MEDIA SCUM

ED CURTIN—Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness.  Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby.  They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves.  It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.

“When everything the American people believes is false.”  Casey must be smiling in hell.

PAUL EDWARDS—The only indisputable truth about the Afghan debacle is that the U.S. War Machine and its wholly-owned Congress and Press, hyped fear and outrage at 9/11 to spin the mythical GWOT and two decades of limitless profiteering using the brutal destruction of a poor, defenseless country as a weapons-testing experiment.

ROSA MIRIAM ELIZALDE—More than 800,000 U.S. troops have been deployed in Afghanistan since 2001. The Department of Defense has recognized 2,443 casualties and some 20,589 wounded. This military institution, together with the State Department and the Agency for International Development (USAID), not including other entities such as the CIA or the Department of Veterans Affairs, have spent 2.26 billion dollars since 2001, according to estimates by the Human and Budgetary Costs of the War on Terrorism project of Brown University, Rhode Island.

The Costs of War project also estimates that 241,000 Afghans have died as a direct result of military intervention. These figures do not include deaths from disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure and other indirect consequences of the war.

ALEX RUBINSTEIN—Inside the three-day inaugural International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit, which organizers and attendees pronounced like “smurf,” there was a wide diversity of peoples but far less variance in talking points. The wickedness of the Chinese Communist Party was constantly discussed. While lip service was paid to Yezidis and Rohingyas, the so-called “religious freedom summit” was little more than a CCP hate-fest and China’s alleged crimes against “religious believers” took center stage. 

Hosted at the opulent four-star Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, DC (the first conference hosted there since the start of the coronavirus pandemic), the hottest topic at the summit — dubbed the “Davos of religious freedom” by co-chair Sam Bronback — was regime change and Balkanization in China.

The actual origin of the Taliban is a bit confusing (to most Americans), and although Jimmy does a brave job at explaining the matter properly, confusion continues. In any case, we are preparing a special post on this subject alone. For the time being, keep this in mind: (a) The Afghanistan War, as far a the US is concerned, began more than 40 years ago, when Pres. Carter listened to his manichean National Security adviser major russophobe Polish emigre Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, along with Henry Kissinger, had the great idea of giving the Soviet Union its “own Vietnam”, by spawning a huge countrywide resistance to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan (the Soviet military was there at the invitation of the government, and to bolster a reform-oriented but besieged leftist government opposed by fundamentalist jihadists (the mujaheddin).