SAUDI WAHABBISM SERVES WESTERN IMPERIALISM

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S MEDIA MONOPOLY IS UP TO YOU.

Text and Photos: Andre Vltchek


When the Saudi Crown Prince gave an interview to the Washington Post, declaring that it was actually the West that encouraged his country to spread Wahhabism to all corners of the world, there was a long silence in almost all the mass media outlets in the West, but also in countries such as Egypt and Indonesia.


Poster of radical FPI in Jakarta.

Those who read the statement, expected a determined rebuke from Riyadh. It did not come. The sky did not fall. Lightning did not strike the Prince or the Post.

Clearly, not all that the Crown Prince declared appeared on the pages of the Washington Post, but what actually did, would be enough to bring down entire regimes in such places like Indonesia, Malaysia or Brunei. Or at least it would be enough under ‘normal circumstances’. That is, if the population there was not already hopelessly and thoroughly indoctrinated and programed, and if the rulers in those countries did not subscribe to, or tolerate, the most aggressive, chauvinistic and ritualistic (as opposed to the intellectual or spiritual) form of the religion.

Reading between the lines, the Saudi Prince suggested that it was actually the West which, while fighting an ‘ideological war’ against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, handpicked Islam and its ultra-orthodox and radical wing – Wahhabism – as an ally in destroying almost all the progressive, anti-imperialist and egalitarian aspirations in the countries with a Muslim majority.


As reported by RT on 28 March 2018: “The Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism began as a result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the Washington Post.

Speaking to the paper, bin Salman said that Saudi Arabia's Western allies urged the country to invest in mosques and madrassas overseas during the Cold War, in an effort to prevent encroachment in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union…

The interview with the crown prince was initially held ‘off the record’. However, the Saudi embassy later agreed to let the Washington Post publish specific portions of the meeting.”

Since the beginning of the spread of Wahhabism, one country after another had been falling; ruined by ignorance, fanatical zeal and fear, which have been preventing the people of countries such as post-1965 Indonesia or the post-Western-invasion Iraq, to move back (to the era before Western intervention) and at the same time forward, towards something that used to be so natural to their culture in not such a distant past – towards socialism or at least tolerant secularism.


Destroyed Aleppo: The empire's signature, wherever it plants its vicious talons.

In reality, Wahhabism does not have much to do with Islam. Or more precisely, it intercepts and derails the natural development of Islam, of its strife for an egalitarian arrangement of the world, and for socialism.

The Brits were behind the birth of the movement; the Brits and one of the most radical, fundamentalist and regressive preachers of all times – Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. 

The essence of the Wahabi/British alliance and dogma was and still is, extremely simple: “Religious leaders would force the people into terrible, irrational fear and consequent submission. No criticism of the religion is allowed; no questioning of its essence and particularly of the conservative and archaic interpretation of the Book. Once conditioned this way, people stopped questioning and criticizing first the feudalist, and later capitalist oppression; they also accepted without blinking the plunder of their natural resources by local and foreign masters. All attempts to build a socialist and egalitarian society got deterred, brutally, ‘in the name of Islam’ and ‘in the name of God’”.

Of course, as a result, the Western imperialists and the local servile ‘elites’ are laughing all the way to the bank, at the expense of those impoverished and duped millions in the countries that are controlled by the Wahhabi and Western dogmas.

*

Only a few in the devastated, colonized countries actually realize that Wahhabism does not serve God or the people; it is helping Western interests and greed.

Precisely this is what is right now happening in Indonesia, but also in several other countries that have been conquered by the West, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

Were Syria to fall, this historically secular and socially-oriented nation would be forced into the same horrid direction. People there are well aware of this, as they are educated. They also see what has happened to Libya and Iraq and they definitely do not want to end up like them. The scourge is the Wahhabi terrorist fighters that both the West and its lackeys like Saudi Arabia unleashed against the Syrian state and its people.

Between 1 and 3 million Indonesian people ‘had to be’ massacred in 1965-66, in order to bring to power a corrupt turbo-capitalist clique which could guarantee that the initially bottomless (although now rapidly thinning) natural resources could flow, uninterrupted and often untaxed, into places such as North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]espite its hypocritical secular rhetoric, manufactured mainly for local consumption but not for the colonies, the West is glorifying or at least refusing to openly criticize its own brutal and ‘anti-people’ offspring - a concept which has already consumed and ruined both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. In fact, it is trying to convince the world that these two countries are ‘normal’, and in the case of Indonesia, both ‘democratic’ and ‘tolerant’. At the same time, it has consistently been antagonizing almost all the secular or relatively secular nations with substantial Muslim majorities, such as Syria (until now), but also Afghanistan, Iran (prior to the coup of 1953), Iraq and Libya before they were thoroughly and brutally smashed.

It is because the state, in which the KSA, Indonesia and the present-day Afghanistan can be found, is the direct result of both Western interventions and indoctrination. The injected Wahhabi dogma is giving this Western ‘project’ a Muslim flavor, while justifying trillions of dollars on ‘defense spending’ for the so-called ‘War on Terror’ (a concept resembling an Asian fishing pond where fish are brought in and then fished out for a fee).


Bagrani US air force base in Afghanistan.


Obedience, even submissiveness - is where, for many reasons, the West wants its ‘client’ states and neo-colonies to be. The KSA is an important trophy because of its oil, and strategic position in the region. Saudi rulers are often going out of their way to please their masters in London and Washington, implementing the most aggressive pro-Western foreign policy. Afghanistan is ‘valued’ for its geographical location, which could potentially allow the West to intimidate and even eventually invade both Iran and Pakistan, while inserting extremist Muslim movements into China, Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Between 1 and 3 million Indonesian people ‘had to be’ massacred in 1965-66, in order to bring to power a corrupt turbo-capitalist clique which could guarantee that the initially bottomless (although now rapidly thinning) natural resources could flow, uninterrupted and often untaxed, into places such as North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Frankly, there is absolutely nothing ‘normal’ about countries such as Indonesia and the KSA. In fact, it would take decades, but most likely entire generations, in order to return them to at least some sort of nominal ‘normalcy’. Even if the process were to begin soon, the West hopes that by the time it ends, almost all of the natural resources of these countries would be gone.

But the process is not yet even beginning. The main reason for the intellectual stagnation and lack or resistance is obvious: people in countries such as Indonesia and KSA are conditioned so they are not able to see the brutal reality that surrounds them. They are indoctrinated and ‘pacified’. They have been told that socialism equals atheism and that atheism is evil, illegal and ‘sinful’.

Hence, Islam was modified by the Western and Saudi demagogues, and has been ‘sent to a battle’, against progress and a just, egalitarian arrangement of the world.

This version of religion is unapologetically defending Western imperialism, savage capitalism as well as the intellectual and creative collapse of the countries into which it was injected, including Indonesia. There, in turn, the West tolerates the thorough corruption, grotesque lack of social services, and even genocides and holocausts committed first against the Indonesians themselves, then against the people of East Timor, and to this day against the defenseless Papuan men, women and children. And it is not only a ‘tolerance’ – the West participates directly in these massacres and extermination campaigns, as it also takes part in spreading the vilest forms of Wahabi terrorism and dogmas to all corners of the world. . All this, while tens of millions of the followers of Wahhabism are filling the mosques daily, performing mechanical rituals without any deeper thought or soul searching.

Wahhabism works – it works for the mining companies and banks with their headquarters in London and New York. It also works extremely well for the rulers and the local ‘elites’ inside the ‘client’ states.


Extremist attacks against Indonesian churches. Jesus is obviousli missing some parts.

Ziauddin Sardar, a leading Muslim scholar from Pakistan, who is based in London, has no doubts that ‘Muslim fundamentalism’ is, to a great extent, the result of the Western imperialism and colonialism.

In a conversation which we had several years ago, he explained:

“Trust between Islam and the West has indeed been broken… We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. The colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both from Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting history as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”

“As a consequence, Muslim cultures were de-linked from their own history with many serious consequences. For example, the colonial suppression of Islamic science led to the displacement of scientific culture from Muslim society. It did this by introducing new systems of administration, law, education and economy all of which were designed to impart dependence, compliance and subservience to the colonial powers. The decline of Islamic science and learning is one aspect of the general economic and political decay and deterioration of Muslim societies. Islam has thus been transformed from a dynamic culture and a holistic way of life to mere rhetoric. Islamic education has become a cul-de-sac, a one-way ticket to marginality. It also led to the conceptual reduction of Muslim civilization. By which I mean concepts that shaped and gave direction to Muslim societies became divorced from the actual daily lives of Muslims – leading to the kind of intellectual impasse that we find in Muslim societies today.  Western neo-colonialism perpetuates that system.”

*

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n Indonesia, after the Western-sponsored military coup of 1965, which destroyed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and brought to power an extreme pro-market and pro-Western regime, things are deteriorating with a frightening predictability, consistency and speed.

While the fascist dictator Suharto, a Western implant after 1965, was said to be ‘suspicious of Islam’, he actually used all major religions on his archipelago with great precision and fatal impact. During his pro-market despotism, all left-wing movements and ‘-isms’ were banned, and so were most of the progressive forms of arts and thought. The Chinese language was made illegal. Atheism was also banned. Indonesia rapidly became one of the most religious countries on Earth.

At least one million people, including members of the PKI, were brutally massacred in one of the most monstrous genocides of the 20th century.

The fascist dictatorship of General Suharto often played the Islamic card for its political ends. As described by John Pilger in his book, “The New Rulers of The World”:

“In the pogroms of 1965-66, Suharto’s generals often used Islamicist groups to attack communists and anybody who got in the way. A pattern emerged; whenever the army wanted to assert its political authority, it would use Islamicists in acts of violence and sabotage, so that sectarianism could be blamed and justify the inevitable ‘crackdown’ – by the army…”

‘A fine example’ of cooperation between the murderous right-wing dictatorship and radical Islam.

After Suharto stepped down, the trend towards a grotesque and fundamentalist interpretation of the monotheist religions continued. Saudi Arabia and the Western-favored and sponsored Wahhabism has been playing an increasingly significant role. And so has Christianity, often preached by radical right-wing former exiles from Communist China and their offspring; mainly in the city of Surabaya but also elsewhere.


Deposed Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid (Gus Dur).

From a secular and progressive nation under the leadership of President Sukarno, Indonesia has gradually descended into an increasingly radically backward-looking and bigoted Wahhabi-style/Christian Pentecostal state.

After being forced to resign as the President of Indonesia during what many considered a constitutional coup, a progressive Muslim cleric and undoubtedly a closet socialist, Abdurrahman Wahid (known in Indonesia by his nickname Gus Dur), shared with me his thoughts, on the record:

“These days, most of Indonesian people do not care or think about God. They only follow rituals. If God would descend and tell them that their interpretation of Islam is wrong, they’d continue following this form of Islam and ignore the God.”

‘Gus Dur’ also clearly saw through all the tricks of the military and pro-Western elites. He told me, among other things, that the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta was organized by the Indonesian security forces, and later blamed on the Islamists, who were actually only executing the orders given to them by their political bosses from the pro-Western military regime, which until now is being disguised as a, ‘multi-party democracy’.

In Indonesia, an extreme and unquestioning obedience to the religions has led to a blind acceptance of a fascist capitalist system, and of Western imperialism and its propaganda. Creativity and intellectual pluralism have been thoroughly liquidated.

The 4th most populous nation on the planet, Indonesia, has presently no scientists, architects, philosophers or artists of any international standing. Its economy is fueled exclusively by the unbridled plunder of the natural resources of the vast, and in the past, pristine parts of the country, such as Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), as well as on the brutally-occupied Western part of Papua. The scale of the environmental destruction is monumental; something that I am presently trying to capture in two documentary films and a book.

Awareness of the state of things, even among the victims, is minimal or outrightly nonexistent.

In a country that has been robbed of its riches; identity, culture and future, religions now play the most important role. There is simply nothing else left for the majority. Nihilism, cynicism, corruption and thuggery are ruling unopposed. In the cities with no theatres, galleries, art cinemas, but also no public transportation or even sidewalks, in the monstrous urban centers abandoned to the ‘markets’ with hardly any greenery or public parks, religions are readily filling the emptiness. Being themselves regressive, pro-market oriented and greedy, the results are easily predictable.

In the city of Surabaya, during the capturing of footage for my documentary film produced for a South American television network TeleSur (Surabaya – Eaten Alive by Capitalism), I stumbled over an enormous Protestant Christian gathering at a mall, where thousands of people were in an absolute trance, yelling and lifting their eyes towards the ceiling. A female preacher was shouting into a microphone:

“God loves the rich, and that is why they are rich! God hates the poor, and that’s why they are poor!”

Von Hayek, Friedmann, Rockefeller, Wahab and Lloyd George combined could hardly define their ‘ideals’ in more precise way.

*

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat exactly did the Saudi Prince say, during his memorable and ground-breaking interview with The Washington Post? And why is it so relevant to places like Indonesia?

In essence, he said that the West asked the Saudis to make the ‘client’ states more and more religious, by building madrassahs and mosques. He also added:

“I believe Islam is sensible, Islam is simple, and people are trying to hijack it.”

People? The Saudi themselves? Clerics in such places like Indonesia? The Western rulers?

In Teheran, Iran, while discussing the problem with numerous religious leaders, I was told, repeatedly:

“The West managed to create a totally new and strange religion, and then it injected it into various countries. It calls it Islam, but we can’t recognize it… It is not Islam, not Islam at all.”

*

In May 2018, in Indonesia, members of outlawed terrorist groups rioted in jail, took hostages, then brutally murdered prison guards. After the rebellion was crushed, several explosions shook East Java. Churches and police stations went up in flames. People died.


The killers used their family members, even children, to perpetrate the attacks. The men in charge were actually inspired by the Indonesian fighters who were implanted into in Syria – the terrorists and murderers who were apprehended and deported by Damascus back to their large and confused country.

Many Indonesian terrorists who fought in Syria are now on their home turf, igniting and ‘inspiring’ their fellow citizens. The same situation as in the past - the Indonesian jihadi cadres who fought against the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan later returned and killed hundreds and thousands in Poso, Ambon and other parts of Indonesia.

Indonesian extremists are becoming world-famous, fighting the battles of the West as legionnaires, in Afghanistan, Syria, Philippines and elsewhere.

Their influence at home is also growing. It is now impossible to even mention any social or god forbid, socialist reforms in public. Meetings are broken up, participants beaten, and even people’s representatives (MP’s) intimidated, accused of being “communists”, in a country where Communism is still banned by the regime.

The progressive and extremely popular Jakarta governor, Ahok, first lost elections and was then put on trial and thrown into jail for “insulting Islam”, clearly fabricated charges. His main sin – cleaning Jakarta’s polluted rivers, constructing a public transportation network, and improving the lives of ordinary people. That was clearly ‘un-Islamic’, at least from the point of view of Wahhabism and the Western global regime. 

Radical Indonesian Islam is now feared. It goes unchallenged. It is gaining ground, as almost no one would dare to openly criticize it. It will soon overwhelm and suppress the entire society.

And in the West ‘political correctness’ is used. It is lately simply ‘impolite’ to criticize Indonesian or even the Saudi form of ‘Islam’, out of ‘respect’ for the people and their ‘culture’. In reality, it is not the Saudi or Indonesian people who get ‘protected’ – it is the West and its imperialist policies; policies and manipulations that are used against both the people and the essence of Muslim religion.

*

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile the Wahhabi/Western dogma is getting stronger and stronger, what is left of the Indonesian forests is burning. The country is literally being plundered by the Western multi-national companies and by its local corrupt elites.

Religions, the Indonesian fascist regime and Western imperialism are marching forward, hand in hand. But forward – where? Most likely towards the total collapse of the Indonesian state. Towards the misery that will come soon, when everything is logged out and mined out.

It is the same, as when Wahhabism used to march hand in hand with the British imperialists and plunderers. Except that the Saudis found their huge oil fields, plenty of oil to sustain themselves (or at least their elites and the middle class, as the poor still live in misery there) and their bizarre, British-inspired and sponsored interpretation of Islam.

Indonesia and other countries that have fallen victims to this dogma are not and will not be so ‘lucky’.

It is lovely that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke publicly and clarified the situation. But who will listen?

For the Indonesian people, his statements came too late. They did not open many eyes, caused no uprising, no revolution. To understand what he said would require at least some basic knowledge of both the local, and world history, and at least some ability to think logically. All this is lacking, desperately, in the countries that have found themselves squashed by the destructive imperialist embrace.

The former President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, was correct: “If God would come and say… people would not follow God...”

Indonesia will continue following Mr. Wahab, and the capitalist dogma and the Western imperialists who ‘arranged it all’. They will do it for years to come, feeling righteous, blasting old North American tunes in order to fill the silence, in order not to think and not to question what is happening around them. There will be no doubts. There will be no change, no awakening and no revolution.

Until the last tree falls, until the last river and stream gets poisoned, until there is nothing left for the people. Until there is total, absolute submission: until everything is burned down, black and grey. Maybe then, few tiny, humble roots of awakening and resistance would begin to grow.

[First published by New Eastern Outlook – NEO] 


Ziauddin Sardar and the author (r), in London

About the Author
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.



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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 




Presstitutes push social media to stamp out free speech and all political dissent

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By Addison dePitt


Zuckerberg's auto-da-fé before the Congressional inquisition is designed to send a message to his tech industry colleagues, as well as provide official cover for the future enforcement of draconian rules against deviants from the official script. "Misuse of social media!" cry the new Inquisitors. But who decides what constitutes "misuse"? Isn't that what the First Amendment is all about?



The latest scandal swamping Facebook's top corporate echelons, and capitalist wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg himself (who is clearly out of his depth and, stuck in the mobs that usually surround his appearances of late, often looks like a deer in the headlights), is not about what his company did or didn't do regarding the safeguarding of privacy of hundreds of millions of Facebook users, that's a joke. Personal privacy is punctured and violated every day in millions of ways by the US government (as shown by Wikileaks, among others) and the corporate world, the latter due to its irrepressible drive to harvest prospects to expand sales. It's been like that ever since marketing emerged from the capitalist slime eons ago, and later when it was discovered the Internet provided a lightning fast way of reaching and prospecting customers cheaply and effectively and, given the topography of the new invasive (and often seductive to some) new technologies, in an virtually unstoppable way. In America, intrusiveness has always been a vested right of the corporate nobility, as anyone sitting in front of a tv set can quickly appreciate.

No, friends, as you already probably intuit, that is certainly not what this storm is all about. All this noise, all this frenzy as if the sky was falling, and the calling of Zuckerberg to the Congressional shed, so to speak, is just a smokescreen, a bum steer, plain and simple political BS, deployed by a united establishment led by the Democrats to force the hitherto largely apolitical social media industry to toe the imperial line and enforce ever more draconian measures to patrol and suppress all forms of actual free speech and political dissent. It should be noted here that some entities, like the Google octopus, are already there, way ahead of the pack, virtually embedded with the Pentagon and the intel crowd, merrily collaborating in all sorts of criminal skullduggery, something that even employes have now begun to protest.

The Democrats, a party well known for its repugnant hypocrisy and irrepressible cowardice and opportunism, has led the charge since Trump came to power, creating, in tacit alliance with the CIA and other sinister players, a veritable witch-hunt against dissenting bloggers, and laying, through their equally hypocritical and baseless Russiagate, the groundwork for a criminalisation of political dissidence behind the pretext of neutralising bloggers who supposedly "create national divisions," serve Russia's ends, or disseminate "fake news," a term much in vogue today with truly Orwellian reverberations, all of which would be laughable if it were not so dangerous to the future of this republic. Indeed, such priggish posturing ignores, as we might expect, the irrefutable fact that the main engines of fake news creation and distribution are and have long been the very "respectable" mass media, owned lock, stock and barrel by a handful of plutocrats whose social, economic, and political interests are at variance with 99.99% of humanity.


Incidentally, a number of clueless consumer groups have joined the crusade against Facebook's "ghastly" crimes of being a capitalist entity and doing what capitalists do all day long, and organised protests of their own, over the giant firm's failure to protect their data, thereby giving credibility to the deep state's claim that this is chiefly about compromised personal privacy. In their innocence about what the system is up to for lack of a better word they remind me of the kids in the March for Our Lives campaign, demanding gun control and an end to violence in America, an old liberaloid demand, while ignoring the far larger issues underlying such violence, not to mention the fact that cops and the US military gun down many more people here and abroad with nary a protest by the white middle class crowd.

One more thing needs to be said before presenting a couple of examples of how the media act as enforcers for this insalubrious anti-democratic development. If you think that the Democrats with their new-fangled McCarthyite tactics are threatening free speech now (well, they'll never admit it, of course) only because of their malignant and hopefully temporary obsession with Trump (however superficially plausible considering how odious and unprincipled Trump usually is) you'd be dead wrong. The suppression of free speech in the US and the rest of the "capitalist democracies" (a glorious oxymoron) is a systemic bipartisan plot that long precedes Trump, the result of the establishment's realisation —brought to a boil with the upset election of Trump—that they are losing control of the main narrative—the truth is getting through, so to speak— and the holes must be plugged. The gargantuan echo chamber dedicated to lies 24/7 that is the mainstream media and supporting institutions must be kept safe from further erosion and eventual dismantlement by that pesky little thing some people still quaintly call, "just the facts."


EXHIBITS
Note that in the below CBS (like the rest of its ilk) is happy to push for regulation of the social media tech companies, all for the good of the people, you understand, a veritable Pandora's box with many possible political traps for US and Western dissidents.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  An antiwar and media activist, Addison dePitt despises the Big Lie, abhors neocon-instigated imperial wars, thinks capitalism is a terrible disease, and that Orwell chose the wrong target to skewer in 1984.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Google sets up “news initiative” to censor political opposition and promote mainstream media

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

By Andre Damon, WSWS.ORG


THE NOOSE OF FRIENDLY FASCISM CONTINUES TO TIGHTEN IN AMERICA. 

Schmidt: Just your garden vaiety Silicon Valley friendly fascist. Worth close to $ 14bn. Democracy? Never heard of it, and could care less.

Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and other major news outlets to reinforce their monopoly over news coverage by blocking independent news organizations.

The New York Times, whose stock price soared after the announcement, said Google’s initiative was aimed at combatting “the epidemic of false and unreliable information on the internet,” by “pledging to spend $300 million over the next three years to support authoritative journalism.”

In reality, Google’s action is the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet.

The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and “citizen journalism.” By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.


In reality, Google’s action is the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet. The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and “citizen journalism.” By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote “authoritative content” over “alternative viewpoints,” which led search traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and socialist web sites to plunge by over 50 percent.

After Google’s announcement last year, other major technology companies followed suit in implementing their own measures to censor the Internet. This year, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would promote “trusted” news sources, such as the New York Times, over public postings by individuals and independent news agencies. At a congressional hearing this year, Facebook said it had hired some 10,000 content moderators, and would double that number by the end of the year.

But despite Facebook’s moves to rapidly implement the demands of the intelligence agencies for Internet censorship, leading Democrats, including Senator Mark Warner, have called on them to do more to crack down on social opposition.

Amid a growing strike wave by workers all over the world, including struggles this month by teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma, university lecturers in the United Kingdom, and Amazon warehouse workers in Spain, leading news outlets have repeatedly warned that Facebook was being used to mobilize social opposition outside of the framework of the trade union establishment.

Within this context, the major news outlets have, in pursuit of their own aims, seized upon revelations that the election data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge in 2014. At the time, the firm was owned by Robert Mercer, a billionaire who would later back the Trump campaign, and was headed by Steve Bannon, who would later serve as Trump’s campaign manager.

While the type of data harvesting conducted by Cambridge Analytica raises serious privacy concerns, the media firestorm that has followed the revelations is highly selective.

Cambridge Analytica had access to only a fraction of the data that Facebook itself collects and uses—often in secret—for political purposes. The company’s actions, moreover, are par for the course for the conduct of bourgeois election campaigns, which have come more and more to rely on data analytics and artificial intelligence to assess and impact voters’ political views.

A recent report by Investor’s Business Daily noted “In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.” According to the report, up to 190 million people may have “had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.”

Commenting on the Obama campaign’s data mining operation, former campaign director Carol Davidsen tweeted, “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”

In leaked emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Clinton campaign officials that she “badly” wanted Clinton to win, and that she had met with the candidate and campaign officials on multiple occasions.

While the actions taken by Cambridge Analytica point to a substantial violation of users’ privacy, they pale in comparison to the massive surveillance and content harvesting operation carried out by Facebook itself, with the assistance of the leading US intelligence agencies and Democratic Party, which, in the name of fighting “fake news” and extremist content, aim to review and censor everything posted on the social media platform.

Even more importantly, the Democrats’ highly selective outrage over the Cambridge Analytica scandal is being used to hold Facebook’s feet to the fire, with the aim of forcing it to more aggressively censor social opposition in the name of cracking down on Russian “bots and trolls.” Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading proponent of internet censorship, seized on the scandal to put further pressure on Facebook to declare that it was “misused” by the “Russians” in the 2016 election campaign.

Warner told ABC, “Facebook, since the beginnings of this investigation, has been reluctant, to say the least, to be fully forthcoming. I think it’s time for the CEO, Mr. Zuckerberg, and other top officials, to come and testify, and not tell part of the story, but tell the whole story of their involvement, not only with the Trump campaign, but their ability to have their platform misused by the Russians.”

In an op-ed entitled “Facebook Doesn’t Get It,” New York Times columnist David Leonhardt claimed that, “By spreading false news stories and giving a megaphone to Russian trolls, Facebook — a vastly larger social network than Twitter — played a meaningful role in the presidential campaign.”

In fact, the massive data mining operations carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties render absurd the argument that a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook advertisements allegedly bought by “Russians” swayed the 2016 election. Both parties spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the type of data operations carried out by Cambridge Analytica, seeking to analyze, quantify, and affect the political viewpoints of hundreds of millions of people.

In fact, undercutting his own argument, Leonhardt called alleged Russian meddling a “scapegoat” for the election of Donald Trump and the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. Regardless, the “scapegoat” of “Russian meddling” is being used to fuel an even further crackdown on the Internet, in the name of blocking “fake news” and “divisive content.”

In just one example of the growing crackdown on freedom of expression on the Internet, over the past 48 hours, Facebook deleted a link published by the World Socialist Web Site to its recent review of the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, allegedly because the posting contained “nudity.” In fact, the article contained well-known images of Vietnamese civilians fleeing the atrocities of the United States and its proxy South Vietnamese forces; photos that have been published in dozens of leading newspapers all over the world.

With the class struggle heating up throughout the world, the US ruling elite is working with ever-greater speed to block the expression of social opposition on the Internet. We urge workers and young people seeking to defend the freedom of expression to contact the World Socialist Web Site and join its campaign against Internet censorship.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KKK

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all. Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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All Fire and Fury in Ukraine

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Ubiquitous Neonazi Ulkrainians: they don’t try to hide, but the Western media is perfectly silent about it. (Click on images)


EXCLUSIVE: The still decidedly volatile situation in Ukraine – resulting from another in a long line of U.S.-inspired regime changes that have destabilized the geopolitical landscape over the past few decades – is worth revisiting for a number of reasons. With the fourth anniversary of the coup just passed, the sudden, shock passing of veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry and Consortium News founder/editor also affords even greater impetus for doing so. This is especially given his incisive body of reportage on the crisis since 2014; the larger issue of America’s worsening relationship with Russia; and the geopolitical implications going forward of these developments. Australian blogger Greg Maybury reports.

A Shabby Deck of Political Cards

For those who haven’t seen Ukraine on Fire (UOF), the Oliver Stone-produced documentary on the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, it is not overstating the case to say it’s an essential historical document and one of the most important, insightful political documentaries of recent times. It may also be one of the most portentous.

Quite apart from the illuminating history lesson the film delivers as a backdrop to the current situation in one of Europe’s most pivotal of battlegrounds, there are many takeaways from the film. To begin, it stands as a vital corrective of the disinformation, misinformation, evangelistic doublespeak, ersatz analysis, unadulterated agitprop, and plain old garden-variety groupthink that attended the public discourse on the events and developments in the country, and which ultimately framed most people’s views of the situation. Needless to say, the messages and impressions conveyed by this ongoing, relentless ‘psy-op’ cum fake news onslaught still ‘rules the roost’ in most people’s minds.

Further, the film’s narrative is highly revealing in the manner in which the Western mainstream media (MSM) reported on the events surrounding the turmoil and conflict. In the process it showcases how much the perfidious thought contagion spread by the ever-nefarious neoconservatives and their fellow travelers the liberal interventionists infects U.S. foreign policy, along with the foreign policies of America’s assorted vassal states.

It underscores moreover Russia’s seemingly inexhaustible forbearance with the U.S., which, sans any rational, coherent geopolitical basis for doing so, has been tested beyond reasonable endurance or expectation. This point is rendered especially palpable during the interviews Stone conducts with Russian president Vladimir Putin for UOF. (This is not to mention the actual The Putin Interviews).

At the same time UOF reveals again for those looking America’s recidivistic predisposition for interfering in the affairs of other countries; this is an observation that’s always been evident save for the most preternaturally ignorant, ideologically myopic, or imperially inclined. Given the present zeitgeist as reflected by the headline-hogging “soap-saga” of “Russia-gate” – buttressed by former CIA chief James Woolsey’s whimsically smug concession recently that America interferes in other countries’ affairs “only for a very good cause [and] in the interests of democracy” – this is a reality that cannot be overstated. This is especially so when there are all too few examples where anyone might point to America’s interference actually serving the democratic interests (by any way that might be objectively measured) of any given country one might care to name.


UKRAINE ON FIRE – The Real Story. Full Documentary by Oliver Stone (Original English version) from Robin Westenra on Vimeo.


The narrative encompassed by UOF is by extension a serious indictment on President Barack Obama’s handling of the Ukraine situation and his role in the creation of this singularly unholy mess — a prime exemplar of just how chaotic, dysfunctional, indeed war-like, were in large part the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s foreign policies. Ukraine on Fire attests unequivocally just how far removed the reality of Obama’s tenure was from his campaign rhetoric.


In 2015 about 15,000 people marched through Kiev to honor Stepan Bandera, the leader of Ukraine’s Neonazi collaborationist movement. There have been many such displays of pro-fascist allegiance.

More broadly, the disaster in Ukraine – as we’ll see still a work in progress even now under his successor, someone who pledged to curtail this direction in U.S. policy making, a promise which in no small measure propelled him into the Oval Office — is one of many that will forever inform people’s views of Number 44’s shop-soiled legacy. As Eric Zuesse noted a year after the coup, Obama employed a tactic of,

“…attacking Russia by using fundamentalist and other conservative extremists in a given Russia-allied nation, so as to turn that…nation away from Russia, and toward America, and then of trying to crush these same right-wing extremists who’ve been so effective in defeating (or at least weakening) the pro-Russian leader in that Russia-allied country. This tactic leaves civil war and enormous bloodshed in the given formerly (or still) Russia-allied nation.”

Three years after Zuesse made this comment, and over one year after Obama left office, that situation to all intents prevails, with few harboring any optimism things are going to get better anytime soon. In fact ominously, quite the opposite scenario is unfolding.


Earlier this year, Gilbert Doctorow reported that a new draft law adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament and awaiting president Petro Poroshenko’s signature, threatens to escalate the Ukrainian conflict into a full-blown war, pitting nuclear-armed Russia against the United States and NATO. “Due to dire economic conditions,” Doctorow says, “Poroshenko and other government officials in Kiev have become deeply unpopular, and with diminished chances for electoral success may see war as politically advantageous.”

As history indelibly reminds us, this is an all too frequently recurring scenario in the conduct of international affairs. In a statement that undercuts much of the furor over the Russia-gate imbroglio, Doctorow observes that in contrast to the image of Trump administration policies being dictated by Moscow as portrayed by proponents of Russia-gate conspiracy theories, “the United States is moving towards deeper confrontation with the Kremlin in the geopolitical hotspot of Ukraine. For its part, the Kremlin has very little to gain and a great deal to lose economically and diplomatically from a campaign now against Kiev. If successful, as likely would be the case given the vast disparity in military potential of the two sides, it could easily become a Pyrrhic victory.” [My emphasis]

Just as ominous is the following. As noted in an Oriental Review op-ed earlier this year, a new neo-Nazi revival is clearly in the offing. This is in a country where fascist/Nazi/extreme right sentiment, especially in the western regions, has a long, storied, and ugly history, one that rarely bubbles far from the surface.

Again, this “ugly history” was laid bare in Ukraine on Fire. After concluding that the current situation in Ukraine is ‘painfully reminiscent’ of Germany in the 1920s, the OR op-ed attributes,

“… poor governance on the heels of a lost war, which – added to the sense of betrayed hopes and the sharp decline in average incomes coupled with rising prices – is all driving a critical mass of the Ukrainian population toward an overwhelming feeling of desperation.” [My emphasis]

In an observation attended by a profound sense of déjà vu for even casual students of history, the op-ed goes on to say that “[A] demand from the public for a ‘strong hand’ – a new, authoritarian ruler – is rapidly coalescing, due to their dissatisfaction with President Poroshenko and all the other jokers they’ve been dealt from that shabby deck of political cards.” According to the op-ed, a man like that already exists in this ‘destitute and disintegrating’ country. Known as the “White Führer” to his comrades-in-arms, this man is Andriy Biletsky, the commander of the Azov Battalion who is making an ever-bigger name for himself in the Ukrainian parliament and across the broader political arena.


Open Season on Russia

Right Sector hooligans display Nazi symbols every chance they get. But the Western media always manages to miss them.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]f course all this only serves to highlight the pressures being brought to bear within the country itself; it is also those from without(not entirely unrelated to be sure) that are – or should be — of equal concern. Herein Doctorow again provides an alarming reveal. Although there are indications Washington is ‘fed up’ with the Kiev regime (and as Ukraine on Fire demonstrates conclusively, one it was responsible for installing in the first instance in 2014), he says,

“…the United States has doubled down in its support for a military solution to the conflict. With military trainers now on the ground (does this development itself not have an ominously familiar ring to it?), and the U.S. budgeting $350m for security assistance to Ukraine, Washington has also recently started delivering lethal weapons, including the Javelin anti-tank missile system, free of charge to Kiev.’ [My emphasis].

In a Strategic Culture report, Robert Bridge recently offered an additional reality check on those external pressures. Instead of opting for a more balanced and cooperative foreign policy in its conduct of affairs in Eastern Europe, and specifically in its bilateral relationship with Russia, in his view, it was via the furphy of “Russia[n] aggression” – an allegation he says was “peddled to the unsuspecting masses based on fake news of a Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine and Crimea” – [that] the U.S. and NATO “dropped all pretensions [to cooperation] and declared open season on Russia.” [My emphasis]

This was, he notes, further compounded by assertions Russia manipulated the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and along with Donald Trump’s “empty threat” to pull the pin on NATO if member states did not pony up on additional defense spending, “Eastern Europe has [now] become a veritable hothouse of paranoia-driven militarization.”

Robert Parry appearing in Oliver Stone’s film Ukraine on Fire.

We’ll return to this point later, but some backstory is essential here. Whether one has already seen Ukraine on Fire or not, it now comes complete with a hitherto unexpected layer of revelation and significance, given that the late Consortium News founder and editor Robert Parry is interviewed at length therein. Parry’s appearance in the film, poignantly as it turns out, underscores the man’s trailblazing achievements and his unimpeachable stature within the alternative, independent media cosmos.

For those folks constantly on the lookout for exemplars of journalism’s fundamental values, his input into the film’s narrative is a reminder to us all just how much his political insight and measured analysis will be missed. It goes without saying that those values have themselves been missing in action for some time in our mainstream media, as Parry himself – to his eternal chagrin – was all too aware. This is a state of affairs to which he spent the last two decades of his life exposing via the Consortium News masthead. So much so it seems, there was even some hint (by the man himself as it turns out) that the stress and pressure of being a media outlier had taken its toll and may have been the catalyst for the strokes he had in the weeks before his untimely death.

Yet Parry’s voluminous, in-depth commentary on Ukraine – including his many pieces on the controversy surrounding the still unresolved mystery of the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH-17 in eastern Ukraine in June 2014 (with 38 of my fellow Aussies on board) – was arguably second to none. His fierce, fearless criticism of those engaging in the aforementioned ‘groupthink’ – not just those in and around the Beltway but in the West in general (with as we’ll see my own country being a noteworthy example) – was insightful, along with his own reporting on events and developments as they unfolded over the months and years that followed 2014’s color revolution which culminated in the coup d’état.


Within 24 hours of the tragedy, as if on cue, the Western media was already hysterically accusing Putin of cold-blooded murder. The stench of that smear has never lifted.

Many of Parry’s observations in the film are reflective of, and derived from, that commentary, as those who followed his reporting closely on the Ukraine situation over the years will appreciate. He was acutely aware that one could not have a discussion of the key geopolitical events and developments of our time without some serious examination of the manner in which the corporate media manages (read: “massages”) the narratives that frame the Big Issues therein.

As noted, in this Parry was unremitting in his disdain for those of his fellow “investigative journalists” who had sold their souls for the filthy lucre, the celebrity status, and/or the comfortable, secure tenure at one of the “premium” corporate media marques. To him, at best, they were perception managers; at worst glorified stenographers. (For others perhaps less tactful or more scornful than Parry, they were/are simply “presstitutes”!)

Yet for all that disdain, Parry possibly reserved even greater contempt for the “marques” that employed the “presstitutes”, with the New York Times and the Washington Post being singled out for frequently justified, laser-like reproach. To be sure, that was just with the print media. In this the reporting on the Ukraine crisis provides an exemplar – albeit by no means the only one – of just how self-serving, venal, hypocritical, supercilious, irresponsible, and manifestly dishonest the corporate media were.

And of course they still are, each day sliding further and further into irrelevance as they blithely betray both the hallowed U.S. Constitution and the citizens of the country whose individual and collective interests they are increasingly at pains to validly claim to represent, and whose democratic institutions – along with the rights that are purportedly underwritten by said “institutions” – they are supposed to protect.

‘Shirt-fronting’ the Mainstream Fakery

Such a damning indictment of Western media was brought home in spades in the aftermath of the MH-17 disaster. It was a 60 Minutes Australia report on the tragedy that really got his gander up, and in this writer’s view, rightly so. At the time I was preparing my own take on MH-17, when the 60 Minutes segment aired.

Azov battalion recruits swearing in. The Nazi evocations are intentional.  The unit is openly Neonazi, ironically onetime backed by Igor Kolomoisky. one of Ukraine’s richest Jewish oligarchs.


I immediately alerted Bob to the report, knowing full well that given his earlier commentary on the tragedy and his views on MSM reporting in general, he’d be less than impressed with the conclusions they arrived at from their “investigation.” Much of this commentary by 60 Minutes was based on the dubious findings of Bellingcat (aka Eliot Higgins), a self-styled open source ‘citizen journalist’ who claimed to have the ‘skinny’ on who was responsible for the disaster.

Now space prohibits herein a full account of the circumstances surrounding the shoot-down, nor does it lend itself to a ‘blow by blow’ of the ‘argy-bargy’ between the 60 Minutes crew and their much touted source Higgins, and Parry himself. Suffice to say there seemed to be few limits to the indignation the former all managed to muster when the intrepid Consortium Newsman had the temerity to meticulously and relentlessly challenge their account of the tragedy.

(Those unfamiliar with this dust-up – one that perfectly case studies the vast gulf that exists between MSM reportage on MH-17 and that of a respected alternative news outlet – can see hereherehereherehereherehere, and here for some of the commentary the ‘stoush’ incited and examples of the tit-for-tat exchanges between the respective antagonists.)

It needs be noted that there was much political capital to be gained by those in Washington and most of America’s allies in the West by blaming Russia for the MH-17 tragedy. The U.S. and said allies had already blamed the crisis in Ukraine that derived from the February 2014 coup on Russian “aggression” and Putin’s purported ambitions to resurrect the Soviet Union. So in one sense it was to be expected they’d seek to capitalize on this disaster by blaming the Russians.

Western leaders to this end began tripping over themselves in singling out ‘Vlad the Derailer’ as the bad guy du jour, all the while doing so unencumbered by anything approximating solid evidence to support this stance. As we might expect with the Russia-gate saga, to this day, no definitive proof of the hard-core forensic kind has been presented to identify exactly how the plane was shot down (was the missile launched from the air or from the ground?), much less who actually perpetrated the act (was it the anti-Russian Ukrainian military, the pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, or the Russians themselves?) Again, to this day, the questions as to whether the plane was deliberately targeted (was it a false-flag attack?), or did it just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, also remain unanswered.

MH-17 memorial for the Waltz family from Neerkant village, June 15, 2015. (Pieter Deurne, Wikipedia)

As noted, the downing of MH-17 cost the lives of 38 Aussies, and the fallout from the tragedy – to say nothing of the way the disaster was politicized in order to serve the broader geopolitical objectives of the Beltway Bedlamites and their apparatchiks at home along with their counterparts in other Western nations – was especially pronounced Down Under. Our then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who took to sculling the Washington Kool-Aid by asserting it was Putin himself who was “personally responsible” for the disaster, was especially bolshie in his reaction.

Ahead of Putin’s visit to this country in November 2014 for the G20 meeting in Brisbane that year, Abbott threatened to “shirt-front” the Russian president over the issue when they officially met up. Whilst this made for great headlines here and abroad, it did nothing to arrest his slide in the opinion polls, which one can reasonably surmise was at the time in the back of his mind. All in all, coming from a national leader on the world stage, this unprecedented, petulant outburst was something to behold.

But such was the fervor of the times regarding MH-17, and more broadly, the anti-Russian sentiment that prevailed earlier in the year over Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine in the aftermath of America’s bespoke coup d’état. Clearly Abbott’s desire to leverage the public outrage here in Australia that accompanied the tragedy and to ingratiate himself with the Bedlamites far outweighed any obligation that might’ve routinely accompanied a more measured diplomatic response. (It was after all to no avail; Abbott’s hold on the Aussie “premiership” was itself ‘shirt-fronted’ about a year after making this comment, being successfully challenged for the leadership by the present PM Malcolm Turnbull.)

It should further be noted that many folks – mostly after the fact – justified the removal of the then Ukrainian government because it was irredeemably corrupt. This of course is a specious and convenient argument – a ‘justification’ that makes frequent cameos in the annals of regime change – partly so in this case because there’s little evidence the replacement regime has been any less corrupt.

But this raises an altogether different, arguably more important consideration: If Uncle Sam had removed every last one of the countless client tyrants he’s had on his imperial dance card over the decades on the sole basis of their ethical, moral and/or legal standards of governance, adherence to democratic principles, and/or general political probity, it’s fair to surmise the geopolitical terrain might look as different today as the lunar landscape does to an as yet still pristine portion of the Amazonian rainforest. And the U.S. might still retain – and be able to credibly lay claim to – some of the moral capital it had accrued by war’s end in 1945, which few would argue it has now all but frittered away.

Of course if we really want to push the envelope herein invoking moral relativism, we only need consider that – notwithstanding what it says on the box – America itself is hardly a bastion of “ethical, moral and/or legal standards of governance, [adherence to] democratic principles, and/or general political propriety.” Its ‘unblemished’ track record of thuggery and skullduggery implementing regime change on every continent except the Great White Patch on the “backside” of the Big Blue Ball is ample evidence of that. This is without even referencing its performance closer to home drawing on such benchmarks! It’s a “practice what you preach” thing!


[dropcap]F[/dropcap]urther, there was and remains no smoking gun evidence linking Russia or the Eastern Ukrainian, pro-Russian separatists to the MH-17 shoot-down, and therefore no sound rationale for Washington accusing either of complicity in this crime without ponying up with said evidence. If anything, the longer the dog-not-barking question of why the U.S. refused to release all of the forensic evidence and ‘intel’ related to the shoot-down remains unanswered, the more we should rightfully suspect any findings by the MH-17 investigation team (if they ever see the light of day) – one it has to be emphasized, suspiciously included representatives from the at least equally suspect Kiev regime.


Moreover, for the U.S. to have imposed a further regimen of economic sanctions as a consequence without at least awaiting the outcome of the official investigation spoke further volumes about Washington’s deeper game-plan vis-à-vis Ukraine and ultimately, Russia itself. And it would appear we are now seeing that “game-plan” come to a fruition of sorts. Again, to underscore all of this, in one of Parry’s last substantive analyses of the Ukraine situation back in June last year, he summed a decidedly more coherent reality for us all.

“As the New York Times instructed us’ he observed in 2015, ‘there was no coup in Ukraine….no U.S. interference…and there weren’t even that many neo-Nazis. And the ensuing conflict wasn’t a resistance [movement] among Yanukovych’s supporters to his illegal ouster; no, it was ‘Russian aggression’ or a ‘Russian invasion.’” Parry didn’t spare the horses:

“If you deviate from this groupthink – if you point out how U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland talked about the U.S. spending $5 billion on Ukraine; mention her pre-coup intercepted phone call with [Ukrainian] U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing who the new leaders would be and how ‘to glue’ or [how to] ‘midwife this thing’; note how Nuland and Senator John McCain urged on the violent anti-Yanukovych protesters; recognize that snipers firing from far-right-controlled buildings killed both police and protesters to provoke the climactic ouster of Yanukovych; [and if] you think all that indeed looks like a coup – you obviously are the victim of ‘Russian propaganda and disinformation.’”

But as Parry glumly observed, thanks to the mainstream U.S. media, most Americans didn’t get to hear about any of that as, “[I]t has essentially banned those deviant facts from the public discourse. If they are mentioned at all, they’re lumped together with ‘fake news’ amid the reassuring hope that soon there’ll be algorithms to purge such troublesome information from the Internet.”

And for anyone whose “blowback antennae” are attuned to such matters, we cannot escape one abiding reality regarding the MH-17 disaster: If the putsch-meisters of the Potomac had minded their own business from the off and left well enough alone in Ukraine, irrespective of the cause of the shoot-down and who was responsible, we do know around three hundred innocent people would still be going about their business, and we wouldn’t be having this ‘conversation’. Four years later this is a reality I’ve yet to hear voiced by anyone in the MSM or in the upper echelons of Western governments. [My emphasis].

From Nobel Peace Prize to Imperial Warmonger

The MH17 facilitated a harvest of shame for Russia and Putin, but most evidence (and logic) points to Kiev and a CIA-organised false flag.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast but not least, consider the following. For this writer, it remains incomprehensible that a U.S. State Department official – in this case the aforementioned Ms Nuland (aka The Maidan Cookie Monster) – would seemingly act in such a brazenly undiplomatic manner in bringing about this coup, a reality that as we’ve seen independent media folks like Robert Parry were at pains to bring to wider attention. It is in this instance particularly that the “he who lies first, lies best” maxim really comes to the fore.

Yet there can be no doubt that Nuland initiated this action with Obama’s full knowledge, with it being as much, if not more so, Obama’s mess as it is Nuland’s and her neocon cronies. Well might we say, “cue Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here!”

Of equal or greater concern herein is this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who noted with considerable bewilderment and dismay, the Kiev regime’s deployment – again with the full knowledge, approval indeed encouragement of the regime renovators in Washington – of extreme neo-Nazi forces in facilitating its rise to power from the off, and enforcing since the coup its brutal, illegitimate rule. As noted earlier, they are again getting their second wind.

Given the neoconservatives well-documented vise-grip on U.S. foreign policy in general, and their role in engineering said coup in particular – especially that of the Nuland/Kagan/ex-PNAC factions and their fellow travelers in the U.S. Congress such as McCain, who number amongst them some of the most prominent, so-called “American friends of Israel” – I’m at something of a loss as to how best to explain the glaring disconnect herein.

Of course America’s foreign policy “initiatives” over the decades have always embraced an “end justifies the means” precept; only the most naïve or ill-informed would deny this. But for most objective observers – even those of us all too familiar with the CIA’s notorious Operation Paperclip, or its equally infamous Operation Gladio, wherein the U.S. actively recruited under-the-radar not-so-rehabbed former Nazis and extreme right wing elements to fight on any number of fronts the Cold War against the Soviets – this is breaking new ground in its embrace of the precept. Prima facie, this has to represent another glaring WTF ‘mo’ in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows, one might reasonably conclude! And transforms Nobel Peace Prize winners into imperial warmongers!


Israeli/Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky: one of many counter-intuitive oddities in the new bizarre reality created by the US imperialists—a Jew who does not mind supporting Nazi thugs. Class trumps ethnicity and history.

Or is it possible I’m just missing something obvious here? How are all these “American friends of Israel,” either inside or outside of the Capitol ‘tent’, able to reconcile their on-going support of a regime utilizing such forces – whose pernicious ideology being synonymous with rabid anti-Semitism would one imagine be totally abhorrent to Jewish folks and non-Jews alike – under any circumstances?

As it turns out, the so-called “friends” have been bending butt over backwards since the coup denying, playing down, or completely ignoring this “disconnect”. It is only begrudgingly and belatedly they – along with their hacks, flacks and lackeys in the MSM – were able to bring themselves to concede there has been and remains any such neo-Nazi involvement in Ukraine, much less acknowledge any such “disconnect”.

Another key question here is this. How does the all powerful AIPAC and various Jewish/Israel lobby groups and affiliated bodies feel about their “American friends” precipitating and engaging in regime change missions that involve the use and on-going embrace of neo-Nazi forces? Is this just some fuzzy ‘post-modern’ perversion of realpolitik at work here, and I’m simply too naive to understand what the hell is going on and what the end-game might be? And now that the neo-Nazi ‘natives’ are becoming increasingly restless as noted — their frustration with their nominal patrons within the present regime’s hierarchy reaching boiling points — it’ll doubtless make for interesting times ahead.

All this of course without considering the added reality of these extreme right-wing factions possibly combining forces and cozying up in a Nazi/fascist/white supremacist group hug cum love-fest with radical jihadist/Islamic militant groups in what could likely shape up to be an exceedingly bloody counter-coup, along with the equally likely prospects of the Ukrainian economy imploding in the interim, or at least in the wake of the turmoil induced by any such coup!

Former CIA Director James Woolsey admitting on national television that the United States routinely meddles in other countries’ elections. How can the CIA pretend to promote democracy anywhere when it does not technically exist in the American homeland?

On these matters alone, I’m prepped nonetheless to be enlightened as to how/when anything good is likely to come out of America’s color revolution and regime renovation experiment in this part of the geopolitical landscape. And when it comes to the situation in Ukraine, one that has emanated directly from America’s interference in its political affairs in 2014, well might we ask of the aforementioned, former CIA chief spook Woolsey: How’s that ‘[we] only [do it] for a very good cause [and] in the interests of democracy’ thing workin’ out for ya Jimbo?’

Yet whilst these are just some of the reality checks needed in order to assemble a measure of veracity and insight regarding all things Ukraine, such “checks” one imagines are, and will remain for sometime, asynchronous with the narratives disseminated via Washington’s anti-Putin, anti-Russian “brochure.”

And one final point if I may. If Putin and his Kremlin gremlins did indeed do some kind of a dodgy deal with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election in order to get him across the line ahead of Hillary Clinton – the only story that seems to capture the attention of the MSM mavens these days – it would be fair to say that the otherwise estimable Russian president and his beloved Motherland are getting well and truly shafted. Maybe Putin isn’t as clever as we give him credit for? To be so artfully duped by a dope like The Trumpster? Oh, the ignominy of it all!

Yet, all that aside, wouldn’t many of us just love to hear what the estimable and dutifully righteous Mr Parry might’ve had to say about more recent and possible developments in the country that interestingly – according to Dutch historian Kees Boterbloem — was affectionately known back in the day as “Little Russia”?

But of course that’s not going to happen. I can only hope this missive in some small – if not (ahem) short – measure, passes for the next best thing!

[/su_spoiler]

Rest in peace.


About the Author
 Greg Maybury is a Perth (Australia) based freelance writer. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military and geopolitical affairs, and both US domestic and foreign policy issues. @gjmaybury 


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Fake History. How The Money Power Controls Our Future By Controlling Our Past

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

By Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty
INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE



The ‘Fake History’ and ‘Fake News’ pejoratives (like ‘Conspiracy Theory’ before them) have only recently entered common parlance, but the falsification of history and news reporting is as old as history itself. For many a long year television news channels and newspapers owned or controlled by the Money Power (including the British Broadcasting Corporation), have been feeding us a daily diet of fake information. But in a black is white Orwellian reversal of truth it is the very people spreading falsehood who hurl the ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ pejoratives at truth tellers. To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.

Orwell famously added: ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Fake history is a weapon wielded by ruling elites to exert control over us, for it is knowledge about the past that has the power to shape us as people and develop our comprehension of reality. True history reveals to those who care to learn that democracy is a sham; that we the people are akin to Orwellian proles in Oceania watched over by Big Brother and accepting of anything he cares to tell us or throw at us. Money Power control of the received history is crucially important (more so than control of fake news) because it enables them to keep us in the dark and ensure our ongoing subservience. After almost seventy years Orwell’s observation may appear somewhat clichéd, but it is now more relevant than ever. The highly perceptive author added: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

George Orwell was correct and if humankind is to stand any chance of determining a future without oligarchic totalitarian control, the lies and mythology of our past must be challenged by honest history, hard but necessary truths and historical revision. ‘Revisionism’, according to Joseph Stromberg in an article he wrote about Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘refers to any efforts to revise a faulty exiting historical record or interpretation.’ [1] Professor Barnes, himself one of the greatest revisionists of the 20th century, wrote that revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because ‘truth is always the first war casualty.’ [2] Hold that important statement close. The emotional abuses and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. Consequently, both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.

The present authors’ years of research into the origins and conduct of the First World War of 1914-18 (though it continued until the signing of peace in 1919) demonstrates just how accurate Professor Barnes understanding was. Mainstream historians tell us that Germany was guilty of starting WW1 and committing the most barbarous crimes throughout. Proud, virtuous Britain, on the other hand, was forced to go to war against this German evil to fight ‘for freedom, civilization and the integrity of small helpless nations.’ It is all a deliberately concocted lie. Patriotic myths and the victors’ wartime lies and propaganda had been scripted into Britain’s ‘Official History.’ In truth, Britain - or to be more precise, immensely rich and powerful men in Britain - were directly responsible for the war that killed over 20 million people. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany did not start the war, did not want war and did what they could to avoid it.

But it is not just First World War history that is involved in the grand deception. Our contention that virtually the entire received history of the twentieth century has been faked and requires urgent and complete revision, will raise no eyebrows in enlightened circles. It will most definitely elicit howls of derision and cries of ‘impossible’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ from the vast majority. Self-interest or cognitive dissonance?

This essay cannot cover the many thousands of examples of historical falsehoods or omissions we found in our historical research – our books do that - but it explains in detail how the men behind the curtain actually create fake history. It is complex and the article is, by necessity, long because corners cannot be cut in relating this hugely important issue.

Who is responsible for faking history?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he elites multifaceted approach ranges from the straightforward destruction or concealment of documents and books, to the more subtle methods of employing Court Historians with their control systems such as ‘peer review’. Before we examine how history is actually faked we need to understand who fakes it. In this regard, the most important influences on our work were books by Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment.

The astonishing 1,300 page tome Tragedy and Hope, published in 1966, revealed the existence of a secret society initially created by the gold and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes in London in 1891. Its aim was to expand the British Empire to all habitable parts of the world. The enlarged empire would be run by wealthy upper class elites and based on English ruling class values as espoused by Professor John Ruskin at Oxford University. These rich and powerful individuals felt obliged to rule the entire world because they considered the vast majority of the human race too ignorant to do so themselves. In the decades following Cecil Rhodes death in 1902, the secret society evolved. It became transnational as the singularly English elite merged with the American money-power - Quigley’s Anglo-American Establishment -and the geographical axis moved from London to New York. The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the United Nations in the U.S. were created as Money Power instruments towards their one world government, that is, the ‘New World Order’ which is openly discussed today.

Members of the secret society controlled the United States, the White House, the Federal Reserve System and Wall Street. They likewise controlled Britain, Downing Street, the Bank of England and the City - the financial district of London. They ruled from behind the scenes and were not necessarily the major political players known to everyone. They selected major political figures and funded and controlled them. They would not be the great teachers or historians, but they decided who would be elevated to the great chairs of learning and funded historians who wrote the fake histories. This secret group has been the world’s major historical force since before World War 1 and, according to Professor Quigley, every major event in history since then has been dominated by them. [3] The secret society was

…one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. Indeed, the Group is of such significance that evidence of its existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look. [4]

We looked, followed the clues, trails and names presented by Professor Quigley and were utterly astonished to find that a secret cabal actually existed with unfettered powers in Britain and the United States. Quigley called them the ‘Group’; we have termed them the Secret Elite, but they are also known as the Money Power, the Deep State, the Men behind the Curtain and so forth. The shocking evidence we have uncovered goes much deeper than that exposed by Quigley, and indicates beyond all doubt that the individuals involved in the cabal - in both London and New York - were responsible for starting, and unnecessarily prolonging, the First World War. Through enormous wealth, power and control of Oxford University, they were able to cover their tracks and fabricate a history which blamed Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany. A century later, that fake history is still presented as truth by ‘eminent’ mainstream historians with links to Oxford.

The Rise of the Money Power

Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope revealed the ambitions of those whose wealth bought real power:

…The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.’ [5]

Free from any single political interference, this system was controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Quigley was adamant that ‘Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.’ The power of the central bank in each instance rested largely on its control of the credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and gold flows.

Professor Quigley explained how, in 1924, Reginald McKenna, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and at the time chairman of the board of the Midland Bank, told its stockholders:

I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money … And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people. [6]

It was an extraordinarily frank statement from a man close to the inner circles of the British Establishment. The international bankers on Wall Street were intimately linked to the Rothschilds in London and Paris. They manipulated the political power of the state to create the corrupt Federal Reserve System to gain a monopoly over the money issue through it.

Another important contributor to the unmasking of the Money Power, Professor Antony Sutton revealed:

The Federal Reserve has the power to create money. This money is fiction, created out of nothing … In brief, this private group of bankers has a money machine monopoly. This monopoly is uncontrolled by anyone and is guaranteed profit. [7]

With a magic machine that created money from thin air, the international bankers were able to control not merely individual politicians, but entire governments. By comparison, controlling the writing and teaching of history was child’s play. Quigley revealed the names of the rich and powerful banks and bankers - the Gods of Money - who were intimately involved. They included N.M Rothschild, Barings, Hambros, Lazard Brothers and Morgan Grenfell in London. [8] On Wall Street were J.P. Morgan, Kuhn-Loeb & Co., J.D. Rockefeller and Brown Brothers and Harriman. [9] Members of these banks on both sides of the Atlantic ‘knew each other intimately.’ [10]

Carroll Quigley had been invited by the secret society to study its membership, aims and objectives, and states he was helped in this by the British historian Alfred Zimmern who was himself a member of the secret cabal. It appears that Professor Quigley was actually chosen by the secret society to be its official historian. [11] He was one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of American academics. As a student at Harvard, Quigley had gained two top degrees and a Ph.D. He taught history at Princeton University and Harvard before moving to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown as professor of history. He was a distinguished member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association and the American Economic Association for many years. He was also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian Institution. He sat on the Congressional Select Committee which set up the National Space Agency. This is an outstanding professional record. Most academics of ambition would have considered their careers to be crowned by any one of Quigley’s individual achievements. He had entry to the innermost workings of the powers which controlled the United States. It is vital that we appreciate that his voice comes from the inside looking out. He knew what was happening and how the system truly worked.

Yet Quigley’s personal position on these developments remains somewhat confused. He stated that he admired the society and many of its members and its goals, but not its methods. [12] He believed they should abandon secrecy and make their aims and objectives clear to all. This may have been his downfall. To us it remains an enigma that Quigley said he admired these individuals and their globalist aims of a one world government controlled by bankers, yet on the very same page stated that their tendency to place power in and influence into hands chosen by friendship rather than merit, their oblivion to the consequences of their actions, their ignorance of the point of view of persons in other countries or of persons of other classes in their own country … have brought many of the things which they and I hold dear, close to disaster.’ [13]

Did Professor Quigley decide in the end, like his fellow historian Professor Alfred Zimmern, that the secret society posed such a menace to the world that he chose to expose it? We shall never know. Unable to ridicule Tragedy and Hope as ‘conspiracy theory’ because of his exalted academic position and status, when it was published those he named decided to bury the book. Immediately on its release, unknown persons removed it from bookstore shelves in America - ‘faster than exploding Easter bunnies’ as one wit put it. It was withdrawn from sale without any justification and its original plates were destroyed by Quigley’s publisher, the Macmillan Company. The publishing company was owned by the family of the Earl of Stockton, Harold McMillan, who was British Prime Minister 1957-1963 and at the heart of the British Establishment. Years later, when a rare surviving copy of Tragedy and Hopewas found and an unknown publisher decided to pirate it, copies began to sell.

Quigley was deeply offended by the suppression of a book which had taken him twenty years to write. In a 1974 radio broadcast he warned the interviewer, Rudy Maxa of the Washington Post: ‘You better be discreet. You have to protect my future, as well as your own.’ [14] He revealed in the interview that after the book was suppressed, for the next six years he repeatedly asked the publisher what was going on. They ‘lied, lied, lied’ to him and deliberately misled him into believing that it would be reprinted. Quigley stated that powerful people had suppressed his book because it exposed matters that they did not want known. Universities, academics and the mainstream media remained silent over his explosive revelations, the destruction of the book, and the disgraceful treatment of one of America’s top academics.

Unbeknown to them, Quigley had written an earlier history (in 1949) of the all-powerful secret society titled The Anglo-American Establishment. Though some of the facts came to him from sources which he was not permitted to name, he presented only those where he was ‘able to produce documentary evidence available to everyone’. [15] The book carried far greater detail of the secret society than Tragedy and Hope, especially on the English side of the Atlantic. It exposed exactly who its members were and their intricate family, banking and business inter-connections. It revealed how they controlled politics, the major newspapers, and the writing and teaching of history through Oxford University. It was clearly such an explosive expose of the ruling cabal, and placed him in such potential danger, that he would not allow it to be published in his lifetime. The book was only released in 1981, four years after his death. We consider The Anglo-American Establishment to be the most important work of modern history written in the twentieth century.

The relevance of Quigley’s work in the context of fake history derives from the fact that he revealed exactly how the secret society controlled the writing and teaching of history through a ‘triple-front penetration in politics, education, and journalism.’ [16] They did so through their domination of Oxford University, and Balliol College and All Souls College in particular. They recruited men of ability, chiefly from All Souls and controlled them through the granting of titles and positions of power. The Secret Elite were thus able to influence public policy and education by placing these individuals at the apex of public institutions such as universities, and shielding them as much as possible from public attention or criticism. [17] Viscount (Lord) Alfred Milner was the leading player in the society’s growth and development from the late 1890s until his death in 1925. He gathered around him a brood of talented Oxford men, utterly loyal to the primacy of the British Empire in pursuit of a new world order. Quigley wrote that no country that values its safety should allow what the Milner group accomplished:

That is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period. [18]

Almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions' is, in a nut-shell, how they control history, turn history from enlightenment to deception. The Secret Elite dictated the writing of history from the ivory towers of academia at Oxford, and what was taught thereafter in universities, colleges and schools across the land. To this day, researchers are denied access to documents because the Secret Elite has much to fear from the truth. They ensure that we learn only those ‘facts’ that support their version of history. They are determined to wipe out all traces that lead back to them, and take every possible step to ensure that it remains exceedingly difficult to unmask their crimes.

They carefully controlled the publication of official government papers, the selection of documents for inclusion in the official version of the history of the First World War and all that followed. Incriminating documents were burned, removed from official records, shredded, falsified or deliberately rewritten, so that what remained for genuine researchers and historians was carefully selected material. The professors of history who wrote the false history of the First World War had been carefully selected in the pre-war years by the ruling elite and placed in chairs of modern history and the history of war at Oxford. These chairs had been set up and fully funded by members of the secret society whose outrageous wealth was based on their gold and diamond investments in South Africa. Few, if any, historians elsewhere dared question these ‘eminent’ men at the ‘world’s leading university.’ It is this fake history which has been ingrained in the minds of generations of British schoolchildren over the past century. Any alternative view is heresy.

Unable to ridicule The Anglo-American Establishment as conspiracy theory because of the late Professor Quigley’s high status, and clearly concerned that any publicity would simply draw attention to it, the ruling elite decided to bury it. Anyone ignorant of just how tightly the Money Power controls the mainstream media, might expect quality newspapers to headline this explosive work and praise Quigley as a national hero for exposing the destruction of the democratic process. He had uncovered and revealed a deep and very dangerous corruption which posed a grave threat to our way of life. What happened? Nothing. No newspaper, television or radio station reviewed or commented on his incendiary book. None. It was blanked by ‘official’ history. To our knowledge, and to their shame, no mainstream academic historians have ever written a review of this stunning work. What we must ask is; was anyone permitted to offer such a critique?

From burning correspondence to permanently removing the evidence.

ABOVE: Fake news of the obvious, and therefore real kind, has existed for a very long time, chiefly as a joke. The dangerous and less obvious one is practiced 24/7 by the establishment's corporate media, and led by "respectable" organs such as the New York Times, CBS, and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rom its inception in 1891, members of the secret society have taken exceptional care to remove traces of the conspiracy. Letters to and from its leader Alfred Milner were culled, removed, burned or otherwise destroyed. [19] In 2013 we closely examined many of Milner’s remaining papers which are held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. They bear witness to the zeal with which much evidence of wrongdoing has been obliterated. Secret dispatches that we know from other sources that he sent, have disappeared. Incriminating letters penned by King Edward VII – a leading secret cabal player in the genesis of WW1 before his death in 1910 - were subject to an order that they must be destroyed immediately on his death. Admiral Jacky Fisher a Royal favourite noted in his Memories that he had been advised by Lord Knollys, the king’s private secretary, to burn all letters sent to him by the king. Fisher consequently burned much of his royal correspondence but couldn’t bear to part with it all. [20] Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, member of the cabal and by far the richest man in the world, likewise ordered that his papers and correspondence be burned posthumously lest his political influence and connections became known. As his official biographer commented, one can but ‘wonder how much of the Rothschilds political role remains irrevocably hidden from posterity’. [21]

In Britain crucial primary documents about the lies and deceit surrounding the First World War through diaries, memoirs and important letters were censored and altered, evidence sifted, removed, burned, carefully ‘selected’ and falsified. Bad as that may be, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of crucial papers from across Europe. In the immediate post-war years, hundreds of thousands of important documents pertaining to the origins of the First World War were taken from their countries of origin to the west coast of America and concealed in locked vaults at Stanford University. The documents, which would doubtless have exposed the men who were truly responsible for the war, had to be removed to a secure location and hidden from prying eyes. It was the greatest heist of history that the world has ever known.

Herbert Clark Hoover, a nasty, corrupt and dishonest ‘mining engineer’ reinvented as a munificent humanitarian and international relief organizer, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth job of stealing the European documents. In modern day parlance, had it all been recorded on computer he was the one who pressed the delete button. From the early days of the war in 1914, Hoover had been tasked with ensuring that the enemy, Germany, had sufficient supplies of food. Without this food which, astonishingly, came via Belgium from America and every part of the British Empire, Germany would have been forced to capitulate and the war would have ended by the Spring of 1915. Had they not supplied Germany, the astronomical war profits made by the Anglo-American bankers and merchants of death over the ensuing years of slaughter until November 1918 would have been lost. Far from being the ‘humanitarian hero’ who saved the Belgian people from starvation during the war, Hoover’s so-called ‘Belgian Relief’ agency also fed the German army in order to prolong the conflict and maximize profit. [22] His American-based organization raised millions of dollars through loans and public donation, shipped vast quantities of food and necessities to war-torn Europe and made obscene profits for his backers, yet no documentary evidence of this enormous enterprise could be found at the end of the war. It had disappeared. All of it. Impossible, surely?


The theft of Europe’s historical documents was dressed in a cloak of respectability and represented as a philanthropic act of preservation. These documents, it was claimed, would be properly archived for the use of future historians. The official line was that if not removed from government agencies in France, Russia, Germany and elsewhere, the papers detailing the extent of Hoover’s work would ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. [23] It was no chance decision that only documents relating to the war’s origins and ‘Belgian relief’ were taken. No official British, French or American government approval was sought or given. Indeed, like the thief in the night, stealth was the rule of thumb. On the basis that it was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University and a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days there, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and give it academic credence.

In 1919, Hoover recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s true origins and the sham Commission for Relief of Belgium. Other documents concerning the conduct of the war itself were ignored. His team used letters of introduction and logistical support to collect import / export bills, sales and distribution records, insurance documents and local customs permits amongst a plethora of incriminating evidence. He established a network of representatives throughout Europe and persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. [24] He sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, they visited nations on the brink of starvation and faced little resistance in their quest. They made the right local contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [25] Hoover recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ from European governments. [26] It has not been possible for us to discover who actually funded this gargantuan, massively expensive venture.

The removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem and with the Bolsheviks in control, access to Russian documents from the Czarist regime proved straightforward. They undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 had been orchestrated through Petrograd, and how Russia’s general mobilization on Germany’s eastern border had been the real reason for the war starting. It might appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove twenty-five carloads of material from Petrograd, [27] but when one realizes that the international bankers in the secret society had financed and facilitated Lenin and Trotsky’s return to Russia, and the Bolshevik Revolution itself, it becomes clear. [28] The Americans could have what they wanted. This surprising event was reported in The New York Times which claimed that Hoover’s team bought the documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash. [29] And some people think that fake news is a twenty-first century concept.

Removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’ – a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained this away with the comment that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’. [30] But the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s men also acquired 6,000 volumes of German documents covering the complete official proceedings of the Kaiser’s pre-war activities and his wartime conduct of the German empire. [31] If Germany had been guilty of planning and starting the war - as decreed by Court Historians ever since - these documents would have proved it. Strange that none have ever been released. Had there been incriminating documents, it is certain that copies would have been sent out immediately to every press and news agency throughout the world proving Germany was to blame. The removal and concealment of the German archives by the Secret Elite was crucial because they would have proved the opposite: Germany had no interest in war and most certainly did not start it.

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ at Stanford University was so packed with archived material that it was legitimately described as the world’s largest collection of First World War documentation. [32] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authority had keys to the padlocked gates. It was the Fort Knox of historical evidence, a closely guarded establishment for items too sensitive to share. In 1941 only carefully selected archives were made available to genuine researchers. Over the previous two decades the unaccountable ruling cabal – the very men responsible for WW1 - had unfettered control over them. What they withheld from view, shredded, or put in the Stanford furnace will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that no war historian has ever written about this utterly astonishing theft of the European war documents and their shipment to America.

‘To the victor go the spoils and history is part of that booty’, but it is our history. We should be demanding to know what is hidden from us. The First World War was the seminal event of the twentieth century, and all that followed, including WW2, came as a direct consequence. The people of Britain and Germany, indeed the world, have a right to know the full extent of what has been secretly retained, hidden, or posted ‘missing’ regarding responsibility for that war.

Concealment of British war-time documents

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Hoover Institution at Stanford was not the sole depository for the concealment and sifting of incriminatory documents. In his book The History Thieves, Ian Cobain, an investigative journalist with The Guardian newspaper in London, reveals a secret facility just an hour’s drive north of the city. Concealed in dense woodland near the tiny hamlet of Hanslope, lies ‘one of the most secure facilities operated by any government, anywhere in the world.’ An outpost of Britain’s domestic and foreign spy agencies, MI5 and MI6 which are based in London, Hanslope Park is guarded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence, just beyond which is a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Every few yards between the fences are closed-circuit television cameras and floodlights. Cobain writes, ‘only from the air can the enormous scale of the compound be comprehended, it measures almost half a mile across … It is a perfect place to bury difficult secrets.’ [33]


Hanslope area today—signs indicate denied access to unauthorised parties.

Controversial files relating to Britain’s colonial outrages were destroyed, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that incriminating files confirming British responsibility for starting WW1, have likewise either been destroyed or hidden in the vaults at Hanslope. ‘Files have been concealed for years, held where no historian or lawyer or interested member of the public could find them.’ [35] Many of these documents have been withheld well beyond the freedom of information time limits for the release of confidential papers. Freedom of Information laws exist, but so many exemptions are applied that it can still prove impossible to access documents that are a century and more old. [36] It is difficult to decide what the greatest outrage is; concealment of the documents or the fact that academic historians and mainstream journalists have remained totally supine when they should be standing up to the Money Power and creating hell about this. Ian Cobain is an exception and we are indebted to him.And bury difficult secrets they have. Cobain describes how millions of files containing top secret British government documents dating back even further than the First World War are kept at Hanslope Park. Some documents which were recently released, albeit very reluctantly under direct order of the Courts of Law, revealed the true horrors of British colonial rule in Kenya and elsewhere in the world. The Hanslope documents are among those which have survived the bonfires. Cobain described how just prior to Malaya’s independence from Britain, five truckloads of sensitive documents relating to British colonial rule were driven 220 miles from Kuala Lumpur under police escort to the naval base at Singapore ‘and destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator there’. Papers at the National Archives at Kew ‘testified to a worldwide purge of sensitive or damning documentation: there was correspondence that described the laborious burning of papers; there were telegrams from London giving precise instructions for methods of destruction; there were even “destruction certificates”, signed and witnessed by colonial officials to confirm that certain classes of documents had been incinerated.’ [34] Systematic and institutional vandalism aimed at wiping out the truth.

The fruits of our research very clearly show that the entire mainstream thesis that Germany was to blame for the war is a complete fabrication. This leads us to the inevitable but depressing conclusion that, apart from a few notable exceptions, brave and honest war historians are few and far between. Before the First World War had even begun, a dedicated team of ‘eminent’ English court historians was brought together at Oxford University and richly rewarded for creating anti-German propaganda in the form of ‘Oxford Pamphlets.’ They created fake history which blamed a completely innocent Germany while depicting Britain as the saviour of the free world. It was but the beginning of a great lie. The vast majority of academics beyond Oxford unwittingly swallowed that great lie, or were too cowed to question it. The ‘argument from authority’ meant that it was true because an authority figure said so. Little has changed over the intervening century. To this day Court Historians churn out new books about the First World War which throw in the odd caveat that Germany was not solely to blame, but basically rehash the old lies about German guilt. These books are extravagantly praised by fellow Court Historians, and puffed and critiqued in the mainstream media as ‘new and radical interpretations’. It is likely that a number of academics outside the charmed circle recognize the falsehood, but comfortable academic careers, incomes and mortgages have to be protected. The quiet life is infinitely better to being hounded out of a job and ridiculed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ crank indulging in ‘fake history’. We understand that. They have jobs to keep, mortgages to pay, families to feed.

In faking history, lies are created and truth is twisted or suppressed. Revisionists presenting genuine historical information are fiercely criticized and their work publicly ridiculed. Quite ludicrously, the ‘anti-Semitic’ pejorative is thrown around like mud today if one even mentions ‘international bankers’. Our Hidden History has been subjected to attacks on the web by what some consider a paid disinformation agent of the Money Power. Bold revisionist historians such as Professor Harry Elmer Barnes who stood virtually alone in revealing the true history of WW1, and Professor Antony Sutton and Dr. Guido Preparata, who revealed Wall Street’s role in creating Hitler and WW2, were brilliant American scholars whose careers were ruined for daring to speak truth about the real holders of power. Fortunately we are both retired and no longer have careers to protect.

The polar opposite of revisionists are the ‘eminent’ historians willing to sell themselves in return for important professorships, stellar careers, lucrative lecture tours, television documentary productions and book publishing deals. These are the individuals carefully selected to create false histories. Glowing critiques of their work in the controlled mainstream media are assured. The odd Pulitzer Prize or knighthood in Britain will be thrown in for good measure. But such acquiescence to falsehood among academic historians is not simply a modern phenomenon. Classics scholar Professor Peter Wiseman relates how ancient historiography is plagued by mendacious writings from ‘modest elaboration of fact to outright, even flagrant, lying.’[37]

Peter Hoffer, Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, explained just how difficult it now is for historical truth to prevail:

Lying may be rational or illogical or both, but it is a subject that cannot be avoided in any philosophy of history for our time. History itself is replete with lies and lying. The best and worst example is the big lie. The big lie is a simple message of allegedly great importance. Repeated over and over, despite the piling up of counter-evidence, it has a power that truth cannot deflect and evidence to the contrary cannot undo … A lie [however] does not have to be all that big to make a difference in history. [38]

In bygone days such dishonest academics operated under the patronage of Europe’s royal courts and were termed ‘Court Historians’. They related only accounts that were favourable to the monarchy, no matter how false they might be. The power of royalty has greatly diminished, but Court Historians remain a significant entity as the intellectual bodyguards of the State. ‘They shape and defend the “official line” or interpretation on the State's wars, its presidential regimes, foreign policy or other key historical events and policies. As a result they enjoy high esteem and recognition in the mainstream media and academia. As defenders of the status quo they frequently attack and label their critics as conspiracy theorists, revisionists, isolationists, appeasers, anti-intellectuals, or other bogey men, rather than engage in civil discourse or discussion.’ [39]

There are, of course, more subtle ways of projecting fake history than the straightforward big lie or concealment/destruction of evidence. John Tosh, Professor of History at Roehampton University, London, and former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, has studied the basics of historiography and the problems involved in using primary and secondary sources in ascertaining ‘facts’. Tosh relates how many primary sources used in historical works are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay or actually ‘intended to mislead’. Indeed, ‘the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest.’ [40] According to Professor Tosh ‘Historical writing of all kinds is determined as much by what it leaves out as by what it puts in’. [41] Add that to the fact that so many primary sources have been concealed or destroyed, and the honest investigator faces major barriers to the truth.

The late Cambridge University historian, Professor Herbert Butterfield, warned that omission of important documents from the historical record is not always the fault of historians employed by government. They can only deal with the material they are given. The processes by which official papers are accumulated offers government officials and individual Cabinet Ministers the opportunity to cull these before they are handed over. As Professor Carroll Quigley explained, many of these political figures are effectively puppets of the Secret Elite.

When the official histories are read by the public they have no idea what has been suppressed or withheld. It may be that a single document is more important than all the rest – the exclusion of one document out of three hundred is even capable of destroying the clue to the whole series. … It has proved possible in the history of historical science for a release of diplomatic documents to carry students further away from the truth than before, if the release has not been a total one. [42]

On the role of ‘official’ government historians Professor Butterfield adds: ‘…Nothing could be more subtle than the influence of upon historians of admission to the charmed circle … a well-run State needs no heavy-handed censorship, for it binds the historian with soft charms and with subtle, comfortable chains.’ [43]

The Peer Review process.

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ontrol of the history narrative itself is yet another mechanism for creating fake accounts. This, ironically, is achieved by applying an academic principle of historical research which is meant to prevent junk history; the peer review process. Peer review involves a manuscript or research proposal being read and evaluated anonymously by scholars who are themselves part and parcel of the system. They may have considerable expertise in the period, subject matter, languages, and documents with which the author deals, but they have a list of criteria to which the aspiring historical author must bend the knee. And herein lies the finesse of the overall system which prevents true history emerging. Academic papers which fail to display knowledge of existing work, or fail to provide what the peer reviewers deem as valid evidence, will not be approved. It will be damned as weak and appropriate revisions and resubmissions will be demanded. In other words, the fake history of the approved ‘eminent’ Court Historian has to be included. Where valid documentary evidence has been destroyed, corrupted, removed, culled and so forth, then the author is limited to the scraps which have survived. Thus, at a stroke, the permanent withdrawal of primary source documents at Stanford and Hanslope achieves its aim. Genuine, honest history researchers face huge difficulty moving beyond the parameters created by those who actually determine what can or cannot be accepted as history, and they have to play this peer review game to have any hope of advancing their careers. They are required to stay on the mainline train and regurgitate that which the elites want us to believe is true history. Those who deviate or question the process are not tolerated. The only route is the mainline track, laid down by the great universities from chairs of history funded and controlled by the corrupted system.

According to the American Historical Association, the peer review entails a manuscript or research proposal being read and evaluated by other scholars with expertise in the time period, subject matter, languages, and documents with which the author deals. As peers of the author in a specialized field, these reviewers provide analysis to the review boards of agencies on the scholarly significance of the article: Does the author display knowledge of existing work in the field? Does the research design, processes and methodologies, for example, conform to professional standards? Does the author advance an original argument and provide valid evidence to support the work? If particular areas are weak or absent in the presentation, the peer reviewers suggest revisions that will strengthen the project and call for resubmission before funding is awarded or a manuscript is accepted for publication. Scholars support the concept of carefully monitored peer review as the fairest way possible to ensure disinterested evaluation of research, and ‘the American Historical Association believes that such peer review will best serve the American people who fund the research’. [44] Absorb that, please. ‘Will best serve the American people who fund the research.’ Many academic posts in history are funded by the Money Power. If the state is the funder, it should serve the state. Believe us, it does.

The peer review process may appear the ideal means by which the quality and honesty of historical writing are ensured. And it is claimed that although it is not perfect, it is the best safeguard that academic standards in history have. Reality, however, is different. Well-known, establishment historians who support the status quo are more likely to be recruited as peer reviewers. In the field of war historians especially, it is actually used as a means to sustain and promulgate the junk history it is supposed to weed out. The ‘competent, qualified and unbiased reviewers’ who ‘best serve the American people’ are, in practice, highly critical of articles that contradict their own mainstream narratives. They reject them outright. The fact that their narratives and meta-narratives serve the purposes of Money Power and other elites may be incidental, but is not coincidental, to their epistemological deficiencies. Only official ‘academic’ interpretations and narratives are permitted, and have displaced all other points of view in US and European universities. Naturally, these other points of view are not conducive to the elite interests and consequently are effectively outlawed. The mechanism of displacement is the very matter of peer-review. All ‘revisionist’ voices are starved to death. [45] Professor Carroll Quigley revealed, and we have confirmed time and again in our books, how Oxford University remains the guardian of establishment history in Britain. Shades of an Orwellian dystopia darken the academic freedoms which have long been touted as the mark of an advanced liberal society.

Parallels with medical research

Worryingly, similarities with corruption in academic history and academic medical/pharmaceutical research and reporting appear to be on the increase. Senior academics who have succumbed to the lure of status and financial rewards are to be found in many fields and the corruption of science-based medicine and academic history offers striking parallels. Like peer review in history, that process provides neither an assured filter for incorrect findings nor a guarantor of the researchers’ integrity. Professor Richard Horton, editor-in chief of the Lancet - recognized as one of the most highly respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world – stated recently that the case against science is straightforward: ‘Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.’ [46] History has been faked and science turned towards darkness. Alarm bells should be sounding across the universe. We continue to be lied to.

The ‘flagrant conflicts of interest’ are the root of the problem in both history and medicine, with a number of senior academics in both fields labouring not for the truth, but for lucrative bonuses paid by powerful paymasters with set agendas. Professor Horton adds; ‘Scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world’, but admits that medical journals themselves are not blameless: ‘Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours.’ [47] Exactly the same charge can be leveled against even the most prestigious of history journals.

In 2011 the British Medical Journal quoted Dr. Marcia Angell, a long time editor of yet another highly regarded peer-reviewed medical journal: ‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.” [48]

In the New York Review of Books, Dr. Angell reviewed books written by whistle blowers in the medical field. She states that no one knows the total slush money provided by drug companies to influence results, but it’s estimated that the top nine U.S. drug companies alone pay out tens of billions of dollars a year. As a direct consequence, Big Pharma has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its products. ‘Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.’ Angell added that compromised physicians at the highest levels set the guidelines and treatment recommendations nationally. They sit on governmental advisory panels, head professional societies and speak at regular meetings and dinners that take place to teach clinicians about prescription drugs. [49] Morality is dead. Killed by the greed of the Money Power.

A recent survey found that about two thirds of academic medical institutions hold equity interest in companies that sponsor research within the same institution. A study of medical school department chairs found that two thirds received departmental income from drug companies and three fifths received personal income. ‘Of the 170 contributors to the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.’ Billions were being spent (and gained in profit by Big Pharma) on unnecessary, non-efficacious psychiatric medicines that might well be doing more harm than good, even to very young children. For example the professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who also held the post of chief of paediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital, was largely responsible for children as young as two years old being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with cocktails of powerful drugs. The professor’s studies of the drugs were, as The New York Times summarised, ‘so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.’ A U.S. Senator revealed that drug companies, including those that make the drugs the professor advocated for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid him $1.6 million in consultation and speaking fees. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. [50]

But the corruption was by no means limited to psychiatry. ‘In 2004, after the National Cholesterol Education Program called for sharply lowering the desired levels of “bad” cholesterol, it was revealed that eight of nine members of the panel writing the recommendations had financial ties to the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.’ It is also evident that many members of the standing committees of experts that advise the FDA on drug approvals also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. [51]

Big Pharma and the Money Power are, of course, closely related and their corruption of science based medicine and academic history bears striking similarities. They have extensive ties to senior faculty at prestigious universities where they fund departmental professorial chairs. They compromise physicians and historians at the highest level with lucrative incomes, and highly remunerated lecture tours where they disseminate the ‘sculpted data’ which harmonizes with the false accounts demanded by their paymasters. The peer review process in both specialties has been comprised. It is clear that numerous senior individuals in the medical field have sold their honesty and integrity, just as have numerous senior academic historians. But some in the medical profession can be justifiably proud of the fact that honest doctors and medical journals are prepared to expose corruption and name and shame those involved. There is, alas, no such response to be found in the academic history profession where not one solitary voice has been raised against the corrupters or those who fund the corruption.

The Failure of primary source evidence.

Establishment historians place great value on the use of primary source evidence. This is described as ‘Narrative Fixation’ by the heterodox economist Edward Fullbrook [52] who cites Einstein’s famous aphorism:

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use: It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

Professor Fullbrook states that in his academic field, by adopting a single point of view and refusing to admit alternative insights, economists deprive themselves of the means of a fuller understanding of the matters they seek to explain. But it is not just in economics that such limitations become apparent. The narrative fixation on the dialectical side of scientific development has had, and continues to have, a deleterious consequence in the human sciences. This involves all of the Humanities and Social Sciences including, as we see here, History. In any attempt to understand a complex truth, what is required is a multiplicity of points of view – a width of methodologies and epistemologies – a ‘Narrative Pluralism’ - but academic historians have a narrative fixation: No documents; no narrative. [53]

In an article, The Frailty of Historical Truth: Learning Why Historians Inevitably Fail, published by the American Historical Association, Professor David Lowenthal states that ‘Secondary sources are ipso facto unreliable.’ [54] In other words, primary sources should be used. The fundamental problem in war history, however, as we and other revisionists have clearly demonstrated, lies in the fact that it is underpinned by primary sources which are unreliable – not least because so many have been systematically destroyed, falsified, altered, misrepresented, hidden or ‘lost’. In the absence of reliable primary source evidence, it is entirely legitimate – indeed it is mandatory on the part of truth-seekers - to look to other means of establishing what has occurred, what continues to happen and why. ‘Eminent’ historians have decreed that secondary sources/circumstantial evidence are a taboo in historical research, yet they play a hugely important role in the criminal law courts and can literally mean a matter of life or death? In homicide cases or other serious felonies, police detectives act much like historians in searching the past for evidence. If it is considered that sufficient evidence has been uncovered, the accused is sent for trial before a jury of his peers. The gold standard in law courts is direct evidence, but in the majority of cases there is none and only indirect circumstantial evidence is available. By way of example, direct evidence is presented if a witness states that she saw the defendant pull out a gun and actually shoot the victim. On the other hand, if she did not witness the shooting but saw the defendant enter a house with a gun, heard a gunshot and screaming and thereafter saw the defendant leave carrying the gun, it is circumstantial evidence. If two or more independent witnesses testify to this, it is very powerful circumstantial evidence.

Circumstantial evidence – and that includes fingerprints and forensic evidence presented by expert witnesses - allows for more than one explanation. When different strands of such evidence are drawn together and each corroborates the conclusions drawn from the others, there is every reason to take serious notice. For hundreds of years attorneys have talked about this ‘cable’ of circumstantial evidence. A cable is made up of many strands which individually are not particularly strong, but the more strands which are applied to the cable the stronger it becomes. In many, if not indeed the majority of legal cases, it is this cable of circumstantial evidence and not direct evidence which solidly links an accused to the crime. Juries in the United States and elsewhere are entitled to reach a verdict on such evidence, and Judges are able to condemn an individual to death on the strength of that verdict. The U.S. Supreme Court has stated that ‘circumstantial evidence is intrinsically no different from testimonial [direct] evidence,’ [55] yet academic war historians deride its use.

Straightforward lies, concealment of important evidence, a peer review system that encourages only accounts sympathetic to the Establishment, and insistence on using only primary source documents (which in reality are the remnants which have survived the Establishment’s cull) are all important elements in the production of fake history.

Document Weeding

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the early 1970s, Canadian war historian Nicholas D’Ombrain began researching British War Office records. He noted: ‘The Registry Files were in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of the policy of “weeding”. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five-sixths.’ [56] Astonishingly, a large amount of ‘sensitive’ material was actually removed as the researcher went about his business. Where did it go? Who authorized its removal? He accused the establishment of systematic withdrawal of evidence. In addition, D’Ombrain noted that minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defense and ‘circulation and invitation lists’ together with much ‘routine’ correspondence had been destroyed. [57] That D’Ombrain found five-sixths of the total files melting away in front of him demonstrated clearly that unnamed others still retained a vested interest in keeping hidden genuine evidence of historical record.

On conducting our own research we noted that the official notice in the Public Record Office List of Cabinet Papers warns, ‘the papers listed … are certainly not the whole of those collectively considered by Cabinet Ministers.’ The gap, however, is breath-taking. No effort is made to explain why crucial records are missing or what happened to them. Nothing is included from 14 July until 20 August, 1914. Nothing! This period covered the crucial two week ‘July Crisis’ in the run up to the First World War, the British declaration of war on Germany on 4 August, and almost three weeks into the war itself. [58] It beggars belief that such crucial Cabinet papers relating to one of the most significant events in British history have disappeared.

While official Cabinet papers for the time frame do not exist – presumably destroyed (the files at the National Archives at Kew in London were completely empty) we know what was going on in some detail because Prime Minister Asquith (aka ‘Squiffy’ because it was alleged that he drank a bottle of claret each evening) was writing letters to his paramour, Venetia Stanley, and sharing secret Cabinet details with her. Had Asquith not communicated privately and very indiscreetly to his young paramour, much of what was discussed at those meetings would be lost to history. His letters of August 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, contain the inner secrets of what was said by whom in crucial Cabinet meetings whose minutes were presumably destroyed. The book H.H. Asquith letters to Venetia Stanley - essentially a compilation of Asquith’s love letters - was not published until 1982 [59] and therefore not subject to the post-war censor. This unquestionably saved the information from being redacted or burned.

When researching later Cabinet Memoranda housed in the National Archives, [60] pages were found to be missing. Page 685 (which was in a series which included crucial confidential documents about Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief) has been torn out. Despite this, we had more than sufficient evidence to prove that Britain and America were secretly provisioning Germany throughHoover’s organization in order to prolong the war. Countless documents are missing, but in fairness to the librarians and custodians of the Public Record Office, they could only catalogue what was passed to them from the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Colonial Office. It is not the fault of librarians.

An Australian expert on Gallipoli, Harvey Broadbent, had a similar experience when researching the archives: ‘…Difficulties lie in the fact that not all Gallipoli documents seem to be present in the National Archives. There are gaps in document collections of certain events and at crucial times of the campaign.’ [61] Broadbent harbours suspicion that the 1915 Gallipoli campaign (where over a quarter of a million allied soldiers and sailors, including many from Australia and New Zealand, were killed or badly wounded) was deliberately set up to fail by the British and French governments. We gathered many individual strands of circumstantial evidence on this, wound them in to a very strong cable, and have absolutely no doubts whatsoever that it was indeed deliberately set up to fail.

The doomed project went ahead to enable greater geo-political strategies which would benefit the Secret Elite, including post-war control of oil in the Middle East and control of Palestine. Gallipoli was a disaster for the allies in 1915 and the truth had to be concealed at all costs from the peoples of colonial Australia and New Zealand or they would have reacted severely against both the ‘Mother country’ and the war. Yet the big lies persist, and many Australians continue to celebrate a disaster dressed as a glorious sacrifice; an honour to Australian and New Zealand youth. Lies, lies, lies.

It is evident that falsification of the history of the twentieth century has involved a wide range of nefarious subterfuge. Today, the accepted mainstream version continues to be taken as the source for new books and documentaries in film and television. The ideal of objectivity was abandoned long ago. Highly biased and selective choices were made from the infinite number of true facts. Some were given a central place, others marginalized. Facts were selected to align with the narrative which the oligarchs demanded. Many inaccurate, muddled or tainted primary sources were chosen to mislead. A range of documents might be brought into the public domain with one crucial piece of the jigsaw removed. This skewed the picture, deliberately. And there were lies, outrageous lies, levied against anyone who stood as a potential barrier to elite rule and one world government by exposing the truth. Yet all of that is merely the tip of the rotten iceberg and represents what we can actually recognize when we search the available record. Below the surface lie vast quantities of documents removed from public scrutiny and hidden away in places such as Stanford and Hanslope. It seems possible, if not indeed likely, that other as yet unknown depositories exist. It is impossible to say how many records remain concealed to this day, or have already found their way into furnaces in a factual holocaust. As an iceberg in warmer water gradually melts and recedes from the bottom up, so the records decrease in volume, unseen, unknown and unreported as more and more are selected for destruction. In the age of mass communication we have less access to the truth about history than the generations before us. This is no mistake.

As in so many other areas, when researching history a good opening question is: Cui bono? Who benefits from this systematically destroyed, falsified, altered, hidden or ‘lost’ evidence? The Elites, past and present? The court historians whose success is predicated upon conformity?

In the words of Professor Hillel Ticktin, academic economics, is ‘useless – utterly useless’. So too in any objective sense is academic history. Its value resides only in supporting the present-day elites who pay the piper and own the pipes.

If Orwell’s aphorism holds true it is imperative that we revise the entire historical record of the twentieth century. It may already be too late, but we have to dispel pessimism to stand any chance of taking control of our own future. Much has already been done by revisionists such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Antony Sutton and Guido Preparata, and not least by Carroll Quigley who provided the signposts we need on this complex journey. But the ruling elite today are more adept at burying the truth than ever - as witnessed by the vast percentage of the ‘educated’ peoples of the world who remain totally unaware of their existence or the fact that democracy is a sham. Modern history in its entirety requires grassroots revision.

There is too another concern. The selection of approved versions of history dictates what is taught in our universities and schools. Scottish schoolchildren are taught certain aspects of the First World War but all contentious issues are absent from the syllabus. Attending a conference in Brussels several years ago we learned that Belgian schoolchildren are taught absolutely nothing about the 'Committee for the Relief of Belgium' which was directly at the centre as the most significant institution in the country's First World War history. Internationally, university professors and departmental heads determine the body of knowledge from which degrees are judged. Armed with their prized degrees, those who progress to a career in history are obliged to teach from the same sacred scripture in schools, colleges or universities. No one questions this. No one dares. School and college students are then examined on their historical learning and understanding from texts blessed with institutional approval. Thus, generation after generation, we witness the perpetuation and consolidation of fake history.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that all modern historians or war historians are intentionally producing fake history, but they raise no dissenting voice against those who do. The distressing reality is that brave revisionist historians are a very rare breed indeed. Academic historians of all colours need to muster their courage, speak truth to power, and stop toeing the Establishment line. The fact that it is not historians but ordinary intelligent men and women who are at the vanguard of the historical truth movement today brings shame to their profession. The verdict of history itself will surely judge them harshly.

Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty: Authors: Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, and Prolonging the Agony. How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WW1 by Three-and-a Half Years. Comments to: jim.macgregor@tiscali.co.uk 

Notes

  1. Quote from Jeff Riggenbach,Why American History is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, p. 72.
  2. Ibid., p. 73.
  3. For an excellent summary of the role of the secret society see G. Edward Griffin’s talk.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynVqPnMQ2sI
  4. Carroll Quigley,The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. ix-x.
  5. Carroll Quigley,Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time, p. 324.
  6. Ibid., p. 325.
  7. Antony C. Sutton,The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, p. 2.
  8. Quigley,Tragedy and Hope, p. 500.
  9. Ibid., pp. 529-531.
  10. Quigley,Anglo-American Establishment, p. ix.
  11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynVqPnMQ2sI
  12. Quigley,Anglo-American Establishment, p. xi.
  13. Ibid. 14.www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeuF8rYgJPk
  14. Quigley,Anglo-American Establishment, p. x.
  15. Ibid., p.15.
  16. Ibid.
  17. Ibid., p.197.
  18. A.M. Gollin,Proconsul in Politics,p. 551, footnote.
  19. Lord Fisher,Memories and Records, vol. 1, p. 21.
  20. Niall Ferguson,House of Rothschild, vol. II, p. 319.
  21. Jim Macgregorand Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 201 et seq.
  22. Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
  23. Charles G. Palm and Dale Reed,Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives, p. 5. 25. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Libraryhttp://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
  24. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
  25. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library athttp://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
  26. Macgregor and Docherty,Prolonging the Agony, p 453 et seq.
  27. New York Times,5 February 1921.
  28. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library athttp://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
  29. New York Times,5 February 1921.
  30. Hoover Institution, Stanford University athttp://www.hoover.org/about/herbert-hoover
  31. Ian Cobain, The History Thieves, pp. 101-103.
  32. Ibid., pp. 119-120.
  33. Ibid., p. 109.
  34. 1bid., p. 160.
  35. T.P. Wiseman,Lying Historians: Seven Types of Mendacity.http://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/liverpool/9780859893817.001.0001/upso-9780859893817-chapter-4
  36. Peter Hoffer,The Historians Paradox, The Study of History in our Time, p.88. 39.http://www.johnccarleton.org/court_historians.html
  37. John Tosh,The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, pp.33, 65-66.
  38. Ibid., pp. 136-137.
  39. Herbert Butterfield,History and Human Relations, pp. 201-209.
  40. Ibid., p. 198.
  41. American Historical Association, Statement on Peer Review for Historical Research, (2005).https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/statement-on-peer-review-for-historical-research
  42. Dr. John O’Dowd, personal communication.
  43. http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf
  44. Ibid.
  45. http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d284
  46. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
  47. Ibid.
  48. Ibid.
  49. E. Fullbrook,Narrative Fixation in Economics, World Economics Association, London, 2016.
  50. Dr. John O’Dowd, personal communication.
  51. David Lowenthal,The Frailty of Historical Truth: Learning Why Historians Inevitably Fail,American Historical Association. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2013/the-frailty-of-historical-truth
  52. Holland v. United States, 348 U.S. 121, 75 S. Ct.127, 99 OL. Ed.150 [1954]
  53. Nicholas D’Ombrain,War Machinery and High Policy, preface, p.xiii.
  54. Ibid.
  55. List of Cabinet Papers, 1880–1914. PRO booklet.
  56. Michael Brock,H.H. Asquith letters to Venetia Stanley.
  57. Cabinet Papers, 1905-1918 Volume IV ref: FO 899/4.
  58. Harvey Broadbent,Gallipoli: One Great Deception?http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-24/30630

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