Pictured above: Max Parry visiting an anti-Soviet KGB Museum in New York City. Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), YouTube video, as well as being syndicated on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, RUvid and Ivoox (links below), Max Parry is an independent freelance writer, journalist and geopolitical analyst. Originally from San Diego, CA, he has resided in New York City for over ten years. His articles have appeared widely in Counterpunch newsletter, the Unz Review, Greanville Post, the Center for Research on Globalization, Dissident Voice, Off-Guardian, Mint Press News, Zero Hedge, Popular Resistance, Signs of the Times, 21st Century Wire, Soverain Media (French), and more. Max is a great writer of articles, who really has a knack for getting the background on every piece he writes. He knows the importance and relevance of the historical perspective and always does his research as far back as needed, to really frame the subject. Enjoy and learn while reading and listening/watching this written interview, which I recorded for CRRS fans out there, who prefer audio-visual media. Want to read more of Max’s work and give him a shout out? Contact Max: maxrparry@live.com Read all his work here: https://medium.com/@maxparry Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/max.parry.39 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/maxrparry Questions A: I was raised by old lefties, so I had the advantage of becoming aware of the evils of empire very early on in my life. What really solidified my worldview and awakening was coming of age in the Bush era and experiencing the political aftermath of 9/11, which for me was truly the American ‘Reichstag fire’, and then the Iraq War. It started with reading Chomsky and Zinn, but when I discovered Michael Parenti, I was truly ready to go all the way down the rabbit hole. There was no turning back after that. A: Although it was completely ignored by Western media, Milosevic was actually posthumously exonerated of responsibility for war crimes by the ICTY. Unfortunately, it was in 2016, many years after he died under mysterious circumstances while on trial in the Hague. I suspect he was murdered like many believe about Hugo Chavez and Yasser Arafat. In the trial that convicted Radovan Karadzic, it showed Milosevic and he were actually frequently at odds and there was no evidence that any ethnic cleansing by the Serbs was being directed from Milosevic and Belgrade. As for its legality, the ICTY was a kangaroo court put together by NATO as a tool of Western imperialism from the very beginning. In fact, the ICTY was established simultaneous with and even before most of the alleged crimes it ended up prosecuting had even occurred back in 1993. How can a court be established to prosecute crimes in a war that was still going ongoing? It was all part of the facilitation of the war itself and the breakup of country, where the Bosnian heroes and Serb villains were preselected. The same sort of judicial body was created by the UN Security Council for Rwanda’s so-called genocide, where another inter-ethnic civil war was exploited and politicized. Just as many Hutus were slaughtered as Tutsis, but who knows that in the West? Meanwhile, the ICC will never bring any member of the Bush administration to court for the Iraq War, or the Clinton administration for bombing Serbia for 78 days straight for that matter. The US has no regard for international law. Just this last week Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened to bar members of the ICC from traveling to the US and face financial sanctions if they proceed with an investigation of Israel and its crimes. The US and its allies are free to commit atrocities with impunity while creating ad hoc tribunals to condemn those that defy them. A: I firmly believe the Cold War never really ended if you look in retrospect at the West’s geopolitical moves since the Berlin Wall came down. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the war on Serbia, as you note was Russia’s ally, was part of the expansion of NATO, which on paper no longer serves any purpose since its formation was for the stated purpose of containing the Soviet Union and communism. Now NATO has contained Russia, even though it is under free enterprise. The US neocons in the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya brought Wahhabist separatism to the Caucasus during the 1990s. Who ended that conflict? Putin, which is one of the reasons he has drawn the ire of the West in addition to rebuilding the Russian economy, subduing its hegemony in the Middle East and assisting targeted developing countries in the Global South (including Venezuela at the present moment). The new manufactured cold war is just an extension of its predecessor. Had he been in power instead of Yeltsin, the war on Serbia would likely not have gone the way it did. As for the ICC, international law does apply to the Western elites, the US has explicitly stated it will not recognize any court that would indict Americans for war crimes. As George H.W. Bush said after the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 back in the 80s, “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America, ever, I don’t care what the facts are.” A: Ah yes, it was at the Rambouillet Accord. She gave the ultimatum that Serbia had to give up its sovereignty or face the onslaught of ‘humanitarian’ bombs, as it was the last vestige of Eastern European socialism remaining. She followed through on her threat, unfortunately. What a nice way to repay the Serbs who had actually saved her family during the Holocaust. For me, it was not until 2010-11 that I came across the video of WTC Building 7 collapsing in freefall, a massive skyscraper that was officially “untouched” in 9/11. I’m a certified science teacher and know that the universal laws of physics cannot be suspended or ignored. It started my long and shocking research into false flags and in China Rising, I completely dismembered the official propaganda for 9/11, Charlie Hebdo and Boston Marathon hoaxes. I kept following them and was mortified at how amateurishly they can be done, like Bataclan, Nice, Las Vegas and all the others, yet still brainwash the masses. But, our elite owners know they can trick us into believing whatever they want, to serve their capitalist-imperial agenda. They really know how to manipulate homo sapiens’ evolutionary group survival mental processes, our ability to compartmentalize cognitive dissonance, obediently submit to collective amnesia and genuflect to leaders’ dictates. You also wrote about the many CIA/MI6 Gladio Army false flags in Europe, to destroy popular and political support for communism. Need I say more? I don’t bother researching them now, since Western false flags are so numerous and predictable, but journalists like Kevin Barrett continue to do fine work exposing these hoaxes of empire (http://www.truthjihad.com/). I grew up in Oklahoma and belatedly learned that the OKC Federal Building bombing was another blatant false flag (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/06/a-us-government-lie-exposed-the-1995-oklahoma-city-bombing-china-rising-radio-sinoland-170505/). Then, just in the last year, I read Dave McGowan’s must-study Wagging the Moondoggie (http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie/). I laughed so hard at myself, I almost peed in my pants that I could have been such a dupe for fifty years, but again being a scientist, I knew Mr. McGowan spoke the bitter truth. What all of my experiences and research have taught me is that Western empire cannot survive without the crowd control and brainwashing effectiveness via the endless acid drip of false flags. They put the sheep in sheeple. I know you just wrote your article on conspiracy theories a few months ago. But, in the interim, have you reflected further on false flags and the role they have on humanity’s stage. A: I think the so-called ‘War on Terror’ has become a global enterprise with a business model. It has become a self-perpetuating machine. Something like terrorism really happens randomly and infrequently. Yet, the rate at which attacks are occurring all over the world today shows that it is being manufactured on a global scale, not just with the exporting of Wahhabism around the world from Damascus to Xinjiang but domestically here in the U.S. It has a financial incentive to do so. How can a ‘war on terrorism’ be fought at the cost of billions of dollars per year which has only INCREASED international terrorism exponentially? How can these attacks be escalating with the amount of panoptic surveillance around the entire world? And of course, I’ve always had my suspicions about 9/11, from the ominous predictions in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for the New American Century to the Carlyle Group and bin Laden family being flown out of the country before commercial airspace was even reopened. Take, for instance, the mass shooting phenomenon. It’s no coincidence that the FBI has increased its use of unethical sting operations which prey on mentally unstable individuals on the political fringe, be it Islamists or white nationalists, who are then coaxed into committing acts they likely may have never done otherwise. They even facilitate the weapons and cost, one would assume in the hopes they will be caught beforehand and entrapped. After all, if there were not enough terrorism to fight, it would have to be manufactured in order to meet their business model and its quotas. For example, there are regularly headlines where plots are thwarted. Unfortunately, I believe they also frequently go wrong. It’s funny you mention the OKC bombing, I just recently watched the documentary ‘A Noble Lie.’ I think many of these attacks, like the OKC bombing were either sting operations gone bad or even allowed to happen on purpose in order to increase homeland security funding and the rolling back of civil liberties. Time and time again the fingerprints of Western intelligence agencies are found all over these events. Even this most recent mosque shooting in New Zealand bears all the hallmarks. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out to be another sting operation gone wrong. For one thing, the perpetrator’s travel activities are extremely curious for someone we are supposed to believe is a white supremacist, like visiting North Korea and Pakistan? He fits the Oswald profile of a patsy and fall guy in a larger operation. I watched the disturbing full video of the shooting that was taken off social media. In my view, he was clearly a militant and trained professional. Or look at the Orlando shooting where Omar Mateen, the gunman, was in an FBI sting operation for an entire year prior, and afterward everyone assumed it was a hate crime because the target was a gay club when he had selected it randomly because it had little security. Or the Boston Marathon bombers who were already on the FBI’s radar and even radicalized by the Jamestown Foundation’s sponsoring of radical jihadists in the Caucasus. I think a lot of people on the left today are unfortunately hostile to questioning the nature of these events because they have swallowed the anti-conspiracist Kool-Aid. Many leftists may be willing to rightly believe that wars abroad are started with false flags, from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Syrian gas attacks…but what about here in the U.S.? It’s no different in my view. They also have a tendency to reduce the causes for these events into the false paradigm of the two-party culture wars. Sorry, a ‘crisis of masculinity’ is not the only reason mass shootings are happening. I think there is a LOT more going on than that and it is a reality most are unwilling to confront. How long do you think our elites have been able to use false flags and propaganda to manipulate the people into war and totalitarianism? World War I? Can we go back to the Crusades? Ancient Rome or Greece? It seems like Western citizens don’t stand a chance at understanding the truth. A: I believe one of the earliest records of a ‘false flag’ incident was in a war back in the 1700s between Sweden and Russia where the Swedes disguised themselves in Russian military uniforms and staged an attack on their own troops. The government assembly had been unwilling to go to war with Russia prior to the incident, and afterward the King of Sweden was able to convince them to start a war. It was truly a Gulf of Tonkin or Lusitania centuries ahead of its time. From Native Americans, to Africans, to Irish, to Italians, to Germans, to Jews, to Slavs, to Latinos, to Muslims – the litany is seamless. Robert Williams, Jr. wrote the wonderful, Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization” (https://alaskaindigenous.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/book-review-savage-anxieties-the-invention-of-western-civilization-by-robert-a-williams/). In it, he catalogued in detail that this vision of foreign monsters and beasts goes back to prehistoric Greece, where everyone and everywhere outside their boundaries were man-eating, godless and/or demonic, gigantic and/or grotesque, horrific, evil, mentally retarded, sexually deviant and lazy, unwilling to till the land, make things and be productive “people”. According to Williams, these paranoid, pathological justifications laid the foundations of what I call Western civilization’s “Six E’s of Racism: Expansionism, Extermination, Expropriation, Extraction, Enslavement and Evangelism”. In Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s sobering and revealing book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, she wrote how the English perfected their model of colonial “total war” (kill all, burn all, destroy all) by adopting the methods of terror used during Europe’s medieval Crusades to Palestine (https://www.reddirtsite.com/). She later talked about how American elites found that it was the poor Scot-Irish immigrants who made the best soldiers for total war on Native Americans, because they were so infused with the Christian Covenant of Manifest Destiny, their punitive, hardcore Protestant strain that took no prisoners. Putting all this together, I had an epiphany, that the prehistoric Greeks got their paranoia, pathology and monsters from the Old Testament/Torah, which is full of the Five E’s of Racism and a very angry, violent, jealous, vindictive, petulant God. Abraham was from Mesopotamia, which with the epic poem Gilgamesh and King Hammurabi, was the source of many Old and New Testament stories and miracles. All of the Old Testament’s incest, parricide, matricide, fratricide, rape, genocide, murder, monsters, demons and sexual deviancy are fully expressed in Greek, and later, Roman mythology. Am I on to something here? I just developed this idea over winter vacation, when I was back in the US, and to inoculate myself from the American Dream, read Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, as well as Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Mr. Berman averred, saying he looked upon the Bible/Torah as simply a morality tale, which is a good riposte to my thesis. Please share your thoughts. A: Open Veins of Latin America is one of my favorite books but I’m no Biblical scholar. However, a lot of what you’re saying reminds me of the first chapter of Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist series of films. The Egyptians and Greek zodiacs containing 12 signs… A: I am a Marxist-Leninist and a committed communist. Unfortunately, I am not a member of any political party, as even the ML parties in the United States who are otherwise solid are heavily invested in identity politics and dividing the working class on cultural issues which in my view is anti-Marxist and counterproductive. They refuse to engage the majority of apolitical working-class people in the United States, many of whom are now being spoken to by a growing far right that resonate with their grievances. Fundamentally, I believe the left in the US is still residually damaged from the effects of COINTELPRO. Overall it is still hindered by an excessive preoccupation with privilege/lifestyle/identity politics, anarchistic amateurishness and disorganization and most of all a hostility toward any kind of leadership in favor of pluralism. A: I am currently working on another piece on the historical misconceptions surrounding the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Spanish Civil War and how they are the basis of the ‘red-brown’ smear being hurled at several journalists I admire the work of, namely the Irish journalist Angela Nagle who authored a fantastic article entitled ‘the Left Case Against Open Borders’, as well as the popular anti-war blogger Caitlin Johnstone. Both of them have been the subject of unfair attacks and the piece is a defense of them and others like Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Michael Tracey and other figures who’ve been smeared for appearing on Fox News and Tucker Carlson. I also have a potential opportunity doing freelance work for an alternative media network. Nothing is certain yet but hopefully it will materialize. I plan to build my own proper website as well. Stay tuned…. A: Michael Parenti was a huge influence on me as I said before as far as geopolitics and history go, he was always the most consistent politically in terms of understanding empire and communism. Many Western leftists in the Chomsky mold seem only able to accept that the US is an imperial nation if they can believe Russia and China are somehow on an equal scale of evil simultaneously which is their inner social chauvinist talking. Parenti doesn’t have these political confusions. John Pilger is another person whose work I greatly admire, as a filmmaker, journalist and politically. Of course, I can’t go without mentioning Lenin’s writing because it’s so crude, caustic and uncompromising. I recommend the usual suspects like Consortium News, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone Project, Black Agenda Report, Global Research, etc. Thanks for the fascinating questions and interview, Jeff! Why and How China works: With a Mirror to Our Own History
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