BY JONATHAN TAYLOR

Mensch

Just listen to Louise Mensch, ostensibly a conservative blogger for Heat St, whom Wikileaks just outed as a Hillary campaign helper: “Globalists is a racist code word for Jew because there are none. free trade between sovereign nations is not a wish to abolish the former.” By Mensch’s convoluted logic, since globalists don’t want to completely destroy national sovereignty, they aren’t really globalists. Therefore when people say globalists, they must mean Jews.

Or let’s hear from the Republican campaign strategist and “Never Trump-er” Rick Wilson: “Globalist”…why don’t you just say “Jew” and get it over with?”

Then there’s Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal, who demanded conservative columnist Laura Ingraham be fired for using the term “globalist cabal.” “Globalist cabal” is an anti-Semitic dog whistle of the first order. Fox News should act,” Stephens insisted.

And Louis Mensch again: “”Globalists” is, like “zionists” or “zios” the new antisemitic code word for Jews”. Distressing news no doubt to anti-Zionist Jews and critics of Israel, who are used to being spuriously accused of anti-Semitism.

Then there’s neocon blowhard Jamie Kirchick’s response to an incoherent tweet by Paul Ryan challenger Paul Nehlen, about Ryan’s staffer Dan Senor “With globalist advisers like @DanSenor it’s no wonder @PRyan is to the left of @HillaryClinton on #TPP. “ To which Kirchick responded “Why don’t you just say “Jew?”” Senor is indeed Jewish, and is rumored to be the person who leaked the infamous Trump- Billy Bush “pussy” tape to the press.

Dan Senor: A slimy Neocon warmonger, prominent in pushing for the war on Iraq under Bush2, and, naturally a media favorite. Married to the clueless Campbell Brown.

One Is tempted to just quote Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

But perhaps we should take a step back and look at the words globalism and globalist themselves . Globalism is currently used mainly to describe economic and political globalization. The word first became popular in the 1940s to describe US policies of containment of the Soviet Union. “Globalist” refers more broadly to someone who favors “global capitalism” and to political leaders who strive to create a unified global economy. In its more political-economic sense, the word “globalist” refers to international institutions that intervene globally. The United Nations, World Bank, IMF, World Trade Organization, EU, OECD, G20 and World Economic Forum are examples of globalist institutions. Politicians and bureaucrats who favor these institutions and their ability to dictate terms to sovereign states are globalists. Essentially, we are talking about the majority of mainstream US politicians from both parties.

In its more conspiratorial sense the word globalist is applied to groups who are thought to attempt to create global policies secretly or behind the scenes. This would include groups such as the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, or the people who put together global trade deals that override national laws, like the TPP.

In his speech of October 13, 2016, Donald Trump used the term globalist repeatedly, triggering accusations of anti-Semitism from media outlets such as Mother Jones and Raw Story. The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted his concern, mildly stated compared to the rampant Twitter hysteria, that “Trump should avoid rhetoric&tropes” that suggest anti-Jewish themes. But despite the media pile-on, Trump has been discussing globalism in his speeches for months. As Jill Stein and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders represent the long-standing anti-globalization movement of the left, Trump represents the anti-globalization movement of the right. And there is significant overlap between the two, as opposition to the TPP demonstrates or to provocative militarism towards Russia demonstrates.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ack on April 27, in a speech on foreign policy, Trump stated: “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism. The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”

From his acceptance speech at the RNC: “The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America first. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”

From a speech on jobs on June 28: “Today, we import nearly $800 billion more in goods than we export. This is not some natural disaster. It is politician-made disaster. It is the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”

Trump appeals to economic nationalist policies, calling for more advantageous trade deals and hinting at protectionism. On foreign policy he advocates for less interventionism and military policy that is primarily defensive and in service of clear US national interests. He questions the patriotism of US elites by implying they serve some other power than the American people. That these ideas are appealing is not surprising in a country in which 70% of all households have less than $1000 in savings.

But are these policies anti-Semitic? Trump, whose daughter Ivanka is a Jewish convert married to an Orthodox Jewish husband who is a top Trump campaign advisor, seems an unlikely Jew hater, but the mainstream Hillary-loving press has been insisting he is Hitler throughout the campaign (odd since they also accusing him of being controlled by Russia. A new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?) As the election looms the media are busy cranking up Jewish paranoia to 11. As the unflappably cool Matthew Iglesias surmises. “My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity.”

In the wake of Trump’s October 13 speech, reporter Travis Gettys informed his readers that Trump’s very reference to international banks at all was anti-Semitic. His article for Raw Story was just a series of breathlessly fearmongering tweets. If Trump attacking bankers inspires such fear and loathing one hesitates to guess what Gettys must think of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, let alone bankster critics like Michael Hudson or David Graeber. Clearly goose-stepping brownshirts all.

Tactically speaking, the primary purpose of an accusation of anti-Semitism is to end debate. So if someone says “globalist is a code word for Jews”, or “blaming international banks for economic problems is anti-Semitic”, the function of this is to ensure that globalists and international banks cannot be blamed. It’s as if someone responded to the Occupy movement that “the 1%” is a codeword for Jews, so we should stop talking about wealth disparity.” The ramifications are obvious – leave the global elites out of this campaign or you’re a Jew-hating bigot and by the way here comes the ADL.

Second, by making this association, these supposed defenders of the Jews are in fact the ones at risk of fostering anti-Semitism. If “globalists” are conflated with Jews by Jews, then doesn’t that means that globalists ARE Jews? If “international bankers” is a cover for anti-Semitism, than by simple deduction most international bankers must be Jewish! The mind reels at the notion that suggesting these ideas is some sort of push-back against the actual anti-Semitism found among those who discuss “the Jewish Question” on the alt-right. And of course the alt-right trolls read these tweets, chuckle and say they knew it all along.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or those sitting on the sidelines, a logical response to these accusations of anti-Semitism is to start wondering about just exactly how Jewish the global elites really are. Of course, this is way beyond anything Trump is asking his supporters to do. Trump does not “name the Jew” as segments of the alt-right wish he did. Given his prominent position in globalist networks of power, Trump knows that while Jews are disproportionately represented that doesn’t mean that the global elite itself is predominantly Jewish. However Trump has singled out a couple of Jews in recent speeches: George Soros, and Sidney Blumenthal. Soros, as an extraordinarily wealthy financer and speculator who also funds an enormous amount of liberal and dare I say globalist causes around the world has long been a subject of attention on the far right. Blumenthal is less important, as a prominent Clinton advisor and Libya plotter who makes cameo appearances in Wikileaks. But naming a couple of prominent Jews associated with Hillary is hardly reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the SS. Of course it is possible that Trump has some antipathy towards Jews, but far more likely that his actual beef is with globalists whose policies he is opposed to and whom are doing their damnedest to try to prevent him from becoming president.

Anti-Semitism is frequently used to silence people from saying the things they want or need to say. Trump needs to make his case for economic populism and an essentially paleoconservative foreign policy by depicting his opponents as the enemy. When the enemy appears to be an octopus-like conglomeration of career politicians like the Clintons, Wall Street bankers, wealthy .. uh… globalists like George Soros, oligarchs with media empires like Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos, Trump needs to affix a label to them. He does use “special interests” but the term is ambiguous and there are special interests on Trump’s side as well. So Trump must name his enemy, and globalist is the word that fits best.

Trump’s Jewish attackers want to pretend that Trump is an anti-Semite and all of his attacks on globalist institutions or individuals is a personal attack on Jews. That’s preposterous, and projection. Trump’s Jewish attackers don’t want to admit their Jewish privilege. We Jews (yes, I’m one) are the wealthiest religious group in America and the second richest ethnic group behind Indian-Americans. For our tiny size, we are by far the most politically influential. The worlds of finance, media, journalism and law are home to extremely disproportionately high numbers of Jews. Leading globalist institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO have high numbers of Jewish executives and staffers, as do organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which one informal estimate claims is around 50% Jewish. Half of the US’s billionaires are Jewish. Jewish donors play an enormous role in funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The normally Republican and predominantly Jewish neoconservatives have thrown their support behind Hillary. None of this is evidence of conspiracy. Jews are overrepresented in a many other fields as well, such as mathematics, physics, medicine, philosophy, etc. Jews like to argue with each other and with gentiles, and anybody positing a unified Jewish perspective on any issue has obviously never had Shabbat dinner with a typical Jewish extended family. But claims that Jews are using their disproportionate wealth and influence to support Hillary Clinton are, in fact, true.

Bringing up anti-Semitism then just reminds people of how much influence and power Jews have. Casually hurling charges of anti-Semitism at critics of globalism is incredibly ill-advised and unhelpful. Trump’s critique of globalism, global elite corruption, and the role of bankers in global affairs is not anti-Semitic but the people who allege that it is are the ones who actually foster anti-Semitism, while simultaneously protecting globalism and globalist institutions from critique. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in some parts of the alt-right. There’s no need to make it worse by shaming people who criticize global elites.

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CARRYING OUT THE CRIMINAL AGENDA OF THE 0.00001% ACROSS THE GLOBE

ALEX LANTIER, SENIOR ANALYST, WSWS.ORG

Dateline: 27 September 2016, first iteration

This week, as criticism of the US-Russian cease-fire in Syria mounted within the Pentagon brass, a prominent foreign policy analyst issued a statement denouncing the truce. He reiterated US calls for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, and he advocated a major escalation of the US-NATO intervention in Syria—arming the Islamist opposition with anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons.

Gilbert Achcar

“As almost everybody can now tell,” this critic wrote, “the new cease-fire agreement on Syria is doomed to break down, as would any such agreement that does not settle the core political problem of the crisis. Of course, even a respite that doesn’t last is better than nothing at all (although the truce has so far been very disappointing with regard to humanitarian relief). But short of an agenda that includes a comprehensive agreement for Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow a transition toward a pluralist government, no cease-fire stands a chance in that war-torn country.”

He added, “Without a balance of military forces on the ground in Syria which would compel the Assad regime and its Iranian backers to seek real compromise, a genuine political settlement is not possible. … [T]he issue of creating such a balance of forces—especially by providing the Syrian opposition with anti-aircraft missiles capable of limiting the Syrian regime’s use of air power, its main weapon of large-scale destruction—has been the principal bone of contention on Syria within the Obama administration since 2012.”

One might assume that this essay had been prepared by a CIA operative, or, perhaps, a columnist for either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. In fact, the author is Gilbert Achcar, the prominent associate of France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA). Achcar left that movement to take a professorship at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London and join the NPA-linked Socialist Resistance group in Britain. His latest article was written for the Nation and republished on the Pabloite’s International Viewpoint web site, affiliated with the NPA.

As Achcar was drafting his essay, Ashley Smith of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States published a similar warmongering appeal on the Socialist Worker web site. For Smith, the truce should be used to re-arm US-backed “revolutionary” militias fighting alongside the Al Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front. He wrote that the truce “at best, might allow breathing space for revolutionaries to regroup for a future uprising against the regime.”

Smith attacked the Obama administration for lacking the appetite for a major confrontation with Russia. Smith criticizes Obama for having failed to militarily exploit the concocted “poison gas” episode of 2013 to overthrow Assad and bring the opposition to power.

Achcar using his professorial status to pollute the minds of the unwary or simply ignorant.

This was because Obama, Smith wrote, has been “hesitant to press this policy out of fear of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.” He continued: “Thus, whenever the Assad regime crossed supposed ‘red lines,’ like its continuing use of chemical weapons, the US preferred to cut deals with Russia rather than take any action that might topple Assad, but also threaten a wider upheaval. The US has also refused to supply the FSA [Free Syrian Army militia] with weapons it pleaded for to defend itself against regime air strikes.”

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]mith’s denunciations of the Assad regime’s “relentless bombing of civilian targets” are utterly hypocritical and tailored to the specific needs of American imperialism. His selective outrage overlooks the US-backed Saudi bombing and blockade in Yemen, which has killed thousands and threatens hundreds of thousands of children with starvation. Smith has written nothing on Yemen, which has been ignored by Socialist Worker and the entire pseudo-left press.

Nor is Smith concerned about the sectarian massacres carried out by the US-backed Islamist opposition in Syria, and the bloody record of US imperialism itself, whose wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have still claimed a far greater toll than the Kremlin’s Syrian intervention.

The writings of Achcar and Smith obliterate any significant distinction between the positions of leading pseudo-left political tendencies and the most ruthless representatives of American and European imperialism. Indeed, in an extraordinary passage, Achcar closes his essay with a friendly quotation from Anthony Cordesman, the head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.

“If anyone in the region had any illusion about the democratic and humanitarian pretexts invoked by Washington in previous wars, they have lost them completely by now,” he writes. “As Anthony Cordesman, one of the most astute observers of the military-political situation in the Middle East, recently observed, the US president is now entirely focused on an ‘exit strategy’—not an exit from the Syrian crisis, though, but his own exit from office.”

Achcar’s “astute observer” is in fact one of American militarism’s most important strategists. He is the author of innumerable reports calling for the escalation of US wars in the Middle East and aggression against China and Russia. He is also the author of a CSIS report on nuclear war that dismissed the destruction of India and Pakistan—that is, the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people—as economically unimportant. “The loss of India and Pakistan might create some short term economic issues for importers of goods and services,” he wrote. “However, the net effect would shift benefits to other suppliers without any clear problems in substitutions or costs.”

From Achcar’s standpoint, however, Cordesman is a colleague with whom he can work on the friendliest basis. They share the same objectives, as well as the same enemies—that is, anyone who opposes their war policies.

The articles by Achcar and Smith express not just the positions of these two individuals, but the evolution of social forces and their reflection in political tendencies.

In 1999 David North, international editorial board chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, wrote:

The objective modus operandi and social implications of the protracted stock market boom have enabled imperialism to recruit from among sections of the upper-middle class a new and devoted constituency. The reactionary, conformist and cynical intellectual climate that prevails in the United States and Europe—promoted by the media and adapted to by a largely servile and corrupted academic community—reflects the social outlook of a highly privileged stratum of the population that is not in the least interested in encouraging a critical examination of the economic and political bases of its newly-acquired riches. [A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016]

This social stratum and the political tendencies that reflect their interests have moved sharply to the right. The writings of Achcar and Smith show how, amid growing anger and mass disaffection with war in the working class, pseudo-left organizations are being integrated and recruited to play major roles in imperialist politics. The organizations and tendencies that were in the leadership of anti-war protests in the late 1960s and 1970s are now shamelessly pro-war. Workers, students and youth must understand this fact, and the social processes that underlie it, in order to build a new movement against the immense dangers that confront mankind.

The fight against imperialist war requires the systematic political exposure of the pro-imperialist pseudo-left. But this theoretical-political work is inseparably linked to the political organization and education of the working class and the broad mass of youth. It is within this powerful social force that the mass constituency for revolutionary opposition to imperialist war will be found. The Detroit conference called by the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality—Socialism vs. Capitalism and War—will mark an important advance in the fight to build a new movement against war. We urge readers and supporters of the World Socialist Web Site to come to Detroit on November 5 to participate in this critically important conference.

Alex Lantier

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

But be sure to support YOUR media.
If you don’t, who will?

---

Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

Diminishing Returns. Image: Michael Kerbow courtesy via thecreatorsproject.vice.com.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n spite of their differing perceptions of the architecture of the totalitarian superstate and how it exercises power and control over its residents, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley shared a fundamental conviction. They both argued that the established democracies of the West were moving quickly toward a historical moment when they would willingly relinquish the noble promises and ideals of liberal democracy and enter that menacing space where totalitarianism perverts the modern ideals of justice, freedom, and political emancipation. Both believed that Western democracies were devolving into pathological states in which politics was recognized in the interest of death over life and justice. Both were unequivocal in the shared understanding that the future of civilization was on the verge of total domination—or what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.”

While Neil Postman and other critical descendants have pitted Orwell and Huxley against each other because of their distinctively separate notions of a future dystopian society,¹ I believe that the dark shadow of authoritarianism that shrouds American society like a thick veil can be lifted by re-examining Orwell’s prescient dystopian fable 1984, as well as Huxley’s Brave New World, in light of contemporary neoliberal ascendancy. Rather than pit their dystopian visions against each other, it might be more productive to see them as complementing each other, especially at a time when, to quote Antonio Gramsci, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”²

New order of authoritarianism

Both authors provide insight into the merging of the totalitarian elements that constitute a new and more hybridized form of authoritarian control, appearing less as fiction than a threatening portent of the unfolding twenty-first century. Consumer fantasies and authoritarian control; “Big Brother” intelligence agencies and the voracious seductions of privatized pleasures; the rise of the punishing state, which criminalizes an increasing number of behaviors and invests in institutions that incarcerate and are organized principally for the production of violence; the collapse of democratic public spheres into narrow, market-driven orbits of privatization—these now constitute the new order of authoritarianism.

Orwell’s Big Brother has more recently found a new incarnation in the revelations of government lawlessness and corporate spying by whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden.³ All of these individuals revealed a government that lied about its intelligence operations, illegally spied on millions of people who were not considered terrorists or had committed no crime, and collected data from every conceivable electronic source to be stored and potentially used to squelch dissent, blackmail people, or just intimidate those who fight to make corporate and state power accountable.⁴ Orwell offered his readers an image of the modern state in which privacy was no longer valued as a civil virtue and a basic human right, nor perceived as a measure of the robust strength of a healthy and thriving democracy. In Orwell’s dystopia the right to privacy had come under egregious assault, but more than that, such ruthless transgressions of privacy pointed to something more sinister than the violation of individual rights. The claim to privacy, for Orwell, represented a moral and political principle by which to assess the nature, power, and severity of an emerging totalitarian state. Orwell’s warning was intended to shed light on the horrors of totalitarianism, the corruption of language, the production of a pervasive stupidity, and the endless regimes of state spying imposed on citizens in the mid-twentieth century. Orwell opened a door for all to see a “nightmarish future” in which everyday life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance, and control—a society in which the slogan “ignorance becomes strength”—morphs into a guiding principle of mainstream media, education, and the culture of politics.

Huxley shared Orwell’s concern about ignorance as a political tool of the elite, enforced through surveillance and the banning of books, dissent, and critical thought itself. But Huxley believed that social control and the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in power through the political tools of pleasure and distraction. Huxley thought that this might take place through the use of drugs and genetic engineering. But the real drugs and social planning of late modernity are found in an entertainment and public pedagogy industry that trades in pleasure and idiocy—most evident in the merging of neoliberalism, celebrity culture, and the control of commanding cultural apparatuses extending from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, news, and the social media.

Orwell’s Big Brother of 1984 has been upgraded in the 2015 edition. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, if the older Big Brother presided over traditional enclosures such as military barracks, prisons, schools, and “countless other big and small panopticons,” the updated Big Brother is concerned with not only inclusion and the death of privacy but also the suppression of dissent and the widening of the politics of exclusion.⁵Keeping people out is the extended face of Big Brother, who now patrols borders, hospitals, and other public spaces in order to spot “the people who do not fit in the places they are in, banishing them from … ‘where they belong,’ or better still never allowing them to come anywhere near in the first place.”⁶

This is the Big Brother that pushes youthful protests out of the public spaces they attempt to occupy. This is the hypernationalistic Big Brother clinging to notions of racial purity and American exceptionalism as a driving force in creating a country that has come to resemble an open-air prison for the dispossessed. This is the Big Brother whose split personality portends the dark authoritarian universe of the 1 percent, with their control over the economy and use of paramilitarized police forces on the one hand, and on the other their retreat into gated communities manned by SWAT-like security forces. Fear and isolation constitute an updated version of Big Brother. Fear is now managed and buttressed by normalizing the neoliberal claim that it be accepted as a general condition of society, dealt with exclusively as an individual consideration, disassociated from the politics and moral panics endemic to an authoritarian society, and used to mobilize the individual’s fear of the other. In the surveillance state, fear is misplaced from the political sphere to the personal concern with the fear of surviving, of not getting ahead, of unemployment, and of the danger posed by the growing legions of alien others. As the older order dies and a new one struggles to be born, Gramsci’s vision rightly identifies a liminal space that has given rise to monsters, all too willing to kidnap, torture, and spy on law-abiding citizens while violating civil liberties.⁷ He is also right in suggesting that while such an interregnum offers no political guarantees, it does provide, or at least gestures toward, reimagining “what is to be done,” how it might be done, and who is going to do it.⁸

Orwell’s 1984 continues to serve as a brilliant and important metaphor for mapping the expansive trajectory of global surveillance, authoritarianism, and the suppression of dissent that has characterized the first decades of the new millennium. The older modes of surveillance to which Orwell pointed—including his warnings regarding the dangers of microphones and giant telescreens that watch and listen—are surprisingly limited when compared with the varied means now available for spying. Orwell would be astonished by this contemporary, refashioned Big Brother given the threat  that the new surveillance state poses because of its reach, and the alleged “advance” of technologies that far outstretch anything he could have imagined, technologies that pose a much greater threat to both the personal privacy of citizens and the control exercised by sovereign power.

Individual freedom and privacy

As Marjorie Cohn has similarly indicated, “Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.”⁹ Snowden, Cohn, and other critics are correct about the dangers of the state’s infringement of privacy rights, but their analysis should be taken further by linking the issue of citizen surveillance with the rise of “networked societies,” global flows of power, and the emergence of a totalitarian ethos that defies even state-based control.¹⁰ For Orwell, domination was state imposed and bore the heavy hand of unremitting repression and a smothering language that eviscerated any appearance of dissent, erased historical memory, and turned the truth into its opposite. For Orwell, individual freedom was at risk under the heavy hand of state terrorism.

In Orwell’s world individual freedom and privacy were under attack from outside forces. For Huxley, in contrast, freedom and privacy were willingly given up as part of the seductions of a soft authoritarianism, with its vast machinery of manufactured needs, desires, and identities. This new mode of persuasion seduced people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, disposable goods, and new scientific advances in which any viable sense of agency was undermined. The conditions for critical thought dissolved into the limited pleasures of instant gratification wrought through the use of technologies and consuming practices that dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking itself. Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression, whereas Huxley’s is the stuff of distractions, diversions, and the transformation of privacy into a cheap and sensational performance for public display. Neil Postman, writing in a different time and worried about the destructive anti-intellectual influence of television, sided with Huxley and believed that repression was now on the side of entertainment and the propensity of the American public to amuse itself to death.¹¹ His attempt to differentiate Huxley’s dystopian vision from Orwell’s is worth noting:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.¹²

Echoes of Huxley’s insights play out in the willingness of millions of people who voluntarily hand over personal information whether in the service of the strange sociality prompted by social media or in homage to the new surveillance state. New surveillance technologies employed by major service providers now focus on diverse consumer populations who are targeted in the collection of endless amounts of personal information as they move from one site to the next, one geopolitical region to the next, and across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. As Ariel Dorfman points out, “Social media users gladly give up their liberty and privacy, invariably for the most benevolent of platitudes and reasons,”¹³ all the while endlessly shopping online, updating Facebook, and texting. Indeed, surveillance technologies are now present in virtually every public and private space—such as video cameras in streets, commercial establishments, workplaces, and even schools, as well as the myriad scanners at entry points of airports, retail stores, sporting events, and so on. They function as control mechanisms that become normalized through their heightened visibility. So, too, our endless array of personal devices that chart, via GPS tracking, our every move, our every choice, our every pleasure.

At the same time, Orwell’s warning about Big Brother applies not simply to an authoritarian-surveillance state but also to commanding financial institutions and corporations that have made diverse modes of surveillance a ubiquitous feature of daily life. Corporations use the new technologies to track spending habits and to collect data points from social media so as to provide us with consumer goods that match our desires, to employ facial recognition technologies to alert store salespersons to our credit ratings, and so it goes. Heidi Boghosian points out that if omniscient state control in Orwell’s 1984 is embodied by the two-way television sets present in each home, then in “our own modern adaptation, it is symbolized by the location-tracking cell phones we willingly carry in our pockets and the microchip-embedded clothes we wear on our bodies.”¹⁴ In this instance, the surveillance state is one that not only listens, watches, and gathers massive amounts of information through data mining, allegedly for the purpose of identifying “security threats.” It also acculturates the public into accepting the intrusion of commercial surveillance technologies—and, perhaps more vitally, the acceptance of privatized, commodified values—into all aspects of their lives. In other words, the most dangerous repercussions of a near total loss of privacy involve more than the unwarranted collecting of information by the government: we must also be attentive to the ways in which being spied on has become not onlynormalized but even enticing, as corporations up the pleasure quotient for consumers who use new digital technologies and social networks—not least of all by and for simulating experiences of community.

Authoritarian-surveillance state

Many individuals, especially young people, now run from privacy and increasingly demand services in which they can share every personal facet of their lives. While Orwell’s vision touches upon this type of control, there is a notable difference that he did not foresee. According to Pete Cashmore, while Orwell’s “Thought Police tracked you without permission, some consumers are now comfortable with sharing their every move online.”¹⁵ The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone—especially young people—into a regime of security and commodification in which their identities, values, and desires are inextricably tied to a culture of commodified addictions, self-help, therapy, and social indifference. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of major corporations such as Disney and the Bank of America as well as the secret domains of the NSA, FBI, and fifteen other intelligence agencies. As Edward Snowden’s revelations about the PRISM program revealed, the NSA has also collected personal data from “the world’s largest Internet companies—Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Google—as well as extensive efforts by Microsoft to provide the agency with access to its communications platforms such as Outlook.”¹⁶ According to a senior lawyer for the NSA, the Intenet companies “were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.”¹⁷

The fact is that Orwell’s and Huxley’s ironic representations of the modern totalitarian state—along with their implied defense of a democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy and the right to be educated in the capacity to be autonomous and critical thinkers—have been transformed and mutilated almost beyond recognition by the material and ideological registers of a worldwide neoliberal order. Just as we can envision Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopian fables morphing over time from “realistic novels” into a “real-life documentary,” and now into a form of “reality TV,” privacy and freedom have been radically altered in an age of permanent, nonstop global exchange and circulation. That is, in the current moment, the right to privacy and freedom has been usurped by the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism’s unending desire to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life subject to market forces under watchful eyes of both government and corporate regimes of surveillance. In a world devoid of care, compassion, and protection, personal privacy and freedom are no longer connected and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good, or a vulnerability born of the recognition of the frailty of human life. Culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory, civic literacy, and the lessons of history in a social order in which the worst excesses of capitalism are left unchecked and a consumerist ethic “makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals.”¹⁸ With the rise of the punishing state along with a kind of willful amnesia taking hold of the larger culture, we see little more than a paralyzing fear and apathy in response to the increasing exposure of formerly private spheres to data mining and manipulation, while the concept of privacy itself has all but expired under a “broad set of panoptic  practices.”¹⁹ With individuals more or less succumbing to this insidious cultural shift in their daily lives, there is nothing to prevent widespread collective indifference to the growth of a surveillance culture, let alone an authoritarian state.

xxxxxxxThe worst fears of Huxley and Orwell merge into a dead zone of historical amnesia as more and more people embrace any and every new electronic device regardless of the risks it might pose in terms of granting corporations and governments increased access to and power over their choices and movements. Detailed personal information flows from the sphere of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing as they are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace for either commercial purposes or for fear of a possible threat to the social order and its established institutions of power. Power now imprisons not only bodies under a regime of surveillance and a mass incarceration state but also subjectivity itself as the threat of state control is now coupled with the seductions of the new forms of passivity-inducing soma: electronic technologies, a pervasive commodified landscape, and a mind-numbing celebrity culture.

Underlying these everyday conveniences of modern life, as Boghosian documents in great detail, is the growing Orwellian partnership between the militarized state and private security companies in the United States. Each day, new evidence surfaces pointing to the emergence of a police state that has produced ever more sophisticated methods for surveillance in order to enforce a mass suppression of the most essential tools for democratic dissent: “the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.”²⁰ As Boghosian points out, “By claiming that anyone who questions authority or engages in undesired political speech is a potential terrorist threat, this government-corporate partnership makes a mockery of civil liberties.”²¹ Nowhere is this more evident than in American public schools, where youth are being taught that they are a generation of suspects, subject to the presence of armed police and security guards, drug-sniffing dogs, and an array of surveillance apparatuses that chart their every move—not to mention in some cases how they respond emotionally to certain pedagogical practices.

Whistleblowers are not only punished by the government: their lives are also turned upside down in the process by private surveillance agencies and major corporations, which now work in tandem. For instance, the Bank of America assembled fifteen to twenty bank officials and retained the law firm of Hunton and Williams in order to devise “various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and Greenwald whom they thought were about to release damaging information about the bank.”²²It is worth repeating that Orwell’s vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state look mild next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state surveillance system that can tap into every conceivable mode of communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites around the country, and potentially use that data to repress any vestige of dissent.²³

Discontents

As Huxley anticipated, any critical analysis must move beyond documenting abuses of power to addressing how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which individuals become complicit with authoritarian practices. That is, how is the loss of freedom internalized? What and how do state- and corporate-controlled institutions, cultural apparatuses, social relations, and policies contribute to making a society’s plunge into self-generating dark times, as Huxley predicted? Put differently, what is the educative nature of a repressive politics, and how does it function to secure the consent of the American public? And, most important, how can it be challenged and under what circumstances?

The nature of repression has become more porous, employing not only brute force but also dominant modes of education, persuasion, and authority. Aided by a public pedagogy produced and circulated through a machinery of consumption and public relations tactics, a growing regime of repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market to support the widespread embrace of an authoritarian culture. Relentlessly entertained by spectacle, people not only become numb to violence and cruelty but also begin to identify with an authoritarian worldview. As David Graeber suggests, the police “become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture … watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view.”²⁴ But it is not just the spectacle of violence that ushers individuals into a world in which brutality becomes a primary force for mediating relations as well as the ultimate source of pleasure; there is also the production of an unchecked notion of individualism that both dissolves social bonds and removes any viable notion of agency from the landscape of social responsibility and ethical consideration. Absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification, and display, Americans vicariously participate in the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state. Violence has become the organizing force of a society driven by a noxious notion of privatization in which it becomes difficult for ideas to be lifted into the public realm. Under such circumstances, politics is eviscerated because it now supports a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the idea that “humanity is never acquired in solitude.”²⁵ This violence against the bonds of sociality undermines and dissolves the nature of social obligations as freedom becomes an exercise in self-development rather than social responsibility. This upending of the social and critical modes of agency mimics not just the death of the radical imagination but also a notion of banality made famous by Hannah Arendt, who argued that at the root of totalitarianism is a kind of thoughtlessness, an inability to think, and a type of outrageous indifference in which “there’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.”²⁶

By integrating insights drawn from both Huxley and Orwell, it becomes necessary for any viable critical analysis to take a long view, contextualizing the contemporary moment as a new historical conjuncture in which political rule has been replaced by corporate sovereignty, consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship, and the only value that matters is exchange value. Precarity has replaced social protections provided by the state, just as the state cares more about building prisons and infantilizing the American public than it does about providing all of its citizens with quality educational institutions, health care, and other social rights. America is not just dancing into oblivion, as Huxley suggested; it is also being pushed into the dark recesses of an authoritarian state. Orwell wrote dystopian novels, but he believed that the sheer goodness of human nature would in the end be enough for individuals to develop modes of collective resistance that he could only imagine in the midst of the haunting specter of totalitarianism.

Huxley was more indebted to Kafka’s notion of destabilization, despair, and hopelessness. For Huxley, the subject had lost a sense of agency and had become the product of a scientifically manufactured form of idiocy and conformity. Progress had been transformed into its opposite, and science needed to be liberated from itself. Where Huxley fails, as Theodor Adorno has pointed out, is that he has no sense of resistance. According to Adorno, “The weakness of Huxley’s entire conception is that it makes all its concepts relentlessly dynamic but nevertheless arms them against the tendency to turn into their own opposites.”²⁷ Hence, the forces of resistance are not simply underestimated but rendered impotent.The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system, with its “urge to surveil, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet,”²⁸ can be fully understood only when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in supermax prisons, the hypermilitarization of local police forces, the justification of secret prisons and state-sanctioned torture abroad, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.²⁹ This is part of Orwell’s narrative, but it does not go far enough.

Neoliberal dreamworld of babbling consumers

The new authoritarian corporate-driven state deploys more subtle tactics to depoliticize public memory and promote the militarization of everyday life. Alongside efforts to defund public and higher education and to attack the welfare state, a wide-ranging assault is being waged across the culture on all spheres that encourage the public to hold power accountable. If these public institutions are destroyed, there will be few sites left in which to nurture the critical formative cultures capable of educating people to challenge the range of injustices plaguing the United States and the forces that reproduce them. One particular challenge comes from the success of neoliberal tyranny to dissolve those social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility toward others and form the basis for political consciousness. Under the new authoritarian state, perhaps the gravest threat one faces is not simply being subject to the dictates of what Quentin Skinner calls “arbitrary power,” but failing to respond with outrage when “my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose.”³⁰ The situation is dire when people seem no longer interested in contesting such power. It is precisely the poisonous spread of a broad culture of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom that lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The democratic imagination has been transformed into a data machine that marshals its inhabitants into the neoliberal dreamworld of babbling consumers and armies of exploitative labor whose ultimate goal is to accumulate capital and initiate individuals into the brave new surveillance/punishing state that merges Orwell’s Big Brother with Huxley’s mind-altering soma.

Nothing will change unless people begin to take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United States and what it might require to make such issues meaningful in order to make them critical and transformative. As Charles Derber has explained, knowing “how to express possibilities and convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important” if any viable notion of resistance is to take place.³¹ The current regime of authoritarianism is reinforced through a new and pervasive sensibility in which people surrender themselves to both the capitalist system and a general belief in its call for security. It does not simply repress independent thought but constitutes new modes of thinking through a diverse set of cultural apparatuses ranging from the schools and media to the Internet. The fundamental question in resisting the transformation of the United States into a twenty-first-century authoritarian society must concern the educative nature of politics—that is, what people believe and how their individual and collective dispositions and capacities to be either willing or resistant agents are shaped.

What will American society look like in a hundred years? For Huxley, it may well mimic a nightmarish image of a world in which ignorance is a political weapon and pleasure a form of control, offering nothing more than the swindle of fulfillment, if not something more self-deluding and defeating. Orwell, more optimistically, might see a more open future and history disinclined to fulfill itself in the image of the dystopian society he so brilliantly imagined. He believed in the power of those living under such oppression to imagine otherwise, to think beyond the dictates of the authoritarian state and to offer up spirited forms of collective resistance, being willing to reclaim the reigns of political emancipation. For Huxley, there was hope in a pessimism that had exhausted itself; for Orwell optimism had to be tempered by a sense of educated hope. History is open and only time will tell who was right.

References; 

[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985, 2005).

[2] I take up elsewhere, in great detail, the nature of the surveillance state and the implications that the persecution of these whistleblowers has for undermining any viable understanding of democracy. See Henry A. Giroux, “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State,” Truthout, February 10, 2014, available at www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state.

[3] For an excellent description of the new surveillance state, see Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (New York: Signal, 2014); and Julia Angwin, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (New York: Times Books, 2014).

[4] Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

[5] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity, 2004), 132–133.

[6] Heidi Boghosian, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (San Francisco:<>City Lights Books, 2013).

[7] Instructive here is Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

[8] Marjorie Cohn, “Beyond Orwell’s Worst Nightmare,” Huffington Post, January 31, 2014.

[9] See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); and Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

[10] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, xix–xx.

[11] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

[12] Ariel Dorfman, “Repression by Any Other Name,” Guernica, February 3, 2014.

[13] Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 32.

[14] Pete Cashmore, “Why 2012, Despite Privacy Fears, Isn’t Like Orwell’s 1984,” CNN, January 23, 2012, available at www.ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-770499.

[15] Greenwald, No Place to Hide, p. 108.

[16] Spencer Ackerman, “US Tech Giants Knew of NSA Data Collection, Agency’s Top Lawyer Insists,” The Guardian, March 19, 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-knew-nsa-data-collection-rajesh-de.

[17] Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 22.

[18] Jonathan Crary, 24/7 (London: Verso, 2013), 16.

[19] Mark Karlin, “From Spying on ‘Terrorists Abroad’ to Suppressing Domestic Dissent: When We Become the Hunted,” Truthout, August 21, 2013.

[20] Ibid., Boghosian, Spying on Democracy, 22–23.

[21] Arun Gupta, “Barrett Brown’s Revelations Every Bit as Explosive as Edward Snowden’s,” The Guardian, June 24, 2013.

[22] Bruce Schneier, “The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership,” Bloomberg, July 31, 2013.

[23] David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012): 119.

[24] The quotation by Karl Jaspers is cited in Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2013), 37.

[25] Ibid., 48.

[26] Theodor W. Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 106–107.

[27] Tom Engelhardt, “Tomgram: Engelhardt, a Surveillance State Scorecard,” November 12, 2013, available at Tom Dispath.com.

[28] I take up many of these issues in Henry A. Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014), The Twilight of the Social (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), and Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).

[29] Quoted in Quentin Skinner and Richard Marshall, “Liberty, Liberalism and Surveillance: A Historic Overview,” Open Democracy (July 26, 2013). Online: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/quentin-skinner-richard-marshall/liberty-liberalism-and-surveillance-historic-overview

[30] Charles Derber, private correspondence with the author, January 29, 2014.

Originally published by the Sri Lanka Guardian.
Opening Photo: Oregon Dept of Transportation SWAT team. Photo: Smallman12q.

Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor

Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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=By= GH Eliason

UCK-KLA logo (Dessy92)

Why were known terrorists at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia? Doesn’t the Secret Service vet people that are in the same building as the President of the United States anymore?

What the hell is going on?

Invited as a guest to the 2016 Democratic National Convention is none other than Kadri Veseli, the Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly.

Kadri Veseli

Veseli is a former Kosovar Albanian leader of the KLA and its spy organization SHIK. He’s being indicted along with the current president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, for small things like organ trafficking and crimes against humanity.

“A new investigation into the shadowy spy group, known as Shik, could also prove embarrassing for western intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and France’s DGSE, whose support for prime minister Hashim Thaçi, the PDK and Shik dates back to the 1998-9 Kosovo war. At the time, the Americans and French backed Thaçi as the most effective Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) commander fighting the Serbian military, which was conducting a brutal counter-insurgency and “ethnic-cleansing campaign”… The launch of the new enquiry, which will be conducted by Kosovan and Eulex investigators, will raise questions of why it was not begun five years earlier.”

“In his 2009 video Bllaca said that he worked for the execution arm of Shik, charged with killing “collaborators”, LDK officials and potential witnesses against KLA commanders for war crimes.”

“He said that between 1999 and 2003 he took part in an estimated 17 crimes, including assassinations, attempted assassinations, threats and blackmail, claiming that he worked directly for Syla.”

“His explosive testimony threatened to devastate the PDK and confirm suspicions that Shik, supposed to have been disbanded, remained a potent force in the shadows of Kosovan public life.”-Alleged connections between top Kosovo politicians and assassin investigated (Julian Borger The Guardian November 2014).”

Thaci, who is obviously preparing his defense against the charges, didn’t make it this time. But after all, he was a special guest when Secretary of State John Kerry was in the running.

Do organ trafficking operations run like the urban legend would have you think? You know, a guy walks into a bar and a beautiful girl seduces him and gives him a “mickey.” He wakes up in a bathtub with stitches, feeling a “little sore” and a few pounds lighter?

This real world confession from one of Kadri Veseli’s men lays the horror out plainly. And shows why both he and Thaci are facing charges for it.

“The interview was broadcast on Monday a day after Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told AFP his office had a witness who “testified about a medical procedure, done in northern Albania, that consisted of harvesting organs from Serbs kidnapped during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo”.

“They gave me a scalpel. I put my left hand on his chest and began cutting. When I got near the bottom (of the ribs), the blood started pouring,” the witness, whose face was not shown and whose voice was distorted, told RTS.

“As soon as I started cutting, he began screaming not to kill him and then he lost consciousness. I don’t know if he fainted or died,” he said,”-  Former Kosovo rebel describes removing prisoner’s heart for black market sale The Telegraph September 2012

After you cut out a man’s heart I think it’s safe to say everyone else in the room can figure out if he died or not even if you can’t. The monsters who ordered these things are people Hillary Clinton calls friends. Emigre Super Bloc Part 4- Clinton’s Jihadis | Will the Super Delegates Vote YES to More Terrorism? (GH Eliason).

“With revealed NATO files as well as WikiLeaks documents, findings suggest that the government of Kosovo is lead by crime fugitives with names such as the ‘Butchers’, ‘Balkan Mafia Boss’ as well as organ harvesters. Judging from the revelations origin, it seems like the United States and some other Western European powers that support the government of Kosovo, have had extensive knowledge for several years of criminal ties to former rebel leader Hashim Thaci, including the whole structure of political parties in the country, without exception. Foreign political, military, police, and justice powers in Kosovo have scandalously kept silent for over 17 years, granting crime a lawless and consequence-free paradise. Those findings suggest that the foreigners would continue to turn a blind eye to crime gangs on their doorstep if there were no insiders to reveal the evidence of their tacit involvement.”(Kosovo: A Nest of Crime Fugitives in Europe,  Foreign Policy Journal March 2016 Vedat Xhymshiti).

“Even before, there were accusations from The Hague (war crimes) tribunal, and KLA commanders prevailed against injustice and slander. The war of the Kosovo people was a just war.”

Prosecutors and diplomats say efforts to investigate war crimes allegedly committed by the KLA have run into witness intimidation, a culture of reverence for the former guerrillas and deep clan loyalties.

The organ harvesting allegations hit the headlines in 2011 with publication of an explosive report by Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty.

He alleged that Thaci and four high-ranking members of the prime minister’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) had been part of a group involved in the sale abroad of organs removed from Serb prisoners who had been smuggled out of Kosovo to a makeshift clinic in Albania during the war…All four of his party allies named in the report are running for parliament on Sunday. One of them, Kadri Veseli, was beside Thaci as he stepped out a black BMW jeep in Gjakova. (Kosovo votes under shadow of war crimes probe Gjakova Kosovo Reuters Fatos Bytyci)

In spite of all this, Vice president Joe Biden calls Thaci the “George Washington” of Kosovo. I didn’t know George Washington engaged in ethnic cleansing, torture, political assassinations, mafia-like crime and drug trade activities, or of course, the organ trade.

In a rare honest moment, Madeline Albright had this to say to Thaci “I hope you will become Kosovo’s Gerry Adams and choose peace over continuing war and terrorism.”

“For me, my family and my fellow Americans this is more than a foreign policy issue, it is personal,” Clinton stressed. Hillary Clinton was speaking about the KLA and Hashim Thaci.

In Thaci’s Kosovo today, IGIL is quietly setting up training camps ahead of the US presidential elections. The war in Serbia will more than likely start directly after a Clinton win. If we are at war with IGIL, should we be inviting IGIL’s friends to political conventions?

“On the territory of Kosovo and Metohija, the local police detained three militants of so-called “Islamic State” (a terrorist organization banned in Russia), is going to organize a series of terrorist attacks in Serbia.” Terrorists LIH (IGIL) break through the Balkans to Western Europe March 2016

Once again, I’m not accusing Hillary Clinton of a lack of judgment in this situation. Her judgment is clear. Hillary Clinton supports organ selling, drug trafficking, genocidal Islamists that revive Waffen SS battalions in return for their support at the ballot box.

According to USA Today, there were 61 speakers on the first day of the Convention and not one mention of terrorism or terrorist groups.

Does Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine show better judgment…or at least something recognizable as American policy?

We have a winner! “In 2007, Kaine was the Governor of Virginia and, of all people, chose Muslim American Society (MAS) President Esam Omeish to the state’s Immigration Commission. A Muslim organization against Islamism criticized the appointment and reckless lack of vetting.

Federal prosecutors said in a 2008 court filing that MAS was “founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” A Chicago Tribune investigation in 2004 confirmed it, as well as MAS’ crafty use of deceptive semantics to appear moderate.”Clinton VP Pick Tim Kaine’s Islamist Ties Ryan Mauro July 2016

The article goes further to state that he spoke at a dinner that gave a lifetime achievement award to the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood USA, a terrorist that wants to institute the Islamic Revolution in the United States.

What is nice about this is that Senator Kaine along with Hillary Clinton also share a special relationship to Fetullah Gulen and his many groups. Kaine, who supports the Muslim Brotherhood also supports the Gulen terrorist organization. When even Gulen’s recent past is looked into, aside from the attempted coup, he directly supports groups that have murdered more people than Osama bin Laden.

Gulen groups are known for greasing the wheel in Congress, and our Congressmen are known for protecting the Islamic graft.- ( .Emigre Super Bloc: The Failed Turkish Coup – An Exploded View, George Eliason).

What’s kind of nice is that along with Senator Kaine, the Muslim Brotherhood, which then Secretary of State Clinton tried to install in power during the Arab Spring in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and so on, also supports Gulen.

Gulen on the other hand, supports the US Congress. In stories broken by the Washington Post and USA Today, Gulen’s groups illegally funded over 200 Congressional trips to Turkey. The practice has been stopped as a result of a House ethics panel investigation. One member of the panel recused themselves because of taking trips that Gulen paid for. A couple others that should have did not.

“Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, agreed.  “The fact these organizations were sponsoring 100 members of Congress and then suddenly dropping to zero would raise red flags that the organizations themselves or their funders are not supposed to be sponsoring these kinds of trips,” Holman said.” USA Today June 2016

According to Congressman David Scott from Georgia, “In a robust republic, civic organizations such as the Gulen movement cannot and should not be designated as terrorist organizations without evidence for the sake of political expediency.”

The Gulen organization is a finely tuned political machine. When the political donations are looked at they go across the board. Both Democrat and Republican alike are on the graft wagon with this Islamist group. This is not just a Democratic party problem. It’s an American Problem.

“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here. -Secret Fethullah Gülen Sermon1990 broadcast on Turkish television

Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Gulen groups make inroads because they are not Muslim in character or practice. They are fascist, nationalist, and terrorist.

In the last article segment Fetullah Gulen has been shown to be a terrorist leader. Congressman Scott, now that the proof has been shown, how about revisiting the designation question again?

What’s are the differences between Osama bin Laden, Hassim Thaci, and Fetullah Gulen? Osama bin Laden was never accused of the organ trade, mafia-like crimes, or bribing Congressmen. Through the emigre groups, the other two not only do the above but sway election results in the USA.

This leads to the conclusion that bin Laden’s great sin was being stingy in the political donation arena. I don’t know for sure but given that the other two have committed greater crimes and he’s dead, it makes you wonder.

Do we really need Fascist Islamist Terrorists having a bigger say in who gets elected to be President of the United States than you do? It’s time to fix the system.

Welcome to Gulen-Gate’ where every terrorist that donates is a winner.

Part 1: Inside The Secret Super Majority that Decide Election 2016 & War with Russia

Part 2: The 2016 Super Bloc Vote Part II  Unleashing David vs the Russian Goliath

Part 3: Election 2016 Emigre Super Blocs Part III – How the Emigres Function

Part 4: The 2016 Super Bloc Vote Part IV:Emigre Super Bloc – Clinton’s Jihadis

Part 5: Emigre Super Bloc Part V: The Failed Turkish Coup – An Exploded View.

Part 6 (this post): Emigre Super Bloc Part VI: “Gulen-Gate” Islamic Terrorists Descend on the Democratic National Convention

GH Eliason lives in Ukraine. He writes content and optimizes web based businesses across the globe for organic search results, technical issues, and design strategies to grow their business. He used to be a large project construction specialist. However, when Fukushima happened it became known that I was a locked high rad specialist and a penchant for climbing. He was paid to climb a reactor at a sister plant to Fukushima 3 because of a 1 million dollar mistake. His work since then has essentially been in  project safety.

by NAUMAN SADIQ

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Source : geocurrents.info

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The plague of terrorism has old roots in cynical Western colonialism and imperialism. And the West, pretenses aside, has not changed its spots. Source : independent.ie

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Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of “Jihad in the way of God” might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists’ cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

This emotional outrage, in my opinion, is a far more potent factor than the sterile rational argument of God’s supposed command to fight holy wars against the infidels. If we take all the other contributing factors, that I have mentioned in the second paragraph out of the equation, I don’t think that Muslims are some “exceptional” variety of human beings who are hell-bent on killing the heretics all over the world.

Notwithstanding, it’s very easy to distinguish between the victims of structural injustices and the beneficiaries of the existing neocolonial economic order all over the world. But instead of using words that can be interpreted subjectively I’ll let the figures do the talking. Pakistan’s total GDP is only $270 billion and with a population of 200 million it amounts to a per capita income of only $1400. While the US’ GDP is $18 trillion and per capita income is in excess of $50,000. Similarly the per capita income of most countries in the Western Europe is also around $40,000. That’s a difference of 40 to 50 TIMES between the incomes of Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, i.e. the Western powers.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]nly the defense budget of the Pentagon is $600 billion, which is three times the size of Pakistan’s total GDP. A single multi-national corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world owns assets in excess of $200 billion which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such business conglomerates are: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC, BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, RDS, Total, Vitol; Manufacturers – Apple, Microsoft and Google.

On top of that, semi-legit wealth from all over the world flows into the Western commercial and investment banks: last year there was a report that the Russian oligarchs have deposited $800 billion in the Western banks, while the Chinese entrepreneurs have deposited $1.5 trillion in the Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add up Saudi investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.

The first and foremost priority of the Western powers is to save their Corporate Empire, and especially their financial institutions, from collapsing; everything else like eliminating terrorism, promoting democracy and “responsibility to protect” are merely arranged side shows to justify their interventionist foreign policy, especially in the energy-rich Middle East.

Additionally, the irony is that the neoliberal dupes of the mainstream media justify and validate the unfair practices of the neocolonial powers and hold the victims of structural injustices responsible for their misfortunes. If a Third World’s laborer has been forced to live on less than $5 a day and a corporate executive sits in the Wall Street on top of $18 trillion business empire, neoliberals are okay with this travesty.

However, we need to understand that how does a neoliberal mindset is structured? As we know that mass education programs and mass media engender mass ideologies. We like to believe that we are free to think, but we aren’t. Our narratives aren’t really “our” narratives. These narratives of injustice and inequality have been constructed for the public consumption by the corporate media, which is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments and the business interests.

Media is our eyes and ears through which we get all the inputs and it is also our brain through which we interpret raw data. If media keeps mum over some vital structural injustices and blows out of proportion some isolated incidents of injustice and violence, we are likely to forget all about the former and focus all of our energies on the tangential issues which the media portrays as the “real” ones.

Monopoly capitalism and the global neocolonial economic order are the real issues while Islamic radicalism and terrorism are the secondary issues and itself an adverse reaction to the former. That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nauman Sadiq is an attorney (U. of Peshawar) residing in Islamabad, Pakistan. He blogs at Petroimperialism.

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