Weird Video: Eraserhead; Folger’s Dad in the Tub; Cardi B for the Census

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

Weird Video
COMMENTARY BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

Cultural nuggets from the annals of cinema, tv, advertising, and other corners, all reflecting aspects of our strange, semi-deranged culture. The West is not normal, folks. It can be horrid, it can be tedious, it can be smug, and sometimes it can even be funny.

THE BIG SCREEN
ERASERHEAD (1977)
by David Lynch

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]avid Lynch is for most people, including critics, unclassifiable. Following his often troubling vibes (which most auteurs do, anyhow) in this 1977 surrealist horror film Lynch (who also gave us Mulholland Drive and The Lost Highway) breaks most "sacred" rules to build an utterly strange, dreamlike and compelling (when not revolting) world that mixes imagery redolent of steampunk with nightmarish biology, all along apparently drawing great inspiration from the likes of Kafka and Dali. In sum, weird.

TV COMMERCIALS
SUPER MERITORIOUS MENTION

Folgers new Coffee commercial is the best

Zombie Chris approves, and we agree

(Video courtesy by Zombie Chris)

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this age of stifling PC keeping all establishment channels in tight conformity with the new stentorian rules of propriety dictating interactions between races, genders, ages, nationalities and other subdivisions of the human race, it's almost miraculous we accidentally bump into this extremely irreverent, Buñuelesque tv spot for, of all things, Folger's coffee. The fact no one has yet gotten hysterical over this highly peculiar spot for breaking just about every standing code of conduct in our cancel-obsessed culture is perhaps itself testimony to its uniqueness and, yes, it's both refreshing and surprising. I am awfully glad that Zombie Chris, whose YT commentary and sense of humor we  appreciate, agrees. Furthermore, to anyone who has the slightest idea about how a major marketer's commercial is produced—the sheer work and detail involved; the countless hoops that need to be jumped through; the things that need to be cut to avoid the slightest whiff of impropriety that might offend some priggish soul in New York or Opelousas—this must seem like a profound mystery.  It certainly does to me. Folks, heads have rolled for much less than this, much less. Weird.

TV COMMERCIALS
SPECIAL MENTION

NYC Census 2020 Message from Cardi B
Cardi tells "mi gente, presente" to register with the Census

[dropcap]OK[/dropcap], folks, so let's get this straight: Cardi B, the super-talented in-your-face Dominican/Trinidadian dynamo, is not Donna Reed. Reed, the beautiful farm girl from Iowa lives on in another cultural warp, mainly the Wonderbread white 1950s. Cardi is pure, unadulterated 21st century—product of the finally ascendant multicultural brew that makes our society tick with rich new strains of humanity. For Cardi, born in Manhattan and brought up in the Bronx, the one with the Goddess fingernails and extravagant lissome hair, a rapper, that's right, a rapper who is not afraid to admit to a past that would scandalize every prig in this ridiculously prudish nation, is nothing if not the ultimate antidote to tedium. That's why we are a bit piqued by the firestorm in a teacup kicked up by the whiners who think Cardi B "does not represent New York".  Does not represent NYC? Whaddayamean she does not represent NYC? !!!  Pal, you gotta be kidding. Just weird.

(Note: Cardi wants her folks to believe the Census will make a difference in their lives, but she's wrong. In theory, like Civics 101 (the fantasy script of US democracy), maybe. In reality, nah. It won't happen. The ruling class spends all its time figuring ways of enlarging its wealth and power, plotting new crimes and betrayals, and public needs barely register on its radar. Maybe that's only logical because the US is not a real democracy. Contrary to official propaganda, it never was. Check this, this and this, if you don't believe me.)

 Patrice Greanville is this publication's founder and editor in chief.

 
 


2020 Academy Awards: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite from South Korea wins major awards

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

David Walsh

11 February 2020

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he South Korean film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, won four major awards at the 2020 Academy Awards Sunday night in Los Angeles. It earned both the best picture and best international feature film awards, an unprecedented event, and Bong won the prizes for best director and best original screenplay.

Sam Mendes’ 1917 earned three awards (including veteran Roger Deakins for best cinematography), while Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari and Todd Phillips’ Joker each won two. Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) and Renee Zellweger (Rupert Goold’s Judy) collected the best actor and best actress awards, with Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) and Laura Dern (Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story) winning in the best supporting actor and actress categories.

Parasite deserved to win the most serious awards. It was markedly superior to every other film up for consideration. Bong’s effort is a complex, troubling work about the social, economic and psychological disaster represented by the vast gap between rich and poor. Two families, the Kims and the Parks, who ordinarily live at the opposite ends of society, are suddenly brought into close proximity, with terrible consequences. The climactic scene culminates in an eruption of class anger.

As we noted in our original review, South Korea is one of the most socially unequal societies on the planet. Bong’s film spells out, in a thoughtful and logical manner, the inevitable results of such a division: the impoverished will do almost anything to emerge from their nightmarish conditions, subsisting literally in the underworld. The pampered rich, living in a cocoon, are utterly unprepared for the envy, anger and violence their dominance and arrogance provokes.

Bong told the Guardian recently that “Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology … but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”


Despite all the efforts by the media, the Academy hierarchy and the political establishment generally to drown culture in race and gender, the social questions emerge.
 The sweeping triumph of a South Korean film about class resentment and conflict at the Academy Awards has a certain objective significance, no matter what the rest of the Awards program may have been like and no matter how the voters may slip back and delude themselves, as they are wont to do, in subsequent years. Despite all the efforts by the media, the Academy hierarchy and the political establishment generally to drown culture in race and gender, the social questions emerge.

And those efforts Sunday night were considerable. The organizers of the Awards ceremony were stung and disappointed by the outcome of the nominating process, which resulted in only one black performer nominated for an acting award (Cynthia Erivo in Harriet) and no female directors. The last weeks have been dominated by the subsequent media “furor.”

Mendes' 1917

The New York Times, inevitably, played a leading role. The Times, for example, referred in one recent article to “the Oscars’ most noted offscreen controversy—the glaring whiteness and maleness of many of the major categories and movies.” And another piece observed: “Going into the 92nd Academy Awards, the headlines were about what we wouldn’t see: no J. Lo [Jennifer Lopez for Hustlers], no female filmmakers of top films, almost no people of color in the acting categories.” And the relentless Times commented further: “Old Hollywood—and the way it is represented by the academy and its nominations—has been under the microscope for awhile now, whether because of #OscarsSoWhite or #MeToo or the lack of recognition of female directors.”

In our view, American filmmaking is truly deficient at this point in an objectively rooted social and moral compass, oriented to the problem of social inequality and class, as well as the great threats confronting the population, authoritarian rule and war. The filmmaker who is oblivious to these questions, whatever his or her gender, race or orientation, will have little of value to say to an audience.

After all, the first female director on whom the Academy bestowed—with great fanfare and much self-congratulation—its best director prize, in 2012, was Kathryn Bigelow, for the thoroughly falsified, CIA-sponsored account of the death of Osama bin-Laden, Zero Dark Thirty.

This year, in response to the angry response to the nominations and the resulting pressures, the organizers of the Awards event did everything within their power to inject race and gender politics into their program Sunday night, to an obvious extent. Desperately over-compensating for their failure to nominate the “proper” number of “nonwhite” and “nonmale” personalities, the Academy made certain that there would be no such complaints when it came to the presenters, singers, comics and musicians, and their various comments about female or black “representation.”

This sort of campaign does not address the legitimate, democratic question of the cultural education and involvement of vast numbers of young people, of all colors and genders, who are excluded from participating in the film, television and music industry because of their social background and economic conditions. What’s involved in the Academy’s “diversity” program is the conformist acceptance of the cultural status quo and the mere redistribution of a portion of the existing positions and wealth to African American, female and gay individuals, already affluent in many cases.

This appeals only to a relatively thin layer of the population. No doubt various factors account for the continuing decline of the Academy Awards’ television audience, which reached its lowest level in history Sunday night, 23.6 million people, but the self-involved, often self-pitying emphasis on race and gender is not widely and popularly appealing.

For example, this moment, described by ABC News, was simply grating: “[Actresses] Sigourney Weaver, Gal Gadot and Brie Larson joined together on stage to introduce a groundbreaking performance of this year’s nominated best original scores.

“‘We want to celebrate the first time in the 92-[year] history of the Academy Awards—a female conductor will be leading the orchestra for this performance,’ Weaver said.

“With Gadot and Larson by her side, Weaver said, ‘all women are superheroes.’”

Renée Zellweger in Judy


The New York Times took the unusual step of running an advertisement for their racialist and discredited “The 1619 Project” during the Awards ceremony. The spot featured actress-singer Janelle Monáe (who actually opened the program with a musical number), as one publication described it, “standing alone on the Virginia shore. The water swirls behind her and the camera pulls in closer as she recites the following words: ‘In August 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon near Point Comfort, Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country we know today has been untouched by the slavery that followed. America was not America, but this was the moment it began.’”

Cynically, the Times ad concluded with this title: “The truth can change how we see the world. The truth is worth it."

Democratic Party politics dominate the Hollywood film world. In a reference to the recently concluded impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Brad Pitt, accepting his award for best supporting actor (for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), quipped, “They told me I only had 45 seconds, and that's 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.” Bolton, of course, is the extreme reactionary and warmonger with whom the Democrats formed a de facto alliance after his claims about Trump and Ukraine in an upcoming book were leaked to the media.

The success of Parasite at the Academy Awards was generally praised by the American media. But not everyone was happy. Of course, an avowedly right-wing columnist last week headlined his comment, “Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite' Is Overrated, Implausible, Class-Struggle Nonsense.”

Aside from such reactionaries, however, a few other nervous voices were raised. Critic Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post , in particular, has made it known that the prominence of Parasite was not pleasing to her. Hornaday’s tack was to treat Parasite as though it were simply a variation on the Tarantino-style cinema of gratuitous violence and avoid its social content. “The techniques and tropes Bong repurposes so adroitly in Parasite ,” she wrote, resorting to feminist jargon, “make the film feel both original and oddly familiar, the product of the male gaze that still holds sway in Hollywood.”

Speaking of the Awards ceremony, Hornaday asserted that “clips from the best picture nominees played out like so many boys-with-their-toys wish-fulfillment fantasies, complete with swagger, cars that go vroom and women who are either silenced or virtually absent.” How could Greta Gerwig’s Little Womencompete “against so many films that mythologized Big Men?” Lumping in Parasite with the confused and even disoriented Joker, the Post critic described the two films as “derivative and insular, a self-referential grab bag of ‘cool’ visual style—often involving bloody violence—in service to narratives that were either flimsy or just plain shallow.”

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, who was in the Academy Awards audience in Los Angeles the other night. He too might well agree that the unsettling ideas propelling Parasite are “either flimsy or just plain shallow.” 

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Narrative Managers Claim White Helmets Founder Was Driven To Suicide By Syria Skeptics

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Caitlin Johnstone

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]mperialist spinmeisters are trial-ballooning a new Syria narrative that is so breathtakingly stupid it needs its own article solely for the purpose of mockery.

On Christmas Eve PBS aired a bizarre segment on the death of James Le Mesurier, the former military intelligence officer who founded the extremely shady propaganda construct known as the White Helmets. The segment makes relentless, ham-fisted appeals to emotion, even attempting to associate the White Helmets with Armistice Day using wistful camera pans over poppy flowers and misty war memorial art exhibits, but by far the most yogurt-brained part is its repeated suggestions that Le Mesurier killed himself because people had been accusing him of being a propagandist.

“And now a story of a humanitarian trying to help Syria: the suspicious death in Turkey last month of James Le Mesurier, the co-founder of the White Helmets rescue organization in Syria,” opens PBS News Hour‘s Judy Woodruff. “Friends and colleagues fear that he may have been murdered or driven to suicide by a campaign of character assassination.”


BELOW: Watch the typically clueless or complicit Judy Woodruff call James Le Mesurier a "humanitarian".  A member of the sinister anglo-American network of military/spy networks; a man who dedicated his life to advance Western imperialism, and who cynically manufactured a disinformation platform—the White Helmets— to facilitate the selling of wars and all-out aggression against an innocent nation—Syria—is called by this idiot and the rest of her disgusting ilk a "humanitarian".

PBS NewsHour
HERE IS THE RIDICULOUS BUT INTENTIONALLY MISLEADING YOUTUBE BLURB ON THIS SEGMENT. Note PBS is talking about "character assassination" driving Le Mesurier to suicide. That takes some cheek for a member of the imperial media whose very specialty is character assassination. 
"A month after the suspicious death of White Helmets co-founder James Le Mesurier in Turkey, British officials are being urged to conduct a thorough investigation of the incident. Friends and colleagues fear Le Mesurier may have been murdered or driven to suicide by a relentless campaign of character assassination. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports on how propaganda maligned him." (sic)

“Whatever the cause, Le Mesurier was a victim of a very modern war,” the special’s narrator solemnly intones. “There is no hiding place in cyberspace. Le Mesurier was at the epicenter of a propaganda war, and his friends are appalled at what they regard as a campaign of character assassination.”

“The amount of abuse, the amount of ill-placed propaganda, disinformation that’s on social media and the Internet coming out of Russian bots and Syria, Syrian regime, and others was unbearable,” Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon mourns.

This ridiculous narrative was picked up and run with by Syria narrative managers on Twitter.

“On lethal disinformation— a thread,” tweeted virulent Syria narrative manager Idrees Ahmad. “This is a disturbing report by Malcolm Brabant on the lethal consequences of conspiracism. It shows how slander and disinformation may have pushed James Le Mesurier, one of the finest humanitarians, to his death. The report highlights the pernicious lies issuing from the self-described ‘Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media’, which is a small group of academics, none specialising in Syria or the Middle East, in alliance with a group of pro-Kremlin trolls like Vanessa Beeley et al.”

It is true that both Beeley and the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media have accused Le Mesurier of running a propaganda operation on behalf of western governments using western government funding. But if Ahmad truly believed that accusing people of conducting propaganda caused them to kill themselves, he should turn himself in for attempted murder, because he accuses people of being propagandists constantly.

Here’s a link to Ahmad calling journalist Max Blumenthal a “propagandist for Maduro”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling Beeley a “pro-regime propagandist”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele “a fabricator and a propagandist”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou “a propagandist for Putin”.

Talk about “lethal disinformation”, Idrees.

But of course, no one really believes that accusations of conducting propaganda actually drive people to suicide. If that were so, people like me would have thrown ourselves off a building years ago.

I am accused of being a propagandist nearly every day. At the height of Russiagate hysteria it happened many times a day in my blog post comments and social media notifications. Depending on what’s in the news and how I’ve responded to it I’ve been accused of writing paid propaganda for the Kremlin, Assad, the Iranian government, Palestinians, Pyongyang, Beijing, Maduro, the alt-right, George Soros, and WikiLeaks, just off the top of my head.

Every anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist, and antiwar activist with any kind of platform has had this experience. Ever since the new McCarthyism of establishment-driven Russia hysteria took off, accusing people who question imperialist narratives of conducting psyops for foreign governments has become the norm in political discourse. It’s created an extremely hostile and vitriolic environment in which productive conversations are vanishingly rare.

Where’s our PBS special? Does anyone care? Is there any compassion from these hand-wringing establishment loyalists for the fact that Vanessa Beeley and the members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media are hounded day in and day out by establishment narrative managers and their brainwashed followers with accusations of spreading propaganda, supporting genocide, and embracing war crimes? I know I’ve never had a garment-rending Idrees Ahmad thread written about concerns for my psychological well being, and I’ve been targeted by multiple online harassment campaigns over the years.

The amount of hateful vitriol that gets leveled at people for simply opposing imperialism, for wanting peace, is truly astonishing. Just for saying “Hey here are some reasons we should maybe reconsider toppling yet another government in yet another Middle Eastern nation” will bring in complete strangers calling you all sorts of names, calling you disgusting, calling you evil, calling you a monster. For supporting peace.

There are all kinds of people in the world who are very deserving of harsh words. Powerful exploiters, oppressors and manipulators. People who destroy the environment for profit. People who get rich selling weapons of war while paying politicians and think tanks to advance the cause of war. War criminals who’ve never faced justice. With all those people in the world who we can all agree are terrible, you wouldn’t think peace activists should feature anywhere near the top of anyone’s list. But they do. Because war propaganda is just that influential.

And, of course, nobody cares. None of these narrative managers care about what psychological burden they might be placing on people by assuring their audiences that it’s perfectly sane and normal to hound and harass anyone who questions imperialist propaganda. Their concern is not and has never been about anyone’s psychological health. Their concern is in managing narratives in a way that favors the US-centralized empire that they serve.

I do not know what caused Le Mesurier’s death; to be in any way confident that a known spook committed suicide at all, or was murdered by Russians, is absurd. Maybe he killed himself because he failed to listen to the adage “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

What I absolutely do know, with absolute certainty, is that only idiots believe that skepticism about western regime change agendas in the Middle East kills people.

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

About the Author

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

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25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Caitlin Johnstone

CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled “25 times Trump was soft on Russia“, in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case that the US president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.

The items within the CNN article consist mostly of times in which Trump said some words or failed to say other words; “Trump has repeatedly praised Putin”, “Trump refused to say Putin is a killer”, “Trump denied that Russia interfered in 2016”, “Trump made light of Russian hacking”, etc. It also includes the completely false but oft-repeated narrative that “Trump’s team softened the GOP platform on Ukraine”, as well as the utterly ridiculous and thoroughly invalidated claim that “Since intervening in Syria in 2015, the Russian military has focused its airstrikes on anti-government rebels, not ISIS.”

CNN’s 25 items are made up almost entirely of narrative and words; Trump said a nice thing about Putin, Trump said offending things to NATO allies, Trump thought about visiting Putin in Russia, etc. In contrast, the 25 items which I am about to list do not consist of narrative at all, but rather the actual movement of actual concrete objects which can easily lead to an altercation from which there may be no re-emerging. These items show that when you ignore the words and narrative spin and look at what this administration has actually been doing, it’s clear to anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty that, far from being “soft” on Russia, Trump has actually been consistently reckless in the one area where a US president must absolutely always maintain a steady hand. And he’s been doing so with zero resistance from either party.

It would be understandable if you were unaware that Trump has been escalating tensions with Moscow more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall; it’s a fact that neither of America’s two mainstream political factions care about, so it tends to get lost in the shuffle. Trump’s opposition is interested in painting him as a sycophantic Kremlin crony, and his supporters are interested in painting him as an antiwar hero of the people, but he is neither. Observe:

1. Implementing a Nuclear Posture Review with a more aggressive stance toward Russia

Last year Trump’s Department of Defense rolled out a Nuclear Posture Review which CNN itself called “its toughest line yet against Russia’s resurgent nuclear forces.”

“In its newly released Nuclear Posture Review, the Defense Department has focused much of its multibillion nuclear effort on an updated nuclear deterrence focused on Russia,” CNN reported last year.

This revision of nuclear policy includes the new implementation of so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons, which, because they are designed to be more “usable” than conventional nuclear ordinances, have been called “the most dangerous weapon ever”by critics of this insane policy. These weapons, which can remove some of the inhibitions that mutually assured destruction would normally give military commanders, have already been rolled off the assembly line.

2. Arming Ukraine


Lost in the gibberish about Trump temporarily withholding military aide to supposedly pressure a Ukrainian government who was never even aware of being pressured is the fact that arming Ukraine against Russia is an entirely new policy that was introduced by the Trump administration in the first place. Even the Obama administration, which was plenty hawkish toward Russia in its own right, refused to implement this extremely provocative escalation against Moscow. It was not until Obama was replaced with the worst Putin puppet of all time Uthat this policy was put in place.

3. Bombing Syria

Another escalation Trump took against Russia which Obama wasn’t hawkish enough to also do was bombing the Syrian government, a longtime ally of Moscow. These airstrikes in April 2017 and April 2018 were perpetrated in retaliation for chemical weapons use allegations that there is no legitimate reason to trust at this point.

4. Staging coup attempts in Venezuela


Venezuela, another Russian ally, has been the subject of relentless coup attempts from the Trump administration which persist unsuccessfully to this very day. Trump’s attempts to topple the Venezuelan government have been so violent and aggressive that the starvation sanctions which he has implemented are believed to have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelan civilians.

Trump has reportedly spoken frequently of a US military invasion to oust Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, provoking a forceful rebuke from Moscow.

“Signals coming from certain capitals indicating the possibility of external military interference look particularly disquieting,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “We warn against such reckless actions, which threaten catastrophic consequences.”

5. Withdrawing from the INF treaty


For a president who’s “soft” on Russia, Trump has sure been eager to keep postures between the two nations extremely aggressive in nature. This administration has withdrawn from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, prompting UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to declare that “the world lost an invaluable brake on nuclear war.” It appears entirely possible that Trump will continue to adhere to the John Bolton school of nuclear weapons treaties until they all lie in tatters, with the administration strongly criticizing the crucial New START Treaty which expires in early 2021.

Some particularly demented Russiagaters try to argue that Trump withdrawing from these treaties benefits Russia in some way. These people either (A) believe that treaties only go one way, (B) believe that a nation with an economy the size of South Korea can compete with the US in an arms race, (C) believe that Russians are immune to nuclear radiation, or (D) all of the above. Withdrawing from these treaties benefits no one but the military-industrial complex.

6. Ending the Open Skies Treaty

“The Trump administration has taken steps toward leaving a nearly three-decade-old agreement designed to reduce the risk of war between Russia and the West by allowing both sides to conduct reconnaissance flights over one another’s territories,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month, adding that the administration has alleged that “Russia has interfered with American monitoring flights while using its missions to gather intelligence in the US.”

Again, if you subscribe to the bizarre belief that withdrawing from this treaty benefits Russia, please think harder. Or ask the Russians themselves how they feel about it:

“US plans to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and multiply the risks for the whole world, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said,” Sputnik reports.

“All this negatively affects the predictability of the military-strategic situation and lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, which drastically increases the risks for the whole humanity,” Patrushev said.

“In general, it is becoming apparent that Washington intends to use its technological leadership in order to maintain strategic dominance in the information space by actually pursuing a policy of imposing its conditions on states that are lagging behind in digital development,” he added.

7. Selling Patriot missiles to Poland

“Poland signed the largest arms procurement deal in its history on Wednesday, agreeing with the United States to buy Raytheon Co’s Patriot missile defense system for $4.75 billion in a major step to modernize its forces against a bolder Russia,” Reuters reported last year.

8. Occupying Syrian oil fields

The Trump administration has been open about the fact that it is not only maintaining a military presence in Syria to control the nation’s oil, but that it is doing so in order to deprive the nation’s government of that financial resource. Syria’s ally Russia strongly opposes this, accusing the Trump administration of nothing short of “international state banditry”.

“In a statement, Russia’s defense ministry said Washington had no mandate under international or US law to increase its military presence in Syria and said its plan was not motivated by genuine security concerns in the region,” Reuters reported last month.

“Therefore Washington’s current actions – capturing and maintaining military control over oil fields in eastern Syria – is, simply put, international state banditry,” Russia’s defense ministry said.

9. Killing Russians in Syria

Reports have placed Russian casualties anywhere between a handful and hundreds, but whatever the exact number the US military is known to have killed Russian citizens as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing Syria occupation in an altercation last year.

10. Tanks in Estonia

Within weeks of taking office, Trump was already sending Abrams battle tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and other military hardware right up to Russia’s border as part of a NATO operation.

“Atlantic Resolve is a demonstration of continued US commitment to collective security through a series of actions designed to reassure NATO allies and partners of America’s dedication to enduring peace and stability in the region in light of the Russian intervention in Ukraine,” the Defense Department said in a statement.

11. War ships in the Black Sea


12. Sanctions

Trump approved new sanctions against Russia on August 2017. CNN reports the following:

US President Donald Trump approved fresh sanctions on Russia Wednesday after Congress showed overwhelming bipartisan support for the new measures,” CNN reported at the time. “Congress passed the bill last week in response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, as well as its human rights violations, annexation of Crimea and military operations in eastern Ukraine. The bill’s passage drew ire from Moscow — which responded by stripping 755 staff members and two properties from US missions in the country — all but crushing any hope for the reset in US-Russian relations that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had called for.”

“A full-fledged trade war has been declared on Russia,” said Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in response.

13. More sanctions

“The United States imposed sanctions on five Russian individuals on Wednesday, including the leader of the Republic of Chechnya, for alleged human rights abuses and involvement in criminal conspiracies, a sign that the Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on Russia,” The New York Times reported in December 2017.

14. Still more sanctions


“Trump just hit Russian oligarchs with the most aggressive sanctions yet,” reads a Viceheadline from April of last year.

“The sanctions target seven oligarchs and 12 companies under their ownership or control, 17 senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its subsidiary, a Russian bank,” Vice reports. “While the move is aimed, in part, at Russia’s role in the U.S. 2016 election, senior U.S. government officials also stressed that the new measures seek to penalize Russia’s recent bout of international troublemaking more broadly, including its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and military activity in eastern Ukraine.”

15. Even more sanctions

The Trump administration hit Russia with more sanctions for the alleged Skripal poisoning in August of last year, then hit them with another round of sanctions for the same reason again in August of this year.

16. Guess what? MORE sanctions


“The Trump administration on Thursday imposed new sanctions on a dozen individuals and entities in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” The Hill reported in November of last year. “The group includes a company linked to Bank Rossiya and Russian businessman Yuri Kovalchuk and others accused of operating in Crimea, which the U.S. says Russia seized illegally in 2014.”

17. Oh hey, more sanctions

“Today, the United States continues to take action in response to Russian attempts to influence US democratic processes by imposing sanctions on four entities and seven individuals associated with the Internet Research Agency and its financier, Yevgeniy Prigozhin. This action increases pressure on Prigozhin by targeting his luxury assets, including three aircraft and a vessel,” reads a statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from September of this year.

18. Secondary sanctions

Secondary sanctions are economic sanctions in which a third party is punished for breaching the primary sanctions of the sanctioning body. The US has leveled sanctions against both China and Turkey for purchasing Russian S-400 air defense missiles, and it is threatening to do so to India as well.

19. Forcing Russian media to register as foreign agents

Both RT and Sputnik have been forced to register as “foreign agents” by the Trump administration. This classification forced the outlets to post a disclaimer on content, to report their activities and funding sources to the Department of Justice twice a year, and could arguably place an unrealistic burden on all their social media activities as it submits to DOJ micromanagement.

20. Throwing out Russian diplomats

The Trump administration joined some 20 other nations in casting out scores of Russian diplomats as an immediate response to the Skripal poisoning incident in the UK.

21. Training Polish and Latvian fighters “to resist Russian aggression”

“US Army Special Forces soldiers completed the first irregular and unconventional warfare training iteration for members of the Polish Territorial Defense Forces and Latvian Zemmessardze as a part of the Ridge Runner program in West Virginia, according to service officials,” Army Times reported this past July.

“U.S. special operations forces have been training more with allies from the Baltic states and other Eastern European nations in the wake of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014,” Army Times writes. “A low-level conflict continues to simmer in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region between Russian-backed separatists and government forces to this day. The conflict spurred the Baltics into action, as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia embraced the concepts of total defense and unconventional warfare, combining active-duty, national guard and reserve-styled forces to each take on different missions to resist Russian aggression and even occupation.”

22. Refusal to recognize Crimea as part of the Russian Federation


…even while acknowledging Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights as perfectly legal and legitimate.

23. Sending 1,000 troops to Poland

From the September article “1000 US Troops Are Headed to Poland” by National Interest:

Key point: Trump agreed to send more forces to Poland to defend it against Russia.

What Happened: U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to deploy approximately 1,000 additional U.S. troops to Poland during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Reuters reported Sept. 23.

Why It Matters: The deal, which formalizes the United States’ commitment to protecting Poland from Russia, provides a diplomatic victory to Duda and his governing Law and Justice ahead of November elections. The additional U.S. troops will likely prompt a reactive military buildup from Moscow in places like neighboring Kaliningrad and, potentially, Belarus.

24. Withdrawing from the Iran deal

Russia has been consistently opposed to Trump’s destruction of the JCPOA. In a statement after Trump killed the deal, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was “deeply disappointed by the decision of US President Donald Trump to unilaterally refuse to carry out commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, adding that this administration’s actions were “trampling on the norms of international law”.

25. Attacking Russian gas interests

Trump has been threatening Germany with sanctions and troop withdrawal if it continues to support a gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2.

“Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said he’s looking at sanctions to block the project he’s warned would leave Berlin ‘captive’ to Moscow,” Bloomberg reports. “The US also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany.”

“We’re protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany” for its gas, Trump told the press.

I could have kept going, but that’s my 25. The only reason anyone still believes Trump is anything other than insanely hawkish toward Russia is because it doesn’t benefit anyone’s partisanship or profit margins to call it like it really is. The facts are right here as plain as can be, but there’s a difference between facts and narrative. If they wanted to, the political/media class could very easily use the facts I just laid out to weave the narrative that this president is imperiling us all with dangerous new cold war provocations, but that’s how different narrative is from fact; there’s almost no connection. Instead they use a light sprinkling of fact to weave a narrative that has very little to do with reality. And meanwhile the insane escalations continue.

In a cold war, it only takes one miscommunication or one defective piece of equipment to set off a chain of events that can obliterate all life on earth. The more things escalate, the greater the probability of that happening. We’re rolling the dice on armageddon every single day, and with every escalation the number we need to beat gets a bit harder.

We should not be rolling the dice on this. This is very, very wrong, and the US and Russia should stop and establish detente immediately. The fact that outlets like CNN would rather diddle made-up Russiagate narratives than point to this obvious fact with truthful reporting is in and of itself sufficient to discredit them all forever.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

About the Author

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

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The “Dirty War” Pope [and the filthy media, again]

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

BILL VAN AUKEN, wsws.org. • First posted Mar 13, 2013.

"The Argentinean Catholic church support was by no means platonic. The junta’s detention and torture centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as “separating the wheat from the chafe,” they assured those operating the so-called “death flights,” in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing “God’s work.” Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of confession to extract information of use to the torturers."

Pope_Francis_blog

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or over a week, the media has subjected the public to a tidal wave of euphoric banality on the Roman Catholic Church’s selection of a new pope.

This non-stop celebration of the dogma and ritual of an institution that for centuries has been identified with oppression and backwardness is stamped with a deeply undemocratic character. It is reflective of the rightward turn of the entire political establishment and its repudiation of the principles enshrined in the US Constitution, including the wall of separation between church and state.

What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted that document. It was Thomas Jefferson’s well-founded opinion that “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

Jefferson’s view—and the reactionary character of the media’s sycophantic coverage—finds no more powerful confirmation than in the identity of the new pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of “humility” and “renewal.”

Placed on the papal throne is not only another hard-line opponent of Marxism, the Enlightenment and all manner of human progress, but a man who is deeply and directly implicated in one of the greatest crimes of the post-World War II era—Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

Amid the pomp and ceremony Friday, the Vatican spokesman was compelled to address the past of the new Pope Francis—the former Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio. He dismissed the accusations against him as the work of “anti-clerical left-wing elements.”

That “left-wing elements” would denounce the complicity of the Church’s leaders in the “Dirty War” waged by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is scarcely surprising. They accounted for many of the estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others who were “disappeared” and murdered, and the tens of thousands more who were imprisoned and tortured.

"Bergoglio (the new Pope Francis) was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power..."

But some of Bergoglio’s harshest critics come from within the Catholic Church itself, including priests and lay workers who say he handed them over to the torturers as part of a collaborative effort to “cleanse” the Church of “leftists.” One of them, a Jesuit priest, Orlando Yorio, was abducted along with another priest after ignoring a warning from Bergoglio, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, to stop their work in a Buenos Aires slum district.

During the first trial of leaders of the military junta in 1985, Yorio declared, “I am sure that he himself gave over the list with our names to the Navy.” The two were taken to the notorious Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) torture center and held for over five months before being drugged and dumped in a town outside the city.

Bergoglio was ideologically predisposed to backing the mass political killings unleashed by the junta. In the early 1970s, he was associated with the right-wing Peronist Guardia de Hierro (Iron Guard), whose cadre—together with elements of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy—were employed in the death squads known as the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), which carried out a campaign of extermination against left-wing opponents of the military before the junta even took power. Adm. Emilio Massera, the chief of the Navy and the leading ideologue of the junta, also employed these elements, particularly in the disposal of the personal property of the “disappeared.”

Yorio, who died in 2000, charged that Bergoglio “had communications with Admiral Massera, and had informed him that I was the chief of the guerrillas.”

The junta viewed the most minimal expression of opposition to the existing social order or sympathy for the oppressed as “terrorism.” The other priest who was abducted, Francisco Jalics, recounted in a book that Bergoglio had promised them he would tell the military that they were not terrorists. He wrote, “From subsequent statements by an official and 30 documents that I was able to access later, we were able to prove, without any room for doubt, that this man did not keep his promise, but that, on the contrary, he presented a false denunciation to the military.”

Bergoglio declined to appear at the first trial of the junta as well as at subsequent proceedings to which he was summoned. In 2010, when he finally did submit to questioning, lawyers for the victims found him to be “evasive” and “lying.”

Bergoglio claimed that he learned only after the end of the dictatorship of the junta’s practice of stealing the babies of disappeared mothers, who were abducted, held until giving birth and then executed, with their children given to military or police families. This lie was exposed by people who had gone to him for help in finding missing relatives.

The collaboration with the junta was not a mere personal failing of Bergoglio, but rather the policy of the Church hierarchy, which backed the military’s aims and methods. The Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky exposed Bergoglio’s attempted cover-up for this systemic complicity in a book that Bergoglio authored, which edited out compromising sentences from a memorandum recording a meeting between the Church leadership and the junta in November 1976, eight months after the military coup.

The excised statement included the pledge that the Church “in no way intends to take a critical position toward the action of the government,” as its “failure would lead, with great probability, to Marxism.” It declared the Catholic Church’s “understanding, adherence and acceptance” in relation to the so-called “Proceso” that unleashed a reign of terror against Argentine working people.

This support was by no means platonic. The junta’s detention and torture centers were assigned priests, whose job it was, not to minister to those suffering torture and death, but to help the torturers and killers overcome any pangs of conscience. Using such biblical parables as “separating the wheat from the chafe,” they assured those operating the so-called “death flights,” in which political prisoners were drugged, stripped naked, bundled onto airplanes and thrown into the sea, that they were doing “God’s work.” Others participated in the torture sessions and tried to use the rite of confession to extract information of use to the torturers.

This collaboration was supported from the Vatican on down. In 1981, on the eve of Argentina’s war with Britain over the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, Pope John Paul II flew to Buenos Aires, appearing with the junta and kissing its then-chief, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, while saying not a word about the tens of thousands who had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

As Jefferson noted, the Church is “always in alliance with the despot,” as it was in backing Franco’s fascists in Spain, its collaboration with the Nazis as they carried out the Holocaust in Europe, and its support of the US war in Vietnam.

Nonetheless, the naming of a figure like Bergoglio as Pope—and its celebration within the media and ruling circles—must serve as a stark warning. Not only are the horrific crimes carried out in Argentina 30 years ago embraced, those in power are contemplating the use of similar methods once again to defend capitalism from intensifying class struggle and the threat of social revolution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bill Van Auken is a leading political analyst with the wsws.org, information arm of the Social Equality Party.