IMPERATIVE

P. GREANVILLE—Since we are talking here about the global plutocracy’s megaphone, ably directed by an army of hidden persuaders, the money and resources—public and private—for the manufacturing of elaborate lies are inexhaustible.  In 1984 Orwell envisioned a shameless tyranny with a “Ministry of Truth” in charge of manufacturing lies and escapist fantasies 24/7.  Orwell, who despite his participation in the Spanish Civil War as an anarchist sympathizer was actually no real lefty (but a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government), aimed 1984 and his equally famous satire Animal Farm at the Soviet Union. Orwell thought —or asked us to believe—that in the Soviet Union mankind had met the ultimate perfidy. He was alarmingly wrong then and he would be triple wrong today, if, surmounting his class prejudices and temperament,  he had examined with equanimity the true history of the world since the end of WW2, and the consequent rise of the Anglo-American empire to global supremacy.

The Yalta Agreements, then, did not award the Soviet Union the monopoly of influence in Eastern Europe, that is, the kind of exclusive influence that the Americans and the British already enjoyed, with Stalin’s silent approval, in Western Europe, even though they assigned “controlling influence” in Eastern Europe to the USSR.

The Yalta Agreements thus represented a considerable success for the Western Allies. It has often been said of Churchill that he had grave misgivings about the “concessions” that Roosevelt allegedly had made in the Crimean resort. In reality, he was totally euphoric when the conference ended,[19] and with good reason, since the British and Americans had fared far better at Yalta than they would have dared to hope when it started.

JACQUES PAUWELS—The [Western] elites had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.

In Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the elite is still very much focused on this task, clearly in the hope that soon nothing at all will be left of the welfare state. The fall of the Berlin Wall made it possible that we are now witnessing a return to the unbridled, ruthless capitalism of the nineteenth century – a catastrophe for ordinary people, for the demos, and therefore a major setback for the cause of democracy.

G H ELIASON—As journalist Robert Parry wrote in October 2016, the propaganda campaign in favor of military confrontation with Russia was driven by “a consensus among the major think tanks of Official Washington, where there is near universal support for Hillary Clinton, not because they all particularly like her, but because she has signaled a return to neocon/liberal-hawk strategies.”

STEVE WEISSMAN—”Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he’s told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator,” laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. “It used to be the CIA doing these things,” he tells Democracy Now. “I know that for a fact.” Now it’s the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.