Occupied Nation: How the CIA Created Modern Germany

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Kit Klarenberg
Covert Action Bulletin

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Sprawling US embassy in Germany

The sprawling U.S. embassy in Berlin. [Source: spiegel.de]


On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis—or perhaps, “pre-mortem”—on the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.

The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”

Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.

Olof Schultz

Olaf Scholz in the Bundestag on January 31, 2024

Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any U.S. counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inescapably disastrous.

For this failure, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of U.S. military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.

This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.

A book cover with map and blue text

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[Source: abebooks.co.uk]

“Enormous Presence”

Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of U.S. foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.

After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the U.S., the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to U.S. “commercial interests.”

In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription. 

Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to challenging capitalism in a serious way. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies. 

In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there–which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations—was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing U.S. military occupation.



This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the U.S. military, posing as mere soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. U.S. operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”

Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organizations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same organizations. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”


A map of germany with many red stars

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[Source: g2mil.com]

“Discredit and Destroy”

Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.



The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG—along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned—and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.


Gerhard Schindler, the president of Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the country’s foreign intelligence agency, at the former NSA base in Bad Aibling. The NSA largely abandoned the base in 2004, but an NSA team stayed behind and continued to work closely with BND agents who took over the site. [Source: spiegel.de]


The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of U.S. troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.


The total number of US military personnel has risen to over 50,000 in 2024. (Image: DW.com)


While intended to punish Germany for greenlighting the now-destroyed Nord Stream 2, polls indicated most Germans were only too happy to say “auf wiedersehen.” In all, 47% were in favor of them leaving, while a quarter called for the permanent closure of all U.S. bases on their soil. Yet, just two weeks after entering the White House, Joe Biden reversed his predecessor’s policy, returning 500 soldiers who had departed.

The President also scrapped plans to relocate the Stuttgart-based U.S. Africa Command, which effectively embeds Washington in the armed forces of 53 countries across the continent, elsewhere in Europe. Research shows the Command’s training programs have precipitated a significant rise in the number of military coups in Africa. As Agee attested, U.S. military bases are a hotbed of CIA spies. Berlin therefore must remain “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” within and without the country, whether Germans like it or not.


The training area at Grafenwöhr in Bavaria is one of the US Army's largest in Europe (Photo: picture-alliance/Zuma Press/U.S. Army)


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Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at:


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If The Mainstream Worldview Was Accurate, Gaza Wouldn’t Be Burning

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Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST

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The destruction of Gaza proves the entire mainstream western worldview is bullshit, because if the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the destruction of Gaza would not be happening.

By the mainstream western worldview I mean the general consensus about what’s going on in the world which is prevalent among mainstream western politicians and pundits and the creators of mainstream culture in New York and Hollywood. The worldview which takes it as a given that western democracy is real, that the US and its allies are basically good actors on the world stage even if they make mistakes from time to time, that the western news media pretty much tell us the truth about things (or at least the media which align with the mainstream political faction we support), and that the world works pretty much the way we were taught in school.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its western allies would not be helping Israel rain military explosives upon a walled-in civilian population that’s half comprised of children — because the mainstream western worldview maintains that the US and its western allies behave in an ethical way with high regard for human rights and wellbeing.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its western allies would not be assisting Israel while it deliberately starves civilians — because according to the mainstream western worldview that kind of collective punishment is a violation of the international law which the US and its western allies uphold and defend.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, we would not be continually reading stories about how large media outlets like CNN and The New York Times force their staff to slant their coverage in a way that benefits Israeli information interests — because per the mainstream western worldview the western press are reliable sources of information, and propaganda is something that is only used by bad guys like Putin and Kim Jong Un.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, Hollywood and the western news media would have spent six months united in passionate and consistent condemnation of Israel for its nonstop mass atrocities in Gaza — because the mainstream western worldview says we live in a truth-based society guided by ethical institutions.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, we wouldn’t see western officials standing behind podiums justifying the mass slaughter of civilians and denying obvious Israeli war crimes day after day and month after month — because in the mainstream western worldview murdering civilians and facilitating war crimes is something that is only done by illiberal, undemocratic countries to the east and the south.

If the mainstream western worldview was accurate, the US and its allies wouldn’t have spent this time bombing people in Yemen, Iraq and Syria who try to fight back in opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza — because the mainstream western worldview asserts that the US power alliance is an upholder of peace and stability throughout the world.

We simply are not seeing what we’d expect to be seeing with regard to Gaza if the mainstream western worldview was accurate. This is because the mainstream western worldview is not accurate — it’s a false narrative construct that has been carefully assembled inside each of our skulls by the most sophisticated propaganda machinethat has ever existed. 

In reality we do not live in a truth-based society that is guided by morality and governed by basically decent people — we live in a lie-based society that is guided by greed and the pursuit of power, and is governed by unelected sociopaths. We do not live in the kind of world we were taught about in school. We live in a corrupt, mind-controlled dystopia, under the thumb of an undeclared globe-spanning empire which requires more and more violence and tyranny to sustain.

Gaza should devastate any part of the mainstream worldview which still exists in your mind, because all the facts we are seeing right in front of our faces squarely contradict that worldview. 

Changing your worldview is not easy. It takes work. It takes sincerity. It takes a willingness to sit in the discomfort of cognitive dissonance while staring at facts which prove our perspective is misinformed, and coming to terms with them. But it’s the only way for an individual to come to a truth-based understanding of the world, and one day it’s how we as a collective will move into the creation of a real truth-based society.


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All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on PatreonPaypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


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

 


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Gaza: The Strategic Imperative

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Michael Hudson
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Ania K.

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Gaza: The Strategic Imperative

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​PROF. MICHAEL HUDSON, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA. – Ania K


ANIA: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to my channel. Today I have with me for the fourth time, I’m still counting, a very, very special guest, one of the best professors in economics and financial analysts in the world. And I’m very glad we are reconnecting with Professor Hudson again.

I want to start this live stream with asking all of you to check all my links down below this live stream, because being on other platforms, especially nowadays, is very important. So you have my locals there, you have mailing lists, and every other link if you choose to support my work as well.

Also, Professor Hudson’s three links. You have the website (michael-hudson.com), Patreon (patreon.com/michaelhudson), and all the books that Professor Hudson has published so far, you can order. It’s all the way down below this live stream. I’m sure this video will bring you immense value, and I would like you to hit this like, because it helps other people to see it, since YouTube recommends videos with a lot of likes. Leave the comments and also share the video, because the knowledge that you will be hearing today, it’s priceless.

Welcome back, Professor Hudson. Thank you so much for joining me today for this conversation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me back again.

ANIA: And I would like to say to the audience as well that this video is dedicated to what is taking place, especially in Gaza and Israel. Of course, we will address other countries related to this situation, but Professor Hudson has sent me a very in-depth email after our last live stream a week ago, also on Friday, and we actually decided after we ended that live stream to have this particular topic to be the main topic of this video. So, I give this to you, Professor Hudson, where would you like to start this conversation, please?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think I should start with my own background, because 50 years ago, in 1974, I was working with the Hudson Institute, with Herman Kahn, and my colleagues there were a number of Mossad agents who were being trained. Uzi Arad was there, and he became the head of Mossad and is currently the main advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.

So, all of what is happening today was discussed 50 years ago, not only with the Israelis, but with many of the U.S. defense people, because I was with the Hudson Institute, which was a national security agency, because I’d written Super Imperialism, and I was a balance of payments expert, and the Defense Department used my book Super Imperialism not as an expose, but a how-to-do-it book. And they brought me there as a specialist in the balance of payments. Herman brought me back and forth to the White House to meet with cabinet members and to discuss the balance of payments. He also brought me to the War College and to the Air Force think tanks.

So, all of what is happening now was described a long time ago, and Herman was known as a futurist. He was Dr. Strangelove in the movie. That was all based for him on his theories of atomic war, but he was also the main theorist behind Vietnam. And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now is all based on what was the U.S. strategy during the Vietnam War. And it was based on the “strategic hamlets” idea, the fact that you could cut back, you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was all pioneered in Vietnam.

And Herman had me meet with some of the generals there to explain it. And I think I mentioned I flew to Asia twice with Uzi Arad. We had a chance to [get to] know each other very much. And I could see that the intention from the very beginning was to get rid of the Palestinians and indeed to use Israel as the basis for U.S. control of Near Eastern oil. That was the constant discussion of that from the American point of view. It was Israel as a part of the oil.

So, Herman’s analysis was on systems analysis. You define the overall aim and then you work backward. How do you do it? Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians and strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years. It’s been carved up into districts requiring electronic passes from one sector to another to go into Israel, to go to Jerusalem, or to go to Israel for jobs to work.

The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties. Israel doesn’t want its soldiers to die any more than Americans do. So, the American form of war, as it was in Vietnam, is bombing them. You don’t want person-to-person contact because people fighting for their lives and liberty tend to be better fighters because for them it’s really essential. For the others, they’re just doing soldier’s work.

So, the genocide that you’re seeing today is an explicit policy, and that was a policy of the forefathers, the founders of Israel. The idea of a land without people was a land without Arabs in it, the land without non-Jewish people. That’s really what it meant. They were to be driven out starting even before the official funding of Israel, the first Nakba, the Arab Holocaust. And the two of the Israeli prime ministers were members of the Stern gang of terrorists. The terrorists became the rulers of Israel. They escaped from British jail and they joined to found Israel. So, what you’re seeing today is the final solution to this plan. And the founders of Israel were so obsessed with the Nazis, essentially, they wanted to do to them what they did to us, is how they explained it to people.

For the United States, what they wanted was the oil reserves in the Middle East. And again and again, I heard the phrase, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier in Israel’. Uzi Arad, the future Mossad head, would be very uncomfortable at this because he wanted Israel to be run by the Israelis. But they realized that for Israel to get by with the money that it needed for its balance of payments, it had to be in a partnership with the United States.

So, what you’re seeing today isn’t simply the work of one man, of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s the work of the team that President Biden has put together. It’s the team of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Lincoln, and the whole deep state, the whole neocon group behind them, Victoria Nuland, and everyone. They’re all self-proclaimed Zionists. And they’ve gone over this plan for essentially America’s domination of the Near East for decade after decade.

But as the United States learned in the Vietnam War, populations protest, and the U.S. population protested against the Vietnam War. What the Biden administration wants to avoid is the situation that President Johnson had in 1968. Any hotel, any building that he went to, to give a speech for his re-election campaign, there were crowds shouting, LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? President Johnson had to take the servants entrance to get away from the press so that nobody would see what he was doing. And essentially, he went on television and resigned.

Well, to prevent this kind of embarrassment, and to prevent the embarrassment of journalists who were doing all this, Seymour Hersh described the [Mai Lai] massacre, and that helped inflame the opposition to Johnson. Well, President Biden, who’s approved Netanyahu’s plan, the first people you have to kill are the journalists. If you’re going to permit genocide, you have to realize that you don’t want the domestic U.S. population or the rest of the world to oppose the U.S. and Israel. You kill the journalists. And for the last, ever since the October 2nd Al-Aqsa event, you’ve had one journalist per week killed in Israel. That’s part of it.

The other people you don’t want, if you’re going to bomb them, you have to start by bombing the hospitals and all of the key centers. That also was part of the idea of the Vietnam War. How do you destroy a population? This was all worked out in the 1970s, when people were trying to use systems analysis to think, how do you work back and see what you need? And the idea, if you bomb a population, you can’t really hide that, even if you kill the journalists. How do you kill a population passively? So you minimize the visible bombing. Well, the line of least resistance is to starve them. And that’s been the Jewish, the Israeli policy since 2008.

You had a piece by Sarah Roy in the New York Review, citing a cable from 2008, from Tel Aviv to the embassy saying, as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to the embassy officials on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gaza economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge. Well, now they’re pushing it over the edge.


Amoral —even sociopathic—careerism is inherent in capitalist culture as America so eloquently proves.


And so Israel has been especially focusing after the journalists, after the hospitals, you bomb the greenhouses, you bomb the trees, you sink the fishing boats that have supplied food to the population. And then you aim at fighting the United Nations relief people.

And you’ve read, obviously, the whole news of the last week has been the attack on the seven food providers that were not Arabs. And this was, again, from a systems analyst point, this is exactly what the textbook says to do strategically. If you can make a very conspicuous bombing of aid people, then you will have other aid suppliers afraid to go, because they think, well, if these people, aid suppliers, are just shot at, then we would be too.

Well, the United States is fully behind this. And to help starve the Gazan people, Biden immediately, right after the ICJ finding of plausible genocide, withdrew all funding from the United Nations relief agencies. The idea, again, the hope was to prevent the United Nations from having the money to supply food.

So when the United States is now trying to blame one person, and Biden goes on a television recorded call with Netanyahu saying, please be humane when you’re dropping your bombs, do it in a humane way. That’s purely for domestic consumption. It’s amazing how nakedly hypocritical all this.

And ever since the Al-Aqsa Mosque was raided by Israeli settlers on October 2, leading to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood retaliation on October 7, it was closely coordinated with the Biden administration. All the bombs have been dropped day after day, week after week, with the whole of the US. And Biden has said on a number of occasions, the Palestinians are enemies.

So I think I want to make it clear that this is not simply an Israeli war against Hamas. It’s an American-backed Israeli war. Each of them have their own objectives. Israel’s objective is to have a land without non-Jewish population. And America’s aim is to have Israel acting as the local coordinator, as it has been coordinating the work with ISIS and the ISIS commanders to turn them against targets provided by the United States.

Basically, that’s the duopoly that’s been created.

And I think Alastair Crooke has cited Trita Parsi, [the US-Iranian relations scholar], saying the objective really in all this, of Israel’s conflict and Biden’s acquiescence to it, is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms about warfare. And that’s really it.

You have people, you have reporters, such as Pepe Escobar, saying that the United States is a chaos agent. But there’s a logic in this. The United States is looking forward to what it’s going to be doing in the Near East, in Ukraine, and especially in the China Sea and Taiwan. Looking forward, the United States says, how do we prevent other nations moving against us in the international court or suing or somehow putting sanctions against us? Israel is the test case, not simply for what’s happening there in Israel and Palestine itself, but against anything that the United States will be doing through the rest of the world.

That’s why the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., echoed by [Blinken] and other U.S. officials, said there’s no court of justice ruling against genocide, that it was a non-binding ruling. Well, of course it was binding, but it has no means of enforcement. And both [Blinken] and yesterday, the head of the army said, there is no genocide taking place in Gaza. Well, what that means is you have to go to a court, and that’s going to take years and years. And by the time the court case is over and there’s any judgment of reparations due, then you’re going to, by then the Gazans will all be dead. So the U.S. aim is to end the rule of international law that is why the United Nations was founded in 1945.

And in fact, this international law goes way back to 1648 with the peace of Westphalia in Germany to end the 30 years war. All the European nations agreed not to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries. Well, that also was part of the United Nations principle.

And yet you have the United States explicitly advocating regime change in other countries, and most specifically in Russia and throughout the Middle East. So if you can end the whole kind of rule of law, then there’s really no alternative to the United States rules-based order, which means we can do whatever we want, chaos.

And if you look at what’s happening in Gaza is facilitating a transition from a orderly world of the United Nations to chaos, then you’re going to understand basically what the whole, the big picture, the long range picture that’s been put in place really over a series of decades. That’s why the United States, and the United States has no plan B. It only has the plan A to do this. It’s not taking into account the counter reactions and the feedback. Maybe we can discuss that a little later. I’d better leave the questions up to you.

ANIA: Thank you. You actually have already answered many of my questions in that intro, but I want to ask you this now. I will jump a little bit now. I have a question about something that you wrote to me in your email.

I believe looking at many, many situations that are taking place in the world, that sometimes all you really need to do is to follow the money and it will give you a lot of answers. So as you said in your email that, let me check, where is it? The Israeli developers already are planning to turn Gaza into luxury beachfront properties.

So let me ask you here, Professor Hudson, What is really the main goal for Israel’s existence? And in this case, is this really about their luxurious properties, oil? What else is this region really about? Why is it so crucial?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s not just about beach properties. It’s what’s off the beach, the gas, the natural gas that they’ve discovered right offshore the Mediterranean that belongs to Gaza. So the Israelis are after the gas.

But your basic question, you’d sent me a list of questions you were going to go through. And I think if you keep to that sequence, it’s good. What you’re really asking is, you know, what’s the main goal for Israel’s existence? And I think if people don’t really, their sense of justice is so strong that they can’t believe what the original goal was. And the initial goal in the 19th century was formed in a period where Europe was anti-Semitic. The most anti-Semitic part of all was Ukraine. If you read Leon Trotsky’s autobiography of growing up in Odessa, he described the pogroms there. And so the Zionists, the first wave of Zionists, were looking for how can the Jewish people escape from this anti-Semitism.

Here’s the problem. By 1947, when Israel was formed, anti-Semitism was passé. Most Jews in the United States, certainly who I grew up with, they were all assimilated. Of course, they had well wishes for Israel. There was very little talk of the Arabs. But you had two arms of Judaism.

The one arm were the people who remembered with a vengeance what was done for them against them in Ukraine and Russia, and especially by Hitler and the Holocaust. They wanted to be separate and to have just to be protected.

But most of the Jewish population in America and Europe was thoroughly assimilated. And the last thing they wanted was to be separate. They wanted just the opposite. They wanted anti-Semitism to end.

But the Zionists who were in charge of Israel, the Stern Gang leaders, were obsessed with the old antagonisms. And in a way, they were obsessed with Nazism and said, well, we want to do to them what they did to us.

And again, the idea of a land without a people meant a land— we intend to make Israel into a land without non-Jewish people. That’s what a land without people, their slogan, meant. And from the very beginning, they started by driving Arabs out of Palestine, destroying their olive trees, destroying their orchards, taking their houses, and just killing them. That’s why the English threw them in jail before turning around and said, well, it’s true that we’ve thrown all the leaders in jail, but let’s recognize Israel and make Israel a whole country to do what these leaders that we were before throwing in jail were doing.

ANIA: Thank you.

You said also in your email that ISIS is part of America’s foreign legion. Can you please elaborate on that?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, ISIS was organized originally to fight in Afghanistan against the Russians. And al-Qaeda, which was the parent of ISIS, was simply the roster of people who were willing to fight under the U.S. command.

Well, part of al-Qaeda turned against America on 9-11, but most, especially the Sunni followers of Wahhabi theology, were very eager to fight against the Shiites. Islam is divided into two parts, the Sunni Islam of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Republics, and much of the Near East, and the Shiites from Iran and maybe half of Iraq and parts of Syria also.

So you had these two sectarian groups fighting each other, and the United States provided the funding and the organization to them and essentially delegated to Israel much of the organization of organizing ISIS to fight against Assad, to fight against whomever the United States designated as our enemies, meaning we want to take their oil lands. America has taken Iraqi oil and won’t leave, is taking Syrian oil and won’t leave.

So essentially, the U.S. has used ISIS to fight against all of the Shiites on the theory that the Shiite Islam is all controlled by Iran, and they want to essentially wipe out the Shiites as they’re doing in Gaza, even though I think the Palestinians are mainly Sunni, but you should think of the ISIS as America’s foreign legion. They’ve hired them, they pay them, and they recruit from them.

You’ve just seen in what happened in Russia from the Ukrainians, Oregon recruited Sunni terrorists from Tajikistan. You’ve seen the United States trying to use ISIS to recruit, to fight in Russia’s southern periphery in Central Asia and to fight in the Uyghur territories of Xinjiang in Western China. They’re using ISIS to try to essentially attack the integrity of China, Russia, and Syria and any other area where the United States wants a regime change to put in the usual client oligarchy.

ANIA: So interesting, and they sell it under the description that this is the enemy and terrorist, and they are founding it. And the public is still buying this, Professor Hudson. How is this possible?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is hypocritical. Everybody throughout the world is appalled by the cruelty and the barbarism of ISIS. The United States is not going to come right out and say, hey, that’s us that they’re fighting. We’re directing ISIS from the presidential office. We love ISIS.

Well, Biden loves ISIS, and Blinken loves ISIS, and the entire neocons, the CIA loves ISIS because they’re all running it, but they can’t say it to the American public. They have to pretend just like they’re pretending with Netanyahu that, oh my heavens, look at [what] ISIS is doing. We’ve really got to fight against it.

And for instance, when it put in the white helmets in ISIS, these were the American supplied public relations unit to essentially do false propaganda, false images, make false flag attacks. All of these false flag attacks, all of the white helmets and the propaganda has all been coordinated by the United States.

ANIA: I want to ask you now a question that to some extent you actually answered already. Does Israel make any independent decisions that are not consulted with the United States in regards to bombing Gaza?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the question is, what is the United States or what do you mean by the United States? They don’t need official approval. There’s already a broad agreement in principle. Do whatever you have to do.

The United States has given them a free hand saying, we’re not going to interfere. You’re our managers on site. Just as you’re managing ISIS, you can manage certainly your own country. The U.S. has given blanket approval for Israel’s genocide. That’s why it says there’s no genocide there.

And it shares the aim of extending the war to fight Iran. Again and again, what Netanyahu is saying, we’re not going to be safe until we defeat Iran. Well, the United States has, that’s America, that’s the neocon plan outlined in the 1990s. It was spelled out, I think, by General Petraeus of first Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Syria, and then Iran. All of this was worked out from the beginning. The United States is trying to figure out, how do we do it?

Well, there’s a general expectation that one way to do it is to have Israel mount a false flag attack, something Iran does that is so bad that Israel retaliates and then, as it just bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, that Iran is going to then do something to Israel and the United States will come to protect our Israeli brothers and world peace and prevent the genocide that the Gazans are trying to do against Israel and that Iran is trying to do against the rest of the world and bomb Iran.

Back in 1970s, there were discussions of what do you do? What will Iran do to fight back? Well, there’s one thing that Iran can do, that it doesn’t have to bomb American troops in Syria or Iraq. It doesn’t have to bomb Israel. All it has to do is sink a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. That’s the big strait. You’ve seen what happened, what the Houthis have done with the Red Sea. The big traffic is the Strait of Hormuz. That’s where Saudi Arabian oil and we could call it the oil gulf. It’s called the Persian Gulf, but it’s really the oil gulf. That’s where all the oil trade is. If you sink a ship or two in the oil gulf, that’s going to push oil prices way, way up because that’s going to cut most of the world off for as long as Iran wants from the Middle Eastern oil supply.

Well, that’s what really terrifies Biden because he’s pretending that there’s no inflation in the United States and that the economy is quite heavy. The inflation that would follow from Iran sinking a ship in Hormuz will essentially be crowning the American opposition to Biden, which is growing.

It’s one thing to be against genocide and killing people, but much more important is if your gas prices go up, the American people think that that’s really much more important than the fact of genocide and crimes against humanity. That’s really what is frightening the US.

The question is right now, how do they make the Israeli provocation against Iran— an excuse for the United States to come in with all of NATO’s and European support and somehow prevent Iran from having the power to close down the Straits of Hormuz. That’s what they’re trying to figure out now. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but when Blinken has said, Israel has not broken any rules. It’s all okay. What the United States really is [saying], if they can get away with this, they can say there are really no rules at all for the whole world. We can do whatever we want. Right now is coming to a peak. It’s the follow-up that was all thought in advance of the whole Israeli movement against Gaza.

ANIA: Thank you, Professor Hudson.

Next question that is about targeting civilians, journalists, and workers. Again, you’ve addressed this already, but I will ask you this. Why is the Israeli army targeting all those groups?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s targeting everyone. It’s targeting all civilians because it wants a land without Palestinian people. It’s targeting the most critical people necessary for a Gazan society to survive. It targets the journalists because it doesn’t want the world to see what it’s doing, because Israel has already lost its standing in the world. The United States tells them, especially, you’ve got to kill the journalists because if you don’t kill them, we, the Biden administration, are going to look bad. We already have the Americans turning against the war.

There’s only one anti-war candidate running in the presidential elections for this November. That’s Jill Stein. Every other candidate is completely backing Israel in the war, but the American people, the majority of Americans look at what’s happening in Israel as genocide and as a crime against humanity. They’re not going to vote for Biden. Biden is going to lose the election or certainly not win it. It may go into the House of Representatives if nobody wins it.

In order to drive the rest of the Gazan populations out, you have to, number one, get rid of the journalists. Number two, you want to get rid of the hospitals. As you’re bombing the people, a lot of them are going to get injured. You want all the injured people from the bombs to die. For that, you have to bomb the hospitals. You especially have to target the doctors for killing. Not only will there not be doctors to heal the wounded people, but other doctors, doctors without borders from other countries, will be afraid to go into Gaza because if you go there, you know that if you’re a food worker bringing aid or a doctor or an aid worker, you’re going to get shot because you’re at the top of the target list.

ANIA: It’s horrible. Just listening to this, you know, it’s very hard to…

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, imagine how I used to feel sitting in meetings and all of this was just said as if this is part of a game and this is how we’re planning it all out. All of this was what was discussed. How do we do evil? I mean, this…

ANIA: Yeah, but those are not humans to me. They are not humans to me.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right.

ANIA: Soulless beings that are not humans. That’s all I say here.

Professor Hudson, next question is about those Israeli developers who, as you said in your email, are already planning to turn Gaza into luxury beachfront properties. So what do you really know about this? They are already planning this? Like they have plans for those properties?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The Americans made a start. They began by building docks. You not only want beachfront property, you want docks for the buyers to have a place to tie up their yachts or their sailboats.

And so the United States is building these piers. One reason it’s doing it is it can pretend that it can say, we’re not building the piers for Israeli property owners to have yachts, we’re going to deliver food. But by the time we finish building the piers, there’ll be no more Gazans. I mean, that’s the whole point. By building the piers, they’ve enabled Israel to prevent the food trucks from coming in from the south. So building the piers is a means of pretending to help without doing anything at all to help actually [deliver] food to Israel.

So yes, all throughout the news, there have been statements by the Israeli real estate companies saying, Gaza could have been a nice place to live if there weren’t Arabs in it. And now if we can clear the land of Arabs, make it a land without those people, then this is a wonderful property. And it has natural gas to help the Israeli balance of payments. So the whole idea is to make this a center of Israel luxury development.

ANIA: Again, absolutely disgusting to me, just listening to this. I want to ask you now about, were Gaza [to cease] to exist completely, what will happen to all the Palestinians who survived?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the land is going to be there, and it’ll be beachfront property. Alastair Crooke has been, I think, the clearest writer. He was one of the negotiators between Israel and the Palestinians. He’s explained that there cannot be a two-state solution anymore.

The Israelis say, we are going to kill all of the Palestinians. The Palestinians say, well, we can’t exist with the Israelis, and we have to defend ourselves. If we don’t kill them, they’re going to kill us. So Israel has to be either Palestinian or Israeli. It can’t be both. That is ended forever. So anyone who talks of a two-state solution, they’re just not looking it up.

So the question is, how is Gaza going to exist? Either it’s going to be all Israeli, and the Gazans will be forced to flee. The Israelis want them to flee by boats and to be sunk, most of them will be sunk in the Mediterranean, just like after America and France destroyed Libya. The Libyans tried to flee in boats, and they were sunk.

So either they will drown, or they will somehow work their way into a prison camp that Egypt and its leader is setting up for Gazan refugees. And then the Gazans will somehow try to gain entry into Europe or other countries. So you can expect a huge influx of Gazans into Europe.

Some people have suggested, well, now that Ukraine is turning into a land without a people, maybe either the Gazans can turn Ukraine over to the Palestinians, or we could give it to the Israelis, saying, well, this is your ancestral land, this is where all of the pogroms that started Zionism began. Now you can go back and there are no more Ukrainians. They have programs against you. Maybe the Israelis should go to Ukraine. One population or the other has to emigrate.

Well, Israelis already have been losing a huge chunk of their population, especially their working age population, especially those who have jobs in information technology or highly paying jobs. So, you’re already seeing a population outflow.

So, Gaza will exist geographically, but we have no idea about what is going to be the demographic composition.

And I think the Israeli Defense Forces Chief, Herzi Halevi, said just last Sunday that Israel, he announced Israel knows how to handle Iran, just as they’re handling Gaza, that they’ve prepared for this. They have good defensive systems. And he said, we are operating and cooperating with the USA and strategic problems partners in this region. So, the US is going to be putting pressure on Egypt to expand the concentration camps that it’s setting up and to pressure the Europeans. Maybe so many Germans are leaving their country now that there’s no more work for them. Maybe the Palestinians will go to Germany and other European countries, and wherever they can find some kind of refuge.

America was willing to give the Jewish population refuge as long as the Jewish population served European imperialist aims of controlling the Near Eastern oil. But what can Palestine offer to be protected? If the Palestinians don’t have anything to offer the Europeans or the Americans, their governments simply do not care. They’ve done absolutely nothing to protect the Palestinians because they don’t care if there’s no money in it for them. And the Arab countries with money, the Saudi Arabians, the United Arab Republics have not really lifted a hand to help this. Even though a large labor force in Saudi Arabia is already Palestinian, they don’t need more Palestinians there. So, that’s basically what’s happening.

ANIA: Thank you, Professor Hudson. You know, before I ask you my last question, you know, people’s beliefs that the governments care about them. This is the most… I don’t understand how people can still believe that any government really cares about them in the world, looking at the situation like this. It’s heartbreaking. Just listening to what you said is a lot for me to take in.

The last question is when the bombing will stop and who is going to rebuild Gaza Strip?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the bombing will stop when there are no more Palestinians to bomb. Israel doesn’t have the money to rebuild it or the intention of rebuilding. And even if Israel wants to rebuild it with nice homes all the way to the beachfront, who is going to do the building?

Well, already Israel has made a deal with India to get a lot of Indian construction workers from the poorest provinces of India coming over there. But again, who’s going to pay them? You can give them work permits, but the answer is who will pay them will be the contractors who are given the contracts to rebuild homes and offices and the new Israeli compound in Gaza, unless the world works and says, no, the Israelis have to give back all the land and it’s Israel that will be a minority under a Palestinian government.

You cannot have an Israeli government that is over the whole region because its policy is to kill the Palestinians. So I don’t see that, again, you can’t have a two-state solution. It doesn’t look like anyone’s supporting the Palestinians right now.

Who would help rebuild it? Well, the Turkish builders might come in and build it. Other Middle Easterners would rebuild it. Saudi Arabia could finance huge developments there. The United Arab Republics could buy land. American investors, maybe Blackstone could help develop there, but it’ll be foreign investment.

And if you look at the fact that the foreign investors of all these countries are looking for what they can get out of the genocide against Palestinians, you realize why there’s no real opposition to the genocide that’s taking place.

And the great benefit to the U.S. of all this is that as a result of this absence of any kind of the moral feeling that you’ve just expressed, no claims can be brought against the United States for any of the warfare, any of the regime change, interference that it’s planning for Iran, China, Russia, and as it’s been doing in Africa and Latin America. So Israel and Gaza and the West Bank should be seen, I think, as an opening of the new Cold War. And whatever you see happening in Gaza after the Gazans are driven out, you see this is really the plan for what the United States wants to do in China, in Russia, in Africa, in the whole rest of the world. You’re seeing a plan for basically how to financialize and make money out of genocide and the destruction of society. And in order to do that, you have to prevent anything like the United Nations of having any authority at all.

And the irony in all this is that the United States is creating just the opposite of what it wanted to do. I mean, obviously, while this is happening in Gaza, most of the global majority that we’ve spoken before, the world outside of NATO, America and Europe, are appalled. And the only way of stopping what’s happening in Gaza happening in the rest of the world is to create an alternative to the United Nations, an alternative to the World Bank, to the IMF, an alternative to all the organizations that the United States has controlled to turn the whole rest of the world into Gaza, if it can.

ANIA: Dr. Hudson, Professor Hudson, I want to thank you for coming back. I want to thank you for telling me after our last live stream to address this, because you shared it with me and with the audience. And I really hope that you will spread this video, guys, you will share it.

So I personally believe that we are fighting evil. And the way that I feel I am in a small way contributing to this is to trying to seek the truth and bring people who have knowledge and understanding and can share the facts and the truth with the world. Because if you don’t know what you’re fighting against, what you’re fighting with, then you’re like Don Quixote. You have to know what is the problem. And I am immensely grateful for guests like yourself to be on my channel and to share your knowledge with the audience. I can only imagine knowing all of this, what you shared with us today, living with this for so many years and watching the [unfolding] of those events in the world. For someone who has feelings and emotions, it’s very hard to bear. I can only imagine. So thank you for your contribution.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m on your show, Ania, because you see that this is evil, and it is evil.

ANIA: Yes. Thank you so much. I know you have to go. And I want to invite you again, of course, in the near future. Hopefully, you find time for our next conversation. To everyone who’s watching, make sure to check all the links to Professor Hudson that are already attached down below this live stream. And like I said, please share the video. Hit this like. It’s free of charge, and it helps the channel also. And more people can hear this information in the world. Thank you, everyone. And until next time. 

hosny salah from Pixabay 


News 2739
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  • Help us expand our reach. Defeat appalling hypocrisy. Lies cost countless lives.
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  • This is the Lying Machine that protects the greatest evil humanity has ever seen.
  • YOU know what we are talking about.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at:


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Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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BLOWBACK: “Ironclad” Support (To Everyone) l Uncontrolled Panic Rocks West

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Billy Bob's Blowback Roundtable
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS

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Failing to get concessions from China on what Janet Yellen called "China's overcapacity" (curiously deemed unfair by Washington), Yellen threatened the introduction of protectionist policies.  Needless to say, this is a complete reversal of Washington's usual extremist free market posture. Yellen also had the gall to complain about China helping Russia in its Ukraine contest with the West, apparently assuming Beijing is incapable of figuring that America wants a free hand to subdue and neutralise Russia to then proceed to do the same to China.  Meanwhile, Washington is also encouraging Japan to rearm, as part of its de facto alliance to threaten China.  In any case, "overcapacity" is another word for "containment". 


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable.  You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.


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Israeli Suffering Is Not Comparable To Palestinian Suffering

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Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST

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Israeli Suffering Is Not Comparable To Palestinian Suffering

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The mass media are once again pushing the narrative that Israel is “scaling back” its operations in Gaza, which as journalist Sana Saeed noted on Twitter is a claim they’ve been falsely making for months. To promote such stories even as Israel publicly declares that it’s preparing for an invasion of Rafah is absurd and irresponsible.

A member of the Israeli Knesset named Limor Son Har-Melech says there are secret Israeli plans to establish settlements in the Gaza Strip. It sure is a crazy coincidence how every single part of Israel’s response to October 7 has looked exactly the same as what it would look like if Israel just started doing all the things that it has wanted to do to the Palestinians for generations.

Biden has declared “ironclad” support for Israel as fears mount that Iran will soon retaliate for the Israeli strike on its consulate building in Syria which killed multiple Iranian military officers, despite the fact that Iran has made it clear to the White House that if the US comes to Israel’s defense it will make the US a target as well. We could be near the precipice of the worst-case nightmare scenario of all possible middle eastern conflicts because of this president’s unwavering support for the genocidal Zionist state.

In the early weeks of Israel’s assault Palestinian journalists were filling social media with footage of Israeli atrocities in Gaza. We’re seeing far less footage now because the journalists have been killed and access to the internet made far more difficult and Palestinian access to much of Gaza has been restricted, but it’s important to remember that those atrocities have continued to happen this entire time.

I’m sick of hearing October 7 mentioned in the same breath as Israel’s incineration of Gaza as though they’re equal or even comparable. A thousand Israelis dying (probably hundreds by indiscriminate IDF fire) is not comparable to tens of thousands of Palestinians (probably more) being deliberately exterminated by high tech war machinery, even if before you account for the fact that Israel was the aggressor and that the violence of the oppressed is not comparable to the violence of the oppressor in the first place.

But that’s what you’ll hear all the time from polite western liberals trying to walk a center line on the Israel-Palestine issue. They’ll talk about how “sad” and “tragic” and “heartbreaking” BOTH the butchery in Gaza AND October 7 are, giving equal weight to two exponentially unequal acts of violence.

This is the same as lying. It actively misrepresents what’s actually going on, leading to widespread misunderstanding like the fact that half of Americans have no idea whether more Palestinians or Israelis are being killed in the current “war”. Trying to balance out two wildly unbalanced events gives people a wildly unbalanced understanding of what’s really happening, leading to a wildly unbalanced worldview. But you see this constantly, and the western political-media class do everything they can to feed into it.

Israeli suffering is not equal to Palestinian suffering. It’s not even in the same ballpark. Pretending otherwise is deceitful and manipulative.

Normal person: It’s bad to murder children
Crazy person: Aha I see you hate the Jewish faith.

“It’s so sad and tragic that children are being fed to the Child Incineration Machine,” said the liberal while loading the children onto the conveyor belt. “It’s heartbreaking!”


Is there a word for the tactic where a government does something evil and then throws out a bunch of flimsy lies right off the bat to mute the initial backlash, so when the truth comes out public attention has moved on and it has no impact? Whatever that is, Israel excels at it.

Funny how people get so emotionally invested in US presidential elections when the whole system’s stacked to ensure that each party wins half the time. It’s like putting 10 blue marbles and 10 red ones in a hat and crying when you pull out a red one and celebrating when it’s blue.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


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

 


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