ERIC ZUESSE—Deceiving the public can be essential to the people who hold the real power. But, how long can it continue to succeed? Maybe for as long as bigotries, of all sorts, can be increased, or at least maintained. Perhaps, if bigotries could end, then the deeper problem could finally be addressed. However, if bigotries continue, then there either will be no revolution at all, or any revolution that occurs will be misdirected and thus fail to solve the problem. Every aristocracy, throughout history, has been protected by one or another type of prevalent bigotry. It deflects the public’s incoherent rage, to the wrong targets.
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Trump’s claim he’ll ‘make China pay’ is more pre-election saber-rattling… and he’ll up the ante even further over next three weeks
12 minutes readTOM FOWDY–The China blame game can be attributed to the fact that Covid-19 destroyed Trump’s entire electoral strategy, which was to keep things calm and stable while focusing on positive economic results. This also underpinned Trump’s widely documented effort to play the virus down at first and even his praise of China.
However, the pandemic decimated the US economy and generated record unemployment. This left the administration with the political space to pursue only one tactic; to deflect and whip up nationalist anger against China and portray Beijing as responsible for everything that had gone wrong.
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“TOTALITARIAN” ANTI-COMMUNISM: LOADED LANGUAGE STRAIGHT OUT OF CIA, NEO-CON PLAYBOOK
40 minutes readBRUCE LERRO—Meanwhile, on the right, neo-conservatives had been furious with what they felt was Nixon and Kissinger’s appeasement of the Soviet Union. Most neoconservatives hated Hough’s comparative politics because it neutralized the Soviet Union, presenting it as a state like any other state, instead of the demonical monster that it was imagined as being. In his book The Origins of Soviet Autocracy British scholar, Leonard Schapiro argued that unlike Tucker’s claim, the origins of totalitarianism in Russia do not begin with Stalin, but with Lenin. Shapiro treated the Bolshevik seizure of power as a coup rather than a democratic revolution. He did not think that Trotsky or Bukharin offered any serious alternative. Challenging Shapiro, based on his political biography of Bukharin, Steven Cohen argued that Bolshevism had a far greater evolutionary possibility that could have been realized had Bukharin rather than Trotsky won the power struggle against Stalin after Lenin death, but whether one sided with Trotsky or Bukharin, Bolshevism and Stalinism were very different. The differences between Bukharin and Trotsky were minimal compared to their differences with Stalin.
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Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak about the dystopian show trial going on against political prisoner Julian Assange with journalist Kevin Gosztola, who is covering the UK court hearings to potentially extradite the WikiLeaks publisher to the US. We discuss the major threat this case poses to the freedom of the press — yet how it is being criminally under-reported and whitewashed in the corporate media.
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BEN NORTON—So why do the Russian correspondents, hosts and staffers for real Russian-backed English language news outlets like RT and Sputnik not make the same obvious language mistakes as the anonymous figures behind PeaceData? Why couldn’t Putin’s expert chaos agents find a few proficient English speakers to handle this advanced active measures operation? Once again, these questions were never entertained by the US media outlets amplifying the official narrative about PeaceData. It is certainly possible that PeaceData was a Kremlin operation. But so far, there is no evidence to prove it. Therefore the possibility must be considered that private contractors for US intelligence agencies borrowed the same tactics they employed during the scandalous 2018 Alabama Senate false flag operation, creating the PeaceData network themselves and falsely posing as Russians in order to smear authentic American independent media outlets as Kremlin-linked disinformation operations, to build the case for ultimately censoring them, and to justify their own paychecks.