Category: US GOVERNMENT CRIMES - The Greanville Post

DANIEL WIRT | KULTURKAMPF

WITH SPECIAL ADDENDUM FEATURING ROGER EBERT’S REVIEW OF THE FILM

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

-Bloated, fermented, well-marbled Cameron (fermented in situ on the beach, subsequently poached in Mediterranean seawater and deboned)

-Jerked Brzezinski

-Tormented Killiary with hand-pulled Erdogan

-Sheltered Bush with lifted neocon skulls

-Kaganate of Nuland with Obombanated butter (seasonally substituted with Biden butter)

-Poached Blair with depleted uranium cream

-Sliced Merkel with Hollande sauce

-Harper with stubbed rice, Alberta sunflower extract and fresh lemon basil

-Acromegalic Porkoshenko with pressed Yats Marrow

-Roasted whole Kolomoisky with fascist Polish apples, garnished with assorted well-marbled rich

-Spicy curried KissOff

-Baked Thatcher with RayGun Ragu

-Trumped Donald Duck

-Wild Bibi with transubstantiated Cruz

-Fresh Ukrop Nazi florets steamed in Novorossiyan cauldrons

-Chopped McCain with isis flower-infused Takfiri heads and artichoke hearts

-Bernard-Henri Levy (terminal diner, to be launched into deep space after the last supper)

But, you ask, who will eat this toxic garbage? Even the undead in Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers would not be interested in these people, fresh or cooked (3,4).

Below, some of the recommended ingredients. Be sure to wash your hands after cooking, and disinfect, if possible.

Cameron: As revolting a human being as you can find. but all too typical of imperial politicians.

Charles Koch: Hey, Hillary is alright by us!

Brzezinski: what does he care, this desiccated relic, this unreconstructed reactionary, soon to keel over, if the world blows up into a zillion smithereens? At his age he probably welcomes plenty of company for his trip to hell.

François Hollande remains one of the worst examples of vassalage to Washington in the history of Modern Europe.

Thatcher

Cheney: as vicious and dangerous as he looks, the perfect henchman for an oligarchy bent on conquering te world at any cost. When he dies, expect big media accolades, with the liberals declaring him a key statesman.

Netanyahu

Preparation

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t works like this, The bloated, fermented Cameron is the first to be prepared and is fed to all the remaining perps (using nasogastric tubes and Gitmo APA – American Psychological Association – psychologists, if necessary). Then, after a week or so, the jerked Brzezinski is fed to the remaining perps. And so on and so forth, until only Bernard-Henri Levy, the terminal diner remains. As the cycles progress, the remaining diners will become progressively, morbidly obese. In the end, by the time of the last supper, Bernard-Henri Levy will look like M. Creosote in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” (5,6). (“The sauce is very rich”.) After a few months, Levy will develop a widespread metastatic anaplastic malignancy secondary to the enormous accumulated burden of persistent biological toxins. Being a self-proclaimed philosopher, Levy may accept his fate philosophically — we’ll see. After death, his body will be launched into deep space so as to not pollute the air, land or sea with his concentrated toxins. The precedent for deep space disposition of human bodes was established years ago in the great film, The Loved One (7,8), based on Evelyn Waugh’s macabre comic masterpiece — “with something to offend everyone”; featuring Jonathan Winters, Rod Steiger, and in what has to be one of the most brilliant casting decisions in film history, Liberace, as the casket salesman.

Obviously the criminal predators in the liberal fascist-imperialistic-plutocrat class, along with their puppet politicians and MSM courtiers, number in the thousands or tens of thousands. Thus, it is incumbent on others in the in-touch-with-reality sanity class to form their own such menu lists for the La Hollandaise restaurant. One thousand such menus will result in the removal of ten or twenty thousand PBTs. Think of the possibilities! All the prostitute “journalists” at the (gag)Guardian and the New York Times… The obviously well-marbled Koch brothers… Form your own list. They’d none of them be missed (9,10)!

So, bon appetit in the La Hollandaise, criminal scum!

(“And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

NOTES

1) 366weirdmovies.com/the-cook-the-thief-his-wife-her-lover-1989/

2) www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-cook-the-thief-his-wife-and-her-lover-1999

3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKo3Ry14kMQ

4) http://tinyurl.com/nbow55d

by Stephen Lendman

Obama and the UK's Cameron: Bosom buddies in war planning. An age of repugnant hypocrisy. Where the Nuremberg tribunal now that we need it?

Obama and the UK’s Cameron: Bosom buddies in war planning and appalling all-round criminality. An age of repugnant hypocrisy. Where is that Nuremberg tribunal now that we need it?

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]fficial accounts from Washington and European capitals along with duplicitous major media reports suppress what’s most important to know. Volumes are written without a single explanation of why a refugee crisis exists in the first place, what should be done about it, and most important, how to prevent future ones.
…

Millions fleeing troubled lands aren’t migrants. They’re refugees and asylum seekers – desperately seeking safe havens anywhere out of harm’s way. Washington bears full responsibility for the gravest refugee crisis since WW II – because of its devastating post-9/11 wars. Resolving the problem isn’t rocket science.
…
It’s as simple as declaring peace, stopping US wars, ending its support for ISIS and other takfiri terrorists, establishing effective transition policies, and caring for displaced people humanely until they’re able to return home, adjust to a new environment on their own or go elsewhere.

…

RT International interviewed Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. He correctly blamed America for refugee crisis conditions.

President Maduro: “J’Accuse!”

“It is Europe that has to deal with the disaster caused by the US, because it is Europe that is now taking in thousands of migrants and they don’t know how to cope with this situation,” he said.

“By deception, (America) invaded (Afghanistan), then (Iraq), the cradle of civilization – and razed it to the ground. Now it is literally split into thousands of parts and engulfed by terrorism in its cruelest form” because Washington wanted to steal its oil and exploit its people.

“Who bombed Libya! Who took the lives of more than 100,000 Libyans! Who is now bombing Syria,” Maduro stressed!

“Who financed the terrorists that are now seeking to destroy it. The US has caused a real disaster, chaos, and now it wants to cause chaos in other regions of the world.”

“By deception, (America) invaded (Afghanistan), then (Iraq), the cradle of civilization – and razed it to the ground. Now it is literally split into thousands of parts and engulfed by terrorism in its cruelest form…because Washington wanted to steal its oil and exploit its people…”

Britain’s Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn blasted David Cameron – calling his response to the Syrian refugee crisis (the worst one globally) “wholly inadequate.”

Images of a dead child washing up on Turkey’s shoreline reflect the horrors of Washington’s imperial wars – endless ones taking millions of lives, displacing millions of survivors fleeing for safety, enduring extraordinary hardships few can comprehend, and treated with deplorable callousness most everywhere they arrive.

Tory leadership failed, said Corbyn. Britain granted asylum to less than 300 Syrian refugees since January 2014.

Cameron dismissively says “I don’t think there is an answer that can be achieved simply by taking more and more refugees” – while his complicity with Obama’s wars creates more of them. Corbyn calls it Britain’s “duty under UN law, but also as human beings, to offer a place of safety, and play a role internationally to share our responsibilities, and to try to end (ongoing) conflict(s)” – ones Britain complicit with Washington wage.

On September 4, Human Rights Watch (HRW) listed “five steps to tackle (the) refugee crisis:

2. Fix “the EU’s broken asylum system.” Different polices among member states created a dysfunctional process.

3. Institute “robust search and rescue operations” sustained as long as needed.

4. Establish a “permanent relocation (policy) to share asylum seekers.”

5. “Develop a list of ‘unsafe’ countries whose nationals…need international protection.”

…

HRW omitted what’s most important. Declare a universal commitment to peace and stability. End US imperial wars. End European involvement in them. Hold Israel accountable for slow-motion genocide against Palestinians.

…

When swords are turned into plowshares, refugee crises won’t exist. Instead, Washington’s solution to everything is war, endless conflicts for wealth and power, turning planet earth into a dystopian wasteland – or maybe destroying it altogether.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center).

Just a beer a month is enough to keep us going. How about it?

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DATELINE: PARIS, SEPTEMBER 7, 2015 | DIANA JOHNSTONE

Washington's paws in Paris: Fabius (l) and Hollande. A disgrace in many respects.

Washington’s pawns in Paris: Laurent Fabius (l) and Hollande. A disgrace in many respects, but typical of the new vassalage instituted by Washington via prostituted politicians.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his Monday, September 7, seven Syrian citizens go to court in Paris to pursue their civil suit against French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. The five men and two women all lost family members and close friends in massacres by armed rebels supported by Fabius in word and deed. They are asking for one euro of symbolic damages.

In the end the suit will almost surely be thrown out. The September 7 hearing is on an appeal against an earlier ruling that the courts cannot judge acts of the government in this case, even if the complaint is founded. And yet this futile lawsuit makes a crucial point that Western politicians and media would much prefer to ignore.

Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation. And so far, they are getting away with it. The massive refugee crisis swamping Europe is just the beginning of the troubles that these unscrupulous leaders have brought on their own countries.

Laurent Fabius can fairly be called a French neoconservative. His alignment with Israeli policies is seen in the fact that he was the most reluctant of the foreign ministers involved in the Iranian nuclear negotiations to agree to the final settlement.

He has been one of the most gung-ho advocates of regime change in Syria, a country long on the neocon hit list for its Arab nationalism and support for the Palestinian cause.

Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation.

The Syrian plaintiffs note that:

Fabius: Overt promoter of international war crimes, but above the law, and therefore untouchable.

* On May 29, 2012, Fabius declared that France would intervene against the Syrian regime.

* On August 17, 2012, Fabius declared that Syrian President Bashar el Assad “did not deserve to be alive on earth”.

* On December 14, 2012, speaking out against the Obama administration decision to designate the Al Nusra Front as a terrorist group, Fabius objected that the Al Nusra Front was “doing a good job on the ground”.

* On March 13, 2013, Fabius announced that France and Britain were going to deliver arms to the rebels.

As a group, the plaintiffs maintain that by his declarations, Foreign Minister Fabius stirred up civil war in Syria and encouraged armed rebel attacks against the existing government. Individually, each of the plaintiffs lost family members and close friends in armed attacks and massacres carried out by the al Nusra militia allied rebel groups.

Israel’s Ghastly Twin: the “Islamic State”

[dropcap]U[/dropcap]nder U.S. leadership and Israeli influence, French political leaders have championed “regime change” in Libya and Syria on the tacit assumption that civil war would be better for the people of those countries than living under a “dictatorship”. In practice, however, most people can get along better without a vote than without a roof over their heads. Or without their heads.

It is hardly surprising that the carefully filmed and diffused videos of “Islamic State” (IS) disciplinary methods have caused panic among people living in their path of conquest.

War causes people to become refugees. Western media pay close attention to refugees only when they like the “story”. Huge attention was paid to Kosovo Albanians fleeing temporarily from the 1999 NATO war against the Serbs, because those refugees could be described as victims of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” and thus as justification of the NATO war itself.

But no such media concern was aroused over the much greater number of refugees who fled from the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq and have never returned. Over a million Iraqi refugees fled into Syria, where they were well received.

The situation in the Middle East is critical. Armed by leftover U.S. military equipment in Iraq, enriched by illicit oil sales, its ranks swollen by young Jihadis from all over the world, the Islamic State threatens the people of Lebanon and Jordan, already struggling to take care of masses of refugees from Palestine, Iraq and now Syria. Fear of the decapitating Islamic fanatics is inciting more and more people to risk everything in order to get to safety in Europe.

The Islamic State is truly the horrible enemy caricature of the “Jewish State”, another political entity based on an exclusive religious identity. Like Israel it has no clearly defined borders, but with a vastly larger potential demographic base.

The only force that can stop the Islamic State from expanding its fanatic rule over all of Mesopotamia and beyond is the Syrian State led by Bashar al Assad. The choice is not between Assad and “Western democracy”. The choice is between Assad and the Islamic State. But Western leaders have still not fully dropped their demented cry: “Assad must go!”

Refugees, Migrants and Terrorists

The front pages of some of Britain’s daily newspapers showing an image of the body of Syrian three-year-old boy Aylan are pictured in London, on September 3, 2015. The image spread like lightning through social media and dominated front pages from Spain to Sweden, with commentators unanimous it had rammed home the horrors faced by those fleeing war and conflict in the Middle East and Africa. AFP PHOTO/JUSTIN TALLIS

…

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he results of this madness are washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Images and sentiment have replaced thinking about causes and effects. One photo of a drowned toddler causes a media and political uproar. Are people surprised? Didn’t they know that toddlers were being torn to pieces by U.S. bombing of Iraq, by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen? What about the toddlers obliterated by NATO’s war to “free Libya” from its “dictator”?

The current refugee crisis in Europe is the inevitable, foreseeable, predicted result of Western policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi’s Libya was the wall that kept hundreds of thousands of Africans from migrating illegally to Europe, not only by police methods but even more effectively by offering them development at home and decently paid jobs in Libya. Now Libya is the source both of economic migrants and of refugees from Libya itself, as well as from other lands of desperation. In order to weaken Sudan, the United States (and Susan Rice in particular) championed creation of the new country of South Sudan, which is not a country at all but the scene of rival massacres driving more and more fugitives toward unwelcoming countries.

The famous photo of little Aylan drowned in the Mediterranean is used very largely to make Europeans feel guilty. The leaders should indeed feel guilty – and not least the rich egomaniac Bernard-Henri Lévy, who prides himself on having talked the French government of Nicolas Sarkozy into starting war against Libya, where, he claimed, there were no Islamic extremists, but only pro-Westerners yearning for democracy. Thanks to NATO, Islamic extremists have since run roughshod over the whole country.

Bernard Henri-Levy: BHL, the excremental French fake intellectual adored by the capitalist media. Here enjoying the pleasures of fame and money with his wife., Arielle Dombasle. One more proof there is no God.

Bernard Henri-Levy: BHL, the excremental French fake intellectual adored by the capitalist media, a regular on Charlie Rose. Here enjoying the pleasures of fame and money with his wife, Arielle Dombasle. One more proof there is no God.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has agreed to take in eight hundred thousand Syrian refugees. This is admirable on humanitarian grounds. Germany is economically strong and demographically weak; with its gradually shrinking population, middle class Syrians, many of them terrified Christians, may seem to be a welcome addition to the population. But it deepens political divisions within Germany and in Europe.

This is particularly the case in the new EU countries of Eastern Europe. Starting with Hungary, their leaders are making it clear that those countries are above all concerned with their ethnic identity, and don’t want to take in a lot of people who don’t speak their language. Unlike countries of Western Europe, the Eastern European tier of ethnic states have no tradition of taking in immigrants and no ideological attachment to the Western human rights ideology. In Eastern Europe, “human rights” sounded good to use against Russia and the Soviet Union, but stops there.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Greek crisis already put heavy strains on the unity of the European Union. For the first time, many people are questioning the whole idea. The crisis showed that there is no real sense of solidarity between the peoples of Europe; when it comes to the crunch, Germans are Germans and Greeks are Greeks, and “European” is an abstraction. The refugee crisis is showing new cracks in “European unity”.

Most of Europe today is suffering from massive unemployment, especially the Southern countries where refugees first land: Greece, Italy, Spain. European Union economic policies, already strangling Greece, do not favor job creation for hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Even professionally qualified refugees will find it difficult or impossible to get around rules protecting their professions in host countries. Most jobs they manage to get will probably be low level and illegal, undercutting wages and working conditions in the host countries.

Moreover, it is impossible in the present mass movement of people to distinguish “refugees” from economic “migrants” – that is, from men simply seeking better work opportunities. The EU today has little to offer then, and resentment of this unsought immigration is certain to improve the political fortunes of the nationalist right.

There is another reason that many European citizens feel less than enthusiastic about welcoming hundreds of thousands of unknown foreigners into their communities. The Islamic State has openly boasted of sending terrorists into Europe among the refugees, with the clear intention of committing violent acts to destabilize the West. Of course, the threat of terrorism is being used cynically by governments to enforce police state measures, but that does not mean that the threat of terrorism is unreal. Unfortunately, it exists – thanks very largely to the policies of those very same Western governments.

The refugee crisis should be seen as the warning signal that the United States and its NATO allies – especially Britain and France – are bringing the world to a state of chaos that is going to keep spreading and that is approaching a point of no return. It is quick and easy to break things. Putting them back together may be impossible. Civilization itself may be more fragile than it seems.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book, Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, will be published by CounterPunch in September 2015. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

THIS IS A CROSSPOST WITH COUNTERPUNCH.ORG

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“…in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies held at bay.” – Richard Levins (Source: The Proletarian Center).

Please remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).

Just a beer a month is enough to keep us going. How about it?

The Greanville Post is the best edited political blog in the anglophone world. No one matches our standards.

[box] The present article explores the benefits of co-opting, infiltrating, and leading the opposition. Later articles will (i) document the ubiquity of compromised dissident organizations, intellectuals, and activists, (ii) provide criteria for their detection, and, (iii) apply these criteria to a few cases. [/box]

VIEWPOINTS | By Moti Nissani, Ph.D.

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it”—[A quote often attributed to Lenin]

“If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”—Thomas Hardy

YouTube – Veterans Today -Phil Ochs: Love me, I’m a Liberal

I cried when they shot Medgar Evers
Tears ran down my spine when they shot Mr. Kennedy
As though I’d lost a father of mine
But Malcolm X got what was coming
He got what he asked for this time
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal^[1]

I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every colored boy becomes a star
But don’t talk about revolution
That’s going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal . . .

I read underground papers and Newsweek
I’ve learned to take every view
I’ve warned Vietnam is atrocious
I wish to God that fighting was through
But when it comes to the army of Israel
There’s no one more red white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the U.N. to be strong
I attend all the Phil Ochs concerts
I sure wish he’d write some new songs
I’ll send all the money you ask for
But don’t ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

Sure, once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

***

Introduction: Pillars of American “Democracy”

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ow did the bankers and their accomplices manage to steadily increase their power and wealth at the expense of the vast majority? How did they manage to undermine freedom, justice, peace—and humanity’s prospects for long-term survival? What accounts for their astounding success in turning this beautiful blue and green planet into a raging cauldron of materialism and hate? ^[2] The answer to such questions is of great scholarly and humanitarian interest, involving an extremely complex, multi-faceted, answer. The answer is also an essential component of a revolutionary toolkit, as Sun Tzu explained: “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

The edifice the bankers built rests on a dozen or so mutually-supporting pillars. I have drawn attention to five of these pillars elsewhere:

Sunshine Bribery
Cloak-and-Dagger: I. Case Studies II. Smoking Gun Evidence
Contrived Terror and false-flag Operations: I. A Preview II. Backdrop of Terror III. The Gladio Conspiracy IV. 19 Telltale Signs of Fake Terror V. History: Read it and Learn VI. Give me Logic or Give me Terror
Absence of Real Democracy
appeared here)

The next series of articles explores a sixth pillar: Co-option.

***

Benefits of Leading, Infiltrating, or Co-opting the Opposition:

1. Diminishing the number of potential revolutionaries. As a rule, a compassionate truth-seeker attempting to escape the cave of political illiteracy does so laboriously and gradually. At a certain point, s/he realizes that most mainstream schools, universities, religions, newspapers, books, movies, websites, radio and television broadcasts everywhere in the world, are little more than mind-control operations. As she strikes out on her own, desolate and disillusioned, she naturally seeks companionship and validation of her new, hard-gained, insights.

At that point, the ruling bankers are there, waiting to outfox her again with their phony reform organizations, media outlets, and dissidents. If our truth-seeker is disturbed by the bankers’ needless program of environmental destruction, she may gravitate to organizations such as the Sierra Club or the Union of Concerned Scientists, which have all the trappings of reform organizations but which are part of the bankers’ network of control. Concerned about human rights? Well, the bankers are already down there in the trenches, along with their well-financed Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Civil Liberties? Welcome to the ACLU. Civil rights? Why not try the co-opted NAACP, SPLC, or Barack Obama? Sunshine bribery in politics? Common Cause welcomes her into their fold with its $50 or whatever-she-can-afford plea.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]r maybe our struggling truth-seeker is trying to improve her understanding of humanity’s plight and learn from those ahead of her in the ascent to the sunlight? Here she will encounter the bankers-supported Democracy Now, Nation Magazine, the Guardian, National Public Radio, and so many other front [or severely compromised] organizations—well-meaning perhaps, but constrained by their dependence on bankers’ money.

Thus, co-option sees to it that most compassionate truth-seekers never emerge farther than this web of manufactured dissent.

Even those few who emerge may require years or decades to do so. By then, they might be too old or weary to fight the system. At the very least, the bankers managed to slow down their advance towards truth and meaningful action.

Moreover, our hapless truth-seekers, having come so far, might become disillusioned and wrongly conclude that all human beings are worthless, and that there is no point fighting for a better world.

2. A magnet for genuine dissidents. Or maybe our waking sleeper is looking for like-minded individuals for camaraderie, validation, and exchange of ideas? Again the bankers are there, ready to direct her to all the leading, naive or double-crossing, dissident historians, authors, observers, journalists, broadcasters, and activists fit to print or listen to. David Martin offers one example of this Machiavellian device:

“Pat Tillman’s attempt to leak to the fake dissident Chomsky might well have been what got him killed. That’s one of the reasons the secret government creates phony critics. They serve as magnets for would-be whistleblowers.”

3. Confusing the general public. With captive information sources and compromised reformers, with so many reputable (and well paid) “dissidents” and “skeptics” and so many “disputes” about elementary points, how is the average person to figure out what policy best serves her interests and convictions?

Climate disruptions ^[3] and the Cold War I^[4] provide two examples of changing the course of history by infiltrating and bribing the scholarly community. The disgraceful role of the late population geneticist, “Sir” R.A. Fisher in the tobacco controversy provides another example. Finally, co-opted dissidents, historians, and progressives play a key role in suppressing a free marketplace of ideas about 9/11 and the culling of the Kennedy clan.

4. Squandering the humanitarian camp’s meager resources. The co-opted opposition diverts to itself donations of time and money that could otherwise reach genuine reformers. Consider for instance donations from misguided middle-class donors to the National Wildlife Federation. These donations could have been used for something other than supporting a federation that depends on the enemies of wildlife for its cushy existence and which acknowledges paying its CEO an annual salary (in 2,013) of $365,908.

5. Weakening and dividing the opposition. The need for constant vigilance, for always looking over one’s shoulder when dealing with one’s comrades, encumbers the humanitarian camp. This is a major problem for revolutionaries and dissidents, well-documented in many historical cases. Fictional accounts (and possible solutions) include Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day.

6. Intelligence gathering. Consider, for instance, the bankers’ war against Martin Luther King. To smear, imprison, blackmail, preempt, and–when nothing else worked–assassinate King, the bankers needed inside information. Besides constant shadowing and illegal wiretapping, their FBI lackeys infiltrated King’s circle of trusted collaborators.

“Martin Luther King’s friend and photographer was an FBI informant. Ernest Withers, who was trusted by the civil rights leader to sit in on strategy meetings, spied on black activists and white radicals.

Withers was a former Memphis police officer.

“Martin Luther King must have imagined that the man with the camera so often at his side was doing no more than recording history. But it has been revealed that Ernest Withers – who was on hand to capture King riding newly desegregated buses and the shock of the civil rights leader’s allies immediately after his murder – was also an FBI informer.

It was Withers who took this famous shot of MLK and Ralph Abernathy, on a recently desegregated bus.

“The double life of one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era was exposed by the Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis, which reported that Withers passed on photographs to the FBI along with names and background information about activists and details of schedules.”

…

7. Diverting attention of the vast majority from unspeakable government crimes which could perhaps trigger a revolution.

James Corbett [5] explains:

“The function of a gatekeeper is not to spout lies 100% of the time or to be some sort of a bumbling fool who doesn’t know what he is talking about. It is to be exceptionally smart, exceptionally good, exceptionally keen analyst on enough topics that people would buy into what you are saying. So that on one or two topics that you have to skirt around and that you have to get your audience to stop paying attention to, you can do so with some credibility—building up the capital in order to spend it.”

8. Covering up, justifying, or legitimizing policies which benefit the bankers but counteract the interests and convictions of the vast majority.

Here is an environmental example [6]:

“While I witnessed these early stages of ecocide, I imagined that American green groups were on the people’s side in the corridors of Capitol Hill . . . But it is now clear that many were on a different path – one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation.

“US environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995 – was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.

“Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. . . . He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for “environmental stewardship”. Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted. They saw it as valuable “reputation insurance”: every time they are criticised for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for events such as the massive oil spill that has just turned the Gulf of Mexico into the “Gulf of Texaco”, they wheel out their shiny green awards to ward off the prospect of government regulation and to reassure the public that they Really Care.”

9. Discrediting the dissident camp. If FBI agents infiltrate demonstrations against a rising tide of wanton police criminality in Baltimore, and if these agents then proceed to loot and vandalize homes and small businesses, the public at large will have less sympathy for the struggle against bankers-engineered police brutality. [7]

10. Replacing troublesome policy makers with compliant ones—in either countries or reform organizations. In 2014, the CIA and fake democracy groups such as the National Endowment for Democracy or Soros’ Open Society Institute led the opposition in Ukraine, thereby converting a livable, independent kleptocracy into a tragic U.S.-owned colony. Similarly, by applying the carrot and stick approach, one tycoon (perhaps for understandable motives) precipitated the retirement from the Sierra Club of the principled environmentalist David Brower. Brower went on to found Friends of the Earth from which he—the founder—was again fired by a compromised and “corrupt board of directors.” [8]

Conclusion

It will be seen then that leading, infiltrating, and controlling the opposition provides a powerful instrument in any war—including the tyrants’ war against humanity.

Forthcoming articles in this co-option series will document the ubiquity of compromised dissent, provide criteria for its detection, and apply these criteria to a sampler of organizations and individuals.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Moti Nissani holds B.A. degrees in psychology and philosophy and a Ph.D. in genetics. He taught university courses and published academic papers and books in history, politics, literature, writing, language teaching, environmental biology, genetics, physics, astronomy, science instruction, critical thinking, psychology, animal behavior, media in America, and interdisciplinarity.

His current writings rely on this holistic background to explore interconnections among various branches of knowledge. He is convinced that we now live in one of those tragic times when the trees of liberty, justice, rationality, compassion, peace, and survival must be refreshed by the “blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Almost all dissident writers and websites document the daily atrocities of our rulers but hardly ever ask: How can these rulers be overthrown? By contrast, Dr. Nissani’s writings over the last few years assemble a Revolutionary’s Toolkit (http://www.is.wayne.edu/MNISSANI/RevolutionarysToolkit/RevolutionarysToolkit.htm). This toolkit attempts to answer the following questions: What must we know about ourselves, history, the contemporary world, and the enemies of humanity before we launch our revolution? How and why did these enemies manage to come close to achieving their goals of enslaving and impoverishing us? How did they get away with their program of bringing humanity to the brink of extinction? How did they succeed in diminishing our rationality, compassion, and spirituality? How should we organize our revolutionary movement itself? What kind of political system would best suit humanity’s needs, following a successful overthrow of the tyrants? Above all: What strategy should guide the coming revolution?

Notes and References

1. Thanks to the bankers, the term “liberal” had a different connotation for Phil Ochs than it does for us today. What was once a “liberal” is now, probably, a “progressive.”

2. Another world is possible. Historical examples of fairly happy people leading meaningful lives include ancient democratic Athens and the Iroquois Confederation. Fictional accounts of seemingly realizable utopias include Aldous Huxley’s Island and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Most illiterate people were likewise happier than we are, e.g., Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Lessons In Living from the Stone Age. And here is another confirmation I chanced across the other day (from Paul Hoefler, Africa Speaks, 1931, p. 351):

“I wondered if all the thousands of intervening years had brought the measure of happiness to some of us that these people enjoy, for they do enjoy life every day, dancing and chanting, visiting one another, hunting when necessary. This is their life, simple in all its elements, from the day of birth until death claims their pygmy bodies.”

3. Nissani, Moti., Media Coverage of the Greenhouse Effect. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 21: 27-43 (1999).

4. Nissani, Moti. Lives in the Balance: The Cold War and American Politics, 1945-1991 (1992).

5. Corbett, James. Meet Noam Chomsky, Academic Gatekeeper (a 2013 video).

6. Hari, Johann, Polluted by profit, The Independent (2015).

7. See, for instance, Wikipedia: COINTELPRO.

8. Salzman, Lorna. The Decline and Fall of Friends of the Earth in the United States (1990).

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By Daniel McAdams

Criminal buffoons. By rights it should be a perp lineup.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the most depressing things about watching – even from a distance – the quadrennial race for the White House is seeing what passes for debate on the one area where the president does have some Constitutional authority: foreign policy.

Candidates who have spent little or no time studying or traveling to the rest of the world, and, in the fashion of many Americans in the age of Empire, see the rest of the world as just a series of US colonial outposts, apparently consider foreign policy unworthy of serious consideration.

So little do Republican candidates care about foreign policy that most of them have “outsourced” their foreign policy to a single neocon-dominated foreign policy shop called the “John Hay Initiative.” If you wonder why most Republican candidates sound exactly the same on foreign policy, it’s because they are nearly all getting their advice from the same people.

When nearly all candidates look to someone like Eliot Cohen, a founding member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), to provide an off-the-shelf foreign policy, it should be no surprise that the “debate” in the Republican party is only over which country to attack first.

Any candidate who thinks so little about something so important as America’s place in the world should be automatically disqualified.

But the neocons love it! The “experts” who brought us the 2003 Iraq war and the Libya “liberation” are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to foreign policy.

Obama—the Great Progressive in the eyes of a multitude of fools—has shopped heavily at the PNAC walmart.

“Jeb!” has John Hay Initiative members Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden (remember those crooks?) on board as his advisors.

Marco Rubio reportedly draws from Hay Project member Roger Zakheim, the son of GW Bush administration “vulcan,” Dov Zakheim. Zakheim père, we remember, joined with his fellow neocons to lie the US into war with Iraq, enriching the military-industrial complex, before absconding to the “private sector” to make his millions from the same military-industrial complex. Zakheim quickly and quietly left his position as the Pentagon’s chief financial officer after a trillion dollars went missing and the Government Accountability Office was critical of his handling of matters.

Scott Walker, a soporific candidate who nevertheless still gives neocons like Bill Kristol the vapors, also shops the neocon Walmart of foreign policy, the John Hay Initiative. It should be no surprise, then, that at his big foreign policy coming out speech at the Citadel military college Friday, he unveiled an “aggressive” foreign policy – crying out “America will not be intimidated. And neither will I” – as he promised more war and vowed that “the retreat is over!”

Is this the retreat he is talking about?

Walker reportedly taps into the McCain Institute’s David Kramer, a John Hay member, for his foreign policy wisdom. Kramer is another PNAC alumni, also putting in time at the CIA-affiliated Freedom House and as director of the Bush State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. This must explain Walker’s obsession with taking out Iran. He vowed to “roll back the theocrats in Tehran,” but in fact unlike the US, Tehran has not invaded another country in hundreds of years. What’s to “roll back?”

If Walker actually paid any attention to the quality of advice he gets from his PNAC/John Hay gang he might call for his money back. Walker’s speech was peppered with macho language about “defeat[ing] the barbarians of ISIS,” while also vowing to destroy the two forces actually fighting ISIS – Syria and Iran! In fact, his vow to use the US military to overthrow the Syrian government would without question result in the greatest ISIS victory to date – control of Syria. One need not sympathize with Assad to recognize that he is literally the only thing keeping the whole of Syria out of the hands of ISIS.

John Hay Initiative “experts” also wrote the foreign policy speeches of candidates Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. No doubt they were behind Fiorina’s astonishingly ignorantvow to make her first call as president to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to “to reassure him that we stand with the state of Israel” and to make her second call to Iran to “to tell him that whatever the deal is that he signed with Obama, there’s a new deal and the new deal is this: Until you submit every facility [where] you have nuclear uranium enrichment to a full set of inspections, we’re going to make it as hard as possible for you to move money around the global financial system.”

Pure PNAC.

These neocons should be in jail, not still deeply ensconced in the Beltway foreign policy halls of power, dining in sumptuous splendor while the rest of America is impoverished by the destructive wars they push. Their lies have cost millions of innocent lives overseas as well. They are a cancer on the country. Any candidate who cares so little about the issues as to accept a “virtual staff” of foreign policy “experts” from those who have gotten every single major foreign policy issue of our time totally and catastrophically wrong has no business holding any elected office.

John Hay? I’d rather shop for a foreign policy expert at Walmart.

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Turning the Cradle of Civilization Into its Graveyard

The Co-Option Pillar of American “Democracy.” Part I: Why Subvert the Opposition?

Conclusion

The Neocon Foreign Policy Walmart