War and Empire Links: November 2019 #2

“No No You Guys, THIS US-Backed Coup Is Perfectly Legitimate!” Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 14, 2019.

... Which is just so crazy. That’s how low the bar has sunk for supporting the toppling of a government today. They don’t have to claim he’s starving his own people. They don’t have to claim that he’s using chemical weapons. They don’t have to claim that he’s governing without the consent of the voting populace. Just “Yeah well some of us don’t like him and there’s some paperwork we disagree on.”

... and now the US-approved interim president is an appalling racist and absolute dimwit who calls to mind a very low-budget Bolivian version of Sarah Palin.

Bolivia’s New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy. CJ. Nov. 16, 2019.

... This news comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. US foreign policy is essentially an endless war on disobedience, in which governments that refuse to bow to US interests are toppled by any means necessary and replaced by governments who will.

International affairs are much easier to understand once you stop thinking in terms of separate, sovereign nations and start thinking in terms of alliances and empire. What we are witnessing can best be described as a slow-motion third world war between what amounts to an unofficial globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States and its military on one side, and all the nations which have refused to be absorbed into this empire on the other. Nations which allow themselves to be absorbed are rewarded with the carrot of military and economic alliance with the empire, and nations which refuse are punished with the stick of invasions, sanctions, trade wars, and coups, with the ultimate goal being total unipolar global domination. 

Nothing takes precedence over this agenda of unipolar hegemony. As long as a nation remains loyal to the empire, it can fund terrorists, butcher Washington Post columnists, and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world without fear of any retribution of any kind from the US-centralized empire. As a leaked State Department memo explained in 2017, so far as the empire is concerned human rights violations are nothing more than a strategic narrative control weapon with which to attack unabsorbed nations, and to be ignored when they are perpetrated by absorbed nations.
It should therefore also surprise no one that this same Washington-recognized government installed via US-backed military coup is now murdering demonstrators who object to it.

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 “Supporters of the coup in Bolivia can’t call it a coup,” US politician Lee Carter recently noted. “The US has a law preventing us from sending foreign aid to a new government if it was installed by a coup. So they come up with absurd claims that the military forcing Evo out somehow isn’t a coup.”

And the western mass media are falling right in line with the government forces in refusing to use this word, despite the ousting of a government by the military being exactly the thing that a coup is. This is because in a plutocracy, plutocrat-owned media is functionally the same as state media.

US Needs To Occupy Syria Because Of Kurds Or Iran Or Chemical Weapons Or Oil Or Whatever. CJ. Nov. 3, 2019.

We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because the Syrian government was massacring its people. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria in order to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because Assad used chemical weapons. We were told that the US must occupy Syria to fight ISIS. We were told that the US must continue to occupy Syria to counter Iranian influence. We were told the US must continue to occupy Syria to protect the Kurds. Now the US must continue to occupy Syria because of oil.

These wildly different reasons the public has been given for America’s need to forcibly insert a military presence into Syria all have only one thing in common, and that’s America forcibly inserting a military presence into Syria. This is because they are not reasons, but excuses. The US forcibly inserted a military presence into Syria with the full intention of keeping it there, and then started diddling a bunch of completely different narratives in order to justify the thing it already wanted to do long before any of those excuses arose.

For eight years we’ve been spoon-fed an assortment of radically different narratives explaining why the US needs to control Syria militarily, and it turns out that the US and its allies have been plotting to control Syria since long before then. This is because Syria occupies an extremely geostrategically valuable location that is in no way limited to its oil fields. In 2004 Assad launched his “Five Seas Vision“, a plan to use Syria’s supreme location to place itself at the center of a regional energy and transportation system and become an economic superpower. The nation was then plunged into chaos seven years later, but whoever manages to secure control over this location will be able to achieve the same lucrative energy and transportation control for themselves. The dispute over pipeline routes that many have highlighted is just one small example of this. There’s also the illegally occupied Golan Heights which the extremely shady Genie Energy corporation has a vested interest in, and which provides a third of Israel’s water supply, and which the US has decided to officially regard as Israeli property.

So it’s a geostrategically crucial region, and it happens to have no interest at all in allowing itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, allying itself instead with the unabsorbed nations of Russia and Iran. This has made it the epicenter of a giant global imperialist struggle the implications of which stretch far beyond its borders to the rest of the world.

This is the real reason why half a million Syrians have died in an imperialist proxy war, and why many more Syrians continue to suffer under US-led sanctions and the deprivation of their nation’s valuable natural resources. Not because of humanitarianism, not because of democracy, not because of chemical weapons, not because of ISIS, not because of Iran, not because of Kurds, and not even really just because of oil, but because there’s a globe-spanning oligarchic empire to which Syria has refused to submit. Everything else is empty narrative.

Whenever you see anyone arguing for keeping troops in Syria that aren’t there with the permission of the Syrian government, this is all they’re really supporting: a campaign to annex a strategically valuable location into the US-centralized empire. This is true regardless of whatever reason they are offering for that support. And notice how all the different reasons we’ve been inundated with all appeal to different political sectors: the oil and Iran narratives appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, the humanitarian arguments appeal to liberals, and the Kurds narrative appeals to many leftists and anarchists like Noam Chomsky. But the end result is always the same: keeping military force in a location that the empire has long sought to absorb.

By providing many different narratives as to why the military presence must continue, the propagandists get us all arguing over which narratives are the correct ones rather than whether or not there should be an illegal military occupation of a sovereign nation at all. This is just one of many examples of how the incredibly shrinking Overton window of acceptable debate is used to keep us arguing not over whether the empire should be doing evil things, but how and why it should do them them.

Don’t fall for it. It is not legitimate for the US empire to occupy Syria for any reason. At all. “Because oil” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Kurds” is not a legitimate reason. “Because ISIS” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Iran” is not a legitimate reason. “Because Russia” is not a legitimate reason. “Because freedom and democracy” is not a legitimate reason. “Because chemical weapons” is not a legitimate reason. And those who are driving this illegal occupation know it, which is why they keep shifting to whatever’s the most convenient narrative in any given moment.

Advancing Propaganda For Evil Agendas Is The Same As Perpetrating Them Yourself. CJ. Nov. 22, 2019.

You see this dynamic at play all too often from outlets, organizations and individuals who portray themselves as liberal, progressive, or in some way oppositional to authoritarianism. They happily advance propaganda narratives against governments and individuals targeted by establishment power structures, whether that’s Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Morales, Assange or whomever, but when it comes time for that establishment to actually implement the evil agenda it’s been pushing for, they wash their hands of it and decry what’s being done as though they’ve always opposed it.

But they haven’t opposed it. They’ve actively facilitated it. If you help promote smears and propaganda against a target of the empire, then you’re just as culpable for what happens to that target as the empire itself. Because you actively participated in making it happen.

The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Nov. 27, 2019.

Barack Obama is using his post-presidency to attack the Left and protect the status quo. The historical myth believed by so many liberals that Obama was a progressive leader who was hemmed in by the presidency's political constraints is collapsing fast.

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As for that initial question of what Obama wants, the answer is that he’s told anyone willing to listen from the very beginning. Since 2016, his major concern has been to preserve a legacy whose progressive bona fides are increasingly threatened by the genuine radicalism of those to his left – and to use the vast power and influence at his disposal to stand in their way.

from Distinguishing Capitalism from Growth, by James Magnus-Johnston.

War and Empire Links: November 11, 2019

Because what would Remembrance Day be without a US-led coup? Lest we forget, my ass.

MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting. Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 11, 2019.

There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you’d hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines. 

“Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud” proclaims CNN. 

“Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests” reports The Washington Post. 

“Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down” says The New York Times. 

“Bolivian President Evo Morales resigns amid fraud poll protests” declares the BBC. 

“President of Bolivia steps down amid allegations of election rigging” we are informed by Telegraph. 

“Bolivia’s President Morales resigns after backlash to disputed election” says the Sydney Morning Herald. 

So there you have it. The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world’s largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a “disputed election”.

As is usual, mass media’s reporting on this story is in full alignment with the US State Department,

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The US-centralized empire just keeps throwing coup attempts at unabsorbed governments until they stick. The coup in Venezuela failed in 2002 and again in 2019, but they’ll just keep attempting them until one takes hold. A kickboxer throws strikes in combinations with the understanding that most attacks will miss or do minimal damage against a trained opponent, but eventually one will get through and score the knockout blow. Imperialist regime change agendas employ the same punches-in-bunches philosophy: just keep attacking and undermining at every possible turn, and eventually something will stick. 

And the empire can afford to do this. When you have all the power and resources, you can bide your time, knowing that if the current attempt at toppling the government in a sovereign nation fails, there’s always tomorrow. 

At a United Nations Security Council meeting last year, President Morales summed up the true nature of America’s role in the world very accurately, and, it turns out, very presciently. 

“I would like to say to you, frankly and openly here, that in no way is the United States interested in upholding democracy,” Morales said. “If such were the case it would not have financed coups d’etat and supported dictators. It would not have threatened with military intervention democratically elected governments as it has done with Venezuela. The United States could not care less about human rights or justice. If this were the case, it would have signed the international conventions and treaties that have protected human rights.It would not have threatened the investigation mechanism of the International Criminal Court, nor would it promote the use of torture, nor would it have walked away from the Human Rights Council. And nor would it have separated migrant children from their families, nor put them in cages.”

“The United States is not interested in multilateralism,” Morales continued. “If it were interested in multilateralism it would not have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement or given the cold shoulder to the global compact on migration, it would not have launched unilateral attacks, nor have taken decisions such as illegally declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. This contempt for multilateralism is motivated by the thirst of the United States for political control and for the seizing of natural resources.” 

“Each time that the United States invades nations, launches missiles, or finances regime change, it does so behind a propaganda campaign which incessantly repeats the message that it is acting in the course of justice, freedom and democracy, in the cause of human rights or for humanitarian reasons,” Morales also said. 

“The responsibility of our generation is to hand over a fairer and more secure world to the following generation,” Morales concluded. “We will only achieve this dream if we work together to consolidate a multipolar world, a world with common rules that are respected by and defended from all the threats ranged against the United Nations.” 

Indeed, the only reason the US is able to wage its endless campaign of regime change agendas against unabsorbed governments is because the unipolar world order it rules has allowed it the power, resources and leisure to do so. A multipolar world would enable the citizenry of this planet to have a say in what happens to them in a way that is not dictated by a few sociopaths in and around Washington, DC. A multipolar world is to democracy as a unipolar world is to monarchy. The citizens of the world should oppose this unipolarity.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales Forced Out Of Presidency. Ian Welsh. Nov. 11, 2019.

Morales was virtually the last South American left winger leader. They’ve almost all been swept from power over the last few years. This is because commodity prices crashed. Their prosperity was based on high commodity prices.

Nonetheless, Morales dropped poverty rates by half, and unemployment by a third. He was unquestionably good for most Bolivians.

Because, with the exception of Venezuela, and to a lesser extent Peru, they never secured the state’s coercive apparatus, they were relatively easy to get rid of. The ludicrous sight of Brazil’s Lula forbidden to run (because they knew he’d win) on corruption charges, then the prosecutor who charged him joining the new government, for example.

Left-wing governments need to control the key parts of the state apparatus: military, police, courts. They also need a press which is at least neutral. If they don’t control this, losing power often leads to horrible consequences: firebombings, imprisonment, death squads, rape and torture.

This isn’t a game. The people on the other side are rich and ruthless and scared, and they will do anything to keep power. They don’t play by the “rules.”

Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm's Lithium Deal. Eoin Higgins, CommonDreams. Nov. 11, 2019.

After Evo, the Lithium Question Looms Large in Bolivia. Vijay Prashad, CounterPunch. Nov. 13, 2019.

Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia. Moon of Alabama. Nov. 12, 2019.

The coup in Bolivia is devastating for the majority of the people in that country. Are their lessons to be learnt from it?

How Far Will They Go? James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation. Nov. 4, 2019.

... How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war. That half of the country has actually been reading the evidence of this treason and sedition — underwritten by Hillary Clinton and her allies — on the back-channels of the Internet. None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed. They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery.

A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were. Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employer, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden. This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle. 

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

It’s the DNC, Stupid: Democratic Party, Not Russia, Has Delegitimized the Democratic Process. Elizabeth Vos, Consortium News. Nov. 4, 2019.

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public’s doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party’s subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment’s willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained. 

The Democratic Party’s bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC, as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020. 

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred “pied-piper candidate.” One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race. ...

Trump’s Impeachment Lures Democrats Into a Cold War Mentality. Aaron Maté, The Nation. Nov. 4, 2019.

The hawkish mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace.

Resistance (At All Costs): Kimberley Strassel’s Home Run. Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator. Nov. 7, 2019.

From the FBI’s unprecedented counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, to state defiance of the president’s federal immigration law, to media partisanship, to the drive-by character assassination of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s foes have thrown aside norms, due process, and the rule of law.”

So begins the cover of Kimberley Strassel’s new bestseller, Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.

Strassel, a star Wall Street Journal columnist, zeroes in on the decidedly serious problem that all this insane, foaming hatred of a duly elected president has brought to the country.

There is nothing wrong, Strassel correctly notes, with being a Trump critic. Presidents have always had critics, something that comes with the job. But the spread of a virulent Trump hatred is something quite different, and is, Strassel writes, “proving far more corrosive to our institutions and rule of law than anything of which it has accused the president.”

The Bell Is About to Toll. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr, The American Spectator. Oct. 30, 2019.

The real malefactors of election interference are soon to be exposed.

My colleague George Neumayr and I have been studying the Obama administration’s spying on Trump for over three years. While most of the mainstream media searched desperately for a smoking gun carried by one of President Trump’s people or even by the president himself, we looked elsewhere. We looked at the politicized atmosphere within the FBI and the CIA. We even looked at British intelligence. No one else seemed interested, but we found evidence of criminal misbehavior by the former head of CIA, John Brennan, the former head of national intelligence James Clapper, and former head of the FBI, James B. Comey.

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Seized with Trump Derangement Syndrome, the three stooges — Brennan, Clapper, and Comey — had convinced themselves that Trump, a sui generis American businessman known for his patriotism, was a plant for the Russians. 

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The most perverse irony in all of this is that the American officials who bleated the loudest about “malicious actors interfering in the election” presided over a government that actually did. It was members of the U.S. government who spied upon Trump’s campaign and sought to sabotage it through entrapment schemes and criminal leaks. It was Brennan who turned to foreigners for dirt on Trump to throw the election. They failed, but not for lack of trying. 

Gabbard and Trump Jr. Change America’s View of The View. Tom Luongo. Nov. 10, 2019.

The View, like so much of televised media, is a pillar of the system of control to shape what you think, who you think these thoughts at and what to say to someone who doesn’t think them.  

It exists to reinforce whatever narrative the self-serving Western oligarchy wants the women of America to think about politics.

The Imperial Propaganda Machine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix. Caitlin Johnstone. Nov. 5, 2019.

It’s important to avoid fake news, Russian media or conspiracy theorists. We must only trust those reputable news outlets who tell us that neoliberalism is working fine, that US foreign policy is perfectly sane, and that protests are only happening in Hong Kong and nowhere else.

The difference between state media and western media is that in state media the government controls what information the public is given about what’s going on in the world in order to prevent political dissent, whereas in western media this is instead done by billionaires.

Any attempt to understand the world which fails to take into account the fact that extremely powerful people are pouring massive amounts of money and resources into manipulating your understanding of the world will necessarily result in a distorted worldview.