Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Randi Nord

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

“Anti-imperialism to me means supporting nations in their struggle against my government's violent and exploitative influence.”

This week I spoke with Randi Nord. Nord is a Detroit-based journalist and activist. She is the co-founder of Geopolitics Alert. Her pieces have also appeared in MintPress News. We discussed anti-imperialism and its relevancy to some of the more pressing questions of the period, especially in lieu of the ongoing US-led wars in Syria and Yemen.

DH: Tell me a little about yourself and the genesis of your political development.

Nord

RN: I'm from a working-class family in metro Detroit. Two years after I graduated high school the recession hit. During this time, I was attending college at Wayne State University but didn't see a future through that route beyond hefty tuition, debt, and an uncertain job future so I dropped out.

I ended up moving to Hawaii for three years. I moved with a little money from my job and lived with some people I knew there. I got a job working as a maintenance supervisor/handy person at hotel spas. It was here my eyes were really opened to the devastating effects of global neoliberal capitalism and the history of settler colonialism. I was always aware of our problems in the Detroit area, but living in Hawaii allowed me to see this from another perspective. All of this and watching the Iraq war unfold as a teenager really set the anti-imperialist path for me. I know that US imperialism is really the biggest threat to not only world peace but sustainability and growth around the globe.

DH: You are the co-founder of Geopolitics Alert. What is Geopolitics Alert and what prompted its formation?

RN: My partner Jim Carey and I had been writing for a few different indie outlets like The Fifth Column and Pontiac Tribune. Our topic of writing has always been the war machine and we noticed there weren't many US-based sites focusing on this niche so we decided to fill this gap. The war in Syria was really starting to take off (we launched the site a few months after Russia officially started taking action) and the US-backed Saudi war against Yemen was starting to get hot. We really wanted to provide a non-sensational and fact-based counterweight to war propaganda with hard news and analysis.

DH: Black Agenda Report publishes from a Black left perspective, which has historically been fundamentally anti-imperialist. What does anti-imperialism mean to you in the context of your work? Why is it so hard for Americans and Westerners to adopt anti-imperialism in their media/organizing efforts?

RN: I think it's really hard for people to be genuinely anti-imperialist for a few reasons. For one thing, people don't know anything else. You mention the Black struggle and its anti-imperialist roots. I think that's because Black people in the struggle already have a fundamental understanding of who the oppressor is and how oppression operates. The general population only knows war: there's never been a time in our lives when the US hasn't been at war with several countries. It's just "the way things are" which makes a world without US war seem so far-fetched that it's an idealistic pipe dream.

To top it off, the US population is isolated. It's not easy to find anti-imperialist perspectives if you aren't specifically looking for them.

Another reason is that anti-imperialism is very unpopular. The media does a great job of demonizing US [ruling class] enemies, so it takes very strong and educated principles to stand with nations and leaders who are labeled dictators and murderers with backward ideologies. I think Iran and the DPRK are good examples of this.

Anti-imperialism to me means supporting nations in their struggle against my government's violent and exploitative (to put it lightly) influence. My job is to offer support and not criticism. I think it's really that simple.

DH: In this series, I have paid particularly close attention to American and Western imperialism's obsession with Russia and its impact on independent left-wing media. Corporations such as Google and Facebook have actively censored left-wing media claiming outlets such as Black Agenda Report promote "fake news" and act as “useful idiots” for Russia. How does the team at Geopolitics Alert view the ongoing imperialist campaign against Russia and its link to the repression of independent media?

RN: Other than seldom contributors, my partner Jim and I are the only ones who work on the site so we're the "team" haha. I don't want to show weakness because we won't back down. But to be honest, it frightens us quite a bit. It seems like no one remembers the Cold War and no one wants to take this Russia hysteria seriously. In fact, other "leftists" are contributing to it with their own conspiracies.

These "fake news" accusations are just a few degrees of separation away from labeling people like myself as "Russian operatives." A reader recently emailed to let us know that an EU-sanctioned website had listed something we published as "Kremlin propaganda." Things could get real really quick. At the same time, our work is needed now more than ever to combat this narrative and show readers who the real aggressor is.

I think this just shows that we (us and other outlets like us) are making waves and doing our job because they clearly consider us a real threat. As the US war machine continues to fail in Syria I think it will get worse too.

DH: In studying your work, I've noticed a special emphasis on the ongoing wars in Yemen and Syria. Yemen and Syria rarely garner attention from the corporate media, and when they do, it is not the kind of attention that helps Americans and Westerners understand their government's role in the destruction it has created in these countries. Could you tell readers at Black Agenda Report some of the latest developments on the ground in Yemen and Syria? And where does Syria and Yemen fit in the broader geopolitical context?

RN: We cover Yemen and Syria so much because those seem to be the biggest victims of imperialism right now -- at least in terms of physical casualties. Other areas are certainly important, but we only have so much time in the day and this is where people are dying because of the United States.

What the "work" of the US/UK-Saudi coalition really looks like. Children victims of a recent airstrike. (Geopolitics Alert) This is naturally never shown or talked about on the "respectable" mainstream media, who are too busy whitewashing and egging on the imperialist criminals.

I think the biggest thing readers should know is that the empire is failing in both of these theaters and everywhere really. Yemen's revolutionary government recently took full control of the capital after the death of the former President Saleh, so the US and Saudis are still reeling from this. The entire war against Yemen has not only completely failed all objectives but absolutely backfired. They wanted to smash Yemen's resistance, Ansarullah (the Houthis), but instead, Ansarullah started producing long-range missiles and grew stronger in every way. Plus, the Saudis are losing influence in Yemen's south to the UAE. That's why they just carpet bomb and starve civilians to death: they don't know what else to do to "win." It's disgusting.

“The entire war against Yemen has not only completely failed all objectives but absolutely backfired.”

I think the biggest shift happening in Syria right now is with Turkey going rogue. It's been interesting watching the United States try to balance support for the Kurds against the Syrian government for years while trying to stay friends with Erdogan.

The thing people should understand is that Iran is the "final boss" in both of these wars. If Syria were to fall, the US would go after Iran next. That was a big reason for launching their war against Syria in the first place: take out Iran's allies in the region and cut off Hezbollah's supply route.

Although Iran does not support Ansarullah with military equipment and weapons, the US SAYS they do. The real problem is that they don't want an anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist government on the Arabian Peninsula controlling the Red Sea and giving the civilian population in the monarchies any ideas. The mere possibility that a Yemeni government could ally with the Iran axis is enough for the US to say they already do and carry out military intervention accordingly.

DH: With all of that said, what are some of the bigger challenges to independent journalism in the current political context?

RN: I think the biggest problem right now is reaching people who need to hear our message. Mainstream outlets with large budgets can pay to rank well in search engines and keep their content in news feeds. Plus, they're trying to promote the idea that anyone who promotes an anti-war narrative (and really a non-centrist narrative) is a Russian bot. So breaking the echo chamber is also difficult. It's important to produce digestible content for a variety of readers. You need to remember your mission and goal and write for a broad audience in this field. We don't write for leftists, we write for the working class who wants to understand US wars.

DH: Do you contribute to other projects and organizations aside from Geopolitics Alert?

RN: I also contribute at MintPress News and I organize with local groups in Detroit. A big struggle in Detroit right now is the gentrification and illegal tax foreclosures which are kicking families out of their homes and calling it "revitalization." Detroit is always struggling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

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

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

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

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

U.S. DROPS FLEAS WITH BUBONIC PLAGUE ON NORTH KOREA; MAINSTREAM MEDIA YAWNS

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

By DAVID SWANSON
Crossposted with The Daily Sheeple & Global Research

First published on SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

This happened some 63 years ago, but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it, and it’s generally known only outside the United States, I’m going to treat it as news.

Here in our little U.S. bubble we’ve heard of a couple versions of a film called The Manchurian Candidate. We’ve heard of the general concept of “brainwashing” and may even associate it with something evil that the Chinese supposedly did to U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. And I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people who’ve heard of these things have at least a vague sense that they’re bullshit.

If you didn’t know, I’ll break it to you right now: people cannot actually be programed like the Manchurian candidate, which was a work of fiction. There was never the slightest evidence that China or North Korea had done any such thing. And the CIA spent decades trying to do such a thing, and finally gave up.

I’d also be willing to bet that very few people know what it was that the U.S. government promoted the myth of “brainwashing” to cover up. During the Korean War, the United States bombed virtually all of North Korea and a good bit of the South, killing millions of people. It dropped massive quantities of Napalm. It bombed dams, bridges, villages, houses. This was all-out mass-slaughter. But there was something the U.S. government didn’t want known, something deemed unethical in this genocidal madness.

As usual, Frankenheimer's film was a complete inversion of the truth. The story also has that absurd anti-communist cliché reeking of Fascist lies, that the sinister puppeteers (the parents of the brainwashed killer) were actually rich members of the upper class. Yea the 1% is crawling with commies.

It is well documented that the United States dropped on China and North Korea insects and feathers carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague. This was supposed to be a secret at the time, and the Chinese response of mass vaccinations and insect eradication probably contributed to the project’s general failure (hundreds were killed, but not millions). But members of the U.S. military taken prisoner by the Chinese confessed to what they had been a part of, and confessed publicly when they got back to the United States.

Some of them had felt guilty to begin with. Some had been shocked at China’s decent treatment of prisoners after U.S. depictions of the Chinese as savages. For whatever reasons, they confessed, and their confessions were highly credible, were borne out by independent scientific reviews, and have stood the test of time.

How to counter reports of the confessions? The answer for the CIA and the U.S. military and their allies in the corporate media was “brainwashing,” which conveniently explained away whatever former prisoners said as false narratives implanted in their brains by brainwashers.

And 300 million of so Americans more or less sort of believe that craziest-ever dog-ate-my-homework concoction to this day!

The propaganda struggle was intense. The support of the Guatemalan government for the reports of U.S. germ warfare in China were part of the U.S. motivation for overthrowing the Guatemalan government; and the same cover-up was likely part of the motivation for the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson.

There isn’t any debate that the United States had been working on bio-weapons for years, at Fort Detrick — then Camp Detrick — and numerous other locations. Nor is there any question that the United States employed the top bio-weapons killers from among both the Japanese and the Nazis from the end of World War II onward. Nor is there any question that the U.S. tested such weapons on the city of San Francisco and numerous other locations around the United States, and on U.S. soldiers. There’s a museum in Havana featuring evidence of years of U.S. bio-warfare against Cuba. We know that Plum Island, off the tip of Long Island, was used to test the weaponization of insects, including the ticks that created the ongoing outbreak of Lyme Disease.

Dave Chaddock’s book This Must Be the Place, which I found via Jeff Kaye’s review, collects the evidence that the United States indeed tried to wipe out millions of Chinese and North Koreans with deadly diseases.

“What does it matter now?” I can imagine people from only one corner of the earth asking.

I reply that it matters that we know the evils of war and try to stop the new ones. U.S. cluster bombs in Yemen, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. guns in Syria, U.S. white phosphorus and Napalm and depleted uranium used in recent years, U.S. torture in prison camps, U.S. nuclear arsenals being expanded, U.S. coups empowering monsters in Ukraine and Honduras, U.S. lies about Iranian nukes, and indeed U.S. antagonization of North Korea as part of that never-yet-ended war — all of these things can be best confronted by people aware of a centuries-long pattern of lying.

And I reply, also, that it is not yet too late to apologize. [And rectify policies, although that will have to wait for a real revolution.—Eds.]

This is the TGP version of this post, in conjunction with The Daily Sheeple.

We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details).

Contributed by David Swanson of Global Research.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Swanson is a leading US bourgeois antiwar activist. Swanson co-founded the website After Downing Street (now War Is A Crime .org), based around the U.S. congressional concern of the Downing Street memo. Additionally, Swanson embarked on a campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney^[2] through the now defunct website ConvictBushCheney.Org^[3] as well as contributing to the introduction of Dennis Kucinich’s The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush. Despite his antiwar stance, Swanson, surprisingly, maintains operational affiliations with the Democrats. As an author, David Swanson has written several books; Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union^[8] (2009), War Is a Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011) and War No More: The Case for Abolition (2013).

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

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

Things to ponder

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

[premium_newsticker id=”211406″]

War Monger and War Criminal John Bolton to Head Trump’s National Security Council

by DAVE LINDORFF

Bolton: Vile to his core, this draft-dodging psychopath is impossible to fathom. Such men are chosen—repeatedly—to make American policy.

John Bolton, the man named this past week by President Trump to be his new national security advisor, is like that hand from a bloated, rotting corpse of the torturing rapist local yokel that erupts from the water at the very end of the movie “Deliverance,” returning to remind its former victims of the horrors they had endured earlier and thought they’d finally rid themselves of.

One of the most bloodthirsty members of a gang of war-mongering neo-conservatives (almost all, like him, having no military experience themselves), who ran foreign policy and launched wars of aggression during the Bush/Cheney administration, Bolton is a man who for years has been pushing for an imperial US policy to combat domestic economic decline. According this numbskull notion, Washington should attempt to maintain US primacy in the world affairs through force of arms, picking fights, starting wars, overthrowing governments and playing existentially risky games of chicken with nuclear powers like Russia and China. He and the wacko ideology known as neoconservatism, have returned with Bolton as a National Security Advisor, in this case to advise a president who thinks nuclear weapons are meant to be used.

Now I’m not one who thinks that military experience should be seen as some kind of prerequisite, much less a positive attribute, for appointment to a top federal post, even when that post has to do with military affairs or foreign affairs. Certainly a well-educated and thoughtful person, male or female, with no military experience, could do a better job running the Pentagon, the State Department — or the National Security Council — than a host of veterans of those posts who boasted rows of medals and colorful honors on the uniforms they either wore or kept as souvenirs in their closets.

That said, when someone like Bolton, who is a fanatic warmonger, has repeatedly advocated “pre-emptive” war as the go-to option for dealing with an international dispute, and is ready at the slightest assertion of independence on the part of any foreign power to call for bombing and for sending tens or hundreds of thousands of US troops into harm’s and harming’s way, I would insist that such a person, before being placed in a position of significant power and influence in the US government have had, as a bare minimum, at least some actual experience with combat. Instead we have an apparently perfectly healthy 69-year-old nut-job who turned 18 in 1967, right at the height of the US war against Vietnam, but who, despite being an ardent supporter of that war, used student deferments and who knows what other slippery excuses to avoid fighting in it, now being made Trump’s latest top advisor on issues of war and peace.

We’ve seen over the past two or three decades how disastrous it can be when administrations headed by or filled at the top with policy-makers who are so-called “chicken hawks” — people who advocate for war as a solution to diplomatic issues but who have never worn a uniform or who, even if they have spent a little time in a branch of the military, have never faced or even fired a bullet in anger or watched comrades die in battle. President Reagan, whose only war “experience” was as an actor, sicced the US military on two tiny nations — Grenada and Panama — with deadly consequences for local civilians, President Clinton, who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, happily waged a brutal and one-sided air-“war” against Serbia. George Bush , who hid out from the Vietnam War he supposedly supported politically by signing up for the Texas Air National Guard, carefully checking a box in his enlistment papers saying he did not want to be available for foreign assignment, as commander-in-chief launched two wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which conflicts are still raging almost 20 years later, with as many as 1 million mostly civilian deaths and multiples of that number displaced. Barack Obama, who never wore a uniform, launched a disastrous and bloody war against Libya which led to the overthrow and murder of that country’s leader and left the country in a state of murderous chaos from which it has yet to emerge, launched and ran a murder campaign by drone that killed mostly innocent civilians including kids, and ordered a $1-trillion “modernization” of America’s nuclear arsenal, including the development of small “usable” nuclear bombs.

Now we have President Trump, who famously ducked the draft during the Vietnam War by claiming to have “bone spurs” (surely the shabbiest excuse for avoiding military service since “flat feet” became popular among cowards during World War II). But Trump isn’t alone in the current White House in seeing “war as the answer,” even asking his advisors, at one point, ‘Why do we have nuclear weapons if we can’t use them?” He has also appointed, as national security advisor, a string of pro-war centurion poseurs like himself. The first of this string of crazies (at least briefly until he was caught by and ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI) was Gen. Michael Flynn, whose only actual “combat” experience was the “invasion” of Grenada. Flynn was followed by the grossly resume-inflating Gen. H. R. McMaster [1], who publicly and apparently privately until his forced departure from the National Security Advisor post last week was pushing mad idea of having the US risk a “limited” military attack on North Korea intended to give that country’s leadership a “bloody nose” in the name of demonstrating US seriousness. (At least the draft-dodging Bush Jr. consigliere Dick Cheney, while never actually firing a gun in battle, had the experience of inadvertently shooting his friend and host in the face and chest during a “canned” quail hunt.)

Now that McMaster has been pushed out by Trump, with his appointment of the truly bloody-minded John Bolton, we’re back to 1991. While Trump may have, back during the campaign and during his early months as president, genuinely favored ending the US policy of permanent war that has seen the US military budget grow to where it annually consumes well over half the total federal discretionary budget, and though he may have intended to seek friendlier relations with Russia, with his Bolton appointment as head of the NSC, we’re back in the darkest days of the Cold War. But even worse, the Trump administration is contemplating hot wars with at least two significant powers, Iran and North Korea, the latter armed with dozens of nuclear weapons and rockets capable of delivering them — even to the US.

While the first two of Trump’s National Security Advisors were three-star generals of dubious combat experience and even more dubious foreign policy judgement, now we’ll have a National Security Advisor with zero time even wearing a uniform — a true example of a “chicken hawk.”

Cue the dueling banjos music!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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

CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Comment here or on our Facebook Group page.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

What happened to the West I was born in?!

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. AVOIDANCE OF NUCLEAR WAR DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

By The Saker

Frankly, I am awed, amazed and even embarrassed. I was born in Switzerland, lived most of my life there, I also visited most of Europe, and I lived in the USA for over 20 years. Yet in my worst nightmares I could not have imagined the West sinking as low as it does now. I mean, yes, I know about the false flags, the corruption, the colonial wars, the NATO lies, the abject subservience of East Europeans, etc. I wrote about all that many times. But imperfect as they were, and that is putting it mildly, I remember Helmut Schmidt, Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, even Chirac! And I remember what the Canard Enchaîné used to be, or even the BBC. During the Cold War the West was hardly a knight in white shining armor, but still – rule of law did matter, as did at least some degree of critical thinking.

I am now deeply embarrassed for the West. And very, very afraid.

All I see today is a submissive herd lead by true, bona fide, psychopaths (in a clinical sense of the word)

And that is not the worst thing.

The worst thing is the deafening silence, the way everybody just looks away, pretends like it “ain’t my business” or, worse, actually takes all this grotesque spectacle seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you people?! Have you all been turned into zombies?! WAKE UP!!!!!!!

Let me carefully measure my words here and tell you the blunt truth.

Since the Neocon coup against Trump the West is now on exactly the same course as Nazi Germany was in, roughly, the mid 1930s.

Oh sure, the ideology is different, the designated scapegoat also. But the mindset is *exactly* the same.

Same causes produce the same effects. But this time around, there are weapons on both sides which make the Dresden Holocaust looks like a minor spark.

So now we have this touching display of “western solidarity” not with UK or the British people, but with the City of London. [Britain's "Wall Street"]. Now ain’t that touching?!

Let me ask you this: what has been the central feature of Britain’s policies towards Europe, oh, let’s say since the Middle-Ages?

That’s right: starting wars in Europe.

And this time around you think it’s different?

Does: “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior” somehow not apply to the UK?!

Let me also tell you this: when Napoleon and Hitler attacked Russia she was undergoing deep crises and was objectively weak (really! research it for yourself!). In both cases Russian society was deeply torn by internal contradictions and the time for attack was ideal.

Not today.

So I ask this simple question: do you really want to go to war against a fully united nuclear Russia?

You think that this is hyperbole?

Think again.

The truth is that the situation today is infinitely worse than the Cuban missile crisis. First, during the Cuban missile crisis there were rational people on both sides. Today there is NOT ONE SINGLE RATIONAL PERSON LEFT IN A POSITION OF POWER IN THE USA. Not ONE! Second, during the Cuban missile crisis all the news was reporting on was the crisis, the entire planet felt like we were standing at the edge of the abyss.

Today nobody seems to be aware that we are about to go to war, possibly a thermonuclear war, where casualties will be counted in the hundreds of millions.

All because of what?

Because the people of the West have accepted, or don’t even know, that they are ruled by an ugly gang of ignorant, arrogant psychopaths.

At the very least this situation shows this:

Representative democracy does not work.

The rule of law only applies to the weak and poor.

Western values have now been reduced to a sad joke.

Capitalism needs war and a world hegemony to survive.

The AngloZionist Empire is about to collapse, the only open question is how and at what cost.

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ight now they are expelling Russian diplomats en masse and they are feeling very strong and manly. Polish and Ukrainian politicians are undergoing a truly historical surge in courage and self-confidence! (hiding, as they do, behind Anglo firepower)

The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made preparations for war in Europe. And Russia is ready. NATO sure ain’t! Oh, they have the numbers and they think they are strong. The truth is that these NATO midgets have no idea of what is about to hit them, when the Russians go to war these NATO statelets won’t even understand what is happening to them. Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the continental US.

I was born in a Russian military family and I studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all my life. I can absolutely promise you this, please don’t doubt it for one second: Russia will not back down and, if cornered, she will wipe out your entire civilization. The Russians really don’t want war, they fear it (as they should!) and they will do everything to avoid it. But if attacked then expect a response of absolutely devastating violence. Don’t take it from me, take it from Putin who clearly said so himself and who, at least on that issue, is supported by about 95% of the population. From the Eastern Crusades to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, enough is enough, and the Russians will not take one more western attack, especially not one backed by nuclear firepower. Again, please ponder Putin’s words very, very carefully: “what need would we have for a world if there is no Russia?“

All that for what? The USA and Russia have NO objective reasons to do anything but to collaborate (the Russians are absolutely baffled the fact the leaders of the USA seem to be completely oblivious to this simple fact). Okay, the City of London [Britain's financial nucleus] does have a lot of reasons to want Russia gone and silent. As Gavin Williamson, the little soy-boy in charge of UK “defense”, so elegantly put it, Russia should “go away and shut up”. Right. Let me tell you – it ain’t happening! Britannia will be turned into a heap of radioactive ashes long before Russia goes away or shuts up. That is simply a fact.

What baffles me is this: do American leaders really want to lose their country in behalf of a small nasty clique of arrogant British pompous asses who think that they still are an Empire? Did you even take a look at Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Gavin Williamson? Are you really ready to die in defense of the interest of these degenerates?!

I don’t get it and nobody in Russia does.

Yeah, I know, all they did is expel some diplomats. And the Russians will do the same. So what? But that’s missing the point!

The young march against guns in America. Granted, it's an important issue, but the cure lies way deeper than restricting gun sales, it's a matter of building a true democracy, a healthy culture, and destroying the imperialism parasite that will murder humanity, and America along with it. Marches like this should be taking place every week, at least against the drift to nuclear war, the lies of the media, and the deranged adventures being planed in the darkest recesses of the empire.

LOOK NOT WHERE WE ARE BUT WHERE WE ARE HEADING!!

You can get 200,000 anti–gun (sigh, roll-eyes) protesters in DC but NOBODY AT ALL ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR?!

What is wrong with you people?!

What happened to the West where I was born in in 1963?

My God, is this really the end of it all?

Am I the only one who sees this slow-motion train-wreck taking us all over the precipice?

If you can, please give a reason to still hope.

Right now I don’t see many.

—The Saker

PS: yes, I know. The rules of the blog prohibit CAPS as this is considered shouting. Okay, but this time around I AM TRYING TO SHOUT! So, for this one time only, feel free to use caps if you want. The world badly needs some shouting right now, even virtual shouting.

ABOUT THE SAKER

THE SAKER is the nom de guerre of a former Russian-born military and geopolitical analyst, working at one point for the West. He has described his former career as that of "the proverbial 'armchair strategist', with all the flaws which derive from that situation. Explaining his transformation, he states: "Before the war in Bosnia I had heard the phrase "truth is the first casualty of war" but I had never imagined that this could be quite so literally true. Frankly, this war changed my entire life and resulted in a process of soul-searching which ended up pretty much changing my politics 180 degrees. This is a long and very painful story which I do not want to discuss here, but I just want to say that this difference between what I was reading in the press and in the UNPROFOR reports ended up making a huge difference in my entire life. Again, NOT A SINGLE ASPECT OF THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE WAS TRUE, not one. You would get much closer to the truth if you basically did a 'negative' of the official narrative.” Like The Greanville Post, with which it is now allied in his war against official disinformation, the Saker's site, VINEYARD OF THE SAKER, is the hub of an international network of sites devoted to fighting the "billion-dollar deception machinery" supporting the empire's wars against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and any other independent nation opposing or standing in the way of Washington's drive for global hegemony. The Saker is published in more than half a dozen languages. A Saker is a very large falcon, native to Europe and Asia.

Why America’s Major News-Media Must Change Their Thinking

BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

Contrary to the myth that the American media was once a reliable and honest source of news, the fact is that it has always been a mendacious tool in the service of the national and global plutocracies, the only difference being that in the present era it has degenerated from an erratic and mediocre performance to a totalitarian level. In all likelihood, a well informed public would have never permitted criminal meddling and adventures in Iran, Central America, Korea, Vietnam and scores of other brutally victimised countries. The inherent criminality and hypocrisy of US imperialist foreign policy would have been gradually but surely revealed. —PG

America’s ‘news’-media possess the mentality that characterizes a dictatorship, not a democracy. This will be documented in the linked-to empirical data which will be subsequently discussed. But, first, here is what will be documented by those data, and which will make sense of these data:

In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor, perhaps even more disapproval than approval. So, whereas in a democracy, the public widely approve of both the government and the head-of-state; in a dictatorship, they don’t.

In a dictatorship, the ‘news’-media hide reality from the public, in order to serve the government — not the public. But the quality of government that the regime delivers to its public cannot be hidden as the lies continually pile up, and as the promises remain unfulfilled, and as the public find that despite all of the rosy promises, things are no better than before, or are even becoming worse. Trust in such a government falls, no matter how much the government lies and its media hide the fact that it has been lying. Though a ‘democratic’ election might not retain in power the same leaders, it retains in power the same regime (be it the richest 0.1%, or the richest 0.01%, or The Party, or whatever the dictatorship happens to be). That’s because it’s a dictatorship: it represents the same elite of power-holding insiders, no matter what. It does not represent the public. That elite — whatever it is — is referred to as the “Deep State,” and the same Deep State can control more than one country, in which case there is an empire, which nominally is headed by the head-of-state of its leading country (this used to be called an “Emperor”), but which actually consists of an alliance between the aristocracies within all these countries; and, sometimes, the nominal leading country is actually being led, in its foreign policies, by wealthier aristocrats in the supposedly vassal nations. But no empire can be a democracy, because the residents in no country want to be governed by any foreign power: the public, in every land, want their nation to be free — they want democracy, no dictatorship at all, especially no dictatorship from abroad.

In order for the elite to change, a revolution is required, even if it’s only to a different elite, instead of to a democracy. So, if there is no revolution, then certainly it’s the same dictatorship as before. The elite has changed (and this happens at least as often as generations change), but the dictatorship has not. And in order to change from a dictatorship to a democracy, a revolution also is required, but it will have to be a revolution that totally removes from power the elite (and all their agents) who had been ruling. If this elite had been the nation’s billionaires and its centi-millionaires who had also been billionaire-class donors to political campaigns (such as has been proven to be the case in the United States), then those people, who until the revolution had been behind the scenes producing the bad government, need to be dispossessed of their assets, because their assets were being used as their weapons against the public, and those weapons need (if there is to be a democracy) to be transferred to the public as represented by the new and authentically democratic government. If instead the elite had been a party, then all of those individuals need to be banned from every sort of political activity in the future. But, in either case, there will need to be a new constitution, and a consequent new body of laws, because the old order (the dictatorship) no longer reigns — it’s no longer in force after a revolution. That’s what “revolution” means. It doesn’t necessarily mean “democratic,” but sometimes it does produce a democracy where there wasn’t one before. The idea that every revolution is democratic is ridiculous, though it’s often assumed in ‘news’-reports. In fact, coups (which the U.S. Government specializes in like no other) often are a revolution that replaces a democracy by a dictatorship (such as the U.S. Government did to Ukraine in 2014, for example, and most famously before that, did to Iran in 1953). (Any country that perpetrates a coup anywhere is a dictatorship over the residents there, just the same as is the case when any invasion and occupation of a country are perpetrated upon a country. The imposed stooges are stooges, just the same. No country that imposes coups and/or invasions/occupations upon any government that has not posed an existential threat against the residents of that perpetrating country, supports democracy; to the exact contrary, that country unjustifiably imposes dictatorships; it spreads its own dictatorship, which is of the imperialistic type, and any government that spreads its dictatorship is evil and needs to be replaced — revolution is certainly justified there.)

This is how to identify which countries are democracies, and which ones are not: In a democracy, the public are served by the government, and thus are experiencing improvement in their lives and consequently approve of the job-performance of their head-of-state, and they trust the government. But in a dictatorship, none of these things is true.

In 2014, a Japanese international marketing-research firm polled citizens in each of ten countries asking whether they approve or disapprove of the job-performance of their nation’s head-of-state, and Harvard then provided an English-translated version online for a few years, then eliminated that translation from its website; but, fortunately, the translation had been web-archived and so is permanent here (with no information however regarding methodology or sampling); and it shows the following percentages who approved of the job-performance of their President or other head-of-state in each of the given countries, at that time:

China (Xi) 90%

Russia (Putin) 87%

India (Modi) 86%

South Africa (Zuma) 70%

Germany (Merkel) 67%

Brazil (Roussef) 63%

U.S. (Obama) 62%

Japan (Abe) 60%

UK (Cameron) 55%

France (Hollande) 48%

In January 2018, the global PR firm Edelman came out with the latest in their annual series of scientifically polled surveys in more than two dozen countries throughout the world, tapping into, actually, some of the major criteria within each nation indicating whether or not the given nation is more toward the dictatorship model, or more toward the democracy model. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer survey showed that “Trust in Government” (scored and ranked on page 39) is 44% in Russia, and is only 33% in the United States. Trust in Government is the highest in China: 84%. The U.S. and Russia are the nuclear super-powers; and the U.S. and China are the two economic super-powers; so, these are the world’s three leading powers; and, on that single measure of whether or not a country is democratic, China is the global leader (#1 of 28), Russia is in the middle (#13 of 28), and U.S. ranks at the bottom of the three, and near the bottom of the entire lot (#21 of 28). (#28 of 28 is South Africa, which, thus — clearly in retrospect — had a failed revolution when it transitioned out of its apartheid dictatorship. That’s just a fact, which cannot reasonably be denied, given this extreme finding. Though the nation’s leader, Zuma, was, according to the 2014 Japanese study, widely approved by South Africans, his Government was overwhelmingly distrusted. This distrust indicates that the public don’t believe that the head-of-state actually represents the Government. If the head-of-state doesn’t represent the Government, the country cannot possibly be a democracy: the leader might represent the people, but the Government doesn’t.)

When the government is trusted but the head-of-state is not, or vice-versa, there cannot be a functioning democracy. In other words: if either the head-of-state, or the Government, is widely distrusted, there’s a dictatorship at that time, and the only real question regarding it, is: What type of dictatorship is this?

These figures — the numbers reported here — contradict the ordinary propaganda; and, so, Edelman’s trust-barometer on each nation’s ‘news’-media (which are scored and ranked on page 40) might also be considered, because the natural question now is whether unreliable news-media might have caused this counter-intuitive (in Western countries) rank-order. However, a major reason why this media-trust-question is actually of only dubious relevance to whether or not the given nation is a democracy, is that to assume that it is, presumes that trust in the government can be that easily manipulated — it actually can’t. Media and PR can’t do that; they can’t achieve it. Here is a widespread misconception: Trust in government results not from the media but from a government’s having fulfilled its promises, and from the public’s experiencing and seeing all around themselves that they clearly have been fulfilled; and lying ‘news’-media can’t cover-up that reality, which is constantly and directly being experienced by the public.

However, even if trust in the ‘news’-media isn’t really such a thing as might be commonly hypothesized regarding trust in the government, here are those Edelman findings regarding the media, for whatever they’re worth regarding the question of democracy-versus-dictatorship: Trust in Media is the highest, #1, in China, 71%; and is 42% in #15 U.S.; and is 35% in #20 Russia. (A July 2017 Marist poll however found that only 30% of Americans trust the media. That’s a stunning 12% lower than the Edelman survey found.) In other words: Chinese people experience that what they encounter in their news-media becomes borne-out in retrospect as having been true, but only half of that percentage of Russians experience this; and U.S. scores nearer to Russia than to China on this matter. (Interestingly, Turkey, which scores #7 on trust-in-government, scores #28 on trust-in-media. Evidently, Turks find that their government delivers well on its promises, but that their ‘news’-media often deceive them. A contrast this extreme within the Edelman findings is unique. Turkey is a special case, regarding this.)

I have elsewhere reported regarding other key findings in that 2018 Edelman study.

According to all of these empirical findings, the United States is clearly not more of a democracy than it is a dictatorship. This particular finding from these studies has already been overwhelmingly (and even more so) confirmed in the world’s only in-depth empirical scientific study of whether or not a given country is or is not a “democracy”: This study (the classic Gilens and Page study) found, incontrovertibly, that the U.S. is a dictatorship — specifically an aristocracy, otherwise commonly called an “oligarchy,” and that it’s specifically a dictatorship by the richest, against the public.

Consequently, whenever the U.S. Government argues that it intends to “spread democracy” (such as it claims in regards to Syria, and to Ukraine), it is most-flagrantly lying — and any ‘news’-medium that reports such a claim without documenting (such as by linking to this article) its clear and already-proven falsehood (which is more fully documented here than has yet been done anywhere, since the Gilens and Page study is here being further proven by these international data), is no real ‘news’-medium at all, but is, instead, a propaganda-vehicle for the U.S. Government, a propaganda-arm of a dictatorship — a nation that has been overwhelmingly proven to be a dictatorship, not a democracy.

The American public seem to know this (though the ‘news’-media routinely deny it by using phrases such as ‘America’s democracy’ in the current tense, not merely as referrng to some past time): A scientifically designed Monmouth University poll of 803 American adults found — and reported on March 19th — that 74% believed either probably or definitely that “a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy” (commonly called the “Deep State”) actually exists in America.

The question as asked was: “The term Deep State refers to the possible existence of a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy. Do you think this type of Deep State in the federal government definitely exists, probably exists, probably does not exist, or definitely does not exist?” 27% said “Definitely”; 47% said “Probably”; only 16% said “Probably not”; and only 5% said “Definitely not.”

In effect, then: 74% think America is a dictatorship; only 21% think it’s not. So: this isn’t only fact; it’s also widespread belief. How, then, can the American Government claim that when it invades a country like Iraq (2003), or like Libya (2011), or like Syria (2012-), or like Ukraine (by coup in 2014), it’s hoping to ‘bring democracy’ there? Only by lying. Even the vast majority of the American public now know this.

So: America’s major ‘news’-media will have to change their thinking, to become at least as realistic as the American public already are. The con on that, has evidently run its course. It simply discredits those ‘news’-media.

This article is a crosspost with strategic-culture.org

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]