Patrick Lawrence: No More Silence

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Die-in protest of the Israel Independence Day celebration, Washington, D.C., May 23, 2024. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost

I do not know how it is in your household, but in mine we have developed the practice over the past nine months of reciting to one another the most appalling of the news bulletins from Gaza that come our way from a great variety of sources. It is rather miserable to think life has come to this, reading aloud daily accounts of atrocities, but there is no turning away from the depths to which terrorist Israel has dragged the whole of humanity.

The subtext of each of these recitations is, “Can you believe this is happening? Can you believe the U.S. participates in this? Can you believe this is normalized?”

It is indeed difficult to believe the things we read of are part of life in the third decade of the 21st century, and may this remain so: When it is no longer difficult to read or watch videos of the Israelis’ merciless barbarities, the Zionist army will have bombed and bulldozed our consciences as thoroughly as it has any Gazan or West Bank village.

Over the weekend my partner told me she had read something that was simply too much even for our recitation routines. It was a piece Politico had published on July 19, and it had arrived courtesy of Jonathan Cook, the estimable British journalist.

“We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable” was written not by journalists, but by two American surgeons who had volunteered last spring for humanitarian work in Gaza by way of the Palestinian American Medical Association. Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon who practices in Northern California.

“I haven’t been able to mention this until now,” my partner began, her voice cracking. Then, holding back tears, she told me about the Politico piece. She related the stories of two Palestinians the American surgeons treated during their time at the European Hospital. The European Hospital sits at the southeastern edge of Khan Younis, the city in central Gaza where the Israeli Occupation Forces earlier directed Palestinians to evacuate, then bombed, then left, and now, Khan Younis having been resettled, is now being bombed again.

Screenshot from Tasnim News Agency footage of an ambulance on Oct. 7, 2023, operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, after it was heavily damaged by an Israeli military airstrike. According to the report, at the time of attack the ambulance was in front of Nasser Hospital, carrying three injured people. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Here are the stories.

Juri

One is about a 9-year-old girl named Juri. She was malnourished, unconscious, and in septic shock when Perlmutter and Sidhwa came upon her at the hospital. They operated immediately, and when they did, they found, among other things, she was missing part of a femur and most of the flesh on one thigh. Her buttocks were cut so severely her pelvic bones were exposed. As they proceeded, maggots fell in clumps from Juri’s body.

“Even if they saved her,” my partner said, “she will live a life of severe disability and constant pain.”

Tamer

The other story concerns a nurse who was serving at the Indonesian Hospital last November when Israeli terrorists raided the facility. Tamer, a young man with two children, was assisting the orthopedics staff in the operating room at the time. When he refused to leave an anesthetized patient, an Israeli soldier shot him point blank in the leg.

strapped to a table for 45 days. No medical care, one glass of juice most days, though sometimes not even that. His bone became infected — this is called osteomyelitis — and he was beaten so severely one eye fell out of its socket.

Perlmutter and Sidhwa:

“Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.”

The Politico piece is illustrated with many photographs taken by Feroze Sidhwa. One showed Tamer during his treatment just after he was shot: a strapping, vigorous man lying in a hospital bed. Another showed Tamer after he returned from his 45 days in captivity: emaciated, looking 20 years older, stripped of all vitality, his face set in what psychiatrists call flat affect.

“When it is no longer difficult to read or watch videos of the Israelis’ merciless barbarities, the Zionist army will have bombed and bulldozed our consciences as thoroughly as it has any Gazan or West Bank village.”

My mind snapped as my partner offered summaries of these two stories. “That’s it!” I shouted. “It’s impossible to go on this way any longer.” I began asking in desperate tones what someone trying to be human can do while a nation run by terrorists disgraces all of those now living but for the Palestinian people and the Perlmutters and Sidhwas who give of themselves to them. I thought of Randy Kehler and all those honorable people who started the famous — back then, anyway — tax revolt during the Vietnam War. I thought of Camus and his invocation of Sisyphus: the futility of all action, the necessity of any.

I eventually returned to the headline atop the Politico piece. Yes, what Perlmutter and Sidhwa saw was unspeakable, there is no arguing this. If you read what they have written, and I urge everyone to do so, you must brace yourself for your reaction to it, as my own case may suggest. These two surgeons saw unspeakable things during their time in Gaza, but now they speak of them. And when they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose.

“What can we do?” is surely a question on the minds of millions of people as apartheid Israel proceeds with its genocide in Gaza — and now escalates its criminal conduct in the occupied West Bank. What makes this question so serious a conundrum is that the Gaza genocide and America’s direct participation in it have pushed in our faces the reality that, American democracy in ruins, there are no mediating institutions any longer available to us through which to express our will.

Please see related article:

Politico Does Journalism: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”

As I sat to write this, Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian journalist, sent around a message posted on “X” by someone going by ThePryingEye, who makes a point that simply takes my breath away. “What is happening in Gaza is awful,” ThePryingEye has it, “but asking people to give up what they need to survive for morals is an unfair card to play. People are suffering here already, and when it can possibly get worse, it’s not that people don’t care about Gaza or we are selling the[sic] out for a taco.”

I hope my editors and readers will forgive my French, but what kind of fucking drip would say such a thing? ThePryingEye is, first, the lumpen exemplar of Western humanity’s long decline into moral slovenliness and what I call consumer nihilism. In this I would love to learn ThePryingEye’s idea of what people “need to survive” — apart from tacos, of course.

But there is something else here we must not miss: Whoever this pitiful person is, he or she is the victim of decade upon decade during which power has cynically abused language and images to strip eyes of the ability to see, ears of the ability to hear, minds of the ability to think, and — these most of all — tongues of the ability to speak and bodies of the ability to act. ThePryingEye is exactly how this is intended to turn out: a taco-eating dolt perfectly at home with “Nothing” as the answer to “What can we do?”

When we face at last the reality that we have been deprived of any institutional means to mediate our politics, it follows that we are forced back upon ourselves. And when we become self-reliant in this way, it will come to us that, as Perlmutter and Sidhwa have very clearly demonstrated, there is power in language, in speaking of the unspeakable.

“When they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose.”

I am not at all surprised that the Israelis and the Biden regime — along with the Germans and others — have radically escalated their long-running attack on clear language, most obviously but not only in their patently nonsensical effort to condemn as “antisemitic” even simple expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. Isn’t the objective here obvious? Isn’t it plain that these people understand the power of language and the necessity to control it if Western populations are to remain in ThePryingEye’s condition?

The other image I mention here confirms this impression: It is a photograph of a wall in the pediatric wing of the European Hospital, where one of Perlmutter and Sidhwa’s Palestinian colleagues has scribbled: “#Gaza We don’t care anymore about anything.” An illegible signature follows.

Isn’t this the kind of thing we read in accounts of Holocaust survivors? Giorgio Agamben went long on just this topic in Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone Books, 1999), wherein he examined the reduction of those in the camps to dehumanized ghosts — psychologically destroyed, many of them beyond retrieval.

“I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century,” he wrote in a preface, “and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way — perhaps the only way — to listen to what is unsaid.”

Let us take some inspiration from the Italian philosopher and correct some terms while understanding others differently. This is my reply to “What can we do?” It is to refuse any longer to let our opinions and our expression of them be either policed or self-policed. Perlmutter and Sidhwa can liberate us in this way if we let them.

Giorgio Agamben, 2009. (Et sic in infinitum, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Read their piece again if you need to do so, think about what these past months of terror have done to Gazans, then join me in asking what we are not supposed to ask: Is what Israel is doing in Gaza worse than the Holocaust? I insist we now pose this question instead of flinching from it. Waiting to die? Getting it over with? I am not much for keeping scorecards of atrocity-committing regimes, but there seems an argument that the Reich’s camps were less terrorizing than the Israeli camp called the Gaza Strip.

After reading Perlmutter and Sidhwa, I went back to that remarkable essay Pankaj Mishra published last March in the London Review of Books, “The Shoah After Gaza.” I wanted to read again of all those prominent Jewish writers and thinkers, many of them Holocaust survivors, who rejected the Zionist project in the early years after its inception.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who won the Israel Prize in 1993, warned 25 years earlier of “the Nazification of Israel.” Jean Améry, the Austrian writer, after reports of torture in Israeli prisons began to surface in the 1970s:

“I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.”

And then the case of Primo Levi, the famous survivor of the camps and author of, among other things, If This Be a Man, his account of his time at Auschwitz. A couple of years into the regime of Menachem Begin, who was not Israel’s first terrorist prime minister and not the last, Levi dismissed the Zionist project altogether. “The center of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back,” he wrote, “must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.” He later told an American audience, “Israel was a mistake in historical terms.”

To turn back. I stand with Levi. I take courage from him and conviction from Perlmutter and Sidhwa to say now in the clear language we can admire in these three: Israel, an artificial construct misguided from the first, has to go. Some way or other it can no longer be permitted to exist—not as it is now constituted, and not in any hopeless notion of a two-state solution. We cannot tolerate the unceasing, systematic, criminal cruelty of a human population to which Israel has committed itself. Only a single, secular state that recognizes the equal rights of all has any promise of civilizing the Zionist presence in the Middle East.

Pankaj Mishra at PalFest 2008. (PalFest, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

I do not know how the project of ending this failed experiment may begin, but it should be set in motion as soon as possible. I see nothing shocking in this judgment once the paraphernalia of geopolitics is stripped away and the fraud of marking this thought down to “antisemitism” is dismissed. Eliminating the Nazi regime was a global project on the grounds of sheer humanity. Again, I am not much interested in precisely how Israel stacks up against the Reich, but we must acknowledge the similarities now such that the same principle obtains.

It will be 46 years this November since the U.N. passed Resolution 3379, wherein the General Assembly “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” I am struck once again at the clarity of language that was once prevalent in public discourse and conclude that the immediate project is to recover it. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 after the U.S. applied heavy and extensive pressure among the General Assembly members. “And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism,” George H.W. Bush said as he introduced the motion, “is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II.” It is interesting to note how the Holocaust was leveraged, even then, in a way I have always thought a dishonor to the 6 million victims.

Bush got one thing very right that day. “To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself,” he said. It is many years later now, and Israel’s conduct in the interim seems to me to prove out this equation. This is the diabolic things about the Gaza atrocities. The Israeli military does not understand its operation there as cruel or immoral or in any way wrong. As Israeli leaders make clear again and again, they believe they are righteously doing God’s work.

“To turn back. I stand with Levi. I take courage from him and conviction from Perlmutter and Sidhwa to say now in the clear language we can admire in these three: Israel, an artificial construct misguided from the first, has to go.”

Here is Bibi Netanyahu reacting to the International Court of Justice’s judgment last week, perfectly obvious in itself, that Israel’s occupation of all Palestinian land— not just the West Bank — is illegal.

“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor Judea and Samaria, our historical homeland. No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.”

This remark, openly defiant of decades of international law, openly indifferent to the legal commitments Israel made at its founding and many times since, can be read as a useful prelude to Netanyahu’s monumentally dishonest, reality-warping speech Wednesday to a joint session of Congress. His reiterated dismissal of the ICJ’s ruling — “utter and complete nonsense” — takes a minor place among the Zionist leader’s offensive distortions. Civilian deaths in Gaza have been minimal, the Israeli army should be commended, not criticized, Americans demonstrating for the Palestinian cause “stand with murderers” and are “Iran’s useful idiots,” the Palestinians are comparable to wartime Germans and Japanese: Netanyahu’s hour-long speech was end-to-end with this kind of thing.

Netanyahu addressing a joint session of U.S. Congress on Wednesday (C-Span screenshot)

The Israeli leader’s markedly assertive oration was revealing, at the same time, of the psychological injuries that lie deep within the Zionist project. He offered a generous recital of the centuries of antisemitic persecution across Europe and, of course, the great, indelible hurt of the Holocaust. Netanyahu’s world is one of we-they, us-and-them. You can hear in his these sentences the Zionists’ addiction to permanent victimhood and (especially interesting to me) the paranoia attaching to the feeling, common among Israelis, that the Jews of Europe appeared weak and unmanly as the Reich sent them to the camps. “The Jewish people are no longer helpless in the face of our enemies,” Netanyahu asserted proudly — confirming to my satisfaction that the Zionist project is in one dimension unhealthily, even dangerously compensatory.

“Jerusalem will never l be divided,” Netanyahu declared — an assertion he made in just these words when he last addressed Congress nine years ago. “The land of Israel, of Abraham, Jacob, and Issac, has always been our home and it will always be our home.” There you have it, as baldly stated as possible: Zionist Israel has no intention of entering talks of any kind to settle the Palestinian conflict and insists that the Old Testament is the only law it will observe.

And here we come to Netanyahu’s true purpose in Washington this week: It is to bind the U.S. fully into the Israeli cause even as it reaches egregious extremes.

“We meet today at a crossroads in history,” he said. “This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between barbarism and civilization.” This is beyond preposterous if you keep Perlmutter and Sidhwa in mind as true witnesses to history. But to go by Netanyahu’s reception Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. will buy his story and invest ever more deeply in it. I counted 72 ovations as this de facto war criminal spoke, all but seven of them of the standing variety.

The great majority of those in Netanyahu’s audience, let us not forget, have accepted one or another form of bribe from the Israel lobby. As John Whitbeck, the Paris-based international attorney, put it in a privately circulated note Wednesday afternoon,

“Anyone watching this spectacle could only conclude that the United States of America has ceased to be a respectable independent state, as, indeed, it has been for many years already, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the State of Israel, with shared values rightfully rejected by the overwhelming majority of mankind.”

Bibi Netanyahu is what Zionism sounds like in 2024. There is nothing in it to work with, nothing to honor, nothing to respect. If Zionist ideology ever fit into the modern world, and I will leave this an outstanding question, it no longer does. Intent on dehumanizing the Palestinian people, Zionists have succeeded in ennobling them while making themselves deformed creatures, nothing more or less than humans without humanity.

I do not seem to be the only one deeply affected by the Perlmutter–Sidhwa piece in Politico. Over the weekend Perlmutter gave a lengthy interview to CBS Sunday Morning, during which he reflected further on what he saw while at the European Hospital:

“All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined — 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined — doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza…. I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We’ve taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of 8-year-olds.

And then there’s sniper bullets. I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the ‘world’s best sniper.’ And they’re dead-center shots.”

It is time to say certain things, readers. It is time to put aside the policing and self-policing of our views of the things we see and hear. Time to make good use of language to say what we mean. It is time to see in ThePryingEye all those “good Germans” who saw what was going on around them during the 1930s but turned the other way and went about their business. Time to say, “Actually, what we need to survive is to utter the truth and determine to act on it.”

This is the first thing we can do. Much stands to come of it.

via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

This article is from ScheerPost.

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In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: Netanyahu Goes for Broke

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January 2014. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

It is a matter of record that the Zionist project has had extensive territorial designs on the lands known as Palestine since at least the early 20th century.

As others have argued, the Israelis’ openly racist assault on the Palestinians of Gaza is to be understood not as a sudden eruption of violence, a departure, but as an especially savage continuation of Zionist conduct for more than a century.

When history is brought to bear in this fashion, it becomes increasingly apparent that the invasion of Gaza since the events of last Oct. 7 ought not be seen in isolation. The more pathologically disturbed members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s freak-show regime — notably, but not only, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben–Givr, the finance and national security ministers — have never been shy on this point.

They are entirely dedicated to the restoration of Eretz Yisrael, the mystical Land of Israel, which, variously interpreted through the ages, could extend at the extreme from the Red Sea all the way to the Euphrates Valley.

But the crazed ultras to whom Netanyahu owes his political survival have not yet got far enough to turn their visions into articulated policy. Is this changing?

This is our question, along with another: Is the Biden regime — or at this point its successor — prepared to “stand with Israel,” as American leaders like to put it, if extremist dreams of violent conquest turn into real, live political and military plans?I have been convinced for some time, as I gather that many Palestinians are, that when the Israel Occupation Forces are done in Gaza they will next turn to the West Bank. On this point I now correct myself: In my interpretation the IOF, in close collaboration with brutish Israeli settlers, has already begun its assault in the West Bank.

Attacking Hezbollah

Of late the Israelis have also been openly threatening to launch a full-scale attack on Hezbollah, the political and military movement that controls southern Lebanon. This, too, bears interpretation.

Douglas Macgregor, the retired colonel and now an energetic commentator on politico- military affairs, has no trouble putting together the 2–and–2 of this moment. Here he is last week on “Judging Freedom,” Andrew Napolitano’s webcast program:

“Whatever happened on the 7th of October, and I’m still not convinced that was not allowed to happen, … the decision then to attack had very little to do with what happened on the 7th of October and everything to do with a long-term strategic plan to begin the process of ethnically cleansing, expelling, or murdering, whatever you want to call it, the Arabs in Gaza and, ultimately, the Arabs on the West Bank.”

This seems right but short of the emerging reality. A few minutes later in his exchange with Macgregor, Napolitano played a clip of Netanyahu addressing a table of officials, at least some of whom are American, last Friday:

“Iran is fighting us on a seven-front war. Obviously, Hamas and Hezbollah. The Houthis, militias in Iraq and Syria. Judea and Samaria on the West Bank. Iran itself.

They’d like to topple Jordan. Their goal is to have a combined ground offensive from their various fronts, coupled with combined missile bombardments. We’ve been given the opportunity to scuttle it. And we will.

The first requirement is to cut that hand [he gestures as if to cut through his right forearm], Hamas. People who do these things to us are not going to be there. We will have a long battle, I don’t think it’s that long, but we’ll get rid of them. We also have to deter the other elements of the Iran terror axis. We have to deal with the axis.

The axis doesn’t threaten only us. It threatens you. It’s on the march to conquer the Middle East — conquer the Middle East — conquer. That means conquer Saudi Arabia, conquer the Arabian Peninsula, it’s just a question of time. And what’s standing in their way is a small Satan, that’s us, on the road to the middle-sized Satan, that’s the Europeans — they’re always offended when I tell them that — ‘You’re the great Satan!’ And we have to stop that.”

So far as I know — and more in this line may be said regularly in Netanyahu’s closed-door cabinet meetings — this is the Israeli prime minister’s most explicit statement to date of how apartheid Israel understands the Middle East and its place in it. The danger of this vision will be immediately obvious.

In perfectly clear language, the Netanyahu government has effectively announced that its policy is to widen what is now the assault on Gaza, the IOF’s escalating aggressions in the West Bank and Israel’s provocations along Lebanon’s southern border. However much these statements reflect political pressure the extremists in his cabinet are exerting on Netanyahu, official policy is moving in their direction.

We already see this pattern, as noted, in the West Bank territories. As The New York Times reported last week, illegal settlers, under IOF protection, have stolen more land from Palestinians so far this year, typically at gunpoint, than at any time since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. West Bank sources report that up to 9,000 Palestinians have been arrested since the events of last October — mostly boys and young men, those typically inclined to organize an armed resistance movement.

In my read this is the West Bank’s version of the assault on Gaza. No F–16s, tanks, or heavy artillery this time: Deploying these would risk serious international opprobrium. No, the West Bank campaign will be waged more or less invisibly — a farm or an olive grove, a village or a murdered teenager or a kilometer of road at a time.

The larger war, the war beyond the West Bank, is of course another matter. Israel knows full well it is incapable of waging anything like a “seven-front war” on its own: It is failing in the Gaza Strip as we speak.

Netanyahu has chosen this moment to mount a go-for-broke attempt to bring the U.S. into some kind of once-for-all conflict that would leave Israel supreme in the region — and so would instantly threaten to be the world’s most dangerous war — since who knows when.

We come to the second of the questions noted earlier. If Netanyahu proceeds to provoke his many-front war, will the Biden regime or the administration that follows it continue to offer the “unconditional support” the U.S. has extended to Tel Aviv for many decades?

I wish this were a more interesting question than it actually is. If Donald Trump retakes the White House, whatever modest restraints Washington may now feel — as the barbarities in Gaza continue — will disappear. But what about Biden, on the very off chance he runs in November, and the very, very off chance he wins? What about a Democratic successor who defeats Trump?

A couple of week ago, as things heated up along Lebanon’s southern border, Biden told Netanyahu — or says he told Netanyahu — that if Israel invades south Lebanon it will do so without American support. Another red line, it seems. Biden has drawn as many of these as there are stripes on Old Glory.

CIA 2002 map of Lebanon, 2002. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

There is the obnoxiously pronounced confidence Netanyahu displays when describing a wider war well beyond Israel’s capabilities. And there is the power the Israel lobby exerts in Washington, not least over Biden, who has received more funds from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC — more than $4 million during his Senate years alone — than anyone else holding elected office.

Late last month the U.S. Navy made one of those quiet logistical moves that sometimes seem to reveal more than intended. It sent an amphibious assault ship, the USS Wasp, into the waters of the eastern Mediterranean off the Lebanese coast. Among its other capabilities, the Wasp is designed to manage large-scale evacuations.

USS Wasp transits the Mediterranean Sea July 31, 2016. (Official U.S. Navy Page, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

But an American official told The Associated Press, a little defensively I’d say, “It’s about deterrence,” implying the deployment is part of Washington’s diplomatic effort to prevent a dangerous war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Wait a minute. Just who is the Wasp intended to deter? Neither Hezbollah nor Iran wants a war with Israel any more than the U.S. wants to see one. No need of deterrence there.

And a ship off the Lebanese coast is not going to deter Israel: It stands unambiguously to encourage “the Jewish state” in its effort to bait the U.S. into the big war for which it spoils.

While one ship near Lebanese waters does not signal any grand new commitment to a grand new war — let us not over-interpret — the message seems clear: We don’t want a new war on our hands, Bibi, but if you provoke one, well, we’ll have to be there for you, “standing with Israel.”

I have written this previously but it bears repeating now: In Israel the U.S. has a Frankenstein’s monster on its hands, and there seems little prospect of anyone in Washington having the intelligence and courage to disconnect the electrodes.

However dangerous the Netanyahu regime makes the Middle East, will be precisely the danger in which the U.S. will find itself.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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Patrick Lawrence: 90 Minutes That Shook the Liberals Awake

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Patrick Lawrence: 90 Minutes That Shook the Liberals Awake

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Give me a sec to think. I need to make a list. Two.

The genocide in Gaza, the Middle East tinderbox, Bezalel Smotrich, the lost proxy war in Ukraine, relations with Russia, the danger of nuclear war, the fate of NATO, China, the threat of war with Iran, the emergence of a new world order, Europe’s turn toward populism, third world debt, global inequality, the sharply worsening climate crisis: It is a start on the foreign side, in no particular order.

Inter the endless alia in these United States, I’ve got social and economic inequality, money in politics, our drift toward late-imperial bankruptcy, the corruption of the judiciary, the housing crisis from hell, Julian Assange and press freedom, the creeping censorship regime, widespread drug addiction, immigration, the price of eggs, the Pentagon budget: I will leave out Taylor Swift and stop here.

So, a brief précis of the imposing problems defining the tasks of all world leaders in 2024, and then another atop the first for the man or woman who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, as every president since Kennedy has. I settled last night at 8 Central time thinking I might hear a little something about, maybe, one or two items on each of these lists as Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off—I decline the term “debate”—in a studio at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta.

Nothing. Not a usefully coherent thought to any of this. Nero should have been up there as an honorary third candidate—with his fiddle for the background music, of course.

When these two frightening people descended into a bickering exchange concerning Biden’s golf handicap and Trump’s girth, I knew this first and probably last direct exchange between two incompetents contending for the world’s most powerful office was a lost cause. I lost 90 minutes of my time as it schussed down the chute. But never mind that. And never mind the media “analysts,” who rated the event like theater critics according to who turned in the best performance. The American people lost Wednesday night, and they lost big. And beyond Americans, the rest of the world lost, too.

I have regretted for years the extent to which elections in this country have come to be determined not by ideas, courage and imagination, guiding principles, or the articulation of wise ways forward, but by affect. There is a history to this that goes back to the 18^th century—sentimental politics, let’s call it—but we can leave that for another time. We are on notice as of Wednesday evening that affect is all there is left in the matter of presidential politics.

Guy Debord, the tortured sage of the 1968 événements in Paris, warned us all those years ago that public life in what used to be the Western democracies had lapsed into sheer spectacle. This is what we saw last night, but let us not stop there. Our politics, our political process, our voting rituals: These were up on that studio stage last night right along with the two buffoons demanding our attention, and we must now see that these are all mere spectacle, too. Let us not speak of any such thing as oratory: Far too elevated, that, as it presupposes thought.

The best that might plausibly be said of the Biden–Trump encounter is that can be read as a confrontation between the populism on the rise across the Atlantic world and the liberal-authoritarian elites waging political, social, economic, and ideological war against it from the watchtowers of sequestered power. But this may be grasping at straws, I confess. If Biden is a good-enough expression of what has become of American liberalism—or what it has been for at least a century, as I see it—Trump is an appalling representative of populism as it now revives, even its rightist stripe. I can take Jordan Bardella, who now carries the standard for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, seriously. After Wednesday night, even those few worthy ideas Trump has had over the years—a new détente with Moscow, etc.—do not redeem him.

A blowhard who makes things up met a confused, addled man who is past it: This is the instant orthodoxy among mainstream media—how swiftly do they settle on what they will write and broadcast in boring unison—seems right but nothing like the right story. The right story is that we are in immediate, very serious, very consequential trouble. In the immediate, we had better consider carefully the beyond-dispute, recorded-on-television reality that a demented man now stands (for however many hours a day he can stand) as the world’s most powerful leader. And if human beings are at bottom sight animals, Americans most of all, they can now see, if they care to admit what they have seen, that these two men present no sensible choice and stand as insults to those who persist in the act of voting.

I have marveled for years as the Democratic machine, Wall Street, and all those flaccid liberals in Hollywood put their faith and many millions of dollars into a man whose mental and physical capacities were failing. This made no sense, other than to suggest the Democrats operate according to whose turn it is or could find no credible candidate. Miranda Devine, the right-wing columnist at the New York Post, reported in The Laptop from Hell, her 2021 exposé, that those in Biden’s inner circle were remarking on his incipient dementia as far back as 2012.

Beyond this, the Man from Scranton simply did not present himself as presidential timber, as it is put. It is one thing to roll logs in Congress, where small-time horse trading and corruption are more or less part of the routine, and altogether a mistake to think a long-serving senator who has his teeth whitened can import these habits into the White House and make them work there. Could no one see the mismatch?

Wednesday night, not to be missed, finally shook Biden’s clerks in the media awake. James Carville, the barb-tongued Southerner who has advised Democrats for decades, remarked before the debate that all the mainstream liberals would watch the debate hearts in mouths hoping there would be no fatal slip or silence. There were a few, but all in Biden’s 90 minutes before however many millions tuned in were one-start-to-finish slip.

The New York Times published an astonishing opinion page in its Friday editions. No fewer than six regular contributors, all of them Biden devotees for years, now say he must step aside. Tom Friedman’s headline: “Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He must Now Bow Out of the Race.” Paul Krugman: “The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw.” Ross Douthat, in one of those back-and-forth “conversations” The Times stages in its pages: “Is Biden Too Old? American Got Its Answer.” Something curious in the Krugman case. His piece, in which he argued that Kamala Harris would make a fine replacement should Biden drop out—amazing, Krugman—was pulled from the page a few hours after it was published. I’m not even going to speculate why the economist-turned-Democratic-ideologue took this decision.

I decline to mark this down to wisdom (always a safe course when corporate journalists are at issue). To me this sudden volte-face reflects nothing so much as years of irresponsibility, ideological conformity, and a lemming-like march to what turns out now to be a tumultuous political sea.

“No one respects us,” Trump insisted severally during the fateful 90 minutes. “The world laughs at us.” I seriously doubt another Trump presidency would improve matters in this line, but his reminder of how American politics looks beyond American shores was right.

“I am worried about the image projected to the outside world,” Sergey Radchenko, an international relations man at Johns Hopkins, wrote on “X.” “It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.”

I’ll say. What’re they thinking, I wondered while watching Wednesday evening. What thinking in Paris, Moscow, Brasilia, Beijing, Mexico City, Pretoria? The question kept ringing in my mind like some awful case of tinnitus of the brain.

I have heard and read various answers, all to be expected, none good. I do not get many foreign observers laughing, but many or most worrying or worse. Here is one from the eye of the storm. Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor at Bethlehem University and an energetic publisher of a privately circulated newsletter. He wrote Thursday morning, and I will leave the harsh language as it is:

The U.S./Israel empire marches on with some successes and some setbacks.
Zionist-picked Conman Trump faced off against Zionist-picked Genocide Joe in a presidential debate with no public moderator by two committed Zionist Jews, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash…. It gives the U.S. public a distraction to keep the delusion that they still have democracy instead of dealing with real challenges like climate change, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, the madness of war, etc.… Israel as an apartheid regime must end or the US/Israel killing machine goes on and will lead us to global catastrophic war thanks to the lobby/special interests. We need to focus efforts on stopping the addiction to war (and genocide) for profit and to work to build a sustainable future.

Just a few words to remind ourselves of what people sound like in the imperium’s distant reaches. Professor Qumsiyeh founded and directs the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability. He signs his newsletters, “Stay human and keep Palestine alive.”

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“Report from Donbas.”

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THE FLOUTIST

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‘I am simply bearing witness.'

Destruction in Mariupol, resulting from the battles between the Ukrainian neonazis and Russian forces.

This was leveled two years ago. Mariupol, April 2024. The Russian rate of construction has amazed most observers. (Guy Mettan)

When I first read Guy Mettan’s report from Donbas I felt as if he had transported me to an antipodean universe of some kind. You can take this, as I do, as a measure of how prevalently, as in wall-to-wall, Western media have systematically misrepresented the Donbas region—when they represent it at all, this is to say. I was at once astonished and voraciously curious to read Mettan’s account of his travels to the two republics of the formerly Ukrainian region, which voted in referenda in September 2022 to join the Russian Federation.

Mettan is based in Geneva and travels often, a little in the way of what the French call le grand rapporteur—the accomplished correspondent who has established his authority in the course of a long career. When I met Mettan at a Geneva café the other day to discuss publication of his Donbas report I asked, “What did you expect to find?” It seemed an important question. Mettan immediately smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “I had no expectations whatsoever.”

Good, I recall thinking. A blank slate. A project so counter to the orthodoxy as this would not otherwise work.

This is a very rare account, rare for its objectivity, a look at a place and a people we are not supposed to see from a journalist of long experience. We at The Floutist are pleased to welcome Guy Mettan into our pages.

This is the first of a two-part series. The second part of Mettan’s report will appear shortly.

—Patrick Lawrence, 11 May.

A Dispatch by Guy Mettan

DONESTK—How could they do this to us? Why does Kiev want to destroy us?

These are the questions that the people of Donbas have been asking themselves for the past 10 years. Considered from Switzerland or France, they may seem incongruous, as we are so used to believing that only Ukrainians are suffering from the war with Russia. We don't want to know that the battle has been going on for a decade and has primarily affected the civilian population of Donbas.

For a week in April, I was able to criss-cross the two provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, visiting towns that had been destroyed and those that were being rebuilt, meeting refugees, and talking to people. This is my report.

I have no doubt that this piece will offend many people who are used to seeing the world in black and white. To them I would say what John Steinbeck and Robert Capa said to their detractors when they visited Stalin’s Russia in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War: I am simply bearing witness, reporting what I saw and heard on the other side of the front. Then it’s up to everyone to form an opinion.

Mine is that Russia and the people of Donbas will never stop fighting until they have won.

■

This project began in a very Russian way, through an unlikely chain of circumstances. Nine years ago, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, I met a Tajik entrepreneur from Moscow who was marrying off his daughter. He didn’t speak English and, without paying any attention to my miserable Russian, he invited the delegation I chaired, comprised of Swiss business people, to the wedding. I made a short speech in honour of the bride and her parents.

Since then, Umar Ikromovitch has become a close friend, one that neither distance nor the linguistic barrier could separate. Once or twice a year, on important holidays, he sends me a message via Telegram. In February, I was surprised when he invited me to join him to tour his work in Donbas, a region he had never visited before. Umar is an entrepreneurial builder—of roads, playgrounds, sports fields, and the like. His company employs several hundred workers in the Moscow region and a few dozen in the reconstruction of Donbas.

So, at 3 a.m. on 3 April, he and Nikita, one of his friends from the Russian Ministry of Defence, were waiting for me outside Vnukovo airport to begin our drive to Donbas. Nikita (and it is best I do not give his surname) had prepared the programme and provided the necessary permits, as well as an experienced driver, Volodia. For 10 hours, with a short coffee break at a newly opened petrol station, we drove at breakneck speed down the 1,060 kilometres of the “Prigozhin motorway,” as I nickname it, between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don—the same motorway on which the late leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had set out upon with his tanks last July.

Nothing could be simpler than a Russian motorway. They are always straight. There's not a single bend along the Prigozhin motorway until you reach Rostov. And as the motorway is clear, apart from 50 kilometres of roadworks shortly before Rostov, the journey was quick and effortless, allowing us to travel from the last snows of Moscow to the soft spring of the Sea of Azov in less than half a day. We saw a steady stream of lorries and a few military convoys, although not many of the latter.

■

In Rostov, the bustling port and congested capital of southern Russia, we barely had a chance to put down our luggage and take three steps before setting off on our first visit. This was to an enormous pumping and turbine station, located at the mouth of the River Don some 20 kilometres from the city.

Workers are still finishing the external work. Two gigantic tubes, dozens of 20,000 m³tanks, and eight pumping stations, each with 11 turbines, now transport fresh water to Donetsk, 200 kilometres away, which is deprived of drinking water because of the embargo Ukraine has imposed. Everything is automated. The 3,700 workers started as soon as the republics were reintegrated into the mother country, in November 2022, and finished the huge worksite and the construction of the high-voltage line powering the turbines six months later, in April 2023.

My first conclusion is that, after such rapid and colossal investments, Russia’s will to fight until its final victory seems unshakeable. And I don’t think Russia will ever again agree to separate itself from the Donbas. This territory is now Russian, full stop.

As night fell, we seated ourselves at a table in one of Rostov’s most popular brasseries, facing the peaceful River Don. It was to be a quiet night, and we slept soundly. The following night, with 40 Ukrainian missiles fired at the nearby Morozov’s air base, would prove more animated.

The next morning we set off for Mariupol, 180 kilometres and three hours away. After Taganrog, a small port near the river’s mouth, the road runs alongside the Sea of Azov and is jammed with convoys of lorries coming and going from Donbas. The road is currently being widened. Military vehicles are clearly marked with a “V” or a “Z”—Roman letters, not Cyrillic, adopted at the start of Russia’s intervention to signify victory.

Checkpoints and various controls succeed one another on either side of the Russian border with the Republic of Donetsk. On the side of the road, long convoys wait to be searched. Thanks to our passes, we are soon on ex–Ukrainian territory. Yevgeny, a Russian from Vladivostok who has volunteered for the Donetsk Republic, takes over. He will be our guide and interpreter throughout our stay.

■

Shortly before noon we reach the outskirts of Mariupol and enter the zone of Azovstal, the vast steel complex that was totally devastated early in the war. The factory now is nothing but rusting chimneys, tangles of burst pipes, and twisted ironwork. A vision of apocalypse that immediately evokes the Stalingrad tractor factory of Vasily Grossman, the Red Army war correspondent, and Steinbeck and Capa’s Journey to Russia. None of the surrounding houses and apartment blocks survived.

The city centre, however, has survived the war much better: At first glance, half of it was destroyed, half survived. Mariupol is currently undergoing a major renovation. In the central square, the reconstruction of the famous theatre—bombed or blown up, we’re not sure—is due to be completed by the end of the year. Umar is happy: The children and young mothers have already taken over the park and playground that his company has just completed. The bus routes, with buses donated by the city of St Petersburg, have been re-established. The café terraces have reopened.

Supervised by the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Military Construction Company, with the help of Russian towns and provinces, work goes on day and night. Ten thousand residents have already been rehoused and the town has regained two-thirds of its prewar population of 300,000. In the afternoon, we will visit a second 60–bed hospital, completely new and demountable – designed to be taken apart and moved if the need arises. They are very well equipped and run by volunteer doctors from all over Russia.

■

The most spectacular buildings, however, are the schools.

On the seafront, a new naval academy will welcome its first class of cadets at the start of the new academic year in September. Classrooms, dormitories, sports halls, and training facilities: Four gleaming glass-and-steel buildings have been completed in 10 months. Designed to accommodate 560 uniformed pupils aged 11 to 17, I am told they will take in mainly orphans from the two wars in Donbas, 2014–2022 and 2022–2024. With six days of instruction per week, eight to 10 hours a day, there's hardly time to get bored. At the end of the course, students can either continue their training in the navy or enter a civilian university.

A second school is more traditional but even more spectacular. It’s an experimental school, the like of which has never been seen before in Russia (or in Switzerland, to my knowledge). The design is very sophisticated. The classrooms are equipped with the latest technology, including computers, robots, cyber– and nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. More traditional are the rooms for drawing, sewing, cooking, painting, languages, ballet, drama, chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, and mathematics. There is even a room equipped with compartments for learning to drive and fly.

Begun at the end of 2022 and completed in September 2023, this school welcomed its first intake of 500 students last year and expects 500 more at the start of the new school year in September. The pedagogy is in keeping with the building, but without any pedagogical flourishes: Classes last 12 hours a day—8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with six hours of “hard” subjects in the morning—grammar, mathematics, history—and six hours of more recreational or complementary subjects in the afternoon—sport, ballet, music, drawing. The canteen provides three meals a day. The only difficulty, says the headmistress, is finding teachers willing to move to Mariupol. But she doesn’t seem to be one to shy away from the task.

■

In the late afternoon, we set off on the brand-new motorway linking Mariupol to Donetsk, 120 kilometres away, making a short stop in the small town of Volnovakha, whose Palace of Culture was hit by HIMARS rockets last November. The roof has collapsed, and scaffolding clutters what remains of the stage and auditorium. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured in the blast, as the show scheduled for that day was moved at the last minute.

As far as the locals were concerned, there is no doubt that the Ukrainians were trying to kill as many civilians as possible. My guide explained that they always fired HIMARS rockets in groups of three—the first rocket to pierce the roof and structures, the second to kill the occupants, and, 20 to 25 minutes later, a third strike to kill as many firefighters, rescue workers, relatives, policemen, friends, and neighbours who had come to help the victims as possible. I heard this kind of story several times.

■

Donetsk is a city of one million inhabitants—very spread out, very busy, with heavy traffic. Few buildings or façades have been destroyed. On the other hand, the city is alive with the sound of cannon fire.

I didn’t pay much attention to it when I arrived, because of my fatigue, and the intense emotions provoked by all I was seeing. But when I woke up at 3 a.m., I was suddenly struck by the sound of the cannon. Every two or three minutes, a shot goes off, rattling the windows and lighting up the sky with an orange glow: It’s Russian artillery firing on Ukrainian positions a few kilometres from the town centre. The Ukrainians retaliate with missiles, drones, or HIMARS rockets, which trigger Russian counter-battery fire, at a rate of one or two an hour, I believe.

The next morning, I was taught to distinguish one from the other. The HIMARS rockets are silent until the final explosion, the French SCALP and British Storm Shadow missiles make an airplane-like hum, as do the Russian anti-missile batteries, while the ordinary shells fall with a whistling sound. In any case, I have nothing to worry about, my new friends assure me. They have put me up in the only hotel in the city still in American hands, and the Ukrainians would never dare fire on an American target.

Nevertheless, Ukrainian fire continues to cause injuries and an average of one death a week. All civilians, because there are absolutely no soldiers, military vehicles, or military installations in the town. In four days, I haven’t come across a single uniform.

■

We start the day with a visit to the “Alley of Angels,” which stands in the middle of a beautiful city park. This is the name given to the funerary monument erected in memory of the children killed by Ukrainian bombing since 2014. A hundred sixty names have already been inscribed on the marble. But the list of casualties now runs to more than 200. Dozens of bunches of flowers, toys, and photos of children pile up under the wrought-iron arch. It’s overwhelming.

Initially, in 2014, it was difficult to recruit journalists because of the risk of attack, but that is no longer the case, says editor-in-chief Nina Anatoleva. The Russian intervention in 2022 greatly increased security. But they have lost viewers. Their channels, which used to broadcast widely in the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine, have been cut off—the Ukrainians have blocked the satellite signals—and can now be seen only on the internet or the local network.

■

As soon as you leave Donetsk, you feel the proximity of the front.

In the afternoon, we travel to the village of Yasynuvata, close to Avdiivka and therefore very close to the front line. The village, which is very exposed to Ukrainian shelling, is home to a school that has been converted into a reception centre for refugees from recently liberated villages. The road is torn up by shellfire and littered with the debris of collapsed bridges. On our left, two Ka–50 Alligator attack helicopters and an MI–8 helicopter are flying low over the ground as they return from the front. To our right, trenches and three rows of dragoons’ teeth, the equivalent of the Swiss Army’s Toblerone armoured barriers, so named after the Swiss chocolate because of their shape, form one of the lines of Russian defence. Military vehicles regularly drive along it.

Our vehicle is entirely anonymous. No convoy, no press badges, no bullet-proof waistcoats or helmets to attract the attention of Ukrainian surveillance drones. The GPS on our mobile phones has long since been deactivated. It's all about being as ordinary as possible. The road is getting worse and worse, and traffic is now almost non-existent. The driver, the guide, and Umar are perfectly impassive.

The headmistress of the school, a former maths teacher who is now the head of the reception centre, welcomes us. The liberation of Avdiivka and its neighbouring villages at the end of February brought the surviving inhabitants out of the cellars. They are housed here, in the classrooms, while waiting to return to their homes or find new ones. Some of the 160 people housed here have already been able to return to Avdiivka.

Today, it is the turn of Nina Timofeevna, 85 years old and full of verve, to return to her home. She lived in her cellar for two years, making fires on the street. “The Ukrainian soldiers didn’t help us at all,” she assures us, while the Russian army repaired her roof and the windows of her house so that she can return, flanked by two soldiers from the military police who carry her gear. “It’s not a war,” she says. “It’s a massacre of civilians. They want to destroy us.”

In the corridors, volunteers from the Orthodox Church are unpacking boxes of clothes, bottles of water, and food. In the other rooms, a couple with a beautiful blue-eyed cat, old people. A family with a four-year-old boy: They had their flat blown away by a rocket while trying to find food outside. The father was a factory worker and the mother an accountant at the Avdiivka coking plant. They miraculously escaped death and still can’t believe they survived.

■

On the way back to Donetsk, the discussion turns to life during the war, and Yevgeny, our volunteer guide from Vladivostok, tells me that, in Mariupol in 2014, the neo–Nazi Azov Battalion opened a secret prison in a building at the airport, called the Bibliotheka, the Library, because the victims there were referred to as “books,” like the Nazis who called their victims “Stücke,” “pieces.”

According to eyewitness accounts, dozens of people were tortured and killed there during the eight years when the battalion's nationalists, tattooed with Nazi symbols, ruled Mariupol while the local police looked the other way. Investigations are under way to identify the victims, and visits to the premises have been suspended. The Russian press reported on these incidents, but Western media remained silent for fear of undermining the narrative of the good Ukrainians and the bad Russians.

My second conclusion now. At the beginning of April, Donbas celebrated the 10^thanniversary of its uprising against the Kiev regime, which, in the spring of 2014, had declared a terrorizing war against it. Thousands of people—civilians, children, and fighters—have been killed. Donetsk has taken on the nickname of “City of Heroes.” After so many sacrifices, the three million inhabitants of the oblast, the province, will fight to the bitter end to defend their republic, whatever the cost and whatever people in the West may think of them.

Guy Mettan is an independent journalist based in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva, over which he presided in 2010. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le Club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.

■

This report appears simultaneously in Arrêt sur info, in French, in the German-language Die Weltwoche, and in the Swiss journal Current Concerns.

Editor's Note: Guy Mettan's Wikipedia page is, as we could expect from another platform poisoned by the devious and pervasive anti-Russia propaganda afflicting all information and knowledge institutions in the West, stained by an obvious attempt at slander. Thus, while providing undeniable biographical facts of lesser importance, it waits till the closing paragraph to inject its venom, using as sources Reporters Without Borders (an organisation apparently infiltrated if not created by the CIA); a member of the Swiss Green Party (also Russophobic, as are most Green Parties in Europe, especially in Germany), and a German publication. Let us remember that anyone dissenting from the high-handed spurious narrative used by the West to demonise Russia is immediately tarred as a "Putin dupe" or "apologist".

Mettan's journalistic credibility has been questioned on several occasions. In 2017, Reporters Without Borders criticized Mettan for his pro-Russian militancy and for serving as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda.^[6] Florian Irminger, Secretary General of the Swiss Green Party, also called Mettan an apologist for Putin's government.^[6]Following Mettan's support for the Ukraine bioweapons conspiracy theory in a Die Weltwoche essay in 2022, Swiss magazine Republik referred to the article as a "breathtaking compendium" of Russian propaganda.^[8]

Guy Mettan / Wikipedia page (Excerpt)

ABOUT GUY METTAN / WIKIPEDIA

Guy Mettan (born 19 November 1956 in Evionnaz) is a Swiss journalist and politician. He was a member of the Christian Democratic People's Party of Switzerland before becoming a member of the Swiss People's Party.[1] As a journalist Mettan started with Tribune de Genève as an intern[2] and was its director and editor-in-chief from 1992 to 1998.[3] 1997 he co-founded the Geneva Press Club [fr] and was executive director until 2019. In 2001 he was appointed Vice-President of the Swiss-West African Chamber of Commerce.[3] Mettan has been president of the Swiss-Russian Chamber of Commerce since its inception in 2005.[4] From 2006 to 2014 he was President of the Geneva Section of the Red Cross Switzerland.[5] He also served as President of the Grand Council of Geneva[3] and sat for the center there until 2019.[6] Mettan was awarded the Russian medal of the Order of Friendship in February 2017[4] by President Vladimir Putin.[6] While parliamentary regulations prohibit elected officials from receiving decorations from foreign governments, the Grand Council of Geneva authorised him to receive the medal on a 36-35 vote.[7]

Lili News 029

In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

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Patrick Lawrence: Could the Russians Seize Congress?

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WaPo's latest contribution to Russophobia. The CIA's anti-Moscow psyops never die. What would these guys expect Russia to do, just sit there with the West OPENLY declaring its unquenchable hatred and permanent war intentions toward her?

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/17/russia-foreign-policy-us-weaken/)

By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News

The Russians are coming — or coming back, better put.

As the November elections draw near, let us brace for another barrage of preposterous propaganda to the effect Russians are poisoning our minds with “disinformation,” “false narratives,” and all the other misnomers deployed when facts contradict liberal authoritarian orthodoxies.

We had a rich taste of this new round of lies and innuendo in late January, when Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who served as House speaker for far too long, asserted that the F.B.I. should investigate demonstrators demanding a ceasefire in Gaza for their ties, yes indeedy, to the Kremlin.

Here is Pelosi on CNN’s State of the Union program Jan. 28:

“For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine…. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the F.B.I. to investigate that.”

O.K., we have the template: If you say something that coincides with the Russian position, you will be accused of hiding your “ties to Russia,” as the common phrase has it.

Be careful not to mention some spring day that the sky is pleasantly blue: I am here to warn you—“make no mistake” — this is exactly what “Putin,” now stripped of a first name and a title, “would like to see.”

There is invariably an ulterior point when those in power try on tomfoolery of this kind. In each case they have something they need to explain away.

In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the polls, so we suffered four years of Russiagate. Pelosi felt called upon to discredit those objecting to the Israeli–U.S. genocide in Gaza.

Now we have a new ruse. Desperate to get Congress to authorize $60.1 billion in new aid to Ukraine, Capitol Hill warmongers charge that those objecting to this bad-money-after-bad allocation are… do I have to finish the sentence?

Two weeks ago Michael McCaul, a Republican representative who wants to see the long-blocked aid bill passed, asserted in an interview with Puck News that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Here is the stupid-sounding congressman from Texas, as quoted in The Washington Post, elaborating on our now-familiar theme:

“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it — and it’s almost identical on our airwaves. These people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”

I read in the Post that McCaul’s staff abruptly cut short the interview when Julia Ioffe, a professional Russophobe who has bounced around from one publication to another for years, asked him to name a few names.

So was this latest ball of baloney set in motion.

A week after McCaul’s Puck News interview, Michael Turner, an Ohio Republican who, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, swings a bigger stick, escalated matters when, reacting to McCaul’s statements, reported that this grave Russian penetration was evident in the upper reaches of the American government, as again reported in The Washington Post:

“Oh, it is absolutely true. We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti–Ukraine and pro–Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”

Masked communications uttered on the House floor: Hold the thought, as I will shortly return to it.

The VOA Rendition

The taker of the cake — so far, anyway — arrived last week from Voice of America, the Central Intelligence Agency front posing as a radio broadcaster, under the headline, “How Russia’s disinformation campaign seeps into U.S. views.” Same theme: The Rrrrrussians are poisoning America’s otherwise pristine discourse in an effort to block authorization of the assistance bill, which also includes aid to Israel ($14.1 billion) and Taiwan ($4 billion).

To drive home its point, VOA quotes a lobbyist named Scott Cullinane, who works for something called Razom, which means “together” in the Ukrainian language. Razom is a non-governmental organization “formed in 2014 to support Ukrainians in their quest for freedom.” That is, Razom’s founding coincided with the coup in Kiev the U.S. orchestrated in February 2014.

Razom works with a variety of Ukrainian NGOs to advance this cause and sounds to me like a player in the old civil-society-subterfuge game, though one cannot be sure because, on its website and in its annual reports, it does not say, per usual in these sorts of cases, who funds it.

Here is a little of VOA’s report on Cullinane’s recent doings on Capitol Hill:

“On a near daily basis, Scott Cullinane talks with members of Congress about Russia’s war in Ukraine. As a lobbyist for the nonprofit Razom, part of his job is to convince them of Ukraine’s need for greater U.S. support to survive.

But as lawmakers debated a $95 billion package that includes about $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, Cullinane noticed an increase in narratives alleging Ukrainian corruption. What stood out is that these were the same talking points promoted by Russian disinformation.

So, when The Washington Post published an investigation into an extensive and coordinated Russian campaign to influence U.S. public opinion to deny Ukraine the aid, Cullinane says he was not surprised.

‘This problem has been festering and growing for years,’ he told VOA. ‘I believe that Russia’s best chance for victory is not on the battlefield, but through information operations targeted on Western capitals, including Washington.’”

Straight off the top, there has been no Washington Post “investigation.” The Post simply quoted two paranoid congressmen without bothering to question, never mind investigate, the veracity of their assertions.

Beyond this, the question of Ukrainian corruption is another case of the sky being blue. There is no “alleging” the Kiev regime’s corruption: It is thoroughly documented by, among other authorities, Transparency International, which ranks Ukraine among the world’s most corrupt nations.

You see what is going on here? This is an echo chamber, ever treasured by the propagandists.

Puck News, a web publication of no great account, puts out a warmongering reporter’s interview with a warmongering congressman, The Washington Post reports it, another congressman seconds the assertions of the first, the Post reports that, and then VOA joins the proceedings to report that well-established, beyond-dispute facts are Russian disinformation.

And the echoes multiply, like the circles in a pond when a rock is tossed in. Here is how Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily whose Russophobia dates to its founding during the U.S. occupation after World War II, reported on the assistance bill immediately after the VOA report:

“The controversy about the aid, which has already passed the U.S. Senate, is reflected in numerous posts on social media and articles on news sites. As The Washington Post reports, one actor has played a decisive role in this: the Russian government.”

When propaganda is king, you have to conclude, what goes around keeps going around.

It is well enough to laugh at this silly business, transparently calculated as it is. Except that this kind of chicanery has a long history, and we learn from it that the Russians have been coming, off and on, for seven-plus decades. The consequences of these conjured imaginings, we also learn, are very other than funny.

When I decided to write the book that came out last autumn as Journalists and Their Shadows, exploring the past was essential to the project. If we want to understand our “press mess,” I call the current crisis in our media, we had better understand how it got this way.

In the course of my researches into the exuberant anti–Communism of the early Cold War years, I came upon a lengthy takeout Look magazine published on Aug. 3, 1948, under the headline, “Could the Reds Seize Detroit?” This piece was exemplary of its time.

“Detroit is the industrial heart of America,” the writer began. “Today, a sickle is being sharpened to plunge into that heart…. The Reds are going boldly about their business.”

Before he finishes, James Metcalfe — let this byline be recorded — has Motor City besieged in “an all-out initial blow in the best blitzkrieg fashion.” The presentation featured masked Communists murdering police officers and telephone operators, seizing airports, blowing up bridges, power grids, rail lines, and highways.

“Caught in the madness of the moment, emboldened by the darkness, intoxicated by an unbridled license to kill and loot, mobs would swarm the streets.” Communist mobs, naturally.

It is easy to read this now with some combination of derision and contempt. Do we have any grounds to do so? Are we doing things so differently now?

There were dangers implicit in the Look piece. It published Metcalfe’s paranoic fantasy a year and a few months after President Harry Truman gave his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress in March 1947. Look was in essence recruiting the public as the Truman administration launched the Cold War crusade.

Representatives McCaul and Turner are on a recruitment drive of the very same kind. They are not lying to one another in any kind of effort to clean up Congress. Do not wait for them to lift a finger on that score. They are lying to you and me in what amounts to a scare-hell operation.

And the danger this time is the same as the danger last time. It is the cultivation of a climate of fear wherein the American public is to acquiesce as the new Cold War proceeds and all manner of laws and constitutional rights are abused.

Last Friday the House reauthorized, for two more years, the law known as Section 702, which allows the intelligence cabal to surveille Americans’ digital communications — without warrants and on U.S. soil — if they claim to be targeting foreigners suspected of subversive activities.

What does this have to do with the way the paranoids on Capitol Hill, reporters at The Washington Post, and professional propagandists at VOA are currently carrying on about assistance to Ukraine?

Nothing. And everything.

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Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at:

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Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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The VOA Rendition

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Patrick Lawrence
Crosspost with Consortium News

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Crossposted with Consortium News

Patrick Lawrence
THE FLOUTIST

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