CRIMINAL RULING CLASS

Ben Norton traveled to Ecuador to report on the historic February 7 election, which pits a wealthy US-backed right-wing banker against a left-wing economist who pledges to continue the socialist Citizens’ Revolution launched by former President Rafael Correa. In this dispatch, working-class Ecuadorians explain why they support leftist candidate Andrés Arauz and oppose the repressive Washington-allied government of Lenín Moreno. ||| The Grayzone ||| Find more reporting at https://thegrayzone.com​ Support our original journalism at Patreon: https://patreon.com/grayzone​

CALEB MAUPIN—This Caleb Maupin episode is a tour de force, remarkable even by the superior standards that characerize Maupin’s highly accessible historical analyses. In this chat Caleb covers the historical repercussions of the Holocaust, good and bad. From the rise (and fall) of McCarthyism barely 7 years after the Holocaust, to the emergence of the “New Left (“synthetic left” sponsored by the CIA), and its false political categories, such as the equating of Nazism with Communism (Hanna Arendt’s “Totalitarianism”). This false equation continues to sow confusion among a heavily indoctrinated public.  By the 1990s, Caleb notes, the ruling class had come up with a new set of variations on the subject, this time, milking the psychic wounds and revulsion toward the Holocaust, by pretending to be committed to the prevention of another Hitler, or the “duty” to intervene to prevent another human rights catastrophe, the empowering of a mass murderer, wherever he may threaten to appear. Our audience is well aware that candidates for regime change, as this foreign policy approach has become known in modern days, are only those whom the empire regards as international foes, or as obstacles to its hegemonist designs. This viciously excoriated group never includes a Washington ally, a roster that includes many of the greatest crooks and murderers of the last two centuries.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that it seized 27 online domains, claiming the websites were controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The DOJ seized the domains under the guise of enforcing US sanctions against Iran and the IRGC. Wednesday’s announcement followed the seizure of 92 domains in October that the DOJ also claimed were operated by Iran. The DOJ purports that the domains were being used to spread “Iranian propaganda” and “disinformation.”

BEN NORTON—A far-right Bolivian activist and coup supporter, Nadia Beller, published photos on Facebook and Twitter of The Grayzone electoral observers. The images make it clear that we were being closely monitored while in the airport in Chile. Photos of Blumenthal as he boarded the airplane in Santiago were also published online.

Beller shared the itinerary of when our flight was due to arrive in Santa Cruz, implicitly encouraging her followers to come to the airport to threaten election monitors.

She also falsely smeared Max Blumenthal as a “disinformation expert from RT.”

These stalker photos were subsequently amplified by prominent right-wing Bolivian media personalities, such as Agustín Zambrana Arze.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—On all issues that most severely affect real people on mass scale, these two political factions are in emphatic agreement. They just pour a whole lot of sound and fury into the tiny one percent of the spectrum wherein they have some disagreement. They do not allow for any mainstream discussion of if the oligarchic empire should continue to exist; all their issues, arguments and histrionics revolve around how it should exist.