPCW. Indeed the UK has a binding treaty obligation to present that sample to OPCW. Russa has – unreported by the corporate media – entered a demand at the OPCW that Britain submit a sample of the Salisbury material for international analysis.

Yet Britain refuses to submit it to the OPCW.

Why?

A second part of May’s accusation is that “Novichoks” could only be made in certain military installations. But that is also demonstrably untrue. If they exist at all, Novichoks were allegedly designed to be able to be made at bench level in any commercial chemical facility – that was a major point of them. The only real evidence for the existence of Novichoks was the testimony of the ex-Soviet scientist Mizayanov. And this is what Mirzayanov actually wrote.

One should be mindful that the chemical components or precursors of A-232 or its binary version novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides.

Vil S. Mirzayanov, “Dismantling the Soviet/Russian Chemical Weapons Complex: An Insider’s View,” in Amy E. Smithson, Dr. Vil S. Mirzayanov, Gen Roland Lajoie, and Michael Krepon, Chemical Weapons Disarmament in Russia: Problems and Prospects, Stimson Report No. 17, October 1995, p. 21.

It is a scientific impossibility for Porton Down to have been able to test for Russian novichoks if they have never possessed a Russian sample to compare them to. They can analyse a sample as conforming to a Mirzayanov formula, but as he published those to the world twenty years ago, that is no proof of Russian origin. If Porton Down can synthesise it, so can many others, not just the Russians.

And finally – Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any “novichok” ever existed in Russia itself.

To summarise:

1) Porton Down has acknowledged in publications it has never seen any Russian “novichoks”. The UK government has absolutely no “fingerprint” information such as impurities that can safely attribute this substance to Russia.
2) Until now, neither Porton Down nor the world’s experts at the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were convinced “Novichoks” even exist.
3) The UK is refusing to provide a sample to the OPCW.
4) “Novichoks” were specifically designed to be able to be manufactured from common ingredients on any scientific bench. The Americans dismantled and studied the facility that allegedly developed them. It is completely untrue only the Russians could make them, if anybody can.
5) The “Novichok” programme was in Uzbekistan not in Russia. Its legacy was inherited by the Americans during their alliance with Karimov, not by the Russians.

With a great many thanks to sources who cannot be named at this moment.

Please Also Read My follow-up to this article: “Bothered by Midgies”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

Some cynics are saying that Trump's capricious style of rule is beginning to channel Caligula. Although Caligula himself (like Caesar) have been grossly distorted and disparaged by conservative historians, the legend about Caligula proposing his horse to the Roman senate, to be treated as a peer, acquires some resonance in the seemingly chaotic actions of the Twitterer in Chief. But is there method to this madness? Maybe.

Plus, somebody who smiles and expresses satisfaction when told how North Koreans are suffering and possibly dying in the thousands from famine, thanks to US imposed sanctions - does not even deserve to be called human.

Of course, he is not alone. The current Trump Administration is full of either halfwits or criminals. Take Mike Pompeo, the up-to-now CIA Director; he is an ultra-conservative southern Tea Party member, many of whom are still segregationists (wanting to separate the US south from the north) – racists, sexists – and yes, they hate everything that comes from the east, especially from Russia or is Russian. The latter applies to Pompeo for sure.

So, we can expect more Russophobia, more (totally worthless, sheer propaganda) sanctions, and more belligerent saber-rattling towards the east, mostly Russia, then China. Pompeo is also a loyal buddy of Trump’s, a yes-man, something apparently Tillerson never was, but Trump seems to need. So – why did Trump hire Tillerson in the first place? – It was an odd appointment from the get-go. Tillerson felt lost in his role as a ‘diplomat’ – instead he was an aggressive wolf in sheep skin.

Let’s not be fooled. Much of the chaos being played out for more than a year now in the White House – and an end is not in sight – is, of course, a planned strategy – a strategy to confuse. It makes straight thinking difficult. That’s the plan anyway. Trump looks like a loose cannon, maybe he is, but he plays his role well. Take the new tariffs on steel and aluminum - for starters.

Everyone screams and hollers – China, the EU, Japan, Canada, South Korea, even Africa. Yet in the end Trump will prevail in one way or another. There are already a number of fallback positions in case these neoliberal ‘partners’ go to complain to WTO, the mother of neoliberal globalization. Alternatives include import quotas, or even higher tariffs for some countries and exemptions for others.

The point is “Make America Great Again” – meaning bring back jobs and a real hard-core industrial growth element into the US faltering economy. Trump, in fact, is applying what everyone around the globe should apply – a sort of ‘resistance economy’ – de-globalization, working for the national economy, not for transnational, mostly US globalized corporations – which is the case today (see also https://www.globalresearch.ca/trumps-trade-war-or-de-globalization/5631893).

The trade fiasco may be just another one of the typical deviation maneuvers, so people will not look what’s going on in the back, namely in the more compelling course of foreign US policy. The Deep State pulling the strings on Trump wants blood, Russian blood – and then Chinese blood – and they also want to dominate the Middle East – Full Spectrum Dominance – i.e. bombing Damascus into rubble and abrogating Iran’s Nuclear Deal – and provoking a pretext to start a war with Iran – the one Netanyahu is lusting for. But all of this has to be softened with some trade chaos. And it seems to work.

Let’s see what next month’s Trump-Kim – or shall I say, Kim-Trump? Summit will bring, if it will indeed take place. Someone, for some reason must have convinced Trump that for now an “arrangement” with Pyongyang is better than a potential all destructive nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula. That ‘someone’ – shall we call it again ‘Deep State’ – has a more vital interest in the full dominance of the Middle East. So, Iran, Syria and Russia beware. The new Axis of Evil. It keeps shifting according to Washington’s priorities.

President Kim Jong-un’s Administration, or those who worked already under Kim’s father, Kim Jong-Il, may remember the 1994 ‘Framework Agreement’, initiated by President Clinton, under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its embryonic nuclear program at Yongbyon and in return would receive economic aid and diplomatic concessions from Washington. The thawing of relations between Pyongyang and Washington prospered until 2000, shortly before President Bush took over.

With his hawkish, neocon entourage, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton, exerting pressure, Bush declined to reaffirm the backbone of the Agreed Framework, “no-hostile-intent”, and he pulled out of the Clinton made deal. Not unlike Trump, who wants to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Shortly after reneging on the Agreed Framework, Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses and declared Iraq-Iran-North Korea the axis of evil; launching the endless war on terror. Kim Jong knows that Washington cannot be trusted.

Why would Washington be trustworthy now? – Of course, it is not. Pompeo, the new hawkish chief diplomate, is certainly not a friend of Kim Jong’s, or of communist DPRK. For now, he has to go along with the propaganda summit next month. But once that’s over, however it may play out – anything is possible, he may default on the deal, just like Bush did in 2000, on a peace-favorable agreement and return to square one. By then DPRK may have denuclearized again.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd who will succeed Pompeo at the CIA? – Gina Haspel, the first woman ever to head the CIA, a perfect candidate for this criminal agency. Haspel herself earned the not-so-cute nickname “Godmother of Torture”, as she directed and oversaw a secret US torture prison in Thailand. Her appointment bodes well for what’s to come – more aggression, more torture around the globe. The typical last-ditch tools of a faltering empire. Haspel belongs before a Nuremberg-type tribunal – not to be seen again forever.

But that won’t happen, as all the beautiful people of the exceptional nation get away with murder. Literally. Most of them with mass murder, some even with genocide. And zilch happens. Again, the world just gawks and says nothing, accepting crime in biblical dimensions has become the western new normal.

What a world we are living in: White collar criminals with blood stains all over their elite-white shirts. And the western masses just stare and say nothing – but they become warriors, as the presstitutes tells them lies after bloody lies; they become complicit in the war machine that is killing millions of people on behalf of their silence.

Fortunately, there is Russia coming to the rescue. Despite the rambling bulldozer of western lie-propaganda, Russian voices, especially Mr. Putin’s voice and that of his Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov – are increasingly heard and listened to. But the western propaganda machine, knowing of its crumbling Master-empire, knows no limits of sowing Russophobia.

Take the latest case of senseless Russia bashing – the case of Russian double agent Skripal and his daughter’s nerve gas poisoning on a London park bench. Theresa May, receiving orders from Washington, is accusing Russia of the crime – why would Russia be so stupid and commit such a crime on a spy who had been released from a Russian prison years ago – and that in a prisoner swap with the US? - And why just before Russian elections? – Not one single proof is presented. Yet, the accusations are loud – and ludicrous.

Does anybody still have just a few neurons in their shrinking brains left? Threatening Russia with more sanctions for a crime most likely committed by the British MI6, MI5 or even Mossad, at Washington’s behest, and so that the entire western world could slam down on Putin and Russia again – is sheer insanity. This lunacy is topped off by a Joint Statement, by Trump, May, Macron and Merkel blaming Russia for the poisoning. Such strong lie publicity is certainly taking hold in the western brainwashed armchair population.

Is anybody asking cui bono? Who benefits? And to make the Zion-UK-Washington argument even stronger – UK PM May expulses 23 Russian diplomats. Is Russia going to be responding in a tit-for-tat manner? – Or will Russia just lay back, enjoying the fake news and insane, hysterical behavior of the West?

A Nuremberg tribunal: This is where the current leaders and top henchmen of the Western faux democracies should be sitting, if there was any justice or reason or truth in this world.

About the Author

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The 4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

[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

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.

BREAKING: The Southern Poverty Law Center has retracted and apologized for falsely calling me Alt-Right.https://t.co/jaMKksM4Ko pic.twitter.com/MvBnAG2cNz

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) March 14, 2018

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.

Anyone who thinks I am alt-right has no concept of what it is, and theyre prob suffering from trump derangement syndrome. Dangerous folks.

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) September 20, 2017

1. Nobody with half a brain thinks I’m alt right.
2. Yesterday was the anniversary of the beginning of the siege.
3. Last night was the final episode of the six part mini series about it.
4. Liberals pretending they care about law enforcement when it comes to Waco is a joke. https://t.co/NrWN3MUQlq

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) March 1, 2018

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.

The "You're a secret Nazi!" accusation so often leveled by Left Twitter is even more moronic than the "You're a Kremlin troll!" accusation beloved by Centrist Twitter. Only idiots believe world is full of fake leftists secretly laboring to create a white ethnostate in America.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 24, 2018

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.

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

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

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

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 21^st, 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

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).

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

Of A Type Developed By Liars

Please Also Read My follow-up to this article: “Bothered by Midgies”

Tillerson – Fired by Twitter – but What’s Next?

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

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

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Blaming the Victim, American Style