Evil Deeds Go to Washington

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Batiushka
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Negotiations?

The actor and his screenwriter wife, Volodymyr and Olena Zelensky, have gone to Washington. Why evil deeds? Is that not harsh? Not when over 500,000 Ukrainians are confirmed dead, so far. Let us hope they have a one-way ticket. Because when the actor-president is in Washington, he may well find that his pleas for more arms and dollars will be ignored, even though he has sacked most of his corrupt ministers. His scriptwriters in Washington may well instruct him to start negotiations, even though Zelensky may try and blackmail Biden with his son’s deeds. For his own safety he had better not return to Kiev with the message of negotiate. The Nazi thugs around him will not be happy. How about a stay in Miami, where he has a villa by the sea? And if he gets bored, how about moving on to Hollywood, where out of work actors make biopics?

The Western elite tells us that the Ukraine is going to start negotiating with Russia. Has Russia been informed about this? After all, it does need two sides to agree to negotiations before they can start. Did no-one tell the Russians that? The elite has also forgotten that the Ukraine has passed Presidential decrees outlawing negotiations and that its leader has insulted Russia many times. And, from a Russian viewpoint, what is there to talk about anyway, when for eight years between 2014 and 2022 before the Russian Liberation Operation began, the Ukrainians on Western orders refused to negotiate? And they broke off promising negotiations in April 2022 on Anglo-American orders. And then, why should the Russians negotiate when they are on the verge of victory, with prospects of taking Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev, if they want?

The fact is that the Ukraine is nearing collapse, with or without Zelensky. Kiev has been trying to involve others in its war, US or UK troops, or those of NATO Poland, then Estonia, and now of Romania. Without billions of dollars of subsidies from the US and the EU every month, the bankrupt Kiev regime would not be able to pay anyone. If Russia does negotiate, it will first demand conditional surrender. Conditions: All Russian areas return to Russia. For ever. In the rest of the New Ukraine: Self-determination by plebiscite. No NATO. No EU. No Nazis. No military. No US biolabs. No foreign-owned land. No oppression and massacres of Russians. Freedom to use the Russian language and express Russian religion and Russian culture. No corruption. No secret police. Free media and political parties. Free elections. Human rights for all.

Reality and Wishful Thinking

Zelensky has arrived, but too late. Reality has already dawned on some who no longer believe that: ‘The Russian economy has collapsed under Western sanctions. The Russians have run out of fuel, missiles, ammunition, tanks, money and soldiers. Its troops are criminals, or else frightened old men and teenagers, conscripted by force, untrained and thrown at the enemy either without arms or else with obsolete arms from World War II. Russian corpses are piled up in front of the Ukrainian lines, who have far vastly superior and modern NATO weapons. The Ukrainian heroes have been successful everywhere, breaking through and piercing the Russian lines of defence, achieving victories and taking back villages,’ (whose taking back has already been announced, but which in reality have not been taken even once).



All the above were the elite’s projections. It was easy to invent them. All they had to do was to write about the reality of the Ukrainian armed forces, but change the word Ukrainian to Russian. It is all psychological transfer. The Ukrainian Ministry of Propaganda (Information), advised by US PR companies, merely parrots all the hackneyed old cliches of anti-Russian Western propaganda from World War I and World War II. You can read these in any Western-edited history book. These cliches are in turn parroted, on orders from above by Western mainstream media mouthpieces. In reality, since 4 June Kiev has taken back some 282 sq kms of land out of 120,000 sq kms in exchange for 70,000 Ukrainian dead, 250 dead per sq km. But there are those in the West who for ideological reasons prefer to believe their delusions.

Therefore, we are now at the latest deluded Western propaganda proposition. This is that the conflict in the Ukraine is a ‘frozen conflict’, or ‘stalemate’, or ‘a long war’. This is incredible arrogance. Did the Western propaganda machine ask the Russians if they would agree to entertaining a ‘frozen conflict’, or ‘stalemate’, or ‘long war’? Of course not, none of that is what the Russian side will accept. It is all fantasy. None of that is going to happen in reality. These are all just the delusions of wishful thinking. The fact is that the US alone has already sent Kiev $110 billion and the EU at least half as much, together with mothballed stocks of obsolete Western equipment dating back to the period between the 60s and the 90s. How are the elites going to explain to their impoverished electorates that all that money has been lost and wasted?

The Domino Effect

All the above countries have borders with the Ukraine. EU Romania too. And like Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, they all need Russian energy and fertilisers and Chinese investment in infrastructure, which they cannot get from the EU. And, frankly, the same can be said even for Italy and Germany, which had its Nordstream pipelines blown up by the USA, probably with help from its allies, the UK or Denmark or Norway. The fact is that the survival of the EU, at least in its present form, is highly unlikely, as indeed is the survival of the routed NATO (even if Turkiye actually stays in it – which now also seems unlikely). The EU is not just dividing into its various natural regions, Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern and Central, but something far more radical is happening.

The reality is that if Poland leaves the EU, so will depopulated Lithuania and then depopulated Latvia. If Slovakia leaves, so will its cousin Czechia. If Hungary goes, so will its twin Austria. If Austria goes, so will tiny Slovenia and Croatia. If Romania goes, so will neighbouring Bulgaria and then Greece and Cyprus. And if the market of Eastern Europe has left, then so will Germany. And if Germany at the centre leaves, so will its bank in Luxembourg, its port in the Netherlands, then France and Belgium, with Ireland and then Sweden, Denmark and Finland. And if Finland goes, so will Estonia. And if France goes, so will Italy and Malta and then Spain and Portugal. This is the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989-1991 mirrored. Like all artificial constructs, the American Empire in Western Europe faces the same fate as the Soviet Empire.

The Collapse of the Post-1945 American Empire

The collapse of the EU will leave the now impoverishing non-EU UK isolated, not to mention non-EU Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. They will all be forced to make peace with ex-EU Europe in order to survive. Then all will have to work out a future without the USA in the New World Order, which began on 24 February 2022. Bankrupt Western Europe will at last have to start treating Eastern Europe as equals. Instead of patronising and trying to force Eastern Europeans into its Western straitjacket of faithlessness, called wokeness, and flooding it with refugees from its ex-empires, it will have to start respecting its values and identity. Moreover, for the first time in their arrogant history, all will also have to respect Russia, their security and energy guarantor, now the largest economy in Europe by PPP and the fifth largest economy in the world.

However, there is the wider world outside Western Europe, which since 1945 has also been ruled by the same American Empire in an alphabet soup of puppet organisations: the World Bank, the UN, the IMF, the OECD, the G7, the G20, ASEAN, AUKUS. All are being overtaken by BRICS +, the new UN, as President Lula of Brazil has called it. Amazingly, on the anachronistic UN Security Council the vast majority of the world is unrepresented. Where is India? Where is Africa? Where is Latin America? BRICS is where the dynamic is. The US elite knows this and that is the real reason why they tried to destroy Russia, using the bribed and flattered Ukraine as their battering ram. That Washington fantasy has been a disastrous failure, so Washington is turning to its next fantasy – China. It actually imagines it can destroy China!

Seeing Russia stand up to the USA and all the illegal Western sanctions, militarily, ideologically and diplomatically, and seeing the economic might of China which out-manufactures the West many times over, the Rest are also standing up. First, China concluded Russian peace propositions in West Asia, once called the Middle East, notably between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Then both Iran and Saudi Arabia and also the UAE are joining BRICS. Then Africa stood up to French colonialism, not just in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, but nearly everywhere in Francafrique, forcing French imperialism and its puppet-Presidents onto the back foot. Then came Latin America. Venezuela was already on the Russian path, but now its second-largest country, Argentina, will be joining BRIC, of which Brazil, over three times bigger, is a founder.

Time To Say Goodbye

In the words of the song, to all that it is time to say goodbye. The 1945 world is over. The short American Century that began in 1945 has been over since 2022. The Russian Federation had seriously been preparing for this moment since 2014 and even before with BRICS, building alliances in view of the existential threat from Western aggression. Western Europe will have to re-form and reform, accepting with its 500 million inhabitants, just 6% of the world population, that it is only a small part of the multipolar Global Community. And that is dominated by China, India, the Russian Federation, Africa, Muslim Asia and Latin America. It will also mean that the US, at last sorting itself out, will be unable to print dollars to paper over its cracks, unable to continue sweeping it all under the carpet. The Day of Reckoning is coming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Batiushka is the pen name of an slavonic writer who prefers to remain anonymous.


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How Empire Fabricates Atrocities

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by Kim Petersen

Syria in ruins, thanks to US bombing and its injection of terrorists (aka "moderate rebels").


Another atrocity. Yesterday, the dam holding back the waters for the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station was destroyed releasing a massive flood surge, imperilling people and places below the dam on the Dnieper River. Both sides blamed each other. From the Russian standpoint, it makes no sense to blow up the dam. According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, it was a desperate attempt to improve the defensive positions of Ukrainian forces. It is the latest atrocity in this war. On 26 September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. [A huge ecological crime] Ukraine and western monopoly media blamed Russia. Again, it makes no sense that Russia would blow up pipelines to deliver its gas. Reputable journalist Seymour Hersch made clear his case that the United States, aided by Norway, sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. Russia is no longer blamed.

This book has a depth that is not compromised by its breadth. It offers a thoroughly empirical criticism of the weaponization of human rights by Western imperialist powers. The existing anglophone academic literature too often takes for granted the so-called human rights abuses and atrocities in countries that do not bow down to the West-led order, even when serious arguments have been raised against them.—Tay Jeong

The table of contents is a lead-in to how Atrocity Fabrication reveals the systematic nature of hegemony: Cuba and Viet Nam, the US war in Korea, the disinformation about a massacre in Tiananmen Square, the first US war in the Gulf (i.e., war on Iraq), the US war on Yugoslavia, the second US war on Iraq, creating conflict with North Korea, the NATO-Libyan war, the western-backed insurgency in Syria, and the demonization of the rising economy of China.

In each of these ten chapters, Abrams adumbrates some historical background, and a pattern of what is inimical to Empire is spelled out: anti-communism, control of resources wherever they may be, and instilling and maintaining obedience to Empire.

It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission. (p 241)

Yet, the US usually does not openly flout the laws. It will create pretexts, surround itself with supportive international actors, and call upon its stenographic media. This is one stage of atrocity fabrication. For instance, Saddam Hussein’s weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq and the purported genocide in Xinjiang. Abrams brings this sleazy tactic to the fore.

Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unimaginable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted. (p 455)

Perhaps the worst of all fabrications is the false flag. This is when a massacre is perpetrated and the perpetrator lays the blame laid elsewhere, thereby creating a false casus belli. Such an atrocity fabrication may willfully sacrifice innocent people to attain a foreign policy objective. One example of this was the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. The West seized upon this to vilify Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. Or the warmaker will use the fabrication to justify one’s own hand in mass killing by blaming the other side. This Madeleine Albright did when she infamously said the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth achieving US policy objectives.

Demonizing the leader of a country that the US identifies as an enemy state (i.e., a state that is not sufficiently obedient) is another important weapon in the arsenal of Empire. Thus Assad, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Miloševic, the Kims in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Muammar Gaddafi are all caricatured along the lines of the WWII boogeyman, Adolf Hitler. Today, the US excoriates Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, and anyone else who does not bend to Empire.

U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. (p 163)

The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $ 2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, … (p 215)

In attaining its objectives, the US will stoop to whatever means it deems necessary. Atrocity Fabrication is replete with the most sordid acts of criminality: massacres, rapes and violent sexual indecencies, torture, burying people alive, brutalizing prisoners-of-war, using cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium. The book must be read to grasp the inhumanity and perversion of warmakers.

Whatever and whoever, thus, the US will ally with Islamic terrorist groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), al Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS) — and even retract the designations of groups formerly held to be terrorist, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). In other words, the terrorist enemy of a US enemy is no longer a terrorist. Too often, it is those actors wielding the term terrorist that may be the biggest terrorist. As the noted linguist Noam Chomsky stated in the film Power and Terror (2002): “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

The US-aligned world has regularly resorted to propping up defectors and encouraging false narratives. Along with this is the often insidious role played by NGOs to bring down governments.

*****

This is the third book that I have read by AB Abrams, so I am aware of the depth of research, the substantiated factuality, the logic, and the implicit morality that led to these books being written. Books by Abrams are critical reading.

Don't be deceived by the warmaking demagogues. Refuse to be an accomplice to killing. Life is meant for all humans to live together in peace.


 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail.com.

--

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• VIDEO / A Jewish-Russian Proxy President: Zelensky Transformed into a Nazi?

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DISPATCHES: Maria Zakharova praises Taibbi’s Twitter revelations. Taibbi holds his ground before the Judiciary Subcommittee.

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Dispatches and commentary from diverse sources


Combate-Puerto Rico
Russia FM Spokeswoman ZAKHAROVA: "Matt Taibbi, a former Moscow correspondent for The Moscow Times, continues to spectacularly expose the inner workings of Twitter. And everything there seems thoroughly rotten. According to the latest leaked Twitter files, the US earlier established something Taibbi refers to as the Censorship-Industrial Complex.


This is, roughly, how the group operated: American taxpayers sent their hard-earned money to the government, which used it to fund the various agencies responsible for national security, primarily the FBI. Instead of doing its direct duties, the FBI hired multiple employees to look out for “Russian” (“Chinese,” “Iranian,” etc.) propaganda. If anything even remotely fitting this definition was found, the FBI met with Twitter representatives and ordered them to censor the relevant posts or close the undesirable accounts. Accounts were regularly deleted, and that seemed to satisfy everyone: reports were drafted, "propaganda" was thwarted, and government money was spent. But there are even more shocking details. The US government was giving Twitter – a purportedly independent business – special instructions, for example, about what should be considered “anti-Ukrainian narratives.”

To comply, Twitter changed its internal settings and rejiggered its algorithms. There is a huge stone tablet across from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a sacred place in American history where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were signed. The tablet is engraved with the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly, which is sacred to America. This is what the founding fathers of the United States are believed to have created their country for, and something the Americans shed their blood for in the 18th century and throughout their history. As it turns out now, the stone is still there – only it has been pooped on by a twittering blue bird."


Zakharova, Taibbi, Jim Jordan, Shellenberger, and others denouncing this latest case of vast unconstitutional foul play are right, of course. But the Twitter scandal is not the exception but the rule. It's just one rotten island in a vast archipelago of deception. ALL social media—Facebook, Google (YouTube), Instagram, etc., not to mention the big legacy media who have long set the limits for what is "permissible" and not—The NYTimes, WaPo, the mainstream TV networks, the BBC, etc.—are doing the same thing. And we must not forget Hollywood and its big load of opinionated celebrity denizens and alarmingly insidious conformist productions. They are all targeting the truth, and the truthtellers, many times simply ordinary people expressing their opinions, via outright censorship, shadow banning, intimidation, vicious smears and worse. Accustomed to criminality without penalty, they do this while busily promoting a revoltingly dishonest and extremely dangerous upside-down reality that could not stand impartial scrutiny for ten seconds.          

The hearings on the Judiciary Subcommittee have been instructive. Knowing they can still count on almost overwhelming media support, and an executive as compromised as the last insignificant operative in their ranks, the Democrats are out to defend and justify their involvement in narrative control (actually an establishment objective ultimately endorsed by the whole duopoly) and the introduction of huge hoaxes (Russiagate, the "danger" of fake news requiring a huge and largely secret "anti-disinformation" apparatus, a veritable "thought police", and so on). Below, some highlights from the exchanges, plus various tweets by independent third parties.


When you can't hit them on facts, hit them with something irrelevant, like character assassination. The above is by notorious former FBI agent Pete Strzok, who became a poster boy for the FBI's anti-Trump partisan politicization, which continues to this day.

Aaron Maté interviewed Matt Taibbi about the uncomfortably close ties between the social media giants and various government agencies and individuals demanding censorship of various people and perspectives. The mainstream, corporate media —as we could expect—still tried to depict these revelations as a “nothingburger." Why do you think that is?

The complicity of the vast majority of the media with the "liberal" Democrat/Deep State Neoliberal/Neocon project requiring severe narrative control—including many nominally on the left or alternative channels (the synthetic left)— is by now obvious. Such channels march in lockstep with the official government policy du jour—Love Ukraine, Hate Russia, Hate China, etc. While docilely warmongering all the time. This leaves but a small number of outlets distributing truthful anti-imperialist analyses, including The Grayzone, Garland Nixon, The Duran, Scott Ritter, The New Atlas, The Convo Couch, and Jimmy Dore on the genuine left, and Tucker Carlson, on the right. This list is not exhaustive, of course. There are other invaluable voices we may have neglected to mention here, including our own publication, but we wanted to impress how small the universe of genuinely democratic, anti-imperialist media is in the West today, especially in the US. Meanwhile, bathed in human rights "woke" verbiage, the huge constellation of US Empire-allied channels pushes an essentially Neoliberal authoritarian model of governance that only benefits the global oligarchy running the show from their HQs in Washington and London. 



Written Statement
Matt Taibbi
Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on the Twitter Files” Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee on the Judiciary United States House of Representatives March 9, 2023


My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and a staunch advocate for the First Amendment. Much of my three decades have been spent in Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I have had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love. I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F.Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack.


Today, I’m here because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.
It read:

Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation... was going on at Twitter?”


A week later, the first of what became known as the
Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the Files, that we started to grasp the significance of this story.


The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.



What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives about tweets before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:


Or: Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation. This would be attached to an excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.



Following the trail of communications between Twitter and the federal

government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we’ve summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi.



We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation
requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanfords Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.

Plain and simple, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for deamplification”or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge. As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this sinister mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.


Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense in such cases.



But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
Wittingly or not, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.


Some will say,
So what? Why shouldnt we eliminate disinformation?”To begin with, you cannot have a state-sponsored system targetingdisinformation” without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict.

Many of the fears driving what Michael calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” also inspired the infamous “Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798,” which outlawed“any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president.”Here is something that will sound familiar: supporters of that law were quick to denounce their critics as sympathizers with a hostile foreign power, at the time France. Alexander Hamilton said Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were “more Frenchmen than Americans.”


Jefferson in vehemently opposing these laws said democracy cannot survive in a country where power is given to people “whose suspicions may be the evidence.”He added:



It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.



Jefferson was saying something that was true then and is still true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, even in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy.
This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.

We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we’re now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab“disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI takes it seriously.

It's not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.



This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.



For hundreds of years, the thing that
s distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we dont let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government.


The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If it can knock
over the first and most important constitutional guarantee, it will have no serious opponents left anywhere.


If there’s anything the Twitter Files show, it’s that we’re in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you and I would be happy to answer any questions from the Committee.

 


Some of the original interagency partners for the Global Engagement Center, which would be housed “within” the State Department. (This was the core network of "anti-disinformation" complex and affiliated orgs. A grifters' paradise. All breaking the law, and acting like the Neoliberal hypocritical fascists they are).


The Original Sin of the "Anti-Disinformation" Movement

Buried in the history of the Global Engagement Center is a kernel of misunderstanding that may have spawned a generation of false panics

A brief additional note on the Global Engagement Center, one of the subjects of an upcoming #TwitterFiles thread:

GEC was originally formed as a response to the problem of ISIS successfully recruiting away what one source called “well off white kids from the burbs” in both the U.S. and Europe. (The government always starts hurling money in all directions when any serious social problem reaches into the suburbs). Barack Obama’s Executive Order was specific in outlining this mission, establishing GEC to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), al Qa’ida, and other violent extremists abroad.”

At the time, “information operations” had a specific meaning in the intelligence and counterterrorism realms. One might, for instance, spread a rumor that a certain terrorist had an STD, so that he would rush online to defend his honor just long enough to be geolocated and droned.

Others in the national security establishment had ultimate faith in quantitative information analysis, turning life and death matters over to algorithms that armed and fired at targets in places like Yemen or Syria once enough digital boxes were checked: military-age male, used the wrong cell number too many times, spotted by satellite carrying something that could be a gun, etc. “We kill people based on metadata,” boasted former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden in 2014.

The original conceit of the GEC was to gather pros from this world, who’d put their heads together and come up with kinder, gentler ways of “disrupting” ISIS propaganda. From the point of view of the Pentagon, which paid most of GEC’s original budget, it was a no-lose play: spending $70-$80 million a year was worth it if it meant even one fewer death in the field, be it of a U.S. soldier or a bystander to a drone strike.

Then 2016 happened, and GEC’s mission changed on a dime.

(Unfortunately, the rest is behind a paywall.)

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
ecological murder •

Impotence can make men do foolish things and evoke helpless rage. While erectile dysfunction can be resolved, at least temporarily, with the help of a little blue pill, there is no remedy for political impotence other than reality. One example of Western political flaccidity is Europe’s decision to impose a new batch of sanctions on Russia, which include trying to muzzle RT. Strong nations that are prevailing in a conflict do not resort to such feckless, useless measures. These are the actions of weaklings.

Let me point you to a couple of articles that reflect the West’s growing frustration and rage. First up, the British Ministry of Defence. It appears they genuinely believe their own propaganda:

The British Ministry of Defence predicts a quiet winter is likely ahead for Ukraine. On its Twitter account, the agency revealed on December 12 that Russia would likely not make further moves in the coming months. And while the objective remains to overtake Donetsk Oblast, an attempt to do so probably won’t occur soon.

The UK Ministry of Defense noted in a December 13 tweet that Putin canceled his annual end-of-the-year press conference. The entity suggested that could have been because there may be a significant “anti-war feeling” in the motherland.

https://libertysons.org/new-intel-from-uk-suggests-a-defeated-vladimir-putin/?utm_placement=LBSnewsletter



The phrase, “British Intelligence,” should be entered in the Oxford English Dictionary as the exemplar of an oxymoron. Instead of doing real collection and analysis, the Brits (and their American cousins) are grasping at straws and are guilty of projection. Growing political opposition to the Special Military Operation is not happening in Russia, but it is building momentum throughout Europe. Repeated claims by British military pundits that Russia is running out of missiles and ammunition are metaphorically destroyed every week when Russia launches a new, literal barrage of missiles on key Ukrainian infrastructure. The Russians are sitting shivering in the dark of electricity-deprived apartments. That is the European fate. The Russians are not scrounging for cat food to feed themselves. That is happening in Britain.

Apparently, hopium is the new drug of choice imbibed by the West’s ruling class. Russia has taken Muhammed Ali’s Rope-a-Dope strategy and applied it to the killing fields of Ukraine. Putin’s plan is to let the West punch itself into exhaustion. The Special Military Operation has exposed the frailty and inadequacy of the logistics capability of America and NATO. While U.S. defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are raking in big bucks from new contracts, their ability to produce weapons, like the HIMMARS, in a timely fashion, and in sufficient quantities is, as the Germans say, KAPUT!

The West’s desperation for victory is revealed in its frantic but feeble effort to push the meme that Putin is suffering from a grave illness and may be on his last legs:

Vladimir Putin has created renewed concern around his allegedly deteriorating health after the Russian leader abruptly pulled out of an annual ice hockey game this week, RadarOnline.com has learned.

Putin’s absence from the Night Hockey League, an amateur ice hockey league the Russian president himself created in 2011, marks just the latest high-profile event the 70-year-old struggling leader dropped out of at the last minute in recent weeks. . . .

While sources believe Putin has canceled these events as a result of growing health and security concerns, other critics believe the moves were made to avoid confrontation over the leader’s failing war efforts in Ukraine. . . .

Russian insiders have indicated Putin underwent emergency colon surgery over the weekend after an alleged fall in his Moscow home earlier this month, suggesting his absence from both the end-of-year press conference and annual hockey match was a result of the emergency procedure.

“Putin will have a simple surgical operation,” said one source regarding his alleged emergency procedure last week.

“The fall from the stairs last week, which resulted in a bruised tailbone, did not go unnoticed and caused new problems not directly related to the bruise,” the source added regarding the fall in which Putin “involuntarily defecated” himself as a result of the “cancer affecting his stomach and bowels.”

https://radaronline.com/p/vladimir-putin-pulls-out-annual-ice-hockey-game-health-concerns/

Let me suggest an alternative explanation. The news about Putin is being put out by Russian intelligence as part of a broader deception operation. Putin gave a speech on Thursday (December 15) and did not appear pallid or fragile:

In his speech, Putin assessed the current situation in and around the country, and outlined the six main objectives of state policy in 2023, as well as guidelines for future years. At the very beginning of his speech, the head of state noted that the new solutions he proposed were designed to respond to the challenges facing the Russian economy and citizens today, and would allow the country to confidently develop. In particular, he touched on construction and housing, health and demographics, technological sovereignty, finance, the development of new regions of the Russian Federation and other issues. After the president’s speech the meeting continued.

https://tass.com/politics/1551131


This was not the speech of a sick, desperate, frightened man. At some point in the next weeks or months, the West will be forced to concede that it cannot continue pouring billions into Ukraine without inflicting enormous damage on its own economies and people. At that point, the memes of Russian weakness and defeat will crumble. NATO faces the real risk of being demilitarized. But it will not be the result of a frontal assault by Russia. Russia will continue doing what it is doing — i.e., pulverizing Western wonder weapons and bleeding the Ukrainian and foreign mercenaries with artillery and missiles.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
A Son of the New American Revolution, dedicated to geopolitical questions.

A Son of the New American Revolution


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