BLOODLETTING

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Paul Edwards

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'Gaza and Ukraine: These repugnant bloodlettings share one great similarity: both are funded by The Empire. Americans pay for the Zionist genocide, and the proxy “war” in Ukraine, and seem glad to do it. They feel justified, sure that these shows of organized mass murder deserve their support...'

Bloodletting at the barber-surgeon's salon in the mid-17th century. The occasion was often accompanied by drinking and merrymaking.

I’ll bet you thought this was going to be about Gaza and Ukraine, right?  Well, it is.  Those two hideous, psychopathic exercises in mass murder can’t be avoided in any discourse now.  Even in essays about gender dysphoria or oyster farming, those ghastly, nouminous horrors hang behind them, loom over them.

Bloodlettings are what these horrors are.  We know what we mean by that.  We mean wholesale slaughter of human beings.

The term originally described removing blood from a patient to cure a condition, a foolish, and frequently fatal, piece of medical hocus pocus, solemnly practiced in its benighted era.  Only recently has it come to refer to organized military murder.

The abattoir of The Somme in WWI, in which thousands of men were fed into an imbecilic mass death machine popularized it.  Since then it has been applied to any grand disaster in war.  Of course, Gaza is not a “war”at all, nor is Ukraine a real one.

The Empire calls them “wars”, because that designation makes them acceptable to our morally zombie public, apathetic to the point of catatonia.  “Wars”, it tells its vacuous masses, are waged to defend The Empire, and since people have to die in them, it’s better it’s someone else instead of you.  All you slugs need to do is to support our killing.

Gaza, as all the cowardly world knows, is a simple massacre.  It is the indiscriminate murder of civilian people because of their race.  Nazi Zionist Israel—the 4th Reich, the avatar of Hitler’s Germany—is murdering Gaza’s people, and those in the West Bank, because they are Palestinians from whom they stole the land their sick, vicious, illegal state is built on.

Israel did an extensive, but not sufficiently thorough, job of exterminating Palestinians in establishing their Ganif state in 1948.  They left many of them alive and have lived to regret it.

Six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab was cold-bloodedly murdered along with five relatives and two medics sent to rescue her during an Israeli tank attack in Gaza City on January 29, 2024. Besides being shelled routinely to smithereens, or buried under rubble, numerous Palestinian children are shot deliberately in the head by IDF snipers, a depraved practice the world continues to ignore. 
(Photo: family photo)

Palestinians—those left—were not reconciled to being raped of their land.  They clung to life and organized efforts to regain it.  They have failed repeatedly, but never given up, regardless of the immense suffering inflicted on them by sick, subhuman Nazi Israel, which is now attempting to eradicate them altogether.

"Seldom does an entire country merit dissolution, but the rabid fanaticism of the vast majority of Israelis demands it.  With few dissenters, its evil racist mentality is ubiquitous and ineradicable..."

For more than 80 years Palestinians have been forced to live like perennial migrants in their own homeland, while being deprived of the most elementary human rights.

It will fail, and destroy itself in the effort, which will be justice.  Seldom does an entire country merit dissolution, but the rabid fanaticism of the vast majority of Israelis demands it.  With few dissenters, its evil racist mentality is ubiquitous and ineradicable.

Barring a war it is insanely seeking, that will leave it a pulverized inferno, its end will come from its own raging poison, as when a wasp or scorpion, believing itself attacked, stings itself to death.

Ukraine’s story, very different, is comparably ugly. Precipitated, by The Empire’s anxiety over its displacement as world hegemon, it aimed to defeat Russia by driving supine NATO’s expansion to its borders, using Ukraine as its latest pawn of choice.  If this is not clear to you by now, it’s because you refuse to know it.

They share one great similarity: both are funded by The Empire.  Americans pay for the Zionist genocide, and the proxy “war” in Ukraine, and seem glad to do it.  They feel justified, sure that these shows of organized mass murder deserve their support.

Both our Presidential candidates support the genocide.  One is running a campaign of “joy'”, the result of her endorsement of it, perhaps.  The other agrees, but won’t pay for Ukraine’s suicide.  Americans will be shocked when both horrors end badly for The Empire, after having invested in them so much idiot emotion.

The process of maintaining one’s ignorance is difficult when it means flatly ignoring facts.  That it is also contemptible, only becomes clear when events make it impossible to pretend.  Then, one has to admit to being the egregious ass one is.

This is what awaits most vacant, oblivious Americans.  In the best case, we will be seen as the most despicable herd of moral defectives since Germany under the Nazis.  Far greater danger exists in the potential each horror presents for world war.  If it comes, Americans will find their own suffering much harder to take than that of the people of Gaza and Ukraine they funded.

Bloodletting as a treatment, though useless, fooled all Europe in its time.  The same can be said about The Empire’s propaganda.  For decades the stream of exceptionalist bullshit has inundated Americans, reinforcing their stupidity, and compounding their ignorance.  Like bloodletting, though pernicious, it has continued for generations, doing immense harm to the body politic.

It is now, at last, being exposed, by the principled and heroic, for what it is: a hollow, dangerous, debilitating sham.  There is a great race now underway between the awakening of a morally torpid people, and the destruction and dissolution of their sick and evil state.  How ironic to awaken to the sound of your own explosive demise.


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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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RBN DISMANTLES the ADL After Their SMEAR ATTEMPT Backfires

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Due Dissidence
KEATON WEISS • RUSSELL DOBULAR

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RBN DISMANTLES the ADL After Their SMEAR ATTEMPT Backfires

Due Dissidence

Sep 2, 2024
RBN's Nick Cruse gets into a dust-up with the ADL over whether Jews should feel threatened on campuses. As documented by Keaton and Russell, the smear attempt backfired. 

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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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The German mainstream is collapsing

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Thomas Fazi

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The German mainstream is collapsing

Fazi notes that a new left-right populist spectrum is emerging in Germany, but the phenom is not seen just in Germany, but hroughout the collective West, including, quite possibly, the United States.

AfD leaders in Germany

The imperialist-aligned establishment is throwing a "quarantine" fence around AfD to keep them from forming coalitions, a phenom also seen in France and possibly other countries in the EU and beyond. The AfD, however, is staunchly pro-capitalist, so this is not a party with an ultimate solution to Germany's long-term problems.

This weekend’s regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia have revealed significant shifts in the German political landscape, reflecting a country grappling with multiple crises. Although these were only regional elections, their outcomes carry national implications, particularly given the participation of nearly three-quarters of the five-million electorate. Here are the main takeaways:

The political mainstream has collapsed

The main opposition party, the centre-right CDU, maintained its dominant position in Saxony by a tiny margin. But the party now faces a choice: change or continue to shed votes to the AfD. The CDU’s involvement in centrist coalitions, driven by the necessity of excluding the AfD, has diluted its political identity. Also quite paradoxically, the rise of the AfD has been fuelled precisely by the migration policies of former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel.

The CDU now finds itself weakened, unable to form coalitions without compromising its traditional stances, and without striking alliances that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, such as with the newly formed left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) — an option that is currently being explored by both parties. Incredibly, the BSW is now the third-largest party in both states — an impressive feat for a party that was launched just a few months ago.

For a deep dive into the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, and how her blend of old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-NATO foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is redefining populism — and upending German politics — see this recent article of mine. (It is reproduced as an addendum below.—Ed)

The transplantation of the FRG’s economic order into the former GDR was the most brutal neoliberal shock therapy ever implemented in a European country...The first instrument of this shock therapy was monetary integration, which involved the former GDR’s adoption of the West-German mark, which was highly overvalued relative to the fundamentals of the East-German economy.

Migration and war: the central issues

The vote has confirmed that migration remains the “mother of all domestic policy problems”. The inability to manage migration effectively has eroded public trust in traditional parties. The AfD’s success can be attributed largely to its hardline stance on immigration, a position that has gained traction even among former left-wing voters who now support the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. This development suggests that migration will dominate the upcoming federal elections, turning them into a de facto referendum on Germany’s immigration policies. But opposition to war and to the government’s belligerent approach to the Russia-Ukraine crisis clearly also played a role, especially among young people. Sahra Wagenknecht, in particular, has put opposition to NATO and to the deployment US long-range missiles on German territory, and the question of détente with Russia, at the centre of her party’s platform. 

A new left-right populist spectrum  

The most interesting takeaway from the elections is probably the emergence of a new, and unique in the European panorama, left-right populist spectrum, in the form of the AfD and the BSW, which collectively make up almost 50 percent of the votes. This underscores that dissatisfaction with the established parties is even larger than what right-populists parties alone are able to capture: a lesson for other countries as well. For now the BSW has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, which is understandable from a tactical standpoint: many disaffected voters from the centre and the left are turning to the BSW precisely because it is not the AfD. But in the future the mood might shift: if the establishment refuses to respond to popular concerns, the demand for a left-right populist front could grow. Meanwhile, the fact that both ends of the political spectrum are converging on similar migration policies suggests that this issue may hopefully be approached more pragmatically, rather than through the lens of morality.

An increasingly divided country

One cannot understand the populist uprising sweeping eastern Germany without understanding the economic, social and political trauma that reunification — or better, the East’s annexation by the West — was for many eastern Germans, and how this legacy continues to this day. As I recently wrote in Compact:

The transplantation of the FRG’s economic order into the former GDR was the most brutal neoliberal shock therapy ever implemented in a European country.

The first instrument of this shock therapy was monetary integration, which involved the former GDR’s adoption of the West-German mark, which was highly overvalued relative to the fundamentals of the East-German economy. This shattered the profitability of East-German firms, which quickly became insolvent, resulting in the immediate collapse of GDP and a sharp rise in unemployment. Most ominously, it kicked off what one study described as a “dramatic process of de-industrialization”.  

The second instrument was the mass privatization of state-owned firms, houses, and land by the infamous Treuhandanstalt, a West-German government-controlled trust agency that took control of almost all the assets of the former GDR with the aim of privatizing them as quickly as possible. By 1992, more than 80 percent of firms had already been privatized or closed. The overwhelming majority of the firms were sold to West German investors and companies—at bargain prices, of course. 

In other words, virtually the entire economy of the former socialist state passed into the hands of West-German capitalists.

[This is reflected in] the stark economic disparities that persist between West and East Germany more than three decades after reunification, when the territories of the GDR were incorporated into the FRG in 1990. The states that make up the former East Germany generally have lower GDP per capita and wages, higher unemployment and poverty rates, and poorer infrastructure and public services than those in the West. In 2017, net national income per capita in East Germany was still only 73 percent of what it was in West Germany. 

A wake-up call

In conclusion, the recent regional elections serve as a wake-up call for Germany. They highlight the urgent need for political realignment and the dangers of ignoring the concerns of significant portions of the electorate. The implications extend beyond Germany, affecting its role in the European Union and the broader geopolitical landscape.

This is a longer version of an article that appeared in UnHerd.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)


Addendum
Who’s afraid of Sahra Wagenknecht? Germany's 'left-conservative' has redefined populism
Sahra Wagenknecht

Sahra Wagenknecht: her inteligent political formula may actually represent salvation for Germany and the continent—if the US-aligned satrap establishment will allow.

AUGUST 31, 2024

Few would have predicted that Germany, long known for having the continent’s most boring politics, would become the epicentre of Europe’s new populist revolt — let alone one coming from both the Right and the Left. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.

In the recent European elections, as amply expected, the Right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party overtook the centre-left SPD for the first time, becoming the country’s second-largest party after the centre-right CDU/CSU alliance. Meanwhile, the two major parties between them gained less than 45% of the votes — down from 70% just 20 years ago. It was the biggest collapse of the German political mainstream since reunification.

More than anything, the elections revealed that post-reunification Germany remains neatly divided along its former border: while western Germans are also signalling growing dissatisfaction with the current SPD-Greens-FDP coalition, but remaining within the bounds of mainstream politics, eastern Germans are revolting against the political establishment itself.

Thus, with state elections taking place in three eastern states over the next month — in Saxony and Thuringia this weekend, and in Brandenburg on September 22 — it’s no wonder the German centre is bracing itself for collapse. But while it’s a foregone conclusion that the AfD will make massive gains, with the party leading the polls in two of the three states, the real surprise may prove to be, once again, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party, which is currently polling between 11% and 19%.

For now, Wagenknecht has ruled out forming regional coalition governments with the AfD, as well as with any party that supports arms deliveries to Ukraine (which means most mainstream parties). But her mere presence on the ballot will further erode support for the ruling coalition — and make it very hard, if not impossible, for the latter to form centrist coalition governments at the state level.

The Wagenknecht phenomenon is fascinating — and unique — for several reasons. Not only has she managed to establish the BSW as one of the country’s major political forces in a matter of months, but she’s also running on a platform that is unique in the Western political panorama, at least among electorally relevant parties. Though Wagenknecht tends to avoid framing her party in tired Left-Right terms, its platform can best be described as left-conservative.

In short, this means it mixes demands that would once have been associated with the socialist-labour Left — interventionist and redistributive government policies to regulate capitalist market forces, higher pensions and minimum wages, generous welfare and social security policies, taxes on wealth — with positions that today would be characterised as culturally conservative: first and foremost, a recognition of the importance of preserving and fostering traditions, stability, security and a sense of community.

Flailing Germany is the future of Europe

This inevitably entails more restrictive immigration policies and a rejection of the multiculturalist dogma, in which minorities refuse to recognise the superiority of common rules, threatening social cohesion. As the party’s founding text reads: “Immigration and the coexistence of different cultures can be enriching. However, this only applies as long as the influx remains limited to a level that does not overburden our country and its infrastructure, and as long as integration is actively promoted and successful.” What this looks like in practice became clear in 2015, when Wagenknecht strongly criticised then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, invoking the mantra “Wir schaffen das!” (“We can do it!”). A year later, after a series of terror attacks perpetrated by migrants, Wagenknecht released a statement that read: “The reception and integration of a large number of refugees and immigrants is associated with considerable problems and is more difficult than Merkel’s frivolous ‘We can do it!’.”

More recently, following a fatal knife attack in Mannheim, Wagenknecht again lashed out at the government’s immigration policies: “We basically financed [the migrant attacker’s] radicalisation as well. He lived off us, off the money of the citizens.” Her focus on benefits here is crucial. For Wagenknecht, the promotion of social cohesion, including by restricting immigration flows, shouldn’t just be seen as a positive end in and of itself, such as for reasons of public safety, but also as a precondition for the pursuit of economically redistributive policies, and even of democracy itself. Only a political community defined by a collective identity — a demos — is capable of committing itself to a democratic discourse and to a related decision-making process, and of generating the affective ties and bonds of solidarity that are needed to legitimise and sustain redistributive policies between classes and/or regions. Simply put, if there is no demos, there can be no effective democracy, let alone a social democracy.

This is also why Wagenknecht places a strong emphasis on the importance of national sovereignty, and is highly critical of the European Union: not only because the EU is fundamentally anti-democratic and prone to oligarchic capture [actually captured ab initio by the globalist oligarchy.—Ed] , but because it cannot be otherwise, given that today the nation-state remains the main source of people’s collective identity and sense of belonging, and therefore the only territorial institution (or at least the largest) through which it is possible to organise democracy and achieve social balance. As she has said: “The call for ‘an end to the nation-state’ is ultimately a call for ‘an end to democracy and the welfare state’”.

In short, Sahra Wagenknecht is anything but your typical Western Leftist. Now, this is partly to do with the fact that she was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in former East Germany in 1969. She became interested in philosophy and Marxist economics as a teenager, but the end of the socialist GDR, in 1989, was, according to her biographer Christian Schneider, “the moment in time when the politician Wagenknecht was born”. She experienced it as a “unique horror”: like many East Germans, she believed in a reformed socialism, not in embracing West Germany’s capitalist path.

 

“In short, Sahra Wagenknecht is anything but your typical Western Leftist.”

That same year she joined the East German communist party, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then, following reunification, became one of the leading figures of the party’s successor, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Even back then, she stood out as being both more radical and more conservative than her communist peers. “There was now this young woman who desperately wanted to go back to the old days” of the GDR, as one former leader of the PDS put it.

When, in 2007, the PDS merged with a splinter of the SPD to give birth to Die Linke (The Left), Wagenknecht quickly emerged as one of the party’s leading voices — and the face of the German radical Left. Die Linke’s support rocketed to 12% of the vote in 2009’s elections to the Bundestag, and remained close to there for nearly a decade. Wagenknecht also became a key figure in the German parliament, serving as parliamentary co-chairwoman of her party from 2015 to 2019 and as leader of the opposition (against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s grand coalition) until 2017. It was there that she earned a reputation for her powerful rhetoric and ability to challenge mainstream political narratives.

Her relationship with Die Linke, however, grew increasingly strained over the years: while the party became captured by the kind of “progressive neoliberalism” that has infected, to one degree or another, all Western Left-wing parties, Wagenknecht remained true to her old-school socialist roots. Her views on immigration and other issues — which would once have been completely non-controversial in socialist circles — were quickly becoming anathema on the Left. Eventually, in November 2019, Wagenknecht announced her resignation as parliamentary leader, citing burnout. Two years later, in the federal elections, Die Linkegarnered less than 5% of ballots and lost nearly half its seats — its worst result ever. For Wagenknecht, this was not a surprise.

Will East Germans ever feel at home?

For Wagenknecht, this new movement’s authoritarian shade became clear during the pandemic. Unlike virtually all her colleagues — and most of the German Left — Wagenknecht became a sharp critic of the government’s “endless lockdowns” and coercive mass vaccination programme (she refused to take the vaccine herself). Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Wagenknecht has also emerged as the most vocal critic of Germany’s military support for Ukraine and the sanctions regime. This escalated her rift with Die Linke, which voted in favour of economic sanctions against Russia.

At that point, their break-up became inevitable — and finally, late last year, Wagenknecht announced the launch of her new party. The choice led to the unravelling of Die Linke, which was forced to dissolve its parliamentary faction, and has now virtually disappeared from the political map, receiving only 2.7% of the votes in June’s European elections.

Since the launch of BSW, Wagenknecht has put the question of détente with Russia at the centre of her party’s platform. On several occasions, she has highlighted how Germany’s subordination to the US-Nato proxy war strategy in Ukraine, and refusal to engage in diplomatic talks with Russia, is self-defeating from an economic as well as a geopolitical standpoint. Not only is the oil and gas embargo against Russia the main reason for Germany’s collapsing economy, but the government is, she told the Bundestag, “negligently playing with the security and in the worst case the lives of millions of people in Germany”. More recently, she has strongly condemned the government’s plan to deploy US long-range missiles on German territory and, perhaps most dramatically, challenged the omerta surrounding the Nord Stream attack. Indeed, following recent revelations about the German government’s possible cover-up of Ukrainian involvement, she called for a public inquiry, saying that, “should German authorities have known in advance about the attack plan on Nord Stream 1 and 2, then we would have the scandal of the century in German politics”.

It’s important to note that Wagenknecht views opposition to the proxy war against Russia as part of a much deeper rethinking of Germany’s geopolitical strategy. Its aim, as Wolfgang Streeck has written, is to “free it from the geostrategic grip of the United States, guided by German national survival interests instead of Nibelungentreue, or loyalty, to America’s claim to global political domination”. This necessarily entails re-establishing long-term political and economic relations with Russia, which could potentially lay the groundwork for a new Eurasian security architecture, and even a Eurasian community of states and economies.

Elsewhere, Wagenknecht has criticised the government’s “green” and gender-affirming policies, arguing that “Germany’s energy supply cannot currently be ensured by renewable energies alone”, and voting against a bill passed by the German parliament earlier this year to make it easier to change one’s legal gender. “Your law turns parents and children into guinea pigs for an ideology that only benefits the pharmaceutical lobby,” she said.

Germany's authoritarian turn

If that seems blunt, that’s because it is. But taken together, Wagenknecht’s old-school leftist economics, pro-peace and anti-Nato foreign policy, and conservative cultural outlook is resonating with voters. And as a result, she now finds herself in the crosshairs of both the establishment and her populist competitors. Indeed, on the Right in particular, the common criticism levelled at her is that, by drawing voters away from the AfD, she is weakening and dividing Germany’s populist front.

Yet the evidence for this is somewhat shaky. Rather, opinion polls show that the emergence of the BSW does not seem to have overly affected the AfD, which continues to maintain a 30% vote share in several eastern German states and 20% nationally. In fact, according to a recent study by the Hans Böckler Foundation, the BSW is actually drawing voters mostly from the centre and the Left — Die Linke and the SPD — rather than the AfD. The BSW’s staunchly Left-wing economic agenda, which puts it at odds with the neoliberal economic policy of the AfD, would appear to be key here: the study shows that the BSW draws support mainly from socially marginalised and low-income groups — traditionally, the classic target group of social-democratic parties. It also explains why she enjoys much stronger support in eastern Germany, which has significantly lower GDP per capita and wages, and higher unemployment and poverty rates than western Germany.

This suggests that Wagenknecht’s left-conservative agenda is filling a political space that was previously vacant, hoovering up German voters who are disillusioned with mainstream politics, and even very critical of immigration, but nonetheless feel uncomfortable voting for a party that has undeniably xenophobic or racist traits. The BSW, by contrast, represents a much more palatable “non-extremist” option for these would-be populist voters. This is further confirmed by the fact that, despite its tough stance on immigration, the BSW appears to be winning over an above-average number of voters from migrant backgrounds, a demographic that has traditionally voted for centre-left parties. In short, the evidence suggests that Wagenknecht is actually broadening the populist front rather than simply crowding out the existing populist pool.

It is this, along with the fact that Wagenknecht is among the top three most popular politicians in Germany, that explains why the establishment has decided to go on the attack. In recent weeks, the media there has launched a relentless campaign against Wagenknecht and the BSW, predictably focused on claims that she is a “Russian propagandist” — or “Vladimir Putinova”, as one article called her. Even more desperately, some have attempted to paint Wagenknecht, a literal communist, as a “far-Right extremist”. Only this week, Politico, which is owned by German media titan Axel Springer, unironically asked: “Is Germany’s rising superstar so far-Left she’s far-Right?”

The answer, of course, is a boring nein. And no doubt a far more interesting question will be thrown up by this weekend’s results: with a general election scheduled for next year, has Germany finally found a politician capable of breaking through its ideological wall?

Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

THOMAS FAZI
 
SELECT COMMENT
Gpcus

2 hrs ago

"Uno spettro si aggira per l'Europa: lo spettro del populismo destro-sinistro. Tutte i leader della vecchia Europa si sono coalizzati in una sacra caccia alle streghe contro questo spettro: da Mario Draghi a Ursula Von der Layen, da Macron a Scholz, liberali francesi e centristi tedeschi"... non si vedeva tanta agitazione nelle nostre elites politico-accademico-mediatiche dai moti del 1848 e la stesura del Manifesto, ahahaha!
 


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  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
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Do Something Every Day To Help De-Normalize The Abuses Of The Empire

Be sure to distribute this article as widely as possible. Pushing back against the Big Lie is really up to you.

Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST


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One very important task we can undertake as citizens of the western empire is to help de-normalize the tyranny, murderousness and savagery that the imperial propagandists work to normalize.

 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

One very important task we can undertake as citizens of the western empire is to help de-normalize the tyranny, murderousness and savagery that the imperial propagandists work to normalize. To help other westerners see the freakishness and depravity of the empire with fresh eyes.

If we lived in a healthy, harmonious society, and then all of a sudden the status quo changed to the one we have right now, people would scream their fucking lungs out. They would scream and scream and scream in abject horror and gut-wrenching grief at what they were seeing. It would feel like the end of the world to everyone.

Our task is to try to give our fellow westerners a taste of that experience. To help people viscerally experience the vast contrast between what we have now and what an acceptable status quo would actually look like. To show them the immense suffering, brutality and psychopathy of the empire in all the ways it shows up from day to day, in ways that the normality manufacturers in Washington, New York and Hollywood have been trying to keep them from seeing.

The job of the empire propagandist is to normalize the empire. Our job as healthy human beings who care about the world is to do the exact opposite — to denormalize it. To find new and creative ways to help people see that these things we’ve been conditioned to accept as normal are actually shocking and unacceptable.

  • Denormalize poverty.
  • Denormalize injustice and inequality.
  • Denormalize the ruined buildings and ruined bodies in Gaza.
  • Denormalize the nuclear brinkmanship with Russia.
  • Denormalize the destruction of our biosphere in the ravages of ecocidal capitalism.
  • Denormalize the surging authoritarianism we’re experiencing as the empire works frantically to stomp out dissent.
  • Denormalize the war machinery rolling out around the world, and the increasingly militarized police forces in our streets.
  • Denormalize the psychopathy of the politicians and government officials who cheerfully serve the empire in facilitation of these horrors.
  • Denormalize the way media and government institutions controlled by the powerful work to manipulate the way we think and perceive every day of our fucking lives for the benefit of the powerful.

One of the advantages the empire propagandists have over normal people is that these things are all we’ve ever known. We’ve never experienced a healthy world, so we don’t experience the shock and outrage we’d otherwise experience at what these pricks are stealing from us by keeping that healthy world from us.

But one thing we have that the empire propagandists do not is creativity, and the ability to capture the human imagination. We can use these things to find ways of making the evils of the empire stand out against the background of normalization, and to help people envision a world without those completely unnecessary evils.

There’s always something we can do on this front. Our votes might not matter. Our peaceful protests might get ignored by those in power. Our rights might be getting steadily eroded as the empire managers work to reinforce the bars of our cage. But we can always work to open the eyes of our fellow citizens to the reality of our situation, and to how completely unacceptable it is. And to the urgent need to change it. And to the truth that, if enough eyes can be opened, the power of our numbers will place such change within our grasp.

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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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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 
 

 

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Mirages

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Ed Curtin

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Mirages

I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.  The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau – the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.  I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world’s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe.  Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau’s Cape Cod in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand.  Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment.  It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days.

*

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his cards and conceded the current pot to Donald Trump – what he euphemistically called suspending his campaign for the presidency – he let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him.  His trust in Trump is naïve in the extreme.  With the issue that Kennedy has made central to his work in recent years – Covid and the “vaccines” – Trump is in the opposite camp.

The investigative journalist Whitney Webb has said:  “The inevitable embrace of the Trump campaign by RFK Jr. will see one of the Covid-era’s most prominent (+ promoted) skeptics embrace the man whose administration established the early Covid policies and Military-run Op Warp Speed. What a world and what a disappointment.”

Furthermore, Trump’s campaign is backed by a host of people – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Trump’s vice-president sidekick, JD Vance, among others – who are big promoters and investors in mRNA and DNA vaccine technology.  Thiel and Lonsdale are cofounders of Palantir, a company that collects American’s health data while it also works with the CIA.

Mirages?

And the independent journalist Vaness Beeley, while being equally scathing of the Democratic Party’s masters of war, has said the following of this odd coupling:

With Trump and Kennedy you have a combination that is 100 times more likely to lead us to Armageddon and idiots are saying Trump supplied less weapons to Israel. Of course he did because he was destroying Syria through unilateral collective punishment economic sanctions, assassinating Resistance leadership and paving the way for greater Israel, Clean Break through Abraham Accords and Jerusalem, giving Golan to Zionist occupation. He didn’t NEED to start wars, he certainly didn’t end them, he increased the hybrid war strategy to pave the way for the final solution and Kennedy is fully on board, whatever his title. It’s astonishing to watch people whitewash the Trump role in the empowerment of the Zionist entity which has led to the genocide we are witnessing. There is no one or the other (Trump or Harris) they work as a tag team, oligarchs and deep dark state create the road map. We are already in WW3 and Trump will go to war with Iran, effectively with Russia and China. Why continue supporting a putrid corpse of a US political system? And, by the way, Kennedy support base is not anti-Zionist. They are generally apathetic and prepared to excuse Kennedy’s criminal genocide denial and defence of Zionist apartheid and ethnosupremacism because “America first”. Genocide is the Red line that Trump and Kennedy will erase and normalisation of genocide is a clandestine policy of this partnership. We are already in WW3. Trump will not end any wars, he never has. Iran and China are in his crosshair.

This too is true, and it runs counter to RFK, Jr.’s pledge to end all foreign wars.  One may have noticed that in his speech suspending his campaign Kennedy said that he disagreed with Trump on certain matters, but he did not conveniently mention that they were in accord with each other and the Democrats in supporting the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and its push for war with Iran and therefore Iran’s ally Russia.  That sounds like one big foreign war to this observer.

While the mainstream media relish ripping Kennedy, they rarely if ever mention his unequivocal support for Israel, for to do so would bind them to him (and Biden/ Harris, and Trump/Vance) in being full-fledged supporters of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.  Indeed, there is one taboo that the mainstream corporate media, mouthpieces for the warfare state, assiduously maintain: it is to never report the truth about the power Israel maintains over U.S. Mideast policy through its Israel lobby, and their own complicity in Israel propaganda.  Politicians of both parties are venal reprobates who parade with American flags on their chests as they betray their country.  They can only be described as traitors, as the current Biden/Harris administration’s full-fledged proud military backing for Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians substantiates.  The recent Democratic Convention was a Hollywood spectacle directed by an American version of Nazi Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl, replete with shouts for the destruction of Russia as well as the Palestinians.  (The Biden-Harris administration has just approved its 100th arms shipment to Israel since October 7, 2023.)  That they are pushing the world toward nuclear war didn’t disturb them in the least, as they sang and laughed and acted out for a fan base deluded by mirages and auditory delusions produced Tinseltown style.

So American voters are offered a choice of a political alliance of an odd couple in Kennedy and Trump, along with Vance, and a conventional one in Harris and Walz, based on the fallacious assumption that a choice is being offered between the war parties whose raisons d’être are to wage foreign wars for the teetering American empire.  Hovering over and behind this pathetic travesty lies the controlling power of the national security state and its corporate media propaganda for these endless wars and corrupt politicians.  Only a skeptically acute mental knife, constantly sharpened, can cut through the propaganda campaign aimed, not at a foreign audience, but at the American people by its own government.  Mind control is the name of its game.

*

What would Thoreau, a man who didn’t vote and refused to his pay poll tax to support war and slavery, think of these strange alliances hiding behind glittering mirages?  Though written more than 150 years ago, his words are more than apropos today:

He made it very clear that one should not lend oneself to the wrongs which one condemns, such as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or the US/NATO war against Russia through Ukraine that is leading toward nuclear war.  By voting for the so-called “lesser of two evils,” one is voting for evil and lending oneself to the wrongs one condemns.  It is blatant hypocrisy and a vote for the warfare state.

*

As synchronicity would have it, down the winding road a short walk from where we are staying, sits tiny Rock Harbor in Orleans where a fleet of fishing boats are docked on Cape Cod Bay.  Directly across the road rises a massive tower and huge stone basilica that is part of the compound for The Church of the Transfiguration.  It describes itself simply as the Community of Jesus and across its front is a long large sign in red, white, and blue emblazoned with a star and the word JOY.

Sinister Forces, this church was a front for U.S. intelligence agencies in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.  He says,

As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad. It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s. Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.

It was not until earlier this year when I was contemplating and mourning the self-immolation of Adam Bushnell, the US airman who burnt himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, that I thought again of The Church of the Transfiguration.  Bushnell, who was once a member of this church, left these words:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.

His powerful words and tragic death moved me deeply.  I thought of Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian and a Catholic Worker who in 1965 immolated himself in front of the United Nations building in New York City protesting the U.S. war against Vietnam, while the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Spellman of New York supported the war with the vigor of John Wayne in The Green Berets.  Ruthless jingoism then and now, the lust for killing “others,” such as Vietnamese and Palestinians over the decades.  Worthless people to the War Party.  And two young men whose consciences drove them to extreme acts of protest.

Yesterday I remembered what I read in The New York Post and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation in February about Adam Bushnell and The Church of the Transfiguration.  These reports assert that the church is a cult and that Bushnell grew up here in the Rock Harbor community where his parents still live. The reports claim that members are mind-controlled and abused, and they are raised to strictly obey and follow some secret agenda.  The church says it stands with Israel, which is what Bushnell emphatically came to reject, for he stood with the Palestinians, even literally standing as he courageously took his life in flames.  Like all cults, money doesn’t seem a problem for this strange community.  One thinks also of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple and its strange intelligence connections.  As John Judge has documented in “The Black Hole of Guyana”:

The connection of intelligence agencies to cults is nothing new. A simple but revealing example is the Unification Church, tied to both the Korean CIA (i.e., American CIA in Korea), and the international fascist network known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The Moonies hosted WACL’s first international conference.[217] What distinguished Jonestown was both the level of control and the openly sinister involvement. It was imperative that they cover their tracks.[218]

*

The sky and ocean here on Cape Cod are very restless and constantly changing, even as people come here to rest, to be still for a while.  The movement of the waves and clouds, the shore birds flitting and floating before and above one, the constant breaking of the waves on the shore, and the long looks far out to where the ocean seems to disappear, create dreamy minds, if one allows it.  I am no exception, and this place no doubt increases my tendency to mental vagabonding.  Yet I am one with Thoreau when he says, “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough.”  For I began with mirages and will drift back to them.  They come in many forms, but all contain the sense of being deluded.  This is the lesson of Plato’s Cave and Eastern philosophy’s idea of maya, among many ancient warnings. “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,” Thoreau said truly.  Yet when we turn to the realm of politics in our times, as we must when vacations cease, we are forced back to contemplate the insidious nature of the scoundrel politicians and leaders of all sorts who capture so many minds with lies and mirages of false hope on the horizon.

Most people don’t like to see the summer end, but another Fall is approaching.  A different reality beckons.

 

2 thoughts on “Mirages”

To his credit, the last 20 minutes of RFK Jr’s concession speech, in which he outlined in detail the enormous harm done to the public by the medical/agricultural industrial complex over the past several decades, was the one of the most honest and refreshing things heard from a politician in a very long time. The spread of chronic illness among Americans, and especially the younger cohort, is epic and unprecedented, promising repercussions almost hard to imagine. But his strangely naive faith in Trump is certainly puzzling, and his alignment with the openly murderous campaign against Palestine by Israel is deeply disturbing. We seem to be faced with another Hobbesian choice. Whether one takes the red pill, the blue pill, or no pill at all, the foreseeable future appears to be grim. But it is what it is, and likely part of a larger cycle that cannot be avoided.
As that great Confucius of the Infield quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. Or not.
Borbas says:
Magnificent. Made me rethink some things I had regarded as immutable in my head. 
Thank you for running this. 

 


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.

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