War and Empire Links: August 2019

The Canaries That Sang “Things Suck”. Jack Tucker, via Edward Curtin. Aug. 4, 2019.

 ... let’s not get into that ridiculous debate about nature versus nurture.  We both no doubt agree that suckers are both born and bred in the USA at a feverish rate. 

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Over the following years, I continued to collect my evidence for the phenomenon I call “suck.”  But I also noticed that under Bush Jr, as under Poppi Bush and Clinton, people were increasingly being taken for suckers by the authorities with their lies about Iraq, 9/11, the anthrax attacks, the economy, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war on terror, etc. It’s true, I know, that the same happened under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, but he was generally considered an acting president and life in the 1980s a feel-good movie.  Everyone was happy then, and suck was just a bad word that could spoil the fun of “Morning in America.”

When in 2008 Bush Jr. returned to the ranch and full-time brush cutting, in rode Obama. Slicker than Slick Willy, he really sucker-punched liberals, who were desperate for some classy speech in the White House, someone who could correctly pronounce “nuclear” while promising to spend a trillion dollars on making a new generation of them. They got conned (I guess) when he immediately bailed out the banks and the Wall St. crooks, sent more troops to Afghanistan, cracked down on whistle-blowers, launched killer drones, increased surveillance, destroyed Libya and Syria, sent special forces throughout Africa, etc., smiling as he went marauding.

The power of the Obama propaganda was overwhelming, and so many were sucked in, as they still are. 

UN report shows US forces are killing more civilians than ISIS and Taliban combined. Matt Agorist, FreeThought Project. Aug. 5, 2019.

For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war. It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory—America arms bad guys. The situation has gotten so overtly corrupt that the government admitted in May the Pentagon asked Congress for funding to reimburse terrorists for their transportation and other expenses. Seriously. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A new report from the United Nations shows the US and its allies in Afghanistan have killed more innocent men, women, and children than the group they claim are the bad guys, the Taliban

MSM Smears Sanders For Saying MSM Smears Sanders. Johnstone. Aug. 14, 2019.

There is no legitimate reason to give mass media institutions the benefit of the doubt in any area whatsoever; their outrage and indignation is based on nothing other than their own self-appointed position as arbiters of truth and reality. There is no law that says plutocratic media must be trusted by the public and praised by politicians, and if there were that law would belong in the toilet. Their whole entire argument, when you boil it right down, is that nobody should distrust the mass media because when they do it hurts the mass media’s feelings. This is not a valid argument to make.

This is especially true of The Washington Post, which is wholly owned by a CIA contractor and never discloses this conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community as per standard journalistic protocol. This same CIA contractor, who is also the wealthiest plutocrat in the world, sits on a Pentagon advisory board and is according to some experts working to control the underlying infrastructure of the entire economy. To suggest that a newspaper that is owned by such a figure has in any way earned the benefit of the doubt is insane. The world’s most adept plutocrat did not invest in the purchase of The Washington Post because he expected newspapers to make a profitable resurgence. That did not happen.

All plutocrats, once their wealth control grows to a certain size, begin buying up narrative control to ensure the perpetuation of the status quo they’ve built their fortune upon. They all have public relations firms, many of them fund influential think tanks, many use corporate lobbying and advertising incentives, some buy up media shares, and some buy up entire media outlets. Bezos did the latter.

How To Avoid Being Called A Russian Agent Online. Johnstone. Aug. 10, 2019.

1. Always support all actions of the US military and its allies. 

2. Believe everything the news reporters tells you. 

3. Accept Joe Biden as your Lord and Savior. 

4. Kiss up to power, kick down at the oppressed. 

5. Believe all America’s problems started in January 2017.

The Persistent Myth That Trump Opposes War. Johnstone. Aug. 9, 2019.

But the fact that liberal hawks attack Trump for not being as warlike as he could possibly be in every possible area doesn’t make him a peace president, any more than neocons attacking Obama for the same reason made him a peace president. Right-wing hawks viciously attacked Obama for refusing to arm Ukraine against Russia and for refusing to attack Damascus over the chemical weapons “red line” (both of which are neoconservative agendas that Trump has fully fallen in line with, by the way), but that doesn’t negate Obama’s depraved acts of interventionism in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Both Trump and Obama have at times refused to go quite as far as the most virulent warmongers wanted them to, but that doesn’t mean either oppose war.

If you want a fair, accurate and nonpartisan insight into how much of a war whore the sitting president is, click this hyperlink to get to a list by the antiwar organization St Pete for Peace titled “Trump Foreign Policy Fact Sheet–An up-to-date chronology of the good and the bad of the Trump administration’s foreign policy – from an antiwar perspective”. The fact sheet takes news reports about this administration’s foreign policy statements and decisions and files them under ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ columns. There are some things in the ‘Good’ column, like Trump’s meetings with Kim Jong-un and his refusal to strike Iran for downing a US drone, but just scroll down and see for yourself how much longer the ‘Bad’ column is than the ‘Good’.

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The other argument I get from those who wish to defend Trump on antiwar grounds is that Hillary Clinton would have been a worse warmonger, and had she been elected we could have seen World War Three ignited by her insanely hawkish plans for Syria. I actually agree on both counts, but that doesn’t mean this is a legitimate argument to make. Hillary Clinton being bad doesn’t make Trump good, any more than the existence of cancer makes it good to have congestive heart failure.

Warmongering Neocon ‘Free Beacon’ Glorifies Hiroshima Bombing. Caitlin Johnstone. Aug. 6, 2019.

American Values, an excellent Twitter account which publishes daily information about US atrocities, has just posted a thread for the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and I think everyone should have a look at it today. It reads as follows:

“On this day in 1945, the US committed one of the worst [atrocities] in human history when it dropped a nuclear weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. The city was selected for its location in a valley, magnifying the bomb’s deadly power. 

“The bomb detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic and destroyed 1 square mile, setting fires for 4.7 square miles. 70,000 people were immediately annihilated & 70,000 were wounded. The bombing killed 90% of all medical personnel in the city. The wounded were described by survivors as living pieces of charcoal, wandering mindlessly as their skin fell off until they collapsed and died. Many of the survivors would fall victim of radiation poisoning, some dying violently while vomiting out their insides. 

“Astonishingly, just 3 days after the bombing of Hiroshima, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The bombing was essentially a test, killing 80,000 Japanese in an attempt to see if a plutonium implosion bomb would detonate properly in wartime setting. 

“Much of the US propaganda used during the war depicted the Japanese as subhuman and its this attitude that helped the US government justify these atrocities to itself and its population. 

“One of the most reprehensible myths surrounding the bombings is the idea that they were ‘necessary’ to save lives. Serious historical work has disproven this. See here -> And here -> Nevertheless this myth remains because it alleviates the guilt Americans would otherwise feel for their government committing one of humanity’s most atrocious war crimes.”

For more reading on the historically indisputable fact that America’s decision to unleash the nuclear horror on Japan was a gratuitous act of barbarism which was completely unnecessary for winning the war, see this LA Times article by Oliver Stone and Pete Kuznick and this one by the Mises Institute. 

According to the generals and decision makers of the time, the real reason for the use of nuclear weapons on Japan was to intimidate the Soviet Union, which went on to acquire its own nuclear arsenal a mere four years later in 1949. That’s right, the horrors inflicted upon the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the brainpower and treasure that went into making them, achieved nothing but a weapons advantage that lasted a total of four years. In exchange for four years of military superiority, we’ve had generations of nuclear standoff which could wipe every living organism off the face of this planet.

So of course we are seeing the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon celebrating this horror on Twitter today.

“74 years ago today, America’s Greatest Generation delivered a decisive blow against the enemies of freedom. The Free Beacon salutes our veterans. #Hiroshima,” the outlet tweeted, with a picture of a mushroom cloud.

The Washington Free Beacon, which the late Antiwar.com founder Justin Raimondo once described as “a down-market version of the Weekly Standard,” has served as a platform for neoconservative war propagandists since its founding. It is published by a think tank chaired by PNAC alum Michael Goldfarb, and its editor-in-chief, Matthew Continetti, is the son-in-law of arch-neocon Bill Kristol. The American supremacist values system of this tightly knit and highly influential clique of neoconservatives has been shoved so far into the mainstream that it is now in effect the bipartisan consensus worldview of US policymakers and mass media narrative managers, to the point that now if you get a voice like Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard questioning the US forever war in mainstream circles you immediately see that voice slammed as “un-American“, “isolationist“, and Kremlin-aligned. ...

Conventional Politicians Are Infinitely Weirder Than Marianne Williamson. Caitlin Johnstone, July 31, 2019. 

Night one of the CNN Democratic debates has come and gone, and if you missed it you didn’t miss much. Basically the entire thing can be summed up as Jake Tapper asking the progressives on stage, “So explain why Americans would vote for your policies when we here at CNN have been telling them for years that they’re not allowed to support those policies?” Then for balance they ask one of the boring centrist candidates to explain why Bernie Sanders is crazy. Repeat for two and a half hours.

Disrupting the monotony was Marianne Williamson, who once again was the most-searched candidate following the debate. She raised eyebrows by using the phrase “dark psychic forces” to describe Trump’s demagoguery, prompting many ironically ironic tweets from ironically ironic people eager to make fun of how weird and ridiculous this self-help guru woman is.

Which to me is a bit odd seeing as the people she’s being compared to are status quo politicians, who are some of the most freakishly insane creatures on this planet.

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If people could really see what’s happening in their nation and their world with fresh eyes, they’d scream in horror. But that’s the exact status quo that all these sane, normal, serious politicians have dedicated their lives to upholding. One where people are deliberately kept poor by a plutocratic class which understands that money is power and power is relative. One where the most powerful military force in history circles the globe and wages endless wars upon disobedient populations. One where we rip apart the flesh of our planet and dump poison into our air and our water in facilitation of a new mass extinction event which will someday claim our own species if not reversed. One where we point weapons at each other that can wipe out cities, cover the earth’s surface in nuclear radiation, and fill the sky with black soot blocking out the sun for decades, and we play with escalations toward the deployment of such weapons like it’s a game.

The only reason any of this seems normal to anyone is because the propagandists have normalized it. The only reason the politicians who help support this system seem normal to anyone is because the propagandists have normalized them. Without the filter of propaganda warping our sense of reality, we’d see these depraved monsters for what they really are.

If all of humanity suddenly took sane pills today, we wouldn’t be mocking some longshot Democratic candidate for saying things in a slightly different way than we’re used to hearing them. We’d be mocking the people who’ve been propping up this ridiculous, insane way of being, and we’d be throwing them all out on their asses. And we’d be enraged that it took us this long to do so.

Seasoned career politicians are infinitely more ridiculous, crazy, risible and undignified than Marianne Williamson, because the power structures and agendas they uphold are so transparently bat shit insane. That doesn’t mean Williamson is special, it means they are freaks. And if we ever get sane, we’ll immediately see them as such.

How To Inoculate Yourself From Establishment Bullshit. CaitOz. July 25, 2019.

Of course, the only reason anyone can attempt to claim that Barack Obama had “no scandals” is because in our bat shit crazy world, murdering, oppressing and exploiting large numbers of people isn’t considered scandalous. 

In a sane, healthy world, a presidency like Obama’s would be looked upon with abject horror. Actually in a sane, healthy world a warmongering Wall Street crony like Obama would never have been elected in the first place, but if you were to show the members of a healthy, harmonious society the way that president used his power to do what he did to Libya and Syria, to continue and expand all of Bush’s most evil policies, to divert the push for economic justice into a neoliberal orgy for eight years, those people would recoil in absolute revulsion. 

The only reason liberals think Obama had a low-key, drama-free presidency is because that presidency was normalized for them by the establishment narrative managers of the political/media class. If that class had been shrieking about Obama’s warmongering, surveillance expansion, persecution of whistleblowers, crony capitalism etc in the way that it’s been shrieking about Trump’s nonexistent Russia ties or his obnoxious tweets, these same people would see Obama as a horrible monster. But the propagandists didn’t do that, because it would hinder the cause of bloodthirsty imperialism abroad and crushing austerity at home.

,,, 

Once you’ve got a positive image of a healthy and harmonious world, and once you have a really clear image of what it would be like to live in that world, it’s kind of like you become someone from that imaginary world who stepped into this one and gets to see it for the first time. You get to see life through the eyes of someone for whom “normal” isn’t endless violence, oppression, exploitation and degradation, but for whom normal is the absence of those things. This makes all of the insanity in this world stand out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and gives you the ability to clearly see and describe precisely what needs to change about our situation here.

You’ve already had a taste of this if you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of having to explain what war is to a small child. Nothing about war makes sense to a creature who is looking at this world with fresh eyes; the confusion and upset which immediately flashes over their face will make you feel like an idiot even if you oppose war, just for being a part of a world where grown-ups engage in such idiotic behavior. Someone who came into this world from a healthy and harmonious parallel earth would see it very much the same way.

Imagine if war weren’t normalized. Imagine if a US plane dropping a bomb on foreign soil and ripping human bodies to shreds was treated as the horrific event that it actually is and given weeks of extensive investigative coverage, instead of something that happens many times every single day without any mention at all. A pundit on Fox or MSNBC will tell you that you’re a delusional imbecile if you think this should cease immediately. Anyone who’s seeing our world with unindoctrinated eyes knows you’re a delusional imbecile if you don’t.

All the injustices we’re trained like dogs to see as normal are like this. Corruption. Plutocracy. Wage slavery. The way the homeless are treated. The fact that there are homeless at all. Police militarization. The drug war. Prisons for profit. Government surveillance. Propaganda. All of these things are inherently disgusting, but we lose our accurate sense of disgust because we’ve been tricked into accepting them as normal. So remove the scales from your eyes by creating a new normal for yourself.

Why “Incremental Change” Is Worse Than No Change At All. CaitOz. July 15, 2019.

In both the Obama and the Trump administrations, voters ordered a box of hope and change, received a package labeled “slow, incremental change”, then opened it up and found no meaningful change whatsoever.

This pattern has been repeating for years. People want change because the system is unfairly stacked against ordinary people, so two mainstream political parties promise them big changes. People flock to whichever one makes the most convincing sales pitch, then when they don’t get big changes they’re fed some hogwash about needing to have realistic expectations. Because wanting fast changes in a world that is hurtling toward either ecosystemic collapse or nuclear war is “unrealistic”.

Voters are aggressively discouraged from voting for third parties, assured that there is no need to do this because the mainstream party will provide the changes you seek, and then no changes happen. Ever. This happens over and over and over again.

This pattern is not an accident.

I say that “incremental change” is worse than no change at all because it is deliberately designed to kill all push for change while effectively delivering no change whatsoever. If mainstream political parties were honest about having no real interest in taking power away from the plutocratic class which is exploiting us all and driving us toward extinction, people would immediately stop supporting them. Keeping change on the menu without ever actually serving it keeps people coming back to the table again and again, knowing that they’re starving to death but trusting that nourishment will eventually appear.

All the mainstream “centrists” ever bring to the table is inertia. Inertia is the only real item on the menu. All they’re ever doing is filling our vehicles with lead and telling us it’s gold. Gumming up our gears with false promises designed to keep people from waking up and overthrowing the oligarchs who are rapidly building a cage around them. While the people are being admonished to slow their push for change to the pace of a narcoleptic snail, the oligarchs are all mainlining methamphetamine so they can stay up all night reinforcing the bars of our cage at breakneck speed.

Meanwhile we’re drawing ever closer to an apocalyptic scenario with a rapidly deteriorating ecosystem and mounting tensions between nuclear-armed nations. At a time where we should all be speeding up, the elected leaders closest to power are all encouraging us to slow down. They’re sucking all the energy out of our engines and replacing it with debilitating inertia. They’re promising us the world and delivering us armageddon. We’ve got to stop buying their lies.

Demonocracy: The Great Human Scourge! Antonius Aquinas. July 18, 2019.

One cannot speak too highly of Christophe Buffin de Chosal’s The End of Democracy.  In a fast paced, readable, yet scholarly fashion, Professor Buffin de Chosal demolishes the ideological justification in which modern democracy rests while he describes the disastrous effects that democratic rule has had on Western societies.  He explodes the myth of Democracy as a protector of individual liberty, a prerequisite for economic progress, and a promoter of the higher arts.  Once Democracy is seen in this light, a far more accurate interpretation of modern history can be undertaken.

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The idea of rule by the people is a scam, one perpetuated by those who, in actuality, are in control of the government.  Through the “democratic process” of voting and elections, a small, determined minority can impose its will despite majority opposition:

We often hear it said that ‘in a democracy, it is the people who rule...’
Rule by the people is a myth
which loses all substance once confronted with the real practice in democracy. 

Quoting from a Russian philosopher, Buffin de Chosal continues his criticism:

The best definition [of democracy] was given by the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov.  ‘Democracy is the system by which an organized minority governs an unorganized majority.’ 

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Since the advent of modern democracy, the principle benefactor of its rule has been the State and the politically-connected financial elites who are in actuality the true rulers of societies

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“Monopoly capitalism,” “corporatism,” “the mixed economy,” and “crony capitalism” are not the result of the market process, but stem from “intervention” brought about by the State in favor of its business favorites through participatory democracy.  In a truly free market, entrenched wealth is rarely maintained but is constantly subjected to challenges by competitors:

But what one ought to designate as bad capitalism is the concentration of wealth and power this wealth procures.  This danger does not stem from capitalism itself but rather from parliamentary democracy, for it is democracy that enables money powers to dominate the political realm.

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The author rightly sees that because of its nature and the type of personalities that it attracts, modern democracy cannot reform itself, but will eventually collapse from financial stress, war, and/or civil strife

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The most likely scenario if there is to be a change in Western democratic life will be from a world-wide economic crisis and collapse of the financial system which will render the nation states unable to meet their financial obligations to their citizens.  All economies are hopelessly indebted from their welfare state excesses and can never hope to meet their promises which now runs in the trillions.  What will emerge in the aftermath of a collapse is hard to predict ...

The United States of Terror! Antonius Aquinas.





Two recent articles* have again demonstrated that the greatest “terrorist” entity on earth is not the bogymen – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – so often portrayed by Western presstitudes and the American government, but the United States itself! Ever since World War II, the US has been the most militaristic, far surpassing all of the Communist and dictatorial regimes combined.

Some startling and rarely reported facts:

• Currently, the US drops on someone or something a deadly explosive once every 12 minutes
• W. Bush’s military dropped 70,000 bombs on five different nations during his murderous regime
• Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Barrack Obomber, launched 100,000 bombs on seven countries
• Funding this mass murder is a reportedly $21 trillion (!) that is unaccounted for in the Pentagon’s coffers