It is Us
"Americans are, by and large, an astoundingly mean spirited people. At least white America. Snarky, snide, suspicious, vainglorious and provincial; THAT is the great USA, as well as Puritanical, prudish, narcissistic, and generally xenophobic..."
The flag—chauvinism—is usually the first conditioned response to any crisis among well indoctrinated ordinary Americans.
“The war mentality represents an unfortunate confluence of ignorance, fear, prejudice, and profit. … The ignorance exists in its own right and is further perpetuated by government propaganda. The fear is that of ordinary people scared by misinformation but also that of leaders who may know better but are intimidated by the political costs of speaking out on such a heavily moralized and charged issue.”— Gabor Mate
The manufacturing of Russia as the arch enemy of not just the U.S. but mankind in general has reached levels of absurdity and pathology. This is all sort of obvious, though, I think. The yellow journalism of the creepy Max Boot at the New York Times is emblematic of the current toxic demand for war. I do wonder what these people are thinking. I mean do they know something I don’t? And the list of propagandists, both in media and governments throughout the west, is quite long. In fact finding someone who objects to this war mongering is much harder. There are some, of course, but they are largely invisible in mainstream media.
What does the ruling class want? Almost every major government official who propagates the anti Russia rhetoric is wealthy. Or at least affluent. Why do they want to promote conflict? To make more money? If so, what can that extra money buy them? What does John Bolton not have that he wants? What does Rachel Maddow want that she can’t afford? This has always troubled me. When I ask such questions I usually get an answer like “they want power” or “they want control;”. But why? What does more power bring you? The ability to create institutions in your own image, in accordance with your ideological leanings? Is that it? If this is correct, for some, what does being able to shape institutional authority actually bring you? What benefits? Is it some moral demand for change? Is Mike Pompeo driven by moral or ethical issues? What do the Clintons want? Are they motivated by a moral calling? What does Chuck Schumer want, or Nancy Pelosi? They lead extraordinarily comfortable privileged lives. What would an even limited conflict with Russia or China bring such people? Are the Koch brothers concerned with the happiness of the people of the world? Of course not. They are, in their minds, concerned with their own happiness. But does promoting their irrational ideology bring them a feeling of well being? But then I am not at all sure what happiness looks like to Charles Koch. Not what it looks like to you or me I’d venture to guess.
No, the answer is more complex. It is maybe even, in considerable measure, unconscious. It is resentment and fear, it is ambivalence and narcissism. For the reality is that nobody benefits from a nuclear war. NOBODY. But tens of millions die. And maybe everyone dies.
Is this not something the propagandists know? Do they want to die? All month I’ve been thinking of Wilhelm Reich’s small book Listen Little Man.
This is why I am afraid of you Little Man, deadly afraid. For on you depends the fate of humanity I am afraid of you because there is nothing you flee as much from as yourself. You are sick, very sick, Little Man. It is not your fault. But it is your responsibility to rid yourself of this sickness. You would have long since shaken off your oppressors had you not tolerated oppression and often actively supported it.
Anyone not angered is not well. But I think many are angry, but they feel unable to formulate ways to express this anger. Dissent is an unpopular position. It might cost you work. It might get you fired. And for many, they think of their families. Their children must eat. So they stay silent. They use pseudonyms when they do protest. But it is hard to blame them, really. And yet, and yet, the world is hurtling toward extinction. In the United States there are working families living under freeway bridges and in shelters and living off food stamps. The affluent liberal in America is OUTRAGED at gun laws. And yet they are indifferent to the massive violence visited upon countries like Yemen or Libya or Honduras or Iraq. They claim not to like war but they will salute soldiers and thank them for their service. Nothing is quite so ridiculous as that ‘thanks for your service’ meme. Service to what? To whom? I really do want to know. What is being served? What good does the military do for anyone? The answer, if you ask most people, is to protect them from foreign invasion. In today’s case that means Russia. They are OUTRAGED Putin tried (or succeeded, depending on who they believe) meddling in the US elections. Are they not aware their own government has meddled in dozens of foreign elections? Or worse, have orchestrated coups and propped up dictators. Do they not know Mobutu was a US invention? Do they know their own government trained SAVAK, the murderous] secret police of The Shah? They do remember it was the U.S. who labeled Mandela a terrorist ? Do they remember Vietnam? Do they care?
Do they believe Muslim terrorists are on the verge of attacking America? They remind you of 9/11 …three thousand died….but that body count is about what Yemen suffers each day, and has suffered for the last year or two each day. How many Iraqis have died at the hands of the US military? Do they know what happened at Fallujah? Many are angry at Trump. Which is fine, but they are not angry at Obama or Hillary or Bernie. Do they believe Trump is some significant sea change in governance? Do they realize all his Pentagon advisors were advising Obama, too. And George Bush. Why do so many people regard US foreign policy as coherent? The answer is the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t think about US foreign policy at all. They might know of Kim Jong Il, but they know nothing of the history of US/Korean relations. And they have no idea just how extensively the CIA has funded the very same Muslim jihadists they fear are ready to break into their homes. They hear some mainstream media story, often with a celebrity front person, about stopping this or that genocide (invariably caused by the United States) and decide yes, *we stood by* in Rwanda. Or, *we HAD to go into Yugoslavia to stop the Serbs*, etc. The reality is always diametrically opposed to the one manufactured by the U.S. State Dept. The reality of Kagame or Milosevic, or Hezbollah, or China, or Venezuela is obscured and mystified. And the *white saviour* narrative remains the most popular. Posit that the third world NEEDS western help and you have a winner in the minds of most Americans.
And any opportunity to ridicule and demean other cultures, so it seems, is readily embraced. Americans are, by and large, an astoundingly mean spirited people. At least white America. Snarky, snide, suspicious, vainglorious and provincial; THAT is the great USA, as well as Puritanical, prudish, narcissistic, and generally xenophobic.
On twitter, certifiable retired general Barry McCaffrey [an old lunatic reactionary] tweeted the following :
Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that is he, for some unknown reason, under the sway of Mr. Putin.
Now this is not in and of itself unexpected but what is unexpected is the number of Democrats and liberals re tweeting it approvingly. The bourgeoisie is aligning itself openly with the most fascist elements in the authority structure of the US military. One conclusion that is reached from all this is that Trump is indeed a very useful tool of the ruling class. The sheer revulsion he elicits in most people is being harnessed, quite consciously, to the propaganda machine of the US state — it is as if the personal repugnance of Trump helps to pull focus from historical precedent and actual material policy implications to the subjective feelings of disgust Trump the man brings out in people. And I get it, I really do. Having to watch Trump and his damaged family and various hangers on and cronies on a daily basis is enough to cause a certain genuine palpable nausea. But this use of Trump is effective because of the basic fundamental narcissism of the bourgeoisie. What matters is how THEY feel. Not the death of children in Gaza, or slavery flourishing in Libya, or mass rape by the Cedras Junta in Haiti back under the Clinton regime — let alone cholera in Yemen and massive displacement of hundreds of thousands in Syria — no it is the personal *feelings* of liberal americans. They don't *like* Trump. And as I say, I get it. Nobody likes Donald Trump. Just as nobody likes Jeff Sessions. Nobody likes Mike Pompeo or John Kelley or John Bolton or H.R. McMaster, or Betsy DeVos or Jared Kushner. It is literally as distasteful an assemblage of humanity as it's possible to imagine. But then who liked Rahm Emanuel, or Joe Biden? We know NOBODY likes Hillary Clinton. But the optics were managed. It's almost as if Trump wants people to recoil in disgust. Why would that be?
Look at the United States today. In Oklahoma the corrections department came up with a new way to execute people (cost saving benefits) — they force the oxygen out of them (by forcing in Nitrogen.). This innovative new experiment in death is the result of a shortage of the usual drugs used in lethal injection. This sort of logic is apparently perfectly acceptable in Oklahoma. Mike Christian (sic), the former highway patrolman who came up with idea, is quoted in The Intercept article on the topic, as saying…one way or another “we will put these beasts to death”. I think the average person in the US has lost touch with just how barbaric and compassionless the culture is today. How insensitive and sadistic. People take refuge psychologically in small circles of friends — many of whom might in other contexts be just as sadistic as society overall– and manage the engagements with these friends so as to not have to discuss unpleasant topics.
The so called Chinese wall (sic) that has migrated from the legal and political professions to people’s personal lives. As a sort of psychic safety valve they simply ignore the rest of the country they live in. Remember that Trump’s moronic reality TV show was a big hit. It ran for six years I believe. So many of the same people who recoil in horror at Trump the President, were happy to watch, with feelings of superiority, the cartoon millionaire exercising meaningless edicts. It was kistch schadenfreude. I guess, anyway. The entire Trump political narrative is fraught with temptation to imagine just who is or was pulling the strings. Who wanted him as President? Whatever the story behind the story the fact is that the people running the United States, and these are people largely invisible to the public, operate from motivations I simply cannot fathom. Yes, to make MORE money, I get it, I get it. But this is a loaded sort of thought experiment, I understand this. Why does anyone want more than they can use or need? Let alone a thousand times more than they can use in a lifetime, or in their children or grandchildren’s lifetime. Why does anyone want to live in bizarre five hundred room mansions full of expensive furniture and with multiple swimming pools and tennis courts. What do people feel as they stroll around their estate? Do they feel deserving? Does it not occur to them that most of global humanity live in dire soul deadening poverty?
I remember Barbara Bush during a photo op tour of post Katrina New Orleans commenting about not troubling her beautiful mind about such things. Does she really believe she has a beautiful mind? So one question has to do with the subjective mind of the ruling class. The second has to do with the people who vote FOR their own oppression. Who actively support inequality. There is a new TV reality show where celebrities take part in trying to run a 5 star hotel. They don’t take part in trying to run a homeless shelter, no, for that isn't very fun now is it. Why does anyone care about who the British royal family is going to marry? But people do care, and they spend money following this sort of news. Even people living week to week, working two jobs and hanging on by a thread — often even they are consuming the same cultural product as the more affluent populace. Why are people not angrier? Why is there is not far more social unrest and open revolt? Is it simply fear? I can understand that in a nation that incarcerates over 2 million people. The last growth industries are prison construction and private security. Both relate to a growing underclass that looms as a threat to the very wealthy. Remember that the policing apparatus of the US, on both federal, state, and local levels is draconian and operates with almost total impunity. City police departments trace their origin back to *Slave Patrols*. I think many sense that it is not far fetched to imagine being arrested and then subjected to years of both custody and legal expense. And behind all this is Hollywood and the endless stream of jingoistic and racist TV and film. In fact Russia is now a plot point in nearly all TV drama. If you think that is an exaggeration then you haven’t been watching. The extraordinary xenophobia of American television is mind numbing, honestly. From shows like Designated Survivor to Madame Secretary to stuff like The Shooter or Chicago PD or SEAL Team — the message is uniform. There are no TV dramas with socialists or politically radical protagonists. No shows questioning the virtue of the military (thank you for your service). An Oscar for the portrayal of Churchill, a war criminal racist colonialist. Who wins Oscars for portraying Lenin or Toussaint L’Ouverture? But then those films don’t get bankrolled by Hollywood. Do screenwriters simply instinctively know that back stories that feature ‘tours in Iraq’ or the like as the accepted character foundation for heroism? It is breathtaking how alike most Hollywood product really is and how nakedly reactionary.
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Madam Secretary—the revolting, high-handed adulteration and cosmeticization of ruling class "tribulations" as they manage the perils of a world whose messes they have themselves created. (A central point NOT explained to the audience). In a ridiculous role, beautiful Tea Leoni is really whitewashing the ugliness of all Secretary of States, especially liberal favorites like Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. The show is another CBS pile of manure in the tradition of another popular but basically dishonest show, again, boffo with the liberals, The West Wing.
[dropcap]M[/dropcap]eanwhile the US lurches toward military conflict with nuclear powers. Conflicts that would wipe out humanity. At the least the US is manufacturing a new Cold War. Perhaps that provides a certain comfort. People are given an external enemy to hate, an enemy on which to focus their frustration, resentment, and aggression. The system encourages managed protest about issues that are themselves of little consequence. Gun control for one. Nobody talks about the MILLIONS of dead at the hands of the US military over the last twenty years. Nobody protests 900 military bases globally. What are those bases there for? Oh, to protect us….from *enemies*. The US needs its enemies. Identity issues are fine to argue about, just don't argue about class inequality. Argue about gender and racial identity. About multiculturalism but not about a hierarchical social structure where 0.0001% of the populace own 95% of the wealth. Why is there such poverty if America is so special? A bridge collapses the other day in Dade County, Florida. The infrastructure is falling apart, literally, as I write this. It won’t be the last bridge to fall down. Infant mortality is the same as that of Peru, last I looked. And Peru is seen as an inferior nation in the eyes of most Americans. Don’t raise the issue of military pollution, military rape, military economic waste, or military sadism. Funny how those photos of Abu Ghraib have mostly disappeared from the collective memory of the U.S. The 50th anniversary of My Lai passed without much comment. Vietnam is being given a revisionist re-narration. “Mistakes” were made. etc. Ask about Israel and you get a lot of either hostility or discomfort. Did Russia attack one of our naval vessels? No, that was Israel. Greg Barrett has an article out now pointing out similar realities…
The Russians, therefore, are not responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi state, for the more than one million civilian casualties since the invasion, for the massive waves of terrorism and sectarian violence and refugees entering Turkey and Europe which have resulted, or for the birth of ISIS in the US-controlled Abu Ghraib prison — the same ISIS which was formed by former Saddam military officers imprisoned there. ( ) The Russians did not join together with the UK and France in 2011 to destroy the Libyan state in a major bombing campaign which killed an estimated 30,000 civilians, following US/UK support for Libyan rebels designed to set up the “revolution” in Africa’s most prosperous nation. The Russians then did not abandon the country to its fate, which soon turned out to be rival governments and militias, a growing ISIS presence, actual slave markets where helpless refugees are sold like cattle, and thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean after paying human traffickers to take them to Europe in tiny, overloaded boats. The Russians did not respond to a question about the death of Libyan head of state Muammar Gaddafi — by sodomization with a long blade — by laughing maniacally and loudly on national US television and proclaiming, “We came, we saw, he DIED! Ha ha ha!”
And on and on. It was not Russia who bankrolled Osama Bin Ladin and it wasn't Russia who supported ISIS as they targeted Assad for removal. It wasn't Russia who just helped Saudi Arabia from day one in their genocidal assault on Yemen. Nor did Russia annex Crimea, for the record (as Greg points out “unless a vote of 98% of the population to return to Mother Russia, of which they had always been a historical part until the 1960s, is considered invalid. No responsible party has challenged those numbers.”). Nor does Russia engage in assassination by drone. That is the USA. In fact most of the Muslim world (save the puppet regimes in the KSA, Jordan, and the UAE) aligns with Russia and feels nothing but anger toward the US. And the people in the streets of Jordan and the UAE et al are also aligned against the US, not with it, despite what their corrupt leaders say. Wasn’t Russia who orchestrated the destruction of the former Yugoslavia either. But the public does not engage in such discourse. It is not allowed, for all intents and purposes. The public today, in the US, knows what to say and what to believe. And they rarely go off script.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/neocons-KAGAN-PNAC-FAMILY.jpg)
The Kagans—impervious to rabid antisemitism in their Nazi proteges, a curious if not outrageous stance that Israeli officials themselves share, just witness their silence about the Neonazi plague engulfing Eastern Europe. .
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hich brings me back to what these people want, the ones manufacturing this wave of anti Russian propaganda. Is it war? I don’t honestly know if they are that crazy or not. Some are, lunatics like John Bolton or Robert Kagen or his brutish wife Victoria Nuland. Does anyone ask during presidential debates about Ukraine and the US support for an open Nazi Party? One answer is that they want *global hegemony*. But what does that mean? Why do they want that? What does that provide for them personally? Millions dead and they get what? Power? And what does power give you? Does it provide peace of mind? Happiness? A rich sense of self worth? I honestly don’t know. Maybe I am just dense. But I have never understood the idea of seeking privilege unless everyone can have it. I don't want to fly first class if anyone is flying coach. It makes me uncomfortable. I don't feel special. Why do so many Americans fawn over the rich? Why are the wealthy so admired? I know some partial answers; I know Americans, or American white males, in particular, see the world through a lens that lumps everyone into two categories: winners and losers. On social media the other day there was a story about a man who has lived in the US for forty years but is being deported. The comments were astounding and yet utterly predictable. Men said he was a ‘dumb ass’ for not getting his citizenship. Compassion? That’s for sissies. For losers. And people wonder at the spate of school shootings? Oh, it must be guns, too many guns. No it is the psychology of Capitalism that creates such violence. Competition against your neighbour, not cooperation. Hoarding not sharing. It is a culture of violent scapegoating and stigmatizing and shaming. All reality TV is really the same show and that show is humiliation. Vicarious voyeuristic sadism.
“Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; low more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence (you have it in you, Little Man, buried deeply in a corner of your existence); when your thinking will be in harmony, and no longer at variance, with your feelings; when you will be able to comprehend your gifts in time and to recognize your ageing in time; when you will live the thoughts of great men instead of the misdeeds of great warriors; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians…”
— Wilhelm Reich
“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.”
— Gabor Mate
Perhaps Mate is right. It is a self hating nation that internalized the ethos of Puritanism and produced Manifest Destiny. It was a slave owning nation. It was, at its inception, a genocidal nation. A nation founded on those sorts of psychic wounds is a nation that is repressing and sublimating at extraordinary rates and degrees. It is this self loathing America, the only real failed state in the world, as far as I can see, that is now a dire threat to the survival of humanity. The one core truth for me today, at least politically, is one must resist western Imperialism. You don’t have to agree with the rest of the world that resists it, but you must stand with them. It is only white privilege, hubris, that allows for a westerner, an American, to criticise Maduro, or Assad, or the DPRK. Or Iran. Yes Iran was a conservative revolution, but they are part of a bulwark against the nightmare of Western capital today. Self determination. America has never wanted to save anyone. Ever. America has always had ulterior motives. The self loathing American. The Ugly American. We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Graham Greene, John le Carré, Ludlum, and now Gaither Stewart.
NOT THE NEWS DEPT.
The article below may not be “real” news, but its subject matter is a whole lot closer to the truth than much of what is spoon fed to us by the mainstream corporate mass media. Celebrating the
The spy thriller genre veers closer to the truth
By William T. Hathaway and Paul Cartine
For The Greanville Post
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/syriana-clooney.jpg)
In Syriana, a 2005 geopolitical spy thriller starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Christopher Plummer and other stars, Hollywood got as close to the reality of murky Middle East politics as a liberaloid plot would allow, which is not much, but it did reflect some of the sordid maneuvers and betrayals entertained by the Western spy agencies, as suggested in books by Greene, Le Carre, Ludlum, and Stewart. Card-carrying Obama sycophant Clooney plays a CIA operative, not far from his real-life role as propagandist or useful idiot for Deep State imperialist interventions.
While Bush probably would have approved, many shady intel ops could have escaped his knowledge. Clandestine police and intelligence activities are today so extensive that they constitute a form of power accountable to no one, except their own internal bureaucracies, and perhaps not even that.
Gaither Stewart’s The Trojan Spy [Punto Press, 2012] takes the thriller genre an important step forward, advancing it from the work of his predecessors John le Carré and Robert Ludlum. Le Carré and Ludlum rebelled against the conventions of the classic spy thrillers, which assumed that we’re the good guys who are under attack by bad guys so evil that we’re justified in bending the rules to save ourselves from them. In that world, lies, deceit, sabotage, and even murder are sometimes necessary to defend peace, justice, and the American (or Western) Way against (pick one, depending on when the book was written) Nazis, communists, or terrorists.
Le Carré and Ludlum made the genre less predictable in terms of identifying the bad guys. Instead of these being agents of the particular ennemi du jour, as in the simplistic 007 stories, they gave us plots revolving around corrupt politicians, rogue secret service agents, and insider conspiracies—as in the film Syriana, or le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. The perennial theme of many of le Carré’s stories is the callous amorality of secret services—especially the American and British ones—who routinely betray others, even their own agents, for very questionable ulterior motives. The good guys—whether civilian or secret service—are often sacrificed for political or operational ends.
In Ludlum’s “Bourne” series of books and films the suggestion is that the hero, Jason Bourne, has been subjected to mind-altering techniques which largely erased his original persona, replacing it with that of a programmable assassin. There are clear links here to secret government-sponsored programs such as MKUltra—which were more than likely used in a number of recent faked “terrorist” bombing incidents, notably those of the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the December 2010 “underwear bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—both of whom were described by witnesses as appearing confused and disoriented, with glazed eyes.
Le Carré’s 2008 novel, A Most Wanted Man, is among those books and films which have taken on the issue of so-called “extraordinary rendition”—the entirely illegal abduction, removal to secret locations and subsequent torture of alleged “terrorist suspects,” though in most cases no charges are ever brought. The tactic was openly admitted in the US, even praised, and justified as a necessary part of the bogus “war on terror”—in reality a war of terror on both the post-1990 newly coined “enemy,” radical Islam, and on the general public, which has to be convinced of a non-existent external threat to allow the inexorable expansion of the “national security state” and the concomitant loss of civil liberties.
Rendition and state-sponsored torture—and more recently the equally illegal and barbarous high-tech “assassination by remote-controlled drone” which is fast becoming the favorite “toy” of Western military and secret services (with surveillance drones already operating in some urban areas)—are of course subjects which deserve to be exposed by writers of conscience. Until Gaither Stewart, however, no major thriller author confronted the issue which underpins and lends spurious legitimacy to the whole “war on terror”: large-scale state-sponsored “false flag” terrorism, the well-attested reality of the major incidents of alleged Islamic fundamentalist terrorism since the first, FBI-assisted World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, part of the concoction of the new “enemy” to replace the then defunct “Red Menace.”
"When I began The Trojan Spy in 2007, I intended writing a story about an extraordinary man, a Russian spy, who at the end of World War II was sent from Moscow to Berlin to become a sleeper and a future secret agent for the victorious Soviet Union. During the Cold War he became a double or, perhaps, a triple agent. The fictional figure of cosmopolitan, polyglot Anatoly Nikitin had been developing in my mind long before I wrote the first words about him. At the time I did not realize where Nikitin would eventually lead me. For during his long career extending from post-war Berlin well into the twentieth century he acquired many admirers and imitators on both sides of the conflict and gave birth to a series of characters who followed in his footsteps and ultimately fought wars far different from his."—Gaither Stewart
This is puzzling, in view both of the incontrovertible evidence assembled by assiduous independent researchers, and of the extent of the “collateral damage” caused by the lies. However disgusting rendition and torture are, the number of their victims is relatively small. But the lies which lent spurious justification to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and to the expansion of the war into Pakistan have left a trail of death and destruction of major proportions—perhaps as many as six million dead and the lives of many more millions blighted, with no end in sight. The bogus war continues to spread, with large parts of Africa targeted, accompanied by derisory claims about all manner of alleged “al-Qaeda linked” terrorist entities supposedly threatening the West.
In A Most Wanted Man, set in Hamburg, le Carré has his German domestic intelligence agent Bachmann (one of the good guys in this story) express—in a powerfully emotional outburst—his anger and frustration at the supposed “failure” of the German police and intelligence services to round up “the Hamburg Cell” and thus supposedly prevent the 9/11 attacks. As early as the fourth page of the book we have its author repeating the official nonsense of the supposed piloting, by Mohammed Atta, of one of the allegedly hijacked planes, despite the complete absence of credible evidence that any of the supposed hijackers was on any of the planes. It is difficult to understand how an author like le Carré, whose stories are always meticulously researched, can accept the patently absurd official lie in a matter of such grave importance.
Gaither Stewart dares to go where le Carré, Ludlum, and other authors fear to tread. In The Trojan Spy he is not afraid to state the truth that the bad guys are predominantly to be found in the US and its Western allies, whose intelligence agencies are often revealed to be working in a strange symbiotic relationship with groups publicly demonized as “terrorists”—most famously, of course, that creation of the CIA, al-Qaeda, now joined by the agencies’ new tool in North and East Africa: the shadowy “militant Islamist” organization al Shabaab; or in the case of the “Operation Gladio” bombings and murders in the Europe of the ’70s and ’80s, with far-right paramilitary groups trained and armed by the CIA and MI6. Their activities are used to provide justification for further wars of economic conquest.
![](https://www.greanvillepost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/TrojanSpy.jpg)
BUY THE BOOK! HELP LEFT PUBLISHING.
Stewart provides the geo-strategic and political context without which the various elements of the jigsaw puzzle make little sense, with the illegal wars, rendition and torture, ever larger “defense” budgets and the growth of the national security state at home, oppressive and intrusive surveillance and curtailments of civil rights, entrapment and faked bomb plots—all alleged to be responses to the specter of a claimed resurgent extremism in Islamic countries. Acceptance of any part of the official myth of Muslim or Arab blame for the major “terrorist” outrages of the last decade fatally weakens the case against the wholesale demonization of Muslims. If “they” did it, invasion, occupation, torture, and the rest are, in the eyes of many, justified “to prevent them doing it again.” Following the evidence trail instead of the myth, Stewart exposes the hidden agenda of neo-imperialism and the driving force of the fear of the old enemy, Russia, which holds Western strategists in its grip.•
Stewart’s subversive heresy virtually guarantees that The Trojan Spy will be ignored by the propaganda machines of the corporate mass media. It’s a dangerous book, and a very good one—characters with complex personalities who act in unexpected ways, a well-structured story full of surprises, authentically rendered settings, and a direct but graceful narrative style. The writing shares the thoughtful, meditative qualities of le Carré’s and the brooding menace of Ludlum’s. If Stewart had followed the conventions of the genre, reinforcing the myth that the West is Best, The Trojan Spy could have been boosted by the media into a best seller. But it’s a better book than that—a book that tells the truth. Selections of it are posted on the publisher’s website, and elsewhere at The Greanville Post, a publishing sponsor of this novel.
• This article first ran in May of 2012.
Paul Carline considers himself self-deprecatingly as a “jack of all trades and master of none.” His career spans teaching music and German, work in special needs communities, store owner, direct democracy activist, and general truth campaigner (recent targets including pseudo-science, biblical mistranslation, state-sponsored false flag terrorism, and pseudo democracy). Now in hopefully graceful semi-retirement, Paul works sporadically as a writer, translator and editor, and musician. He authored the preface to the second volume of The Europe Trilogy: Lily Pad Roll. He lives in Scotland.
Things to ponder
While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.
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Theresa May’s “45 Minutes” Moment
DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY “B”
Today the British government made some dubious assertions about Saddam's chemical weapons the poisoning of its double agent Sergej Skripal.
The British Prime Minister Theresa May claimed (saved tweet) in Parliament that:
- Sergej Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.
- The nerve agent was part of a group of agents known as 'Novichok'.
- Russia has previously produced the agent and would still be capable of doing so.
- Russia has a record of conducting state sponsored assassinations.
- The British government assesses that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets.
- The British government concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergej and Yulia Skripal.
May went on to claim that:
- This was either a direct act by the Russian State against the United Kingdom or
- the Russian government lost control of the nerve agent and let it fall into the hands of others.
I find all of the above claims not only dubious but laughable. Here are some facts:
Novichok, 'newcomers' in English, are a zoo of chemical warfare agents that were developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s. Some of the 'newcomers' are said to be highly toxic.
The existence of these chemical agents was disclosed in 1992. Russia joined the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction in 1997. It has since (unlike the U.S.) destroyed all left over stocks from the Soviet Union's chemical weapon program. It does not produce chemical weapons.
These agents and their formulas are not an exclusively Russian knowledge or product:
One of the key manufacturing sites was the Soviet State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT) in Nukus, Uzbekistan. Small, experimental batches of the weapons may have been tested on the nearby Ustyurt plateau. It may also have been tested in a research centre in Krasnoarmeysk near Moscow. Since its independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has been working with the government of the United States to dismantle and decontaminate the sites where the Novichok agents and other chemical weapons were tested and developed.
The formulas for the various Novichok agents are not a Russian secret. The U.S. and the UK surely know how to make these. The agents are said to be made from simply components used in civil industrial processes (and agriculture, as pesticides and herbicides—Eds.). (To qualify any agent as "military grade" is by the way nonsense. Many chemical agents used in civil process are also incredibly deadly.) The Porton Down chemical weapon laboratory of the British military is only some 8 miles away from Salisbury where the Skripals were allegedly poisoned. The British government claims that Porton Down identified the agent allegedly used on the Skripals. The laboratory is surely also capable of producing such stuff, just like similar laboratories in other countries are able to do.
Now let's counter May's claims:
- Novichok agents are claimed to be up to 10 times as toxic as VX. One drop of VX can kill a person. If the Skripals were poisoned with such an highly effective agent how come they are still alive?
- The Soviet Union, not Russia, developed such agents. The main work was done in Uzbekistan. The U.S. helped to dismantle the laboratory.
- Russia is likely able to re-produce such agents but so are many, many other countries.
- What is Russia's "record of state sponsored assassinations"? The British investigation which claimed that "Russia" was somehow involved in the death of MI6 agent Litvinenko is highly dubious. I am not aware of any other cases. There is a long standing protocol to never bother spies that have been exchanged in a spy-swap.
- If Russia sees "some defectors" as legitimate targets why does it not immediately kill them? Skripal was living openly in the UK since 2010. Why would Russia kill him at all and why now?
Given the above it is absurd to conclude that it is "highly likely" that Russia was responsible. If someone is run-over by a BMW is it"highly likely" that the German government is responsible for it?
The real likeliness for that is just as high as the likeliness that Saddam could hit the UK with a chemical weapon missile within 45 minutes. That was a fraudulent claim another British government once made.
May's claims today are just as believable as all the nonsense Tony Blair said about Saddam or as the show U.S. Secretary of State Powell delivered in front of the UN Security Council.
More likely is an involvement of Skripal in the Steele dossier and the CIA/MI6 operation against Donald Trump. Was he assailed because he threatened to talk about it?
Posted by b on March 12, 2018 at 03:41 PM | Permalink .
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THE RISING OF BRITAIN’S ‘NEW POLITICS’ (Reposted)
This piece first ran on 6 October 2017. Reposted here due to renewed relevancy.
elegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world's third biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.
It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is led today by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different from Blair's and is rare in British establishment politics.
Addressing the Labour conference, the campaigner Naomi Klein described the rise of Corbyn as "part of a global phenomenon. We saw it in Bernie Sanders' historic campaign in the US primaries, powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future."
In fact, at the end of the US primary elections last year, Sanders led his followers into the arms of Hillary Clinton, a liberal warmonger from a long tradition in the Democratic Party.
As President Obama's Secretary of State, Clinton presided over the invasion of Libya in 2011, which led to a stampede of refugees to Europe. She gloated notoriously at the gruesome murder of Libya's president. Two years earlier, she signed off on a coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. That she has been invited to Wales on 14 October to be given an honorary doctorate by the University of Swansea because she is "synonymous with human rights" is unfathomable.
Like Clinton, Sanders is a cold-warrior and an "anti-communist" obsessive with a proprietorial view of the world beyond the United States. He supported Bill Clinton's and Tony Blair's illegal assault on Yugoslavia in 1998 and the invasions of Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, as well as Barack Obama's campaign of terrorism by drone. He backs the provocation of Russia and agrees that the whistleblower Edward Snowden should stand trial. He has called the late Hugo Chavez - a social democrat who won multiple elections - "a dead communist dictator".
While Sanders is a familiar liberal politician, Corbyn may well be a phenomenon, with his indefatigable support for the victims of American and British imperial adventures and for popular resistance movements.
For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the Chagos islanders were expelled from their homeland, a British colony in the Indian Ocean, by a Labour government. An entire population was kidnapped. The aim was to make way for a US military base on the main island of Diego Garcia: a secret deal for which the British were "compensated" with a discount of $14 million off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine.
I have had much to do with the Chagos islanders and have filmed them in exile in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they suffered and grieved and some of them "died from sadness", as I was told. They found a political champion in a Labour Member of Parliament, Jeremy Corbyn.
So did the Palestinians. So did Iraqis terrorised by a Labour prime minister's invasion of their country in 2003. So did others struggling to break free from the designs of western power. Corbyn supported the likes of Hugo Chavez, who brought more than hope to societies subverted by the US behemoth.
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With the masses thirsting for muscular leadership, Corbyn's Fabian style may prove too timid and vacillating to properly rescue Labour from fully becoming a British version of the treacherous US Democrats.
And yet, now that Corbyn is closer to power than he might have ever imagined, his foreign policy remains a secret.
By secret, I mean there has been rhetoric and little else. "We must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy," said Corbyn at the Labour conference. But what are these "values"?
Since 1945, like the Tories, British Labour has been an imperial party, obsequious to Washington and with a record exemplified by the crime in the Chagos islands.
What has changed? Is Jeremy Corbyn saying Labour will uncouple itself from the US war machine, and the US spying apparatus and US economic blockades that scar humanity?
His shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, says a Corbyn government "will put human rights back at the heart of Britain's foreign policy". But human rights have never been at the heart of British foreign policy -- only "interests", as Lord Palmerston declared in the 19th century: the interests of those at the apex of British society.
Thornberry quoted the late Robin Cook who, as Tony Blair's first Foreign Secretary in 1997, pledged an "ethical foreign policy" that would "make Britain once again a force for good in the world".
History is not kind to imperial nostalgia. The recently commemorated division of India by a Labour government in 1947 - with a border hurriedly drawn up by a London barrister, Gordon Radcliffe, who had never been to India and never returned - led to blood-letting on a genocidal scale.
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
W.H. Auden, 'Partition'
It was the same Labour government (1945--51), led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee - "radical" by today's standards - that dispatched General Douglas Gracey's British imperial army to Saigon with orders to re-arm the defeated Japanese in order to prevent Vietnamese nationalists from liberating their own country. Thus, the longest war of the century was ignited.
It was a Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose policy of "mutuality" and "partnership" with some of the world's most vicious despots, especially in the Middle East, forged relationships that endure today, often sidelining and crushing the human rights of whole communities and societies. The cause was British "interests" - oil, power, wealth.
In the "radical" 1960s, Labour's Defence Secretary, Denis Healey, set up the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) specifically to boost the arms trade and make money from selling lethal weapons to the world. Healey told Parliament, "While we attach the highest importance to making progress in the field of arms control and disarmament, we must also take what practical steps we can to ensure that this country does not fail to secure its rightful share of this valuable market."
The doublethink was quintessentially Labour.
When I later asked Healey about this "valuable market", he claimed his decision made no difference to the volume of military exports. In fact, it led to an almost doubling of Britain's share of the arms market. Today, Britain is the second biggest arms dealer on earth, selling arms and fighter planes, machine guns and "riot control" vehicles, to 22 of the 30 countries on the British Government's own list of human rights violators.
Will this cease under a Corbyn government? The preferred model - Robin Cook's "ethical foreign policy" - is revealing. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Cook made his name as a backbencher and critic of the arms trade. "Wherever weapons are sold," wrote Cook, "there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war" and "it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries".
Cook singled out the sale of British Hawk fighters to Indonesia as "particularly disturbing". Indonesia "is not only repressive but actually at war on two fronts: in East Timor, where perhaps a sixth of the population has been slaughtered ... and in West Papua, where it confronts an indigenous liberation movement".
As Foreign Secretary, Cook promised "a thorough review of arms sales". The then Nobel Peace Laureate, Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, appealed directly to Cook: "Please, I beg you, do not sustain any longer a conflict which without these arms sales could never have been pursued in the first place and not for so very long." He was referring to Indonesia's bombing of East Timor with British Hawks and the slaughter of his people with British machine guns. He received no reply.
The following week Cook called journalists to the Foreign Office to announce his "mission statement" for "human rights in a new century". This PR event included the usual private briefings for selected journalists, including the BBC, in which Foreign Office officials lied that there was "no evidence" that British Hawk aircraft were deployed in East Timor.
A few days later, the Foreign Office issued the results of Cook's "thorough review" of arms sales policy. "It was not realistic or practical," wrote Cook, "to revoke licences which were valid and in force at the time of Labour's election victory". Suharto's Minister for Defence, Edi Sudradjat, said that talks were already under way with Britain for the purchase of 18 more Hawk fighters. "The political change in Britain will not affect our negotiations," he said. He was right.
Today, replace Indonesia with Saudi Arabia and East Timor with Yemen. British military aircraft - sold with the approval of both Tory and Labour governments and built by the firm whose promotional video had pride of place at the Labour Party conference - are bombing the life out of Yemen, one of the most impoverished countries in the world, where half the children are malnourished and there is the greatest cholera epidemic in modern times.
Hospitals and schools, weddings and funerals have been attacked. In Ryadh, British military personnel are reported to be training the Saudis in selecting targets.
In Labour's 2017 manifesto, Jeremy Corbyn and his party colleagues promised that "Labour will demand a comprehensive, independent, UN-led investigation into alleged violations ... in Yemen, including air strikes on civilians by the Saudi-led coalition. We will immediately suspend any further arms sales for use in the conflict until that investigation is concluded."
But the evidence of Saudi Arabia's crimes in Yemen is already documented by Amnesty and others, notably by the courageous reporting of the British journalist Iona Craig. The dossier is voluminous.
Labour does not promise to stop arms exports to Saudi Arabia. It does not say Britain will withdraw its support for governments responsible for the export of Islamist jihadism. There is no commitment to dismantle the arms trade.
The manifesto describes a "special relationship [with the US] based on shared values ... When the current Trump administration chooses to ignore them ... we will not be afraid to disagree".
As Jeremy Corbyn knows, dealing with the US is not about merely "disagreeing". The US is a rapacious, rogue power that ought not to be regarded as a natural ally of any state championing human rights, irrespective of whether Trump or anyone else is President.
When Emily Thornberry linked Venezuela with the Philippines as "increasingly autocratic regimes" - slogans bereft of contextual truth and ignoring the subversive US role in Venezuela -- she was consciously playing to the enemy: a tactic with which Jeremy Corbyn will be familiar.
A Corbyn government will allow the Chagos islanders the right of return. But Labour says nothing about renegotiating the 50-year renewal agreement that Britain has just signed with the US allowing it to use the base on Diego Garcia from which it has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq.
A Corbyn government will "immediately recognise the state of Palestine". But it is silent on whether Britain will continue to arm Israel, continue to acquiesce in the illegal trade in Israel's illegal "settlements" and continue to treat Israel merely as a warring party, rather than as an historic oppressor given immunity by Washington and London.
On Britain's support for Nato's current war preparations, Labour boasts that the "last Labour government spent above the benchmark of 2 per cent of GDP" on Nato. It says, "Conservative spending cuts have put Britain's security at risk" and promises to boost Britain's military "obligations".
In fact, most of the £40 billion Britain currently spends on the military is not for territorial defence of the UK but for offensive purposes to enhance British "interests" as defined by those who have tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn as unpatriotic.
If the polls are reliable, most Britons are well ahead of their politicians, Tory and Labour. They would accept higher taxes to pay for public services; they want the National Health Service restored to full health. They want decent jobs and wages and housing and schools; they do not hate foreigners but resent exploitative labour. They have no fond memory of an empire on which the sun never set.
They oppose the invasion of other countries and regard Blair as a liar. The rise of Donald Trump has reminded them what a menace the United States can be, especially with their own country in tow.
The Labour Party is the beneficiary of this mood, but many of its pledges - certainly in foreign policy - are qualified and compromised, suggesting, for many Britons, more of the same.
Jeremy Corbyn is widely and properly recognised for his integrity; he opposes the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons; the Labour Party supports it. But he has given shadow cabinet positions to pro-war MPs who support Blairism, and tried to get rid of him and abused him as "unelectable".
"We are the political mainstream now," says Corbyn. Yes, but at what price?
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JOHN PILGER on the bogus “spy poisoning” case, and the transparent corruption of the British establishment.
'Skripal case is a carefully-constructed drama'
Russia-UK relations plunge amid row over the poisoning of a former spy. Award-winning journalist John Pilger joins RT to discuss this issue.
Check out http://rt.com
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