Strategic Culture Foundation

1. 20 Years of Iraq Denialism: The New York Times Continues to Get It Wrong on U.S. Empire

By Anthony DIMAGGIO

Marking the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The New York Times ran a feature-length article titled, "20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?" The piece acknowledges some harsh realities about the war, while dodging questions about its legality and the imperial motivations that fueled it. This is par for the course for the paper of record, which has a decades-long history of sidestepping damning questions about the war.

To provide some context, I should say that I've probably done more empirical research on the ways in which we think and talk about Iraq and the "War on Terror" than any other scholar studying media, public opinion, and war (see here, here, and here). So it's been particularly painful over the decades for me to observe Times reporters systematically distort how we understand U.S. wars. The new Times report reflects on numerous critical facts about the U.S. invasion and occupation, acknowledging "the war's toll in American military deaths (about 4,600)," and "Iraqi lives," with "estimates generally fall[ing] around 300,000 or more killed directly by fighting." The paper also recognizes "the financial cost" of $815 billion – "not counting indirect costs like lost productivity." Finally, there are the larger macro political and societal consequences of the invasion and occupation, including "plunging Iraq into civil war, giving rise to a new generation of jihadism, and for a time, chastening American interventionism."

Concerning justifications for war, the Times reports that official reasons given for the invasion were bogus. Considering claims that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), the Times writes that "Insider accounts consistently portray the administration as playing down or rejecting mountains of intelligence contradicting its claims, instead cherry-picking circumstantial evidence for its case." This makes short work of apologetic and propagandistic scholarship that fallaciously portrays the war as a result of a simple intelligence error. The Times report also correctly notes the dubious foundation for Bush's "false" claims that Iraq was "involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001" – a point in which Bush was repeatedly reminded by his counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke.

The Times comes close to a clear and compelling explanation of the war when it reports that some scholarship maintains that, following September 11, "the United States felt the need to regain status and establish itself as an aggressive global power." As the paper summarizes, this mindset "was rooted in a calculation that America's greatest source of strength was global perceptions of the country as unchallengeable."

Despite these moments of clarity, the paper of record quickly goes off the rails as its reporting digresses into myopic explanations for why the Bush administration wanted war. The Times asks of the 2003 invasion:

"Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which proved false? Was it to liberate Iraqis from Mr. Hussein's rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim? Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts like World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict?"

Sadly, the paper opts for mysticization when explaining what drove the U.S., depriving readers of an opportunity to understand the neocolonial foundation of American foreign policy. As the paper reflects about Iraq: "History-changing decisions are often made through processes and rationales so convoluted that even the people involved might not know exactly how they happened. Hundreds of thousands might die, an entire country plunged into violence, without anyone able to quite say why."

Sifting through this muddled narrative, the Times writes that, "Still, the competing theories tend to share a common baseline: that a mix of ideological convictions, psychological biases, process breakdowns and misaligned diplomatic signals led to an invasion that did little to serve the goals that its architects believed they were advancing." To make a long story short here, the Times is arguing that if you're still unclear after 20 years about what the Iraq war was all about, that's because it's incredibly complicated. So complicated that we may never really fully understand why it was fought. This is not a terribly compelling answer, but it does have the advantage of flattering a bi-partisan political elite who reflexively assume the U.S. has the right to intervene wherever, whenever, and however they want across the globe, and that the country would never pursue foreign wars because of selfish, imperial, and neocolonial interests.

Speaking to its denialism about U.S. empire, the Times report summarizes that "meeting notes" from members of the Bush administration "and other accounts do not show them as plotting to sell a weapons threat that they knew was fictitious, nor as having been misled by faulty intelligence. Rather, the record suggests something more banal: A critical mass of senior officials all came to the table wanting to topple Mr. Hussein for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification." The message delivered in this narrative is hard to miss for those wanting a cogent explanation for this war: it's complicated.

One thing the Times is clear about is that the war was not about neocolonialism and oil. The paper reports that "Scholars now largely doubt another, once-prevalent theory: that Washington invaded to control Iraq's vast oil resources." This narrative is astounding and perverse, considering that I've documented in detail how the paper of record's coverage of Iraq (and withdrawal from Iraq) in the 2000s systematically omitted any discussion of oil as a motivating factor for the war. Considering this pattern of reporting, to speak of the oil explanation now as a "once-prevalent theory" is an extraordinary example of cynical misrepresentation of reality.

Again circumventing any serious discussion of oil as a motive, the new Times report emphasizes that the U.S. was committed to "benevolent hegemony" in Iraq. Situating the war within a larger historical narrative about the post-Cold War rise of the neoconservatives, the paper writes:

"After the Cold War's end, a small circle of policymakers and academics calling themselves neoconservatives argued that the United States, rather than drawing down, should wield its now mostly unchallenged power to enforce an era of 'global benevolent hegemony.' The United States' military dominance, rooted in American ideals, would smash the last vestiges of despotism from the world, allowing democracy and peace to flourish. Any resistance, they warned, however small or remote, was a threat to the entire American-led order."

This narrative – coupled with the refusal to discuss oil as a motivator for war – is a profound example of American denialism. It fuses imperial adventurism with the politics of benevolence and democracy promotion. We are to believe that the Bush administration was simultaneously committed to both imperial power politics and democracy promotion. That's quite an Orwellian message, echoing 1984's elaboration on how official propaganda seeks to reconcile blatantly contradictory messages to validate state power.

This isn't the first time the Times has fallen into Bush administration propaganda about benevolent empire. Shortly after the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the paper reported on what was driving the presidency "in the run-up to the war to oust Saddam Hussein," with the invasion serving as "the first step in a new strategy" that "promised" " to spread democracy in the Mideast," and "sending" "a clear warning to other governments" that "support for terror will not be tolerated." As the Times reported at the time, administration aides acknowledged the war was expected to create a "demonstration effect" – intended as "an impressive demonstration of American will and American capability." It was "the first test, but not the last" in demonstrating that "We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively" in "convincing or compelling states" "not to aid terrorists." The war was intended to show that "the United States would never allow American military supremacy to be challenged in the way it was during the cold war."

Contrary to the benevolent empire narrative, available evidence has long revealed that the U.S. remains committed, despite its altruistic public declarations, to neocolonialism. To miss the neocolonial-oil angle takes real effort and willful ignorance, considering there's now an 80-year paper trail of declassified high-level government documents recognizing oil – and particularly Iraqi oil – as not only vital to U.S. national security, but as a material prize that the U.S. will use military force to control.

As an intellectual and practical thought exercise, it's worth imagining what the Times report could have looked like, had it wished to come to terms with U.S. neocolonialism. A serious attempt at producing a more sober history should include a few main points.

First, the Bush administration was well aware of how weak their claims were about Iraq's alleged WMD threat. They were told numerous times by their own counterterrorism people that Iraq did not have ties to al Qaeda or 9/11. And they were informed by international weapons inspectors that there was no compelling evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons – a point its own allies acknowledged at the time. The administration made dramatic public pronouncements about the imminent threat of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, its ties to al Qaeda terrorism, and a looming nuclear threat. Privately, as Politico reported, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) recognized that the case for war was shaky at best. The administration "struggled to estimate the unknowns" about Iraq and WMDs. As the Joint Chiefs admitted prior to the war, "we cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons," and "our knowledge" of "how and where" Iraq's biological weapons "are produced is probably up to 90 percent incomplete." Regarding Iraq's alleged chemical weapons, the Joint Chiefs "cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce the final chemical agent," while "the specific agent and facility knowledge on Iraq's alleged chemical weapons" was "60-70 percent incomplete." Finally, the JCS report acknowledged that their assessments of Iraq's alleged WMDs "rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence," and that "the evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear weapons."

Simply stated, the administration told the American people that it was certain about Iraq's alleged threat to the U.S. Privately, the administration – including the Pentagon and the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld – knew that the case was anything but certain, and that most of their public claims were based on conjecture and guess work, not hard evidence. There's a word for what the administration did here – lying.

Second, there is a long record of neocolonial U.S. policy planning at the highest levels of government which makes it clear that Middle Eastern (and Iraqi) oil are central to U.S. "national security" concerns, and that America is willing to use military power to dominate this vital resource. I explore this history in detail in my previous book, When Media Goes to War. The U.S. State Department referred to Middle Eastern oil (particularly in Saudi Arabia) in 1945 as "a stupendous source of strategic power, as one of the greatest material prizes in world history," and as a resource that the U.S. viewed as already "nominally in American control." This oil was to "remain under U.S. control for the dual purposes of replacing our dwindling reserves, and of preventing this power potential from falling into unfriendly hands." Similarly during the Eisenhower presidency, the National Security Council referred to the Middle East as the most "strategically important area in the world," while the administration recognized the importance of "combating radical Arab nationalism" and governments that might seek to nationalize their oil reserves, while considering that the U.S. might "hold Persian Gulf oil by force if necessary," with support for Israel deemed "logical" in helping ensure U.S. domination of the region.

Strategic fixation on oil continued in later administrations. The Carter administration's National Security Directive 63 (NSD 63) stressed Middle Eastern oil and efforts "to ensure availability of oil at reasonable prices." These goals were central to U.S. "national security" interests following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. NSD 63 reflected that an "attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force." Similarly, in its 1991 National Security Strategy (NSS), the George H. W. Bush administration warned of about any potential "threat to the oil supplies that flow through the Persian Gulf," promising that the administration would respond "to threats to the United States interests that could not be laid at the Kremlin's door" in the post-cold war era. The administration declared a "New World Order," with the U.S. leading the way. As Bush made clear in his 1991 NSS, the U.S. would "maintain a naval presence" throughout "the Persian Gulf" and "conduct periodic exercises and pursue improved host nation support and preposition of equipment throughout the region" to ensure a continued American foothold.

More than any other administration, and considering its U.S. investment in the 1991 Iraq war, the George H. W. Bush presidency fixated most heavily on Middle Eastern and Iraqi oil. The Pentagon's Defense Policy Guidance report (1992) authored by Paul Wolfowitz – who later became Deputy Secretary of Defense and was one of the architects of the 2003 Iraq war – emphasized a power politics mentality toward the Middle East. The report stated: "the number one objective of U.S. post-cold war political military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower," with a particular emphasis toward securing "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil."

Most lucid was the Bush administration's National Security Directives (NSD) 26 (1989) and NSD 54 (1991), which both articulated that "access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to United States national security. The United States remains committed to its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate through the use of military force, against the Soviet Union or any other force with interests inimical to our own." While the primary concern was the Soviet Union in NSD 26 (1989), that concern shifted to Iraq by NSD 54 (1991) following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait – a U.S. ally. In NSD 54, titled "Responding to Iraqi Aggression in the Gulf," the administration announced that Iraq, "by virtue of its unprovoked invasion of Kuwait," and "its subsequent brutal occupation," had become "a power with interests inimical to our own" – one in which the U.S. was committed to "the use of military force" against to ensure "access to Persian Gulf oil."

While the George W. Bush administration was careful to avoid declarations in the pre-invasion period that it was motivated by oil and neocolonialism, a careful reading of its messaging demonstrates consistency with previous government declarations about the strategic importance of oil within the broader context of promoting American military power and capitalism abroad. For example, despite its declarations about the importance of promoting "peace," "liberty" and "freedom" throughout the world, the Bush administration's 2002 and 2006 national security strategies (NSS) described plans to "further strengthen market incentives and market institutions" via a focus on "emerging markets and the developing world." The 2002 NSS promised to act "preemptive[s]' against terrorists," to "strengthen our own energy security," and "expand the sources and types of global energy supplied" – while "disuad[ing] future military competition" from foreign powers. The 2006 NSS stressed the centrality of U.S. leadership and "preventing the reemergence of the great power rivalries that divided the world in previous eras." This messaging made it clear that the exercise of military power was linked to U.S. economic and energy interests.

Furthermore, President Bush was explicit during the occupation period that the U.S. was unwilling to leave Iraq due to concerns with oil. As The Washington Post reported in the mid-2000s, Bush announced that withdrawal from Iraq would "let Iraq radicals use oil as a weapon" against the U.S. and its allies. The administration's own national security planning also explicitly referenced U.S. concerns with "oil" and "energy" from Iraq, with National Security Directive 24 referencing a "high priority" "effort" to exploit Iraq's petroleum resources and "production" for the "international oil market."

The Times reveals its duplicity when it ignores the extensive evidence of U.S. militarism in pursuit of neocolonial oil interests, which were dismissed in a single sentence in its new Iraq retrospective. But the paper, as the primary medium of American journalistic, political, and intellectual discourse, has always sought to subvert discussions of empire. Considering its whitewashing of U.S. wars as "benevolent hegemony," it's not surprising that its reporters struggle to understand, even 20 years later, why the U.S. went to war with Iraq. It's difficult to understand why the U.S. does what it does in the world when one systematically indulges in willful ignorance by looking past all the evidence of U.S. neocolonialism. In the process, the Times serves as a lapdog for the bipartisan-fueled imperial warfare state. Iraq is the most dramatic example in recent decades, considering the incredible death, destruction, and destabilization that this criminal war imposed, and based upon highly dubious justifications. The Times, by helping to obscure the motives for war, plays the role of the reluctant and "liberal" critic, presenting an outward appearance of interrogating the war, while ignoring the motives that defined it.

counterpunch.org

2. Daniel Ellsberg Calling on Us to Stop Nuclear War

The legendary whistleblower has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

By Marjorie COHN

The legendary Daniel Ellsberg has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In a March 1 email to friends, Dan wrote, "I'm sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live … it might be more, or less." He will turn 92 on April 7.

Dan displayed uncommon courage in 1971 when he publicized the 7,000-page top-secret Pentagon Papers while working at the Rand Corporation. As a consultant to the Department of Defense, Dan drafted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's plans for nuclear war.

In his book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Dan wrote that the Pentagon Papers exposed the "secrets five presidents had withheld and the lies they told" about U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. "This truth telling set in motion a train of events, including criminal White House efforts to silence or incapacitate me." The government's illegal efforts to silence Dan resulted in the dismissal of the charges against him and his codefendant Anthony Russo. "Much more important," Dan noted, "these particular Oval Office crimes helped topple the president, an act that was crucial to ending the war."

In 2014, Dan gave a keynote speech at the 45th reunion of the Stanford Anti-Vietnam War movement. At the reunion, he explained how the United States came dangerously close to using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War. In 1965, the Joint Chiefs recommended to President Lyndon B. Johnson that U.S. forces hit targets up to the Chinese border. Dan thought their real aim was to provoke China into responding and then the U.S. would cross into China and demolish the communists with nuclear weapons.

Now, Dan is urging the world to again avoid nuclear annihilation.

Actions That Helped End the Vietnam War

"When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was)," Dan wrote in his March 1 email.

Dan's courageous actions did help to end that war, which claimed the lives of more than 3 million Vietnamese people and 58,000 Americans. In an email responding to Dan's revelation of his terminal cancer diagnosis, Bui Van Nghi, secretary general of the Viet Nam-USA Society, wrote,

"We highly appreciate Dan's good will, friendship and love to Viet Nam and his support of the struggle for national independence and reunification of the country by the Viet Namese people and with his courage to reveal of the truth and machination about the American Viet Nam War by the U.S. Government that waging the waves of peace, anti-war movements, campaigns to call for early ending of the [war] that helped save hundred[s] of thousands of lives on both sides."

The Pentagon Papers "remain today the most vital discussion of a war from the inside," journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in a recent tribute to Dan. Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre, which the U.S. government covered up for a year. It was a war crime committed by U.S. forces who murdered more than 300 elderly men, women and children during the Vietnam War.

Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's national security adviser, called Dan "the most dangerous man in America" for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Kissinger's characterization became the title of an Oscar-nominated film about Dan.

Working Tirelessly to Prevent Nuclear War

The crater-scarred landscape of the Nevada Test Site, 2016. (National Nuclear Security Administration, Public domain)

For more than five decades, Dan has spent nearly every waking hour working for peace and trying to prevent nuclear war. In spite of his diagnosis, Dan continues the struggle to avoid a nuclear holocaust. "I will continue, as long as I'm able, to help these efforts," he wrote in his March 1 email.

"I feel lucky and grateful," he noted, "about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else)."

"The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen," Dan wrote. He warned that nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would result in "nuclear winter." That means that

"more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth."

Alarmingly, in January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight due largely to Russia's war in Ukraine. This is "the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been." The Clock is a universally recognized measure of vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change and other emerging technologies that could pose a threat.

"This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons," Dan told me in a telephone interview for this article.

"It's urgent to get this war ended. … We need a ceasefire and negotiations before [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is confronted with any prospect of losing Crimea and all of Donbas" which would "make the danger of nuclear war initiated by Russia more dangerous than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis."

In a March 2 program called "Nuclear Dangers: The Ukraine War One Year Later," sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Dan expressed alarm about how the war could escalate, especially given Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's effort, backed by the U.S., to expel Russia from all areas, including those it has held for eight years. Dan is doubtful that negotiations will ever begin if Zelenskyy continues to insist that every Russian troop leave Ukraine before negotiations can occur. If the U.S. were to enter the war "directly with its pilots and combat troops and missiles … I believe that Putin would very likely carry out his threat to initiate tactical nuclear war … even with a high probability of escalating … which would threaten all of humanity with nuclear winter," he said.

"Every person in the world has a stake in preventing that from happening," Dan noted during the March 2 program in which Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk also participated. Chomsky noted, "Either there will be a diplomatic solution or there will be species suicide." Falk called this an "apocalyptic tipping point in human history."

Those who make the nuclear weapons and the investment banks that finance them "have never been interested in limiting them. Their only interest is to have better ones," Dan told me. Those same people "have never been interested in keeping Russia from having H-bombs [hydrogen bombs], ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] or MWHs [multiple warheads] at the cost of giving up ours."

To reduce the risks of nuclear war, "it is essential that members of NATO press the U.S. and others to renounce the atrocious NATO backing of the first-use of nuclear weapons," Dan said.

President Joe Biden's 2022 Nuclear Posture Review inexcusably allows the first use of nuclear weapons and says that "nuclear weapons are required to deter not only nuclear attack, but also a narrow range of other high consequence, strategic-level attacks."

"Contrary to public understanding," Dan wrote in his book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, "[the] strategy has not been a matter of deterrence of nuclear attack on the United States, but rather the illusionary one of improving first-strike capability."

US-Russia Treaties Renounced or Suspended

Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson at the Glassboro, New Jersey, summit in June 1967 where the U.S. first proposed an ABM treaty. (Yoichi Okamoto, Wikimedia Commons)

Dan noted in The Doomsday Machine, "The arsenals and plans of the two superpowers represent not only an insuperable obstacle to an effective global anti-proliferation campaign; they are in themselves a clear and present existential danger to the human species, and most others."

The anti-proliferation regime was dealt the ultimate blow in February when Russia suspended participation in the New START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty]. It was the only remaining nuclear arms reduction treaty between the U.S. and Russia that had not been suspended or renounced. Russia and the United States together possess about 90 percent of the world's nuclear warheads.

New START was signed by President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. It puts a cap on the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia may deploy and provides for inspections of each other's countries three times a year. The treaty also requires regular communication between the U.S. and Russia to avoid accidents or misunderstandings.

In December 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that it signed with the Soviet Union in 1972. The cornerstone of the Cold War nuclear arms control regime, the ABM treaty stated that in order to reduce offensive nuclear forces in the U.S. and Russia, both countries would have to agree to limit anti-ballistic missile defenses.

Bush said that "the hostility that once led both our countries to keep thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, pointed at each other" had ended when the Soviet Union disbanded. He claimed that the treaty was impeding U.S. ability to protect against "future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks."

Putin said the U.S. withdrawal from the treaty, a cornerstone of international security, was "a mistake."

May 26, 1972: U.S. President Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signing the ABM Treaty and Interim Agreement on Strategic Arms Limitation in Moscow, culminating two and a half years of detente-era negotiations. (Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

In 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union adopted the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), to eliminate missiles on hair-trigger alert for nuclear war due to their short flight times. This was the first time the two countries agreed to destroy nuclear weapons. The treaty outlawed nearly 2,700 ballistic or land-based cruise missiles that had a range of about 300 to 3,000 miles.

But, in 2019, President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. obligations under the treaty and Russia pulled out of the treaty the following day.

Courage to Inspire Us All

The whistleblowers and truth tellers who have followed in Dan's footsteps include Chelsea Manning, Katharine Gun, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner and publisher Julian Assange. Dan is one of the co-chairs — with Chomsky and Alice Walker — of Assange Defense.

"Every empire requires secrecy to cloak its acts of violence that maintain it as an empire," Dan testified at the Belmarsh Tribunal on Jan. in support of Assange, who faces 175 years in prison for exposing U.S. war crimes. "If you're going to use the [Espionage] Act against a journalist in blatant violation of the First Amendment," Dan stated, "the First Amendment is essentially gone."

In 2008, when I served as president of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Dan delivered the keynote address to the guild's convention in Detroit. He warned of the dangers of unchecked executive power, stating, "The U.S. president is not a king."

Dan is a brilliant, intense, compassionate man with a remarkably curious mind. I can't count the times he has called me for analysis of the legal ramifications of the U.S. government's illegal action du jour. I am proud to call him my friend.

What does Dan's diagnosis portend? "As the most important American truth teller/whistleblower and nuclear weapons analyst of the last 50 years, it's hard to imagine a world without him," investigative reporter Barbara Koeppel, who has written about Dan in several articles, told me.

We must honor Dan's extraordinary legacy by committing ourselves to the struggle to protect the world from nuclear annihilation.

consortiumnews.com

3. NATO Poodles Whitewashing History in Serbia and Montenegro and Serbian Kosovo With Metohija

U.S. Ambassador Hill is sending a message to the Serbs that they should not do what they want to do but they should do what he wants them to do.

Just less than a decade ago, Dusko Markovic, the last prime minister of 'Montenegro', the country established in place of what used to be and has always been Crna Gora (and is now mercifully back on the historical and political maps), back then contrived by Milo Djukanovic's DPS political party, Markovic bragged about something that an intelligent person would well and truly be ashamed of, that more than 85% of the people of Montenegro were against Montenegrin government's recognition of Kosovo as an independent state back then. But he said (somewhat sneeringly): "We did recognize it nonetheless' They had a vision to do exactly that – he said so emboldened by this 'success', they, in the same 'visionary' way, could conveniently do away with the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro 'in one leisurely sweep', which (the Serbian Orthodox Church in the newly identity-ed Montenegro) reminds them all in a rather uncomfortable way that Kosovo is Serbia after all and that Njegoš and the King Nikola knew that historical fact centuries ago. And those Crnogorci (who do not know the truths which Njegoš and King Nikola knew cannot essentially and truly 'be' Crnogorci any more after they had ceased to be Serbs as well. Anyhow, who are they indeed if not who Njegoš and King Nikola were? It is common knowledge that he used to go 'namo, 'namo da vidju Prizren…(6). because Kosovo is mine and ours and I belong to it and oнамо покој добићу души, кад Србин више не буде роб.

Thus, there emerges a justifiable question.' When did the country of Crna Gora come to be if it is not in any way the same as or similar to who King Nikola used to be during his reign? Shortly afterwards, the unwavering people's litije began – long, nationwide processions of Serbian Orthodox Church believers in pious pursuit to protect and defend the Serbian Orthodox Church and its thousands of holy places of worship and Montenegro did, commensurate to how much is 'allowed by the NATO standards' slowly begin retrieving its Crna Gora centuries-old, historical and political identity.

Therefore, this case of Crna Gora is most precious due to the fact that the same issue is hovering in the political mid-air above Serbia too. It is called the French – German Plan, which has unwittingly evolved into the European Plan in the meantime. It is heavily supported by the USA so it could be conveniently called the NATO plan as well. Let me remind you, NATO is the military pact which committed a brutal act of aggression on SR Yugoslavia (N.B. the official union of Serbia and Montenegro at the time) in order to eventually rip Kosovo and Metohija away from us, the Serbs. In brief, this NATO plan is now for the rest of the then Yugoslavia, which is in fact Serbia now, after Crna Gora had already done it, to recognize that Kosovo does not belong to Serbia any more. They want us to believe that it is not ours any more but theirs. What (utterly lackluster) Dusko Markovic called a 'vision', the EU mediator Miroslav Lajcak describes as a difficult decision to make, yet the crux of the matter is the same. Namely, we the Serbs are ordered to do what the Serbian people are absolutely against. It seems that a 'particular' kind of 'democracy' is that in which these all manner of 'envoys and leaders' of all sorts do not act in accordance with the will of the Serbian people but completely contrary to it.

In Serbian language we interpret this sort of (arrogant doublespeak) approach as: subjugation. The U.S. ambassador in Belgrade, Christopher Hill seems to have thought it was incumbent upon him on that count to approach us in a certain weekly magazine with his address to the Serbs in this way as follows: 'I had heard people talking about sovereignty in the Balkans, and I would always ask the same question 'How come some other countries in the Western Europe as small as Serbia do not worry about their own sovereignty?' Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani elaborated further on what that truly meant. Europe does not have a real foreign and defense policy. We always follow in the (political) footsteps of the USA – he told the Italian reporters of La Stampa. Ramush Haradinaj said something very similar a few years ago in the capacity of the then prime minister of the pseudo state of Kosovo, though we laughed at him back then. Now we understand that this aberration is more common than we thought. There seem to be some nations who welcome their usurpers of their own land with joy. They threw flowers at the Germans when the Germans entered Maribor (Slovenia) or Zagreb (Croatia), for instance. The very same Germans threw bombs at Belgrade (Serbia) at the time. Slovenia and Croatia are now NATO members jumping with the very same joy. (Macedonia and Montenegro were swindled into NATO in the meantime). And yet again all of them are together on their Generalplan Ost onward march against Russia. But we (the Serbs) again bang on stubbornly about our sovereignty, eh? That is the reason why the Germans, and the Germans always follow in the footsteps of the Americans, just like the Italians and Ramush Haradinaj do, as one of the conditions and there were seven of these conditions in total, they asked for our mindset to change. But, we adamantly refuse to forget our past and our history and surely not their bombs.

Adrian Schockenhoff, Bundestag and Chancellor Angela Merkel's envoy to Serbia a decade ago or so, demanded exactly that in all seriousness, and he even committed that demand to paper, translated into Serbian. He handed it out to the reporters so as to avoid any possible misconstructions lost in translation. It happened in 2012 because a little earlier in 2010 we did not obey the commands by Wolfram Mass (the German ambassador in Serbia before him) He said 'I have to voice my criticism of the Serbian authorities for still using the terms such as NATO bombing. Imagine that you walk along Knez Milos Street and your child asks you 'Daddy, who did this?' (showing the buildings torn down by the NATO bombing). You would respond ' NATO did '. What do you expect your child to think of NATO then? Unlike this particular situation, when I was a child, says Mass, I used to see some ruins in Germany but I did not hate those who did it because there were others there who were able to explain to me why they did that. He then added that the European and NATO integrations are interconnected, because the issue of Serbia joining NATO is not a matter of 'if' but of 'when', regardless of what we think about that. (Truth be told) that means subjugation for the Serbs and we are not having it!

The very same things are now demanded by the U.S. Ambassador Hill, after he sent a message to the Serbs that we should not do what we want to do but we should do what he wants us to do; he explained to us 'in a nice way' (as if we would fall for Hill's niceties) that Serbia is now at its most important pathway in its history, towards joining Euro-Atlantic integration, including EU of course… and including NATO of course. That is the true meaning of the Euro-Atlantic integration. That is the reason why, the (infamous) ambassador complained to that Belgrade weekly magazine: 'It was the greatest disappointment for me that the matters which I thought had been resolved a long time ago, are still fresh in the minds and memories of the locals. I was surprised when I came here last March that there were some remembrances of 1999 on a regular daily basis. You have to look into the future! This geographic region is packed with history. One should respect history but one should not be its hostage.'

Moreover, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Russian Ambassador in Serbia, warned that Hill would like to erase historical memory of brutal atrocities committed on the Serbs and our tragically lost lives taken away by NATO. And indeed, if history is the life's teacher, which it is, where would these history teachers (such as the arrogant, infamous Hill) take us in the future, and where would the likes of those who would like to erase our history take us? When they place us, that is, on that most important pathway in our history, the way Hill depicts it. To be something we have never been before, the generations of Serbs who willingly renounce its own Kosovo and Metohija, rather than simply singing patriotic songs about Kosovo at least, waiting for the 'Dogodine u Prizrenu'. When would the history of the Serbs in that case (the way Christopher Hill wants us to see it) begin the same as in the case of those Montenegrini in Crna Gora?

We would renounce Kosovo and (in that far-fetched scenario of theirs) we would renounce our centuries old Serbian Kosovo, pre-Battle of Kosovo cantos and post-Battle of Kosovo cantos of epic poetry from our folklore national heritage, what would in that case our children learn in Serbian language classes in school? And the famed epic poem quote 'Kasno Marko na Kosovo stize' would not be ours anymore because we are not Marko's own people any more. 'Pocetak Bune protiv Dahija' would not feature in our Serbian language and literature classes anymore because even there we recite poetry and sing songs about King Lazar, Milos Obilic and Kosovo and our liberation from the Ottoman Turks and then onward to the revenged Kosovo in 1912. Yet, the likes of Christopher Hill want us to believe that those appear to have been some other Serbs and not us. The same as what happened in 1999 and 2006 when the Constitution of Serbia was passed, our Serbian most beloved and revered Patriarch Pavle also voted for it and led the whole nation in their pious pursuit, because the Constitution says that Kosovo is the heartland of Serbia, be it with its essential autonomy.

Yet, this is a kind reminder that in 2008 there seemed to have been 'some other Serbs' who rejected rather than accepted in total subjugation the self-proclaimed pseudo state of Kosovo.

If we were to obey what Hill orders us to do and the likes of him preaching about the life lessons, and all the other thieves of our history and our land, if we were to make those tough choices with which Miroslav Lajcak relentlessly continues to threaten us, if they were to blindingly blur the scope of our vision which Dusko Markovic had, we would become but sheer subjugated slaves who, because they do not have the past anymore, cannot have the future either 'the future which is in our own hands and not the hands of others. Of course for the sake of the interests of others (i.e. the interests of NATO, USA and EU and surely not our own). To the Serbs, it feels far more like freedom to be the hostage of our history. It is ours at least. And history is a life's teacher, way better than Ambassador Hill, Wolfram Mass and all the rest of those who would rather brutally and illegally seize and plunder our land and distort our mindsets. our world views and our consciousness in such a way that we start thinking (mistakenly) that we deserve it all.

This article is based on the video report by Nikola Vrzic, a renowned Serbian reporter. Annotations and useful notes on cultural and historical references added by me for this article can be read here.

 

4. The Collective West vs. Traditional Values

In the West, there is almost nothing left of the classic division of political parties and movements into left-wing and right-wing ones.

If we were to judge the political life of the countries of the collective West solely on the basis of the concrete activities of political parties that alternate for decades on the stage of the political theater and in power, we would give the right to all those political theorists who like to speculate about the "twilight of ideologies". Let's take the British Labor Party and the Conservative Party as an example. Both parties are positioned in the center of the political spectrum, very close to each other, although the Labor Party is on the center-left and the Conservatives on the center-right, but the general impression is that their official ideological positions are more a matter of folklore and tradition than real ideological practice. In reality, the political ideas that these two parties stand for overlap to such an extent that it has become very difficult for well-informed British voters to see any fundamental ideological differences between the two camps, which does not mean that they do not exist. It's the same with the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Of course, there are ideological differences between them, but they are clear only to politically educated Americans, while as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is only about nuances that mean little, especially when we talk about the continuity of aggressive U.S. foreign policy. The seeming ideological impersonality of the collective West is strongly contributed by the frequent unprincipled coalitions and "big tent" parties, which are characterized by ideological colorlessness.

In short, from whatever angle we observe and analyze the political life of the West, we cannot avoid the impression that there is almost nothing left of the classic division of political parties and movements into left-wing and right-wing ones. To illustrate, we could use the popular Horseshoe Theory, usually attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye, a French philosopher, and writer. In this visual representation of the political spectrum, the distinct Right and Left are not on diametrically opposite sides of the same axis, but, on the contrary, they are very close to each other and almost touch at the ends of the "horseshoe". Almost all the mainstream political parties of the West would be somewhere in the middle of the horseshoe on this political spectrum. Political parties that, unlike the mainstream ones, as a rule, have never enjoyed the generous support of financial elites would, in that case, more than symbolically, be somewhere at the end of Faye's horseshoe. For example, in Germany, such parties would be the left-wing "Die Linke" and the right-wing "Alternative für Deutschland", two parties with authentic political programs that, together with their electorate, have suffered systematic marginalization since their foundation until today. Although this is really not an exact mathematical science because every political spectrum and the theory behind it have a large number of critics and opponents, if we were to use any other presentation similar to this one, we would again notice that the ruling political parties of the collective West are always grouped somewhere in the same zone.

However, to conclude that ideology in the West is dead would be a mistake equal to the assertion that the devil does not actually exist, and only because the unholy wants us to think so. The apparent ideological impersonality is only an expression of the fact that the real ideology of the countries of the Western conglomerate, led by the USA, is hidden deep and firmly embedded in their constitutions and laws. That ideology has been patiently upgraded and expanded for decades in order to become an untouchable dogma that has elevated itself above all criticisms and condemnations. Quite expectedly, the plutocratic elites are the only ones with a clear motive, almost unlimited means, and the opportunity to create an unconventional and unnatural ideological system that will serve only their interests and which will be impossible to question. It would be very naive to think that this monstrous ideology is an internal problem only for those countries that practice it, because its creators, financiers, and advocates have hegemonic, imperialist, and neocolonialist plans and ambitions for which it was created after all. Aspects of this ideology that are easily recognizable and felt in the internal political life of the countries of the collective West simply serve the purpose of realigning those societies for the continuation of even more aggressive expansions and military interventions.

Andrew Gamble, Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and at the University of Cambridge, stated in May 2021 that numerous ideologies have sought to shape Western societies in the past, but that the doctrines of "ordered freedom", free economies, and strong states, continued to dominate the ideas of "authoritarian nationalism". Although Gamble sees the role of socialist and conservative ideologies in the countries of the Western Bloc, he recognizes what is often called "Western liberalism" today as an ideological thought that absolutely dominates the political life of the collective West, and it must be recognized that this is an undeniable fact. After all, this is not strange, given that both Western socialists and conservatives not only allowed but also actively helped the permanent incorporation of the ideas of Western liberalism into the laws of their countries. This very fact gives us the impression today that all classical ideologies in the West are dead. Because they are increasingly limited by the constitutions and laws of their countries, Western conservatives and socialists are increasingly difficult to distinguish from liberals, which is why it is more common to talk about left and right liberals instead of real conservatives and socialists. Parties that are truly socialist or conservative are pushed to the margins of political life and often forced to lead an extra-parliamentary political struggle in which they are characterized as extremist and radical. Yet, the real extremists are, in fact, the destroyers of all the traditional values on which civilization was built, namely the advocates and promoters of modern liberalism, which, as we can see, is no longer positioned only on the left but increasingly covers the space of the center-right.

Since liberalism historically arose as a response to absolutist monarchism, and later developed as a reaction to various forms of totalitarianism, it is more than interesting to analyze how it came to be that what is today considered modern liberalism in the West acts precisely from the positions of increasingly radical authoritarianism and dogmatism. Mahatma Gandhi was one of the first great men of history who saw through the hypocrisy of liberalism and understood that crimes committed in the name of liberal democracy are no less terrible than those committed in the name of openly totalitarian ideologies. Nevertheless, when we talk about the criticism of liberalism, the Russian philosopher, political scientist, and university professor Dr. Alexander Dugin left the deepest mark. Dugin quite rightly speaks of the "dictatorship of liberalism" because it is an ideological phenomenon and practice that establishes new totalitarianism in the name of false freedoms, which effectively abolish all real freedoms. Dugin is one of the first theorists who clearly recognized the evolution of original liberal thought from an authentic struggle for individual freedom into the monstrous ideology it is today. He realized that these mutations were so sudden, radical, and dramatic that he called the dominant ideology of the modern West "Liberalism 2.0". In this way, Dugin wanted to draw a clear historical boundary between the liberalism of the past and the deviant, destructive, and very dangerous liberalism of the present and future. Liberalism 2.0 is, in its essence, pseudo-liberalism, the negation of all real human rights and freedoms, an ideology that has developed a very undemocratic character and does not tolerate any criticism. Nonetheless, since it is protected by very powerful instruments of repression, it has not only its sacred dogmas but also an inquisition that is able to protect them.

Geydar Dzhemal, a Russian Islamic philosopher, admitted, albeit reluctantly, that the civilized world of today is built on the principles of active liberalism. However, he also concluded that Western liberalism, as a mental space, is placed on the platform of denying any higher meaning of life, from which it expresses the conviction that hedonism should be its main dimension. And indeed, hedonism could be considered one of the fundamental principles of modern liberalism, and this becomes more and more evident if one looks at the ideologies that have developed from it, such as LGBT ideology. The Russian poet Yunna Morits, perhaps more artistically intuitively than in the language of political science, speaks through verses about the totalitarian essence of liberalism, which few today can deny and which is its second very important trademark: "Liberal dictatorship, liberal tyranny, liberal Gestapo: whoever is not with them is nowhere!". For reasons that are certainly interesting to anthropologists, historians, and culturologists, the souls and minds of people from the East, not only top intellectuals but also ordinary people, are naturally very resistant to the dogmas of Western liberalism, which they immediately recognize as something that opposes the divine and natural order of things. This is precisely the reason that the ideas of modern liberalism never managed to take deep roots in countries such as Russia, China, India, or the countries of the Muslim world.

Of course, numerous political minds, scientists, and theorists from the West, whose work and research the mainstream media of the countries they come from, generally ignore or deliberately boycott, have bravely tackled the issue of criticism of modern Western liberalism. One of these very original critics is the philosopher and writer James Kalb, author of "The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command," published in 2008 and quite popular in Western conservative circles. In this scientific work, Kalb explained how liberalism developed into a form of totalitarianism and dictatorship in which a comprehensive system of control over individuals and all their relationships accounts only to itself and no one else. This is not only the essence of modern Western ideologies and societies but also of all the globalist institutions that they have spawned, which have the ambition to rule the fate of all humanity as "global" without consulting or answering to anyone for their decisions and actions. Another laudable critic who deserves a lot of attention is Patrick J Deneen, an American political theorist and university professor of political science who, ten years after Kalb's masterpiece on the theory of liberalism, published a landmark book entitled "Why Liberalism Failed." In his work, Deneen fiercely criticized not only the American Democrats but also the Republicans, claiming that liberalism is a wasted ideology that leads only to inequality, cultural decadence, the erosion of all real human freedoms, and the rise of powerful, centralist, undemocratic bureaucracies. Exactly such bureaucracies also rule the European Union by simply making decisions that bypass all national democracies, while at the same time not accounting to anyone for their actions, no matter how bad they may be, according to the pattern previously noted by Kalb. A very often repeated criticism of numerous other political scientists and theorists, including those from the West, is that all that deepening of social inequalities, denial of traditional values, and corroding of personal freedoms that liberalism undeniably generates will, in the end, like a metastasizing cancer, destroy the states it rules and that ideology itself.

What worries the rest of the world is definitely not that, at a certain moment, this pseudo-liberalism will cease to exist, nor what kind of ideological vacuum will arise in the West after that. The real danger lies in the fact that the ideologies that Western liberalism gave birth to, could continue their lives even after its demise. It is known that the theories of advocates and ideologues of modern liberalism such as Francis Fukuyama, Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin, despite being often far more idealistic than militaristic, have been misused as an excuse for the aggressive military expansion of the collective West. When he spoke about how liberal democracy "will always defeat autocracy", Jans Stoltenberg, NATO's 13th Secretary General, by the term "autocracy" meant whatever NATO chooses to call by that name, and what stands between the North Atlantic Alliance as the military fist of the collective West and the resources that the Western conglomerate needs in order to avoid its imminent economic collapse. Therefore, the connection between "Liberalism 2.0" and Western imperialism and neocolonialism is more than direct and obvious, and these extreme ideologies could, unfortunately, survive the collapse of liberal ideology and become a much more serious problem for the unconquered part of mankind. To make matters worse, these are not the only monsters of liberalism that could survive it.

Globalism, systematic and planned Americanization and Westernization, the imposition of Western crypto-satanic pop culture, favoritism of the English language, perverse interpretations of political correctness, militant feminism, aggressive LGBT and gender ideology, the promotion of pedophilia and zoophilia, open Satanism, and who knows what else could crawl out of hell are also dangerous monsters of Western liberalism. These ideologies are manifested together as an attempt to destroy all nations, traditional cultures, and religions by first destroying the traditional family, founded by a man and a woman in the desire to raise offspring together in love and harmony. Pseudo-liberalism, therefore, seeks to "liberate" the individual from that healthy security and support that a natural family provides to a normal human being, replacing it with its freakish surrogates. At the same time, the goal of liberalism is to replace the collectivism of traditional nations, societies, cultures, and religions with corporate collectivism, in which the individual at the "end of history", will be reduced to a mere property of the company. In order for an individual to be successfully and permanently uprooted from the traditional family environment and turned into a being that can be easily manipulated for the purpose of efficient exploitation, it is necessary to fulfill a whole series of preconditions. Thus, pseudo-liberalism seeks to "liberate" the individual from all true and authentic spirituality and religiosity, from any applicable knowledge other than that which is absolutely necessary for work and production, and from any political awareness of true human rights and freedoms. Such individuals are thus completely denied the right to any kind of true self-realization, and all their life choices are narrowed and reduced to mere production, profitmaking, and consumption. This sinister goal is practically impossible to achieve if parents are not removed from the process of raising children beforehand. In the ideal case, it is necessary to bypass the parents completely and to reach the young people as early as possible, more and more often already in kindergarten, indoctrinating them, first of all, with the destructive poison of LGBT and gender ideology as a guarantee that, by creating very vulnerable individuals, the manipulation of them in the near future will be complete.

What kind of future could be intended for our children, can be guessed from the theses of Yuval Noah Harari, a prominent Israeli liberal thinker, author, publicist, and history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari's name is often associated with the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, and many consider him his advisor and right-hand man, but there is no concrete evidence for this. What is indisputable is that Schwab shows great respect for Harari's work and has invited him to speak at World Economic Forum conferences in Davos on a couple of occasions. In his books, Harari, who is, by the way, openly homosexual and lives with his husband, argues that the idea of man possessing free will has come to an end, although it has been not only present but also very important for centuries in all traditional religions, not only Abrahamic, and considered one of the most precious gifts from God. Harari also denies that human beings possess anything that could be called a human soul and even rejects the idea of a human spirit. Instead of all that, he claims that there is already technology that will reduce human beings to the level of hackable animals with the aim of achieving complete surveillance and control over them — and all that on a massive scale. As an obvious supporter of transhumanism, another monster from the ideological laboratories of liberalism, Harari believes that the vast majority of people on the planet are completely unnecessary and, using the term "useless eaters" for them, recommends video games and drugs as a way of life for future generations. Yes, Western liberalism shows a more than obvious desire to establish full control over our children and their future, and we have to ask ourselves where relativizing their ambitions could lead us in the end. Could genetically modified children be born in the very near future with patented genetic codes protected by copyright that would make these children the property of corporations for their entire lives? Before we completely reject such a possibility as the fruit of a dark imagination from some bizarre sci-fi dystopia, we should once again think deeply about all the great "successes" of the liberal ideology that we have already witnessed.

Projections of our collective fears, which just a few decades ago seemed like mere conspiracy theories that could never come true under any circumstances, are today, unfortunately, part of the gloomy everyday reality in which we live. This forces us to be constantly alert and extremely cautious in relation to all the, at first glance, innovative, advanced, and humane ideas with which liberalism tries to hypnotize and seduce us. Let's just remember how the idea of creating a global world in which, thanks to technological progress, there is a free and intensive exchange of goods and services was misused. Just as the initial ideas of liberalism, such as the necessity of protecting personal freedoms as the basic purpose of the existence of the state, were twisted into their opposite, so the initial ideas about the necessity of humane globalization were abused for the needs of a hidden neo-colonialist agenda. Instead of all nations benefiting equally from globalization, it has very quickly turned into a system that favors rich countries, while the workforce and resources of poor countries are unscrupulously exploited and their environments irresponsibly destroyed. The spread of liberal capitalism across the planet has turned out to be just a new form of Western expansion and imperialism that very often precedes brutal military interventions. As for the Western concepts of "cultural exchange" and multiculturalism, they have only led to the erosion of authentic, traditional cultures and the imposition of Western standards in everything. Globalism has raised international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Health Organization, the aforementioned World Economic Forum, and others. All these organizations, which increasingly include some organizations that act as specialized agencies of the United Nations (UNESCO, for example), have in common an extremely low level of transparency of their actions and a very undemocratic way of making decisions. Over time, it became more and more obvious that all these "world" organizations are under the strict control of the Western Zionist and Anglo-Saxon plutocratic elites, and that they serve only them. Globalist organizations are nothing but the foundation of some new totalitarian world order and its world government, the last stage of global enslavement and destruction of all free nations.

One of the greatest ideological evils of the modern world, the vanguard and striking fist of liberalism, is LGBT ideology combined with so-called gender ideology — absolute idiocy that defies simple scientific facts, common sense, and traditional values. Those two combined ideologies and their "values" are best accepted in Western Europe, while quite expectedly, in Russia, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, they encounter very strong resistance. In most cases, aggressive LGBT and gender propaganda in those conservative societies only led to an increase in intolerance in relation to "sodomites", which is a term that is very often used in those areas for members of the so-called "LGBT community". This intolerance is particularly related to gender ideology, which denies the obvious fact to every normal human being, namely that there are only two sexes: male and female, and that their purpose is to establish a family on the foundations of mutual love and respect between a woman and a man and to raise offspring in order to prolong the human species. Instead of something that is obvious to everyone, gender ideology propagates that the biological sex that human beings are born with does not necessarily correspond to the gender that they "feel" they belong to. Thus, Pandora's box was opened to the whole world, although it should have remained closed forever and where it belongs — in psychiatric clinics. Facebook thus, now recognizes 58 different "genders", other "experts" came up with the figure of 72 "genders," and the bidding is still going on, so the figure of 100 "genders" has already been exceeded. Gender ideology "experts" such as Diane Ehrensaft, a "gender-affirming" therapist notorious in conservative circles, advocate that children can be given pseudo-medical diagnoses such as "gender dysphoria" — a "mismatch" between biological sex and gender identity, while they are still in preschool. This "diagnosis" later serves as a legal basis for changing the sex of very young children, which is absolutely monstrous. All this transgender insanity, together with the already standard demands of the LGBT population for various privileges, such as the legalization of same-sex marriages and the right to adopt children, is very brazenly and aggressively imposed on all the nations of the planet while totally ignoring their cultural and religious traditions. For example, the European Union allocated 31 million euros for integration, or more precisely, the imposition of LGBT values in traditionally very conservative and patriarchal Armenia, whose national value system is definitely diametrically opposed to the ideology of sodomites. Such violence against traditionalist societies is possible only if a nation has previously fallen under the strong political influence of the collective West and becomes completely economically dependent on it. In that case, such a country renounces its traditional culture and its values, in exchange for new loans that only lead to further indebtedness and de facto slavery. Such a nation can no longer stand up to the ideological pressures of the collective West, no matter how mindless and shameless they are. The people of such countries, of course, strive to preserve their traditional values at all costs, and all this leads to sharp internal conflicts and political instability.

Although the official representatives of the LGBT+ movement firmly and persistently deny it, like with one of their official documents known as the "Pedosexual Statement" of the LGBT Foundation, independent research, such as that conducted by the Regent University School of Law in Virginia, indicates that there is overwhelming evidence that confirms the belief that homosexuality is directly related to pedophilia. This research shows that children are not only the target of recruitment with the aim of constantly expanding the LGBT community, but unfortunately, they are also the object of homosexuals' sexual desire and brutal sexual abuse. The data obtained by Regent University, which refers to the USA, are more than frightening: for every homosexual male child abuser, there are 150.2 abused boys, while for every heterosexual male child abuser, there are 19.8 girls. Steve Baldwin, the executive director of the Council for National Policy in Washington, DC, reacted to these studies, with the assertion that homosexuality more than obviously destroys the foundations of civilization, by destroying the traditional family and the normal childhood of children. As for pedophilia itself, it is openly promoted under the euphemism, in fact, the synonym "pedosexuality", as a completely normal form of human sexuality, which should therefore be completely socially acceptable. In the liberal West, there has been a decades-long continuum of legal attempts to legalize pedophilia by gradually lowering the age a child must be to give legally valid consent to sex — without, of course, the right of parents to intervene to protect their children. The LGBT movement threatens children's mental and physical health in many ways, but by far the most by the already mentioned promotion of transgenderism and gender changes, even among preschool children. And is gender change even possible, and what does it entail? The surgical butchering of one's genitalia and "hormone therapy" do not result in real gender reassignment because the DNA of every cell of a person who has undergone such a brutal procedure still bears irrefutable evidence of the person's actual, natural sex. Gender reassignment is, in fact, absolutely impossible and must be considered medical malpractice and a crime, especially if it is carried out on immature children who are easily manipulated. In order to keep all this madness alive, terrifying, persistent, continuous, and ubiquitous propaganda and indoctrination of the entire society is carried out in the countries of the collective West, and these are projects in which millions of dollars are invested in the midst of the global economic crisis.

The refusal of individuals to accept LGBT and gender dogmas is slowly beginning to bring with it certain consequences — often legal ones as well. Refusal to participate in LGBT activities is also seen as an illegal denial and violation of human rights. A good example of the insanity of the system that promotes the LGBT and transgender agendas is the case of 16-year-old Canadian student Josh Alexander. He was suspended last month from St. Joseph's Catholic High School, only because, in accordance with his Baptist religious upbringing, he claimed that there are only two genders — male and female, which was perceived as psychological bullying and harassment of transgender students. Because of this kind of terror carried out by the liberal states of the West, parents increasingly accept the LGBT and gender "education" of their children, which starts earlier and earlier without much resistance. For example, when it was announced in October last year that the first LGBT-themed kindergarten would be opened in Berlin's Schöneberg district this spring instead of a boycott, the number of applications was very high from day one. Obviously, in the countries of the collective West, and especially in Western Europe, "voluntary" participation in LGBT activities is increasingly becoming a moral and even legal obligation of every individual, which is better not to oppose. There are other examples as well. On the other side of the ocean, parents reacted violently in June of last year when it was learned that New York City spent over $200,000 for the "expenses" of drag queens who read books to children in public schools without the parents' knowledge or approval, all within the framework of a program promoting the inclusiveness of "transgender" people. A few years ago, half-naked transsexual dancers, also without the parents' knowledge, performed dirty dances in front of preschool children in the Manhattan public school talent show. Even Disney joined the campaign to promote LGBT ideology by deciding that as many as 50% of the characters in their cartoons must be members of one of the myriad genders of the LGBT population. All this, for the umpteenth time, confirms the thesis that liberalism really wants to get hold of our children and mold them to their will.

Even sports have not been spared from the onslaught of LGBT propaganda precisely because they are part of the traditional upbringing of children, which helps them grow into healthy and strong young adults. So Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, announced in December last year that in the future, 10% of the composition of all national teams will have to be members of the "LGBTQI+ community". On the other hand, the insanity of transgender ideology has allowed biological men like transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, despite fully justified and very loud protests, not only to compete in female competition but to absolutely dominate it. At a time when the liberal West is ruled by twisted "political correctness", which considers traditional courtship by men, no matter how polite and cultural, as sexual harassment of women that can be severely punished, Lia Thomas, as a "transgender woman", is entitled to use the women's locker room and further humiliate female swimmers by deliberately exposing the nudity of his unmodified male genitalia in front of them — which is exactly what happened last year and was not considered sexual harassment at all. Somewhat similarly, a 31-year-old Dutchman, now named Marjolein Schepers, decided last year to identify himself as a minor girl, and, in cooperation with doctors, began taking "hormonal therapy" to soon become a member of the female teenage football team. So a mature man, to his undisguised delight, now shares a changing room and showers with 15-year-old girls. The list of such deeply disturbing abnormalities is, unfortunately, getting longer every day and begins to drag on endlessly…

The question that cannot be avoided is: why do plutocratic elites invest so much money and effort in promoting the LGBT and gender agendas? It would be more than naive to believe that this is really about humanism, altruism, and the struggle for human rights. Are there not enough homeless and seriously ill people in this world, even in the most developed countries of the West, who need all kinds of help? Is there no reason to improve the rights of workers and provide completely free education to children and young people who deserve it because of their giftedness, success, and invested effort? Isn't there room to improve existing healthcare systems? As for the promotion of transgender ideology, there is no doubt that overpriced "hormonal therapies" and "gender reassignment" surgeries at the expense of taxpayers are becoming lucrative businesses for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, and among the profiteers, there are certainly other profitable businesses such as the porn and sex industries. Regarding the health insurance industry, one more thing becomes very clear. By declaring the former psychiatric diagnoses to be completely normal forms of behavior, which not only do not need any treatment but are even desirable, millions of dollars in savings are achieved, as insurance companies are not obliged to cover the costs of treating the insured. Of course, this leads to the denial of psychiatric and other necessary medical assistance. Instead, LGBT forms of behavior are deliberately popularized, and they, therefore, spread like infectious diseases. However, in addition to the already listed goals of liberal ideologies, one of the most obvious and important goals of such an intense promotion of LGBT and gender ideology is depopulation, apparently, a sacred dogma that plutocratic elites propagate even openly. Elites of course want to control all global resources and the workforce size, and they seem to think that there is really no need to share resources with "useless eaters", so it is necessary to reduce the number of people several times, regardless of whether it was the infamous "golden billion" or only half a billion as it was written on the Georgia Guidestones, a granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia — whoever financed the erection of that fabulously expensive "monument": Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Satanists, or members of some other powerful secret society. Even if we were to choose to completely ignore all the numerous conspiracy theories, the vociferous advocates of monstrous liberal theories such as the aforementioned Harari are more than enough to state with great certainty that the threat of some new technological slave-owning system is looming over humanity. That dystopian system of the future would be based on some new diabolical economic arithmetic that is in contradiction with all the needs of man as a free political and spiritual being and "homo religiosus".

That is why there is no doubt that the main ideological enemies of Western liberalism, which is, in essence, crypto-satanic pseudo-liberal fascism, are traditional and original religious and philosophical teachings, primarily Christianity and Islam, both because of the number of their believers and the geopolitical space they cover. By abusing the practically unlimited political power that gives the liberal ideology in the states of the collective West full control over the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, its advocates and ideologues very brazenly and without any hesitation go so far as to openly try to modify the original religious teachings sacred to believers. The goal is to create "liberalized religions", whose essence would be diametrically opposed to the values of classical religions. One of the very recognizable trends of such desecration of classical religions is the attempt to create LGBT-friendly Christianity and LGBT-friendly Islam in order to oppose them to the original and traditional religious teachings. In addition, the idea of merging the two new LGBT-friendly religions into a single monstrous, globalist, syncretist concept such as Chrislam is being considered, which is basically the idea of creating an artificial world religion for the purposes of the sinister projects of the plutocratic elites. Can we then be surprised that not so long ago, in the Church of St. Paul in Malmö, Sweden, the first purely LGBT altar with a blasphemous painting appeared? The painting called "Paradise" depicted naked, same-sex couples in passionate, loving embraces in a place that represents a kind of homosexual "Garden of Eden". A similar scandal occurred in Germany, in central Berlin, on July 1 of last year, when the imams of the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque made a very strange decision. A huge flag in the colors of the rainbow was unfurled over the windows of the mosque right before the start of Friday prayers, with the aim of "providing support" to the LGBT community in that city. Despite the fact that this is a scandalous and, for the absolute majority of believers, very offensive perversion of traditional teachings, protests in this and similar cases are generally lukewarm or nonexistent. However, if no one confronts such incidents, which are only the beginning of a massive global campaign, this worrying trend could become the rule and destroy all traditional religions because "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" — whoever said it first, Edmund Burke or John F. Kennedy.

All three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have a very negative attitude not only towards homosexuality but also towards any other type of sexuality that would be practiced outside of the traditional marital union of a man and a woman, and of course, they recognize the existence of only two natural sexes. However, this does not hinder the promoters of liberalism, who, using the numerous available levers of power, exert strong and continuous pressure on all religious communities so that they incorporate the heretical dogmas of LGBT and gender ideologies into their teachings. So far, the greatest "success" has been achieved among Protestant churches, excluding conservative Evangelical churches, which successfully resist all pressures. Unfortunately, Lutheran, United, and all 20 Reformist Protestant churches have completely opened up to the LGBT community, their ideology, and their practices.

As for the Anglican Communion, which is the third largest in Christianity after the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Christianity, a schism began in it due to the bitter disagreement of the bishops precisely over the attempts of the LGBT and gender agenda to penetrate this religious community. The conservative Global Southern Communion of Anglican Churches no longer recognizes the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, as "first among equals" following the decision of the Church's General Synod to allow Anglican priests to bless same-sex spouses. At the beginning of February this year, the Church of England, the mother church of the Anglican Communion "inspired" by gender ideology and its vocabulary, made another huge mistake. Namely, the Church of England decided to depart from the traditional teachings on the basis of which believers addressed God as "Our Father" with the use of the male pronouns "He" and "Him". Instead, the use of gender-neutral terms and pronouns was proposed, which caused justifiable anger among believers. Much earlier, the Anglican Communion also departed from tradition by allowing women to be ordained as priests. That this great Christian church is in a big spiritual, moral, and theological crisis was definitively confirmed by the ordination of the first transgender Anglican priests in Australia in February last year and in England in January this year.

The powerful Catholic Church has readily and widely opened its doors to all disillusioned Anglican priests, even if they are married, and allows them to remain married as new Catholic priests, although according to a centuries-old rule, Catholic priests unless they are missionaries must live in strict celibacy. However, the Catholic Church also has its big problems, such as numerous scandals with pedophile and homosexual priests, which could probably be the reverse of celibacy as a restraint of natural human needs. Pope Francis has shown himself to be far more liberal than all his predecessors, and in February of this year, he made several very conciliatory statements about members of the LGBT community who are part of the Catholic Church, stressing that God is a father who does not give up his children. Admittedly, he very clearly emphasized that homosexuality is a great sin but not a crime, which is why he called for the repeal of the law that criminalizes LGBT people. However, at the beginning of March this year, Pope Francis finally dared to take a very firm position regarding transgenderism as an ideology, calling it very dangerous and its followers naive if they seek any progress in it. Also advocating for the Catholic Church to show pastoral care for such people, the Pope nevertheless emphasized that gender ideology is as dangerous and destructive as nuclear weapons and genetic manipulation and that it is part of the "global war" against marriage and the family. This way, Pope Francis really touched on the essence of the liberal agenda. Nevertheless, the general impression is that the Catholic Church is now at some kind of turning point in which it will either return to strict original principles or fall into the abyss of liberal ideologies, where new schisms and ruin await it.

Islam, with about 2 billion believers, and Orthodox Christianity, with close to 260 million followers, despite the enormous efforts of Western power centers, show great resistance to all attempts to incorporate LGBT values and gender ideology into the teachings of these two very conservative religious communities. There are very few Islamic and Orthodox Christian theologians who, in relation to the LGBT community, have a slightly more lenient attitude, which, however, is still firmly based on traditional teachings. That is why it was decided to break and destroy Islam by artificially generating fanatical sectarian hatred and starting bloody conflicts between the members of the two major branches of Islam and their numerous schools. It is about the semi-secret operations of the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, which finance and arm radical "Islamist" organizations. On the one hand, it can lead to violent sectarian conflicts among Muslims that can last for decades, and on the other hand, the reputation of Islam is damaged both in the world and among Muslim believers themselves. Namely, Islam, which is really a religion of peace and spirituality thanks to extremists financed by the West, is deliberately and maliciously equated with terrorism, extremism, and violence. In Muslim communities in the West, intensive LGBT and gender propaganda is carried out at the same time, which, at least among ordinary Muslim believers, has allegedly begun to yield results in terms of greater tolerance among Muslims towards members of the LGBT community, but not towards what they do. However, it will be more likely that Muslims in the West simply try to avoid conflict with the governments of the countries in which they live in fear of being accused of radicalism.

Orthodox Christianity is fragmented, weakened, and destroyed in a somewhat different way: by the deliberate creation of schisms and disputes of a political nature between the canonically recognized autocephalous churches, which are organized according to historical, territorial, or national principles, and the artificial creation of non-canonical churches motivated by purely political decisions. Three years ago, the CIA, probably very deliberately, with the intention of causing a stir in Orthodox Christendom, for the first time publicly released documents about its earlier connections with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, at a time when the Ecumenical Patriarch was Athenagoras I. During the Second World War, Athenagoras I voluntarily began cooperation with the American secret services and continued to work for them until his death in 1972. Although there is no concrete evidence that the current Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I is a CIA collaborator like his predecessor, the fact that he is in a protracted conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church, against whom he leads his personal, fierce crusade, makes him, at the very least, a person who is the favorite of the collective West and who is also in an ideal place to deliver Orthodox Christianity into the hands of the collective West. Thus, Bartholomew I, beyond his canonical authority, declared the autocephaly of the non-canonical so-called "Orthodox Church of Ukraine" in addition to the already existing and recognized canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which operates under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. That new, non-canonical Ukrainian church was previously created under the patronage of the collective West by the unification of two schismatic, unrecognized, self-proclaimed religious organizations. All this encouraged the Latvian parliament to declare the Latvian Orthodox Church autocephalous, even though it had absolutely no right to do so. These precedents pave the way for further fragmentation of Orthodox Christianity in order to facilitate its union with the Vatican in the name of ecumenism. In the second phase, it would lead to the fall of that "United Christendom" under the control of liberal plutocratic elites and their ideologies. The goal is that in the end, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is beyond the reach of the collective West, remains completely isolated, as weak as possible, and deprived of the great reputation and influence it once had in the Orthodox Christian world.

The collective West's war against traditional religions has several goals. The first is certainly the modification of thousand-year-old traditions and their destruction by incorporating modern, pseudo-liberal, crypto-satanic dogmas into them. This further inevitably leads to dramatic, tectonic splits, the disintegration of traditional religious organizations, followed by deep disappointments of true believers, which would bring liberal ideology very close to giving its greatest enemy, traditional religions, a deadly blow with the intention of opening space for numerous syncretistic, crypto-satanic, openly satanic, and numerous other bizarre and unorthodox cults and sects that the centers of power in the West will be able to easily manage and consequently, exercise complete control over individuals. Western liberalism is the great evil of the modern world, which, with the enormous financial resources of the plutocratic elites behind it, can afford excellent political marketing that is not so easy to resist. That pseudo-liberal fascism has elevated itself above humanity and its real freedoms and needs. Like some huge, global Procrustean bed, western liberalism either cuts off the heads of thinking people who are too big for it or, by stretching, breaks those who are ordinary, simple, natural, and therefore too small. And yet, thanks to tireless and highly professional propaganda, the ideological products of liberalism, in their very attractive packages of false promises and fake freedoms without responsibility and consequences, coated with a sweet glaze of hedonism in the pink color of debauchery, successfully conceal their deeply impure and disgusting essence and the bitterness of slavery in total ignorance and dehumanization.

In his historic speech on September 30 last year, at a ceremony in the Kremlin, on the occasion of the unification of the Donetsk People's Republic, the Luhansk People's Republic, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions with the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly hinted at the birth of a new and better world based on the old and well-verified values. By talking about Russia fully returning to its conservative traditions, Vladimir Putin has, accidentally or not, encouraged numerous other Eurasian, African, and Latin American states that are in more or less open conflict with the collective West to do the same. A large number of these nations are today at a major historical turning point where they will be forced to make a final choice. They now have the option of choosing to join formal and informal alliances of equal and sovereign nations that cherish traditional values, with all the inevitable difficulties and costs of such a choice. The second, seemingly easier path, at the end of which the highest price of all will be paid, is the acceptance of integration with the collective West, which inevitably leads to the death of all nations and their traditional cultures. After what happened to the nations of the European Union, not a single nation will consciously choose its disappearance, and therefore, nothing will be able to stop the awakening of a new, brave, and unconquerable world. It is a world that is ready to resist and defy American hegemony and Western imperialism at any cost because it clearly sees what fate would befall it otherwise. The seeds of the new ideology are germinating in the hearts of billions of ordinary people, and although this ideology is still nameless and informal, it will soon be able to not only give itself a good name but also clearly define its goals. Unlike Western liberalism, whose power lies in brutal financial and military power that is manifested by violence against nature in and around people, the strength of that new ideology that is being born before our eyes will rest precisely on the old, conservative, traditional values that have been tempered for thousands of years and which the collective West has so lightly rejected and is now zealously trying to destroy. That ideology of the free world is based on simple common sense, nobility, and the love of small, ordinary people instead of the greed and madness of members of powerful elites who strive to become gods and rule by creating some new unnatural laws. In this ideology, a woman and a man, mom and dad, get married because they love and respect each other and because they want to raise children in the warmth of the home in the same old, good, proven way that our ancestors have done since the beginning of time. That brave, unconquerable world resolutely rejects Americanization, Westernization, and the vile globalist agenda, whose essence is deeply neocolonial from the very beginning. It is a world that preserves and nurtures the endless wealth of its traditional national cultures and religions, striving for true freedom and equality of sovereign nations, respect, and brotherhood among people and nations. It is that multipolar world that rises unstoppably above the shackles of slavery that were intended for it and contemptuously rejects chauvinism, racism, and extremism by building new, strong, and magnificent bridges of trust and cooperation through Eurasian, African, and Latin American integrations. It is that brave, unconquerable world of the near future that will win!

5. Syrians Have Every Right to Attack U.S. Occupiers

By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

The western world is solemnly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion by blindly following the US into more conflict and militarism while repeating all the same kinds of mass media malpractice.

* * *

If you think it's a coincidence that the western world suddenly got super–duper interested in China's human rights record right when China began threatening US planetary domination, then you're a bootlicking moron who deserves to be shamed in public.

A leaked 2017 State Department memo explicitly acknowledged that it's US government policy to ignore the human rights violations of US-aligned nations while attacking them in nations like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Stop buying into this performance.

China has been sorting out China's internal affairs for thousands of years; they don't suddenly need help from a bunch of white stuffed shirts in Washington, London and Canberra just because a few sociopathic think tankers say so. Leave China's issues to the Chinese to address.

* * *

People who live in the Middle East have every right to attack the occupying forces there whose presence they oppose, and those occupying forces do not have any legitimate right to retaliate.

Two more #US bases in #Syria attacked by #drones. #cdnpoli #SyriaWar #ukrainetoday #warinukraine #Turkiye #NATO https://t.co/MFmuatHthK

— Bruce Dayton (@BruceDayton) March 25, 2023

Every American who is killed or injured by those opposing US military occupations was killed or injured because the US empire put them there. What happens to them is the empire's fault, not the fault of those rightfully resisting a hostile occupation.

Claims that attacks on US occupiers in Syria are "backed" by Iran should never be taken on blind faith, but to be clear it is entirely legitimate for Iran to involve itself in this conflict. Iran is an ally of Syria and is in Syria with the Syrian government's permission; neither of these things are true of the US. Perhaps more importantly, Iran is in the Middle East, and therefore has infinitely more legitimacy than the US in making the Middle East its business.

* * *

Even if everything US pundits and politicians are saying about TikTok is true (and of course it isn't), it's still far less scary than what the US government does to us with American apps, and it's still far less scary than giving the White House massive new censorship powers. If you live anywhere under the thumb of the US empire, then any information-gathering or censorship policies the US government sets for itself have real relevance to your life, because the US government has actual power over you. The Chinese government does not. This is obvious to anyone who doesn't have soup for brains.

It's crazy how the First Amendment explicitly says "Congress shall make no law" abridging freedom of speech or freedom of the press, and yet congress is preparing to do literally exactly that with all American TikTok users.

It's also crazy that US congressmen who don't understand any technology more advanced than a shovel and think the internet comes from magic beans are making decisions about online platforms that affect everyone.

Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) asks TikTok CEO Shou Chew: "Does TikTok access the home WiFi network?" https://t.co/Fmv8MED8z0 pic.twitter.com/xwrYuSn3jE

— Bloomberg (@business) March 23, 2023

* * *

The problem is not that Australia's corrupt media are saying the nation will have to follow the US into war with China, the problem is that they're almost certainly correct. This means Australians must demand we immediately exit our alliances with the US that would lead to this. They're not being dishonest when they say we'll have to follow if the US goes to war against China, they're being dishonest in their failure to immediately begin asking "Okay, so how do we GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BAT SHIT INSANE SITUATION RIGHT THIS VERY INSTANT?"

Because that's the only sane response to finding out that your nation will have to go to war with its primary trading partner to facilitate some dopey agendas cooked up in Washington, Arlington and Langley: asking how the fuck do we get ourselves the fuck out of this situation? What do we need to do? What alliances need to be shredded? Whose offices do we need to storm and whose desks do we need to pound on? Failure to ask these questions is malpractice. Because going to war with China will destroy our country. Absolutely destroy it. It cannot happen.

The Australian media aren't criminal in telling us the US is going to drag us into a war of unimaginable horror, the Australian media are criminal for telling us we just need to accept that and get comfortable with the idea. Fuck you. No. Get us out of this World War III trap immediately.

Never in history has hard-hitting, adversarial journalism been so urgently needed in Australia as it is right now, and never in history have the Australian media been less fit for the job.

If you're wondering why I've been writing so much about my home country lately instead of focusing on the hub of the empire in the US like I usually do, that's why. It's because our worthless, bootlicking press aren't doing their fucking jobs right when it's most urgently important that they do.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

6. The Holy Land And Us: BBC Nakba Series Obscures Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

The documentary hides the real villains: Western governments that left Jews with only one credible escape route from European antisemitism, by dispossessing Palestinians

By Jonathan COOK

The BBC's The Holy Land and Us, a two-part exploration of Israel's founding that concluded this week, has been what pundits like to call "brave television". The first documentary featured testimony of a notorious massacre by a Zionist militia of more than 100 Palestinians, many of them women and children, in early 1948, weeks before Israeli statehood was declared

In a five-star review, the Guardian newspaper termed the programme "taboo-busting". And certainly from a Palestinian perspective, it broke new ground on mainstream television.

Unlike dozens of later massacres committed by Zionist forces that were hushed up, some of which were even worse, the atrocity at the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem, was widely publicised at the time. In fact, the numbers of those slaughtered there were inflated, including famously by the New York Times, to more than 200 Palestinians.

In an age of newly available mass communications, both sides were happy for the already dreadful truth to be exaggerated. The Palestinians in the hope of attracting international attention and intervention; Israel's founders in order to terrorise more Palestinians out of their homeland so that a Jewish state could be established more easily on its ruins.

And yet today, paradoxically, hardly anyone knows about Deir Yassin – or the many hundreds of other communities from which Palestinians were driven by Israeli forces during a year-long act of national erasure. These are events Palestinians know as their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

This is presumably why the BBC's The Holy Land and Us seems so "taboo-busting". Simply identifying the Nakba as a historical event is now seen as an act of courage, so completely has it been wiped from western consciousness – just like those hundreds of Palestinian villages.

For 75 years, western politicians and media have barely acknowledged the essential context for understanding the so-called Israel-Palestine "conflict" – a context that, once stripped away, turns the story on its head. Palestinian resistance is falsely reduced to "terrorism", while continuing Israeli violence becomes simply "retaliation" and "security", as though the Palestinians started their own dispossession.

In this regard, The Holy Land and Us is a welcome exception. It does recall some of the missing historical context for today's supposedly intractable "conflict".

But at the same time, even as the BBC breaks its own self-imposed taboo, the programme-makers still manage to obfuscate and mislead.

Muddying the waters

The programme splits its story into two parallel narratives, separately featuring British Palestinians and British Jews pursuing their families' connections to the events surrounding Israel's creation in 1948.

Although this satisfies the BBC's remit for balance, it serves only to continue muddying the waters – and predictably in ways that benefit western establishments, and Israel, rather than truth and reconciliation, the programme's ostensible aim.

The Holy Land and Us presents the Palestinian and Zionist narratives as two sides of the same story. It is a tale of two peoples' conflicting claims of suffering: the survivors of the Holocaust, and the victims of the Nakba.

What is the Nakba? Day of catastrophe for Palestinians, explained

Read More »

And by turning these two historic traumas into a lachrymose competition for the western TV viewer's sympathy, the Palestinians are set up to fail – just as they did in 1948 against the superior might of the fledgling Israeli army.

The BBC's presentation of the 1948 story as a "Holocaust v Nakba" prize fight creates a false equivalence.

European Jews arrived in the Palestinians' homeland, under British patronage, to terrorise, displace, and sometimes kill, Palestinians. The Palestinians, on the other hand, stayed where they were. They had nothing to do with a strictly European Holocaust.

Israel's creation, however, required that the Palestinians no longer stay put. They had to be ethnically cleansed, and they were, in military campaigns with names such as "Operation Broom". There would be no Israel today without such operations, which is why Israel's founding fathers set out their expulsion principles in a notorious document, Plan Dalet.

And yet the term "ethnic cleansing" is notable by its absence from the programme. And for good reason.

Ethnic cleansing

What The Holy Land and Us serves to do instead – in time-honoured tradition – is prop up a self-serving western myth: of an irreconcilable conflict between two nationalisms, Israeli and Palestinian. And once again, our primary sympathies are steered towards the set of victims whose story we know rather than the victims whose story we don't.

How The Holy Land and Us manages this is illustrated in the first episode by framing the heart-rending massacre of Palestinians in Deir Yassin with a story of the descendants of a British Jew, Leonard Gantz. As the Holocaust unfolds in the heart of Europe, Gantz chooses to leave London to head to then British-ruled Palestine to help build a Jewish state.

What this entails in practice is largely airbrushed by the programme, until tensions between Palestinians and recent Jewish immigrants like Gantz explode into civil war in 1948. Many Jewish immigrants, including those who had fled the Holocaust, took part in ethnic cleansing operations against the native Palestinian population.

Aided by western powers, they managed to drive out 750,000 Palestinians from the areas that would ultimately be carved out as a Jewish state – about 80 per cent of the Palestinian population living in those areas were expelled. One of the hundreds of communities destroyed in these operations was Deir Yassin.

Gantz does not take part in that massacre. His own role in the Nakba is mainly obscured. However, an old photograph shows him wielding a machine gun nearby, in an ethnically cleansed village called Jimzu. Its 1,750 Palestinian inhabitants were driven out of the embryonic Jewish state during the Nakba.

Gantz's son, Daniel, and grandson, David, are taken by the programme-makers to the site of Jimzu. There is something deeply distasteful about the way this scene is handled by the BBC.

Tears of pride

It follows immediately after a British-Palestinian woman, Shereen, has heard gut-wrenching testimony of how members of her family were butchered in Deir Yassin by a Jewish militia, the Irgun. Two of its leaders, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, would go on to become prime ministers of Israel.

In the early stages of the Nakba, the Irgun wanted a big, well-publicised massacre – prominently of women and children – to terrorise other Palestinians and put them to flight. That was one of the reasons for selecting Deir Yassin, in addition to its strategic location close to a road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Shereen breaks down as she is told that a total of 22 members of her family were slaughtered by the Irgun.

But almost immediately the narrative switches back to Daniel and David, who learn of the exploits of Gantz in Jimzu, where Palestinian civilians were attacked, killed and expelled in Operation Dani.

Gantz's involvement in Dani, however, is presented by an Israeli historian who joins them simply as heroic. Anat Stern smiles as she announces that the empty site on which they are standing used to be "an Arab village".

Stern concludes by telling the father and son they should "be proud" of Gantz for choosing to come to the region to fight, to a place he did not know, and that he "contributed to the creation of the state of Israel". Daniel and David hug as they break down, too, though in their case in tears of pride.

The Guardian's reviewer calls this the "key moment" of The Holy Land and Us, writing: "Daniel's pride and gratitude are profound, shared by millions and afforded the greatest respect by the programme."

And yet what is being prioritised and celebrated by the programme – and, if the Guardian is any barometer, by at least some among western audiences – is nothing less than the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of Palestinians. Of innocents, who had nothing to do with Europe's Holocaust.

The Jewish participants still seem to be cocooned from this ugly history, even while taking part.

In the second episode, Rob Rinder believes his great uncle was engaging in the Judaic principle of tikkun olam, or "repairing the world", by becoming an armed member of a kibbutz, built to dispossess Palestinian tenant farmers close to Lake Tiberias. That same kibbutz, Sha'ar HaGolan, still bars all Palestinians from living in it, even those who today have a deeply degraded Israeli citizenship.

The Guardian review observes: "The Holy Land and Us follows British Jews whose family histories pivot around Israel and the impulse to defend it."

But who were British Jews like Gantz "defending" Israel from? The only possible answer is the region's native Palestinian population. "Defence" here refers to acts of ethnic cleansing.

Ongoing Nakba

It is hard to imagine quite how offensive this presentation of the events of 1948 must look to a Palestinian like Shereen – and how shameful it should be for the BBC, the Guardian and for us as viewers to celebrate it – had not westerners been conditioned to be so ignorant and insensitive.

None of this is by accident. The BBC, like the rest of the establishment media, continues to direct our attention away from where true responsibility lies for the slaughter at Deir Yassin. It is not chiefly with Zionist Jews like Gantz or those who fled the Holocaust.

In fact, though the programme again obscures this point, the fact is the last place most of the Jews fleeing the European Holocaust wanted to end up was Palestine. Their destination of choice was the United States.

But just as with European leaders of that time, a mood of antisemitism among US leaders kept the doors locked to most of these Jewish refugees.

They came to Palestine because the region was viewed by the western powers as a dumping ground for an unwanted ethnic group. The "Jewish problem" could be solved by making the Palestinians pay the price instead, as Britain's Balfour Declaration had proposed back in 1917.

And into the bargain, the West got a proxy, dependent, militarised Jewish state projecting western power into an Arab, oil-rich Middle East.

What the programme should have done was to highlight the real villains. It was racist western regimes that left European Jews with only one credible route of escape from western antisemitism: by dispossessing Palestinians.

Instead, The Holy Land and Us continues hero-worshipping Zionist Jews as ethnic cleansers.

When presented with these criticisms, a spokesperson for the BBC stated: "The series aims to consider both viewpoints and experiences of these events equally, as seen through the personal perspectives of the individuals taking part."

The same political trajectory continues to this day, even if Israeli Jews are ethnically cleansing Palestinians a little more incrementally than they did in 1948 and, again in 1967, when they seized the rest of historic Palestine. Israel is still there serving as an outpost of the West, projecting western power into Arab lands.

Palestinians call their experience as a people the "ongoing Nakba" for a reason. Their suffering and dispossession never ended.

Truth and reconciliation

The Guardian review asks an inadvertently revealing question: will this documentary about Israel and Palestine "make viewers on each side sympathise with the other?"

But while Palestinians can offer their sympathy to Jews over the crimes committed by Europeans in the Holocaust, sympathy is not what is required from Israeli Jews or from those, like Gantz's descendants, who take pride in the Nakba.

They need to face up to the historic crimes committed to create Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians' homeland, and the crimes that continue to this day to further dispossess and oppress Palestinians. That demands truth and reconciliation, not sympathy.

Will Palestinians have to wait another 75 years to hear the BBC concede that they live under Israeli apartheid rule, just as they have had to wait 75 years for the BBC to admit that the Nakba lies at the root of the Israel-Palestine "conflict"?

For the sake of Palestinians and Israelis, let us fervently hope not.

 

7. Minsk, Moscow & The Moral Olympics

Lofty ideals that were an integral part of the ancient Olympics and that underwrite the founding of the modern Olympic games are not for NATO.

In assessing NATO's ongoing efforts to terrorise Russian and Belarusian athletes, we must include Minsk sparrows, Muscovite goalkeepers, Nazi paratroopers, African Americans and many more in our calculus to make sense of this latest bout of naked NATO fascism.

Let's start with the late POTUS Nixon, who had the singular honour of welcoming the Soviet Olympic gymnasts, Olga Korbut, the Minx Sparrow included, to the White House. Those young Russian and Belarusian women revolutionised gymnastics and, though the pint-sized Korbut was far from their best performer, she stole the hearts of the world, mine and POTUS Nixon's included because of her demeanour in both victory and defeat. Not only that but Nixon made the critical point that whatever political and other differences existed between the Soviet and NATO political elites, those differences had nothing to do with young athletes like Korbut (or Valieva), whose waking hours are necessarily dedicated to finessing their chosen craft.

Korbut's gravity-defying stunts on the uneven bars entranced the world, as did her tears when she lost the gold medal through basic mistakes that form part of the grit of such high octane contests. The importance of Korbut's tears is they were replicated by figure skater Kamila Valieva, when an unprecedented bout of bullying by the BBC and other thuggish NATO outlets caused the young Russian teenager to slip up at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. In one of a number of such stupid propaganda whoppers, NATO wants us to believe that Korbut's trainers consoled their young athlete, whereas Valieva's attacked their own young prodigy.

The global importance of Russian Valieva is that, had she not been so unscrupulously terrorised by NATO's media thugs, she might have taken the Beijing games by storm, much as Belarusian Korbut took the 1972 Munich Olympics and, just like Korbut, who inspired literally millions of young girls to make gymnastics their sport of choice, so also might Valieva have done the same not only for figure skating but for all that is good in sport and in life itself.

But such lofty ideals that were an integral part of the ancient Olympics and that underwrite the founding of the modern Olympic games are not for NATO. Far better to exclude and bully young girls like Valieva for the crime of being Russian, for being, in short, untermensch.

On the subject of untermensch, NATO likes to lie how Jesse Owens defied Hitler at the 1936 Olympic by winning four gold medals. Not only did Hitler not care a whit about that or, if truth be told, about sport in general, but Herr Hitler himself had an excellent 1936 Olympics, as Germany topped the medals' table (101 medals to the Americans' 57 and 14 for Great Britain) but the legendary film director Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia was universally acclaimed, something that Owens never enjoyed, especially not in his native U.S.A.

Although Owens pipped Germany's Nazi saluting Luz Long for gold in the High Jump, Owens credits his victory to tactical advice Long gave him in the preliminary rounds. Although Long's friendship with Owens is captured in both Riefenstahl's Olympia, and in Owns' own accounts, it is worth recalling how both Long and Owens fared after Berlin.

Long was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but was captured in Sicily July 1943 by the sporting British, who bled him to death over the following four days. Olympics godfather Avery Brundage, meanwhile, forced Owens to race all over Europe, in a scam that enriched Brundage and his crew but did not put a single, solitary dime into the pockets of Owens, who was ostracised thereafter and forced to run races against horses to put bread on his table. When Black Power protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos did their 1968 protest, Owens was wheeled out, Uncle Tom style, to make them behave. Both Carlos and Smith, along with Australian silver medalist Peter Norman, who helped their protests, were persecuted by the top brass of their respective countries for decades after their peaceful protest; they were the Valievas of their day.

As, of course, was Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, who won gold in the 1960 Rome Olympics in the light heavyweight division but whose toughest fights were not against fellow boxers but against the same dark forces that tried to crush Smith, Norman and Carlos when they were not slaughtering Vietnamese children.

Although Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, is credited with giving Hitler's Aryan ideology a black eye by defeating Germany's Max Schmeling in their 1938 bout, it is worth noting that Schmeling financially supported the Brown Bomber in later life and that Schmeling was drafted as a paratrooper into Hitler's Luftwaffe, before being incapacitated by hostile fire during the Battle of Crete.

After fellow Luftwaffe paratrooper Bert Trautman ended up as a prisoner of war in England, he became a professional goalkeeper, before ending up as Manchester City's man between the sticks where he starred in the 1955/6 FA CUP final, despite having a broken neck.

Although Trautman eventually became a Manchester City legend, he had to endure massive protests for being a "Nazi" at a time when NATO's media were slamming the West German team (1954 World Cup winners) and Germans in general for not being human. Russia's legendary Lev Yashin dissented and claimed, rightly, that only Trautman was in the same class as himself. Given what a force of nature Yashin was and given his own tribulations during the Battle for Moscow, no higher praise could be lavished on Trautman.

As regards the average English football supporters, they just wanted to see brilliant goalkeeping, the type Yashin and Trautman epitomised. Indeed, when COVID closed down their own English leagues, the more diehard supporters switched to following the Belarusian league, which continued business as usual. Were that to happen today, God knows what rough justice NATO would demand for England's armchair football supporters for collaborating with Belarusian athletes.

Then take Russian tennis icon Anastasia Potapova's massive crime of wearing a Spartak Moscow top. As Potapova is only 21 and a brilliant athlete in her own right, it is only natural that she would have a passing interest in one of Russia's most successful football franchises rather than, say, Poland's far right ultras Iga Światek knows a thing or two about. If Poland's Iga Światek had instead concentrated on her own game, instead of denigrating Potapova's sartorial choices, she might not have so ignominiously lost her own tennis match to Kazakhstan's Elena Rybakina. But then, when Polish and Ukrainian Nazis cannot differentiate a Russian flag from a French flag, folk like Potapova are best just getting on with improving their own game and letting clowns like Światek cackle on.

For cackling and brown envelopes is what all NATO's sporting enforcers are all about. Barring Valieva and her fellow athletes does not serve Olympus. Rather, it serves the needs of NATO's minions assigned to destroy sport, all while hiding behind Owens, who was allowed shine in Berlin and Ali, who was discriminated in his own American home town, before being jailed for being, with Valieva, Korbut, Potapova and Comănechi the truest of Olympians by sacrificing himself for Vietnam which has only won a relatively modest five medals, as it sees the Games for the circus of NATO doping and cheating that it is.

And, though Vietnam will send another modest crew to Paris 2024, Afghanistan (a total of two bronze medals to date) might also be barred, along with Russia and Belarus. Afghanistan's crime is they have so far refused to send a women's volleyball team to Paris just to make up NATO's numbers. Although Afghan women would no doubt enhance the Games, the Afghans who, like the Vietnamese before them, have suffered from decades of NATO war crimes, have understandably other priorities, not least because NATO has stolen their financial reserves on some trumped up charge Russians would be all too familiar with.

Whether we are talking about Afghanistan, Belarus, Russia or Vietnam, NATO show themselves to be awful sports, fixated as they are on attacking Afghan and Russian women for their respective sartorial choices. Valieva, Potapova and others can, however, take solace in that they are not in Kiev, whose mayor, former heavyweight champ Vitali Klitschko, aka Dr Ironfist, would most likely have them, Olga Korbut and all of Russia's other perfectionists, strapped to lampposts, painted in the Ukrainian flag and whipped for not being Polish or Ukrainian ultras.

Although Valieva, Potapova and others were born for nobler destinies than that, they and all women like them in all sports can take solace in that the true Olympic spirit they, Ali, Schmeling, Yashin and so many others epitomise will prevail and that, like Korbut, Smith, Carlos, Norman and other true Olympians before them, future generations will salute them and call them blessed.

8. The Two Faces of Emmanuel Macron in Africa

How France's president anoints himself in lies, treachery and smear campaigns in the African continent.

African elites can no longer fake it for Macron or the French. The days of when they were obliged to humour French presidents that France still wielded its power across the continent in the post-independence period are long gone, which was proved by Macron's shameful press conference where he spoke down to the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo's president Felix Tshisekedi. With France's decline from the world stage – and in particular Africa – and the emergence of Russia and China as more serious investors in the continent, it was perhaps inevitable that a tantrum of some sort was on the cards. But with the outburst, came a baptism of lies.

The irony of that press conference though is that Macron patronized the DRC president from beginning to end, even suggesting that the African leader could not distinguish between the state and the media due to the DRC's apparent arrested development of freedom of press.

Even that was a lie. Ironically it was France's own media who failed to hold Macron to account over a cluster of other lies peddled at the conference, which the Kinshasa elite would no doubt have noted as they look back at the event. It is true that France's perspective and how it reports on African elections is seen through a paternalistic, colonial viewpoint. But Macron claiming that it was not France's fault that Rwanda currently is creating some real problems in a part of Congo – and that its militia M23, which even French lovie-duvie liberal media admit is funded by Kigali – is another insult to the intelligence of the DRC leader and his cabal of advisors. Tshisekedi outclassed Macron at the press conference and held back from saying the truth: France today is backing the Paul Kagame government in Kigali and considers it a key ally and so Macron's pitiful claims of innocence are salt in the wounds of the Congolese. Perhaps this is what the DRC president meant when he asked Macron to treat him and his people as equals. Stop lying to us and treating us like children as we know what you're doing in Rwanda.

In fact, Macron's egregious lying to African leaders is so prolific that many simply accept it as the price they have to pay to work with him. The deficit that France has in Africa now in terms of negative hegemony has left Macron with only one real policy there which is to have two distinct policies running in tandem: the narrative and the more nefarious reality. Rwanda is actually a good example how this model of diplomacy actually goes much farther back than Macron though and he is merely keeping tradition alive. While the whole world watched in horror as a genocide took place there in April 1994, France preached from a high ground and claimed it had nothing to do with the blood bath. In reality, the terror campaign which installed fear in Hutus, was created and run entirely by Mitterrand's government with his son actually in charge of the disinformation program called "Reseau Zero". The French have a lot of blood on their hands in Rwanda.

But Macron is happy to play the role of champion liar and supreme hypocrite. It's as though he was made for the job as he excels at this both in Africa and on the world stage. World leaders look at how he works so closely with Putin and yet is a chief supporter of the Ukraine war; how he ignored Wagner mercenaries for so long in Mali until they overthrew his own troops – who were there based on an even bigger lie to U.S. and the EU which was all about fighting terrorists (in reality it was about protecting French expats in French multinationals).

Many African leaders put up with the rank hypocrisy and appalling duplicity. Yet the tide is certainly turning with those who can see through the cheap trickery and patronising treatment and also those who simply say "ça suffit". Enough.

The DRC president is not the only one to openly show his fatigue with the lies which are expected to be accepted by African leaders. In Morocco, the king and his government are also making a similar stand against Macron who recently made an impressive if not heart-warming speech about his affections and respect for Morocco claiming that the recent all-time low of relations between Paris and Rabat was down to unknown individuals stirring up trouble.

"We have had several discussions, there are personal relations that are friendly and they will remain so. There are always people who try to highlight incidents, scandals in the European Parliament, and listen to topics that have been revealed by the press," he said speaking of the Moroccan king.

Remarkably, he shirked France's responsibility in the recent hostile campaign targeting Morocco at the European Parliament, stressing that his government had "nothing to do" with the parliament's adoption of a hostile resolution targeting Morocco.

"Is it the doing of the French government? No! Did France pour oil on the fire? No! We must move forward despite these controversies but finally without adding to it," he said.

Impressive stuff. But again a shocking example of how far Macron will go with his bare-faced lies and insulting colonial tutelage when talking to Africans – even to Moroccans which are considered to have an even more special history and relations with France.

Macron was in fact behind the European parliament campaign to hit Morocco as it was a close friend who is a lobbyist in Brussels who masterminded the whole thing. The media in France – the same journalists who can't even hold him and his claims to account in Africa – also kicked the Moroccans when they were down and is probably his own handiwork.

But it's so much more of a dirty game with Morocco and really gives observers a glimpse into what a Machiavellian champion of hypocrisy, lies and deceit is this odious French leader, whom the author once described in a British newspaper as a "weasel". For many Moroccans, the poor relations between France and the EU and Morocco is due to the bribery scandal which backfired on Rabat, France's reluctance to give the green light to Morocco over its bid for sovereignty of Western Sahara and of course the blanket ban on visas for Moroccans wishing to travel to France.

Could there be an even more nefarious scheme at play which justifies why Macron bans even Moroccan academics, doctors and others from the middle classes to even visit France? Does Macron have his own dirty agenda to put Morocco down?

According to one respected Moroccan academic, writing recently in Maghrebi.org, this is exactly the case. Youseff Al Kaidi claims that Morocco's success in recent years with "soft power" in Africa has given Rabat a clear advantage over Paris in Africa.

According to his article, the French General Directorate for External Security "cannot stomach the rise of another Turkey in the region". He claims that a "former French ambassador to Rabat, now retired, told Maghreb Intelligence" that "the [French] smear machine is in motion and all means are at its disposal to achieve its objective: to weaken the Kingdom of Morocco by sullying its reputation."

"This attack by the EU in general and France in particular is driven by the desire to keep Morocco hostage to European/French economic and political control. Wrenching and wriggling free from France's grip is a bitter pill for the French who have long viewed Morocco as its little French poodle" claims the professor at Sais Fes University.

But it's not only the Moroccans who believe this theory. Al Kaidi backs it up with views from U.S. congressmen. Former U.S. Congressman Michael Patrick Flanagan asserted in February that Europe's long-standing interest is in "obstructing Moroccan growth into world markets" beyond those that are "captured" by Europe, and as a result the EU negatively distorts Morocco's image on the world stage to try to maintain its consumer market share.

Given that Macron is so obsessed with trying to secure French business in Africa and his almost incestuous relationship with the EU, which he manipulates always to his own advantage (who can forget his failed attempts at trying to get the EU to punish the UK over France's fishing row with Britain leaked in a letter?), the Moroccan professor's claims of a wicked EU campaign are credible and can be linked to Macron's twofaced behaviour towards Morocco. It is clear that France's objectives are always to keep Africa poor and backward so that the former colonial ruler can exert its own 'soft power' over its elites and exploit the circumstances. And Emmanuel Macron has proved himself to be a superlative example of a treacherous French leader who presides over a country whose dark past cannot be ignored when it is viewed through the same prism of today's events with Macron's barrage of lies which he is peddling in Africa.

9. Iraq War 20 Years On… Collective Western Amnesia Over Anglo-American Crime of Century

The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after, the Western media are at it again.

This week, March 20, saw the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war launched on Iraq. The war resulted in over one million deaths and a decade of brutal military occupation. It spawned sectarian civil war, millions of displaced and destitute, and terrorism that engulfed the entire Middle East, as well as large swathes of Africa and Asia. Iraq and several other ancient nations have been destroyed because of the Anglo-American war. And it was a war based on flagrant American and British lies over alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The 20th anniversary of the U.S.-British war on Iraq, which was also supported by NATO partners, should be an occasion for proper accounting with Nuremberg-standard war crimes prosecutions of American and British political and military figures. Persons such as George W Bush, the former U.S. President, and Tony Blair, the ex-British premier, should be facing jail time for capital crimes. The current U.S. President Joe Biden should also be in the dock since his role as a senior Senator at the time was crucial in enabling the war. Also up for indictment are several Western media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post which promulgated the lies that made the case for war.

Despicably, the man who shed so much light on the crimes, publisher Julian Assange, is the one who languishes in a prison torture dungeon.

Twenty years on, there is an eerie sense of collective amnesia among Western politicians and media over the colossal war crimes associated with Iraq. It's almost as if it did not happen. The Western protagonists and their propaganda outlets have gotten away with mass murder.

This week marked another odious anniversary, which shamefully, was met with the same Western silence and indifference. On March 24, 1999, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance unilaterally began bombing former Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days. Thousands of civilians were killed in a military assault on that country – under the cynical pretext of "humanitarian protection" – which was not approved at the time by the United Nations. The bombing campaign was conducted, like the Iraq War only four years later, on the basis of unilateral action by Washington and its Western allies.

Lamentably, a glance at the calendar would throw up countless such vile anniversaries of unlawful American and Western military aggression. March 19, for example, marked the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011.

In a powerful essay by Ron Ridenour for Strategic Culture Foundation we are reminded of the extraordinary warmongering record of the United States and its imperialist partners. In terms of the number of countries invaded and the consequent death toll, including from the first use of atomic bombs, the U.S. is certainly "exceptional" for all the wrong reasons.

Yet what makes the record all the more horrendous is the impunity. The collective amnesia towards the Iraq War is perhaps the most damnable symptom of impunity in recent decades. It also exposes the rank hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the so-called "rules-based global order" that Washington and its Western minions continually spout about. The "rules-based global order" is an Orwellian blandishment for lawlessness and predation by rogue regimes that trample all over the United Nations Charter and international law.

The chronic impunity that the United States has come accustomed to in the murderous pursuit of its imperialist objectives means that it never stops its rogue state rapacity. It's a repeat offender because it never has been held to account. There is an analogy here with the way Washington relentlessly abuses the privileges bestowed on the dollar as a global reserve currency. Washington parasites off the globe by printing dollars and levying undue rights for unearned services and goods. The racket never seems to stop because there is no accountability.

Likewise, the warmongering of the United States never ceases. The blood lust of its capitalist power and imperialist needs never ceases. The criminality is permitted because in large part the Western media serve to cover up the crimes with fabricated excuses and lies. The wars in Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 60s were whitewashed as "crusades against communism" instead of being reported as the genocidal imperialist rampages that they were. The impunity from those enormous crimes then led to more wars and crimes. The Iraq War fits into this rolling context.

But there is also the historical factor of the Soviet Union and the supposed victory of the Cold War by the United States. Without a checking counterforce, the U.S. rulers became consumed with the arrogance of presumed "unipolar" dominance. It is no coincidence that after 1991, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States embarked on an even more licentious pursuit of imperialist wars and the tyrannical notion of "rules-based global order". There came in short order a state of permanent war on the planet by the U.S. and its Western allies. The wars and covert interventions led by the United States in Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, among other places, were all commensurate with the self-ordained right of expansion by the NATO alliance toward Russia. The same U.S.-led military expansionism is underway toward China.

This is the proper context by which the current war in Ukraine should be understood and assessed. As well as the relentless militarist build-up against China in the Asia-Pacific.

The United States and its NATO allies are fueling a conflict in Ukraine by pouring endless amounts of weapons into that country. The latest step to further escalation is Britain announcing it is supplying depleted uranium artillery shells to Ukraine. These toxic weapons were used by the U.S., Britain and NATO forces in former Yugoslavia and Iraq which have resulted in unprecedented cancer deaths and birth defects among civilian populations. Again, the crime of impunity is followed by more crime.

The morally bankrupt Western media lied to start the Iraq War as they did dutifully about starting other wars for their imperial masters. Twenty years after aiding and abetting the crime of the 21st century, the Western media are at it again. These organs and their grinders are trying to tell the world that Russia is an aggressor in Ukraine and that Russia and China are posing "a threat to Western democracy".

In a state visit to Moscow this week, China's President Xi Jinping and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin declared the need for earnest diplomacy to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. The Western powers and their media lackeys reacted by disparaging any such diplomacy and instead sought to vilify Russia and China as being somehow villains against global security.

It's quite easy to tell who the real villains and liars are. The Iraq War is one of many such touchstones.

10. G7 vs BRICS — Off to the Races

By Scott RITTER

Last summer, the Group of 7 (G7), a self-anointed forum of nations that view themselves as the most influential economies in the world, gathered at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to hold their annual meeting. Their focus was punishing Russia through additional sanctions, further arming of Ukraine and the containment of China.

At the same time, China hosted, through video conference, a gathering of the BRICS economic forum. Comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, this collection of nations relegated to the status of so-called developing economies focused on strengthening economic bonds, international economic development and how to address what they collectively deemed the counter-productive policies of the G7.

In early 2020, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov had predicted that, based upon purchasing power parity, or PPP, calculations projected by the International Monetary Fund, BRICS would overtake the G7 sometime later that year in terms of percentage of the global total.

(A nation's gross domestic product at purchasing power parity, or PPP, exchange rates is the sum value of all goods and services produced in the country valued at prices prevailing in the United States and is a more accurate reflection of comparative economic strength than simple GDP calculations.)

Then the pandemic hit and the global economic reset that followed made the IMF projections moot. The world became singularly focused on recovering from the pandemic and, later, managing the fallout from the West's massive sanctioning of Russia following that nation's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The G7 failed to heed the economic challenge from BRICS, and instead focused on solidifying its defense of the "rules based international order" that had become the mantra of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden.

Miscalculation   

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an ideological divide that has gripped the world, with one side (led by the G7) condemning the invasion and seeking to punish Russia economically, and the other (led by BRICS) taking a more nuanced stance by neither supporting the Russian action nor joining in on the sanctions. This has created a intellectual vacuum when it comes to assessing the true state of play in global economic affairs.

It is now widely accepted that the U.S. and its G7 partners miscalculated both the impact sanctions would have on the Russian economy, as well as the blowback that would hit the West.

Angus King, the Independent senator from Maine, recently observed that he remembers

"when this started a year ago, all the talk was the sanctions are going to cripple Russia. They're going to be just out of business and riots in the street absolutely hasn't worked …[w]ere they the wrong sanctions? Were they not applied well? Did we underestimate the Russian capacity to circumvent them? Why have the sanctions regime not played a bigger part in this conflict?"

It should be noted that the IMF calculated that the Russian economy, as a result of these sanctions, would contract by at least 8 percent. The real number was 2 percent and the Russian economy — despite sanctions — is expected to grow in 2023 and beyond.

This kind of miscalculation has permeated Western thinking about the global economy and the respective roles played by the G7 and BRICS. In October 2022, the IMF published its annual World Economic Outlook (WEO), with a focus on traditional GDP calculations. Mainstream economic analysts, accordingly, were comforted that — despite the political challenge put forward by BRICS in the summer of 2022 — the IMF was calculating that the G7 still held strong as the leading global economic bloc.

In January 2023 the IMF published an update to the October 2022 WEO,  reinforcing the strong position of the G7.  According to Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF's chief economist, the "balance of risks to the outlook remains tilted to the downside but is less skewed toward adverse outcomes than in the October WEO."

This positive hint prevented mainstream Western economic analysts from digging deeper into the data contained in the update. I can personally attest to the reluctance of conservative editors trying to draw current relevance from "old data."

Fortunately, there are other economic analysts, such as Richard Dias of Acorn Macro Consulting, a self-described "boutique macroeconomic research firm employing a top-down approach to the analysis of the global economy and financial markets." Rather than accept the IMF's rosy outlook as gospel, Dias did what analysts are supposed to do — dig through the data and extract relevant conclusions.

After rooting through the IMF's World Economic Outlook Data Base, Dias conducted a comparative analysis of the percentage of global GDP adjusted for PPP between the G7 and BRICS, and made a surprising discovery: BRICS had surpassed the G7.

This was not a projection, but rather a statement of accomplished fact: BRICS was responsible for 31.5 percent of the PPP-adjusted global GDP, while the G7 provided 30.7 percent. Making matters worse for the G7, the trends projected showed that the gap between the two economic blocs would only widen going forward.

The reasons for this accelerated accumulation of global economic clout on the part of BRICS can be linked to three primary factors:

• residual fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic,
• blowback from the sanctioning of Russia by the G7 nations in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a growing resentment among the developing economies of the world to G7 economic policies and
• priorities which are perceived as being rooted more in post-colonial arrogance than a genuine desire to assist in helping nations grow their own economic potential.

Growth Disparities 

It is true that BRICS and G7 economic clout is heavily influenced by the economies of China and the U.S., respectively. But one cannot discount the relative economic trajectories of the other member states of these economic forums. While the economic outlook for most of the BRICS countries points to strong growth in the coming years, the G7 nations, in a large part because of the self-inflicted wound that is the current sanctioning of Russia, are seeing slow growth or, in the case of the U.K., negative growth, with little prospect of reversing this trend.

Moreover, while G7 membership remains static, BRICS is growing, with Argentina and Iran having submitted applications, and other major regional economic powers, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, expressing an interest in joining. Making this potential expansion even more explosive is the recent Chinese diplomatic achievement in normalizing relations between Iran and Saudia Arabia.

Diminishing prospects for the continued global domination by the U.S. dollar, combined with the economic potential of the trans-Eurasian economic union being promoted by Russia and China, put the G7 and BRICS on opposing trajectories. The former should overtake the latter in terms of actual GDP, and not just PPP, in the coming years.

But don't hold your breath waiting for mainstream economic analysts to reach this conclusion. Thankfully, there are outliers such as Richard Dias and Acorn Macro Consulting who seek to find new meaning from old data.

consortiumnews.com