Liberals Are Almost Supporting Ukraine More than Conservatives

CLAVDIVS AMERICANVS: I’m surprised I don’t see liberals virtue-signaling with Ukraine-themed face coverings.

Liberals are some of the worst pro-Ukie Russia-hating maniacs out there. A lot of them are calling for no-fly zones and direct attacks on Russia and Moscow. This makes sense because liberals and Democrats are the ones who went crazy with the McCarthyite BS about “Russia interfered with our election” and “Russia stole the election for Trump” (LOL), “Trump and the Republicans are with Russia”, on and on. The worst insult any liberal dishes out is “You are a Russian”, “You are Putin’s mouthpiece,” “How much does Russia pay you?”

Keep in mind that anything that goes against the Democrats in any way is “Russian propaganda.” It’s totally embarrassing that liberals would do this, but liberals were always some of the worst Cold Warriors of all because Republicans were always calling them Communists and fellow travelers so the Democrats were always in a dick-measuring contest with the Republicans about who could be more anti-Communist. Chris Dodd and Alan Cranston, two of the most liberal members of Congress, were the strongest supporters of the Death Squad Government in El Salvador.

My liberal Democrat father supported every US foreign policy objective ever. He supported every rightwing fascist CIA coup we ever indulged in. He supported all of the death squad democracies we supported. His saving grace was opposition to the Vietnam War, but that war was the last time that liberal Democrats took a principled antiwar position.

And he only changed on this after the Tet Offensive in 1968, but at least he changed. Tet was the signal for opinion change in the US on the war. Believe it or not, before Tet, a majority of Americans supported the war in Vietnam! After Tet for the first time, Americans turned on the war. Walter Cronkite, a great journalist and one of the last real journalists in the US where most are now glorified stenographers, famously turned against the war on national TV! He was a hero to many Americans and I watched him on the news many times.

As I recall it, General Westmoreland kept lying and saying we were winning the war from 1964-68. We were always just turning the corner and the light was always appearing at the end of the tunnel.  Like the suckers they are today, the majority of Americans fell for it.

With the Tet Offensive, it become obvious that he had been lying all along. The enemy was not defeated; instead it was stronger than ever. I remember my mother’s frustration at being lied to. People had had enough. They’d been told for four years and they were steadily winning and victory was coming any day now, but then Tet came and it showed that the enemy was stronger than ever.

This split extended after the war and led to investigations into the CIA, CIA/FBI assassinations, etc. This lasted for a few years and led to a reluctance to get involved in any foreign adventures involving blood and treasure as most of them do. This was called “The Vietnam War Syndrome” and a major goal of hawk monsters like Donald Rumsfeld (the murderer of Patrice Lumumba) and Dick Cheney declared war on the Vietnam War Syndrome.

Rumsfeld is the murderer of Patrice Lumumba when he was a DIA officer in the Congo and Cheney personally had Minnesota progressive Paul Wellstone killed in a plane crash and deliberately failed to stop the 911 attack when he could have. One of the stated purposes of the fake Iraq War was to get rid of the Vietnam Syndrome. So it appears we did get rid of it for a while. Trump then threatened to bring back the Vietnam War Syndrome with his neo-isolationism and skepticism about what he called “the forever wars” (and I thank him very much for using that term).

This infuriated the Deep State, the National Security Establishment (same thing), and the neoconservatives. These factions jumped right back into power as soon as Biden came aboard. It was directly to their escalations that this war in Ukraine ever happened at all. Under Trump it might not have happened.

Alt Left: Why Do “Liberal Democrats” Support US Foreign Policy to the Hilt?

Why do Americans support US foreign policy? Part of it might be apathy. They simply can’t be bothered. Americans don’t seem to care how many bombs we drop or people we kill as long as no Americans are getting hurt or killed. It’s a pretty sociopathic way of looking at the world.

Actually, it is not so much that they don’t care as they are brainwashed. Just about every “liberal Democrat” I know supports US foreign policy to the hilt. Every bomb we drop, every person we kill. They back it all the way. As finding out the truth about US foreign policy necessitates figuring out the constant to  regular lies, tricks, provocations, and false flags, a reality-based assessment of US foreign policy quickly starts looking like very quickly like conspiracy theory.

Most “liberal Democrats” reject all so-called “conspiracy theory,” no matter how true it is, even when the MSM uncovers it.

Of course it is the MSM pushing all of these lies, scams, tricks, cons, and false flags, so they almost never blow the whistle on the conspiracy theory. Even when they do, no one seems to care. I remember the NY Times proved that the mortar attack that killed the US contractor was done by ISIS, not be the PMF. Most “liberal Democrats” I know just said so what, the PMF has probably done other bad things.

Liberal Democrats are horrific on foreign policy. Democratic Party foreign policy has always been reactionary. But all the Democrats in Congress go along with it and so does the media. It’s very hard to get Congressmen to go against US foreign policy, and the media basically never does, as they get most such news from the CIA anyway. Remember Operation Mockingbird?

There is a “bipartisan foreign policy consensus.” It was smashed with Vietnam, and the Deep State regarded this with horror and spent decades trying to get rid of the “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Now the consensus is back. Part of the problem is that in order to go against US foreign policy, you need to side with the so-called enemies of America. When Democrats go against foreign policy, Republicans immediately accuse them of supporting the enemies of America.

But it all goes deeper than that. I’ve thought about it a lot and when liberal Democrats can oppose US domestic policy, they are not saying America is bad. America’s just fine. It’s just the evil Republicans who are bad. America itself is still good. It’s just been hijacked by bad people.

But when you attack US foreign policy, you are attacking the Army! And basically you are saying that America is bad, America is evil. Because foreign policy is never seen as basically good but only bad when it gets hijacked by bad people called Republicans. Instead it’s that US foreign policy under Republicans and Democrats is always 10

The vast majority of liberal Democrats don’t want to say that. A lot of them just believe the “America is 10

Bottom line is “liberal Democrats” are complete crap. There’s nothing liberal about them! I respect Republicans more than these phonies. Republicans come right out and say they’re reactionaries and then act like them. At least they are consistent and true to their word. Liberal Democrats claim to be progressive but govern as reactionaries.

Ever notice that BLM and other woketards never attack US foreign policy? Like not even one time? Ever notice that they don’t even talk about economics? See? All they talk about is divide the working class Identity Politics Cultural Left insanity. Which for some odd reason gets the complete support of the US corporate class for reasons that are still uncertain for me. Those “hip, woke” corporations are still totally reactionary, like all corporations, on economics and foreign policy. They’re just left on cultural BS that doesn’t effect their bottom line or basic philosophy.

Alt Left: The Roots of World War 2 and the Holocaust: The Scapegoating of German Jews after World War 2

Polar Bear: Jews and Gentiles are conditioned to side with Jews. A dead horse beaten to bone dust, used as justification for present day evils. No one in the West is taught the other side by their school, media, etc.

Even I enjoyed killing Nazis in videogames at a very young age. I felt I was killing “evil.”

No one is taught the other side? What other side?

I’ve studied the Holocaust forever and for the life of me, I’m having a hard time seeing what the Jews did that was so horrible that it was necessary to massacre millions of them. And I’ve tried to see it from the Nazi point of view. Trust me.

They were scapegoated by the war veterans and the Freikorps. As World War 2 was heading towards its latter half, the Germans started losing and the country started getting very restless. There was never much justification in them getting involved in the first place in what was more than anything a war of conquest by the kaisers. They were losing a lot of men. Their troops were in retreat. The whole thing seemed hopeless.

Yet the army would not surrender and the meat-grinder in the West in Verdun and other places continued apace.

Poison gas was used in warfare, one of the most awful wartime events in the last 110 years. Those weapons should never be used. Many people were damaged for life by them. With a bullet you can often recover, but not so with gas. After the war, poison gas in war was outlawed, but some scofflaws like Saddam and Winston Churchill in Iraq and Iran continued to use them. There are rumors that the Syrians used poison gas to clear out Hama during the Muslim Brotherhood uprising of 1983. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did. Assad Senior was a brutal man.

Anyway, an antiwar movement sprang up made of liberal and leftwing types analogous to the ones that sprung up in the US during the Vietnam War. Many journalists, pundits, intellectuals, artists, movie people, entertainers, comedians, etc. got involved in this antiwar movement. Quite a few of them were Jews, but keep in mind that Jews were only

As in World War 2, the goodhearted antiwar people were accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There’s not much evidence that that is true. The German army started losing because the US got into the war, not because they lost the will to fight.

After a while, Germany surrendered and the terrible punishing conditions laid on Germany after the war helped lay the groundwork for World War 2 and even the Holocaust. After Germany was defeated, rightwing nationalist war veterans, many of them wounded or hurt by gas, including Adolf Hitler, developed the typical scapegoating that “we would have won if the Jews had not stabbed us in the back.”

This was just a classic projection defense whereby humans blame others for things that they do. People do this all the time. I live with someone who does nothing but this. He never admits he’s wrong. He just gets furious and projects away if you point out that he did anything wrong in any way.

It provided an excuse similar to that offered by rightwingers after the Vietnam War that the antiwar movement had effectively “stabbed us in the back” and “wouldn’t let us fight” and “made us fight with one armed tied behind out backs.” None of it was true but it’s better to blame other people than to admit you lost a war.

Instead of blaming the antiwar movement per se, for whatever reason, the Freikorps chose to blame Jews and possibly also socialists and Communists, possibly because prominent Jewish intellectuals, pundits, entertainers, musicians, comedians, and  movie people ended up being the well-known faces of the antiwar movement. Nevertheless the antiwar movement was very popular and it soon swept the land.

It made no sense to blame Jews for the antiwar movement as they were only

But maybe blaming liberals wasn’t so easy. Not that the Freikorps didn’t target them too, and socialists and Communists. The sad part of this was that, sure, a lot of Jews were in the antiwar movement, but it is shocking how many Jews fought very bravely for the Fatherland, for Germany. Probably far more Jews fought in the war than sat is out.

One of the most tragic images I have of Kristalnacht in 1933 is the many Jews who put on their WW2 uniforms, badges and all (many were decorated veterans), and stood in front of their stores bravely as the Nazi mobs roamed through the streets. But even these great patriotic Jewish men were not spared. That image makes me so sad.

“The stab in the back” – a myth – then got married to the horrible conditions imposed on Germany in the 20’s. As in, “the Jewish traitors stabbed us in the back, made us lose the war, and saddled us with these terrible conditions.” Don’t blame the warmongering Kaisers. Blame the Jews. People like to scapegoat others. During trying times, people want something to project the blame for the problem on because people always have to blame someone. Usually the scapegoats don’t have much to do with whatever crisis is going on.

If you want to do some research on the Holocaust and what exactly happened in those years, please do so. Those German Nazis were very bad people. Just terrible.

And most of those Jews had done nothing wrong at all. They were just families of men, women, and children. In Poland and the Ukraine, many were poor.  Elsewhere they tended to have some money. But it’s hard to understand what sort of crimes they might have committed that would make it legitimate to kill them.

Jews in Europe seemed to be on pretty good behavior in the 1920’s and 1930’s, certainly as opposed to today. Someone needs to show me what was so terrible about them that they deserved getting massacred. Those Jewish family people could have been you, me, or anyone. They were just Mom and Pop and the kids and often grandparents.

It was absolutely sickening what the Nazis did to those people and to a lot of other people too for that matter. It’s gross. It’s sick. It’s disgusting. It makes you want to vomit. I doubt if even one Jew out of those six million did something so terrible that they deserved to die for it. As such, I can’t support the killing of one Jew during World War 2. Or any of the other Nazi victims either. None of those people did the slightest thing wrong.

Jewish behavior now is an order of magnitude worse than it was in the 20’s and 30’s, and I’m still not advocating killing them en masse. Well, ok, I don’t mind killing Israeli soldiers. Kill them to your heart’s content. Please. And I don’t mind killing any of these adult kleptomaniac settlers living on stolen land. Kill em all for all I care. I can’t support killing kids because kids are kids. They don’t deserve killing and they had no choice that their parents decided to be kleptomaniac squatters.

Alt Left: A Bit on the Vietnam War from a Boy Who Had a Front-row Seat

In 1972, we were in the fourth year of Nixon’s stupid “Vietnamization” slow withdrawal, otherwise known as “peace with honor.” This idiot’s peace with honor crap got another 20,000 and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead. So Americans could have honor. 500,000 human beings dead so Americans could feel honorable. You know what? Fuck that. I was a sophomore in high school at the time.

I remember my father hated Nixon and Vietnamization. The Paris Peace Talks were going on all this time too. (((Henry Kissinger))) (The Evil One) was representing the US, so of course almost nothing got done. Nixon was bombing North Vietnam all this time. The Vietnamese had good anti-aircraft weapons (often manned by women!) and they shot down quite a few of our planes.

In addition, they had a lot of Russian MIG fighter jets. I’m not sure if it was Russians or Viets flying them, but they were very good. They were move than a match for our F-15’s and F-16’s, which were very good jets by the way. A lot of our jets got shot down in dogfights with MIGs. I believe he mined the harbor at Haiphong too. The schmuck even invaded Cambodia. I remember that. My father was livid.

This was also the time of My Lai. And the POW’s making broadcasts in North Vietnamese prisons.

Of course, over South Vietnam, we ruled the skies and our jets were never shot down. But we also used helicopters for air cover, and those things did get shot down a lot by Vietnamese troops on the ground. There was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, not really a road but endless paths cut through the thickest jungle on Earth. We flew planes over that trail all the time bombing it, but we never could shut it down, and the Viets still moved an incredible amount of men and equipment through that trail. The vehicles were often camouflaged with leaves.

Keep in mind that the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese Communists) were basically wiped out by the Tet Offensive. After Tet, the North Vietnamese took over the war and they were a much more formidable opponent – a real army – than the Viet Cong, who were also very good but specialized in guerrilla war.

We were also bombing the Hell out of Laos at the time. Most of the bombing was focused on the Plain of Jars in the north. A number of our jets got shot down over Laos too. I’m not sure how they did it. POW’s were not just in North Vietnam. The Pathet Lao (the Laotian Communists) held quite a few US POW’s too. Neither they nor the North Vietnamese treated the POW’s well, but the Pathet Lao were probably worse. One small group of POW’s managed to escape a Pathet Lao prison camp. It is quite an impressive story.

In Laos, we recruited the Hmong, primitive tribesmen who didn’t understand the meaning of the words communism or capitalism and couldn’t have cared less even if we did. We paid these suckers and bribed them to be our mercenaries.

The CIA also smuggled a vast amount of opium out of this area called the Golden Triangle via the Nugen Hand Operation.

In 1968, I walked precints with my father for the antiwar candidate, Gene (Clean Gene) McCarthy. I was 10 years old. I think my father supported the war but he turned after the Tet Offensive. That’s when US support for the war dipped below 5

Westmoreland kept telling us that we were winning all the time, getting closer and closer to total defeat of the enemy. The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” was used many times. Then Tet hit. The Viet Cong attacked every significant city and US military base in South Vietnam simultaneously. They infiltrated Saigon where there were guerrilla battles everywhere. They invaded the US embassy and almost took it over. The Marine guards shot the invaders, who lay on the front lawn, but some of the attaches had to retreat up to higher floors to be rescued.

This was the enemy, that was on its last legs, nearly defeated. Yeah right. Tet showed this for the massive lie it was. Light at the end of the tunnel my ass. Slowly getting better my ass. People had had enough. There was already an antiwar movement, but it really took off after Tet.

Back then we had an actual free independent First Amendment style media, unlike the stenographers, hacks, and state controlled media we have now. Journalists would actually get on TV and criticize a US war! It was during Tet that the great Walter Cronkite (yes, I saw him on TV many times) said the war was hopeless and he was withdrawing support for it. Can you imagine any US TV presstitute saying that about any US war nowadays? Hell no! A free press was a beautiful thing. Too bad we haven’t had one for a very long time in this country, a good 30 years, maybe more.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir, “Merry Xmas (War Is Over)”

John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir, “Merry Xmas, War Is Over,” 1972.

Ok, now isn’t that so nice? That feels real special, just right for the time of year too. Perfect fit. Really hits that sweet spot.

Enjoy.

As you can see, this is an antiwar song recorded at the height of the antiwar movement. Yes, the war was still going on in 1972.

Alt Left: A Bit about the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army

I remember watching the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. That was pretty impressive. Saw the whole thing on TV at age 10. I was already quite interested in politics and foreign affairs at that age. Mayor Daly, a Democrat, hauled his cop goons out and they set about busting heads. Not long after that was the Days of Rage, and that’s when the peaceful antiwar movement petered out. Now the antiwar movement had a violent wing.

Out of this wing grew the Weathermen. The Weathermen and others set off 50,000 bombs in US in the early 1970’s. The almost always phoned them in ahead of time so people could be evacuated and they usually went off in the middle of the night.

They did kill one man, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, staying late in the lab when a Weathermen bomb went off at 3 AM. Everyone screams about that, but the Weathermen were trying to stop the war. That’s what all the bombs were about. They killed one guy. How many did Nixon kill? Who killed more? The Weathermen were trying to end the war and save lives. Was Nixon? Hardly.

I still support the bombing campaign of the Weathermen to this day. In fact, in the 1980’s, I was on the mailing list of their aboveground organization, the John Brown Book Club out of the Bay Area. I got their bimonthly, Breakthrough. They were already pretty insane by them. Hell they were insane back in the day.

Remember that lunatic Bernadine Dohrn’s crazy rants praising the Manson murders? These idiots were already on the “White people are evil” thing. Dohrn would give speeches telling young White women to kill their White babies after they were born so as not to create more evil White people.

Ten years later, in 1981, they hooked up with some crazies called the Black Liberation Army. I believe the BLA was a radical split from the Black Panthers. In the early 1970’s, debate swirled around the Panthers. The war was still on. The Panthers had not achieved their goals.  But they were still ostensibly committed to more or less peaceful change. At least they were not committed to open armed struggle.

The bomb-throwers called the peaceful change types sellouts. They felt, as usual, that peaceful change would get them nowhere and the only way to achieve their revolutionary goals was armed struggle. Most of this group split off from the Panthers and  the Panthers said good riddance. Attempts to link the Black Panthers to the BLA radical armed revolutionaries are false and sleazy. Don’t fall for it. The Panthers were ok.

Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) was one of their most famous guerrillas. They were completely insane of course, like all the armed groups back then, but I have to admit she was one badass bitch. She’s in Cuba now.

She’s wanted for the shooting death of a police officer who was killed in a shootout with BLA members they pulled over in a car. She’s innocent. She got shot and was badly hurt. Hell, she was in the back seat and didn’t even have a gun. The driver, a man, fired most of the shots including the bullet that killed the cop. He himself was killed.

Incredibly, Chesimard escaped after that shootout (!). She was later imprisoned in a federal prison but the her comrades in the BLA actually broke her out of a federal prison in Florida by disguising themselves as workers delivering linen to the prison. They broke her out in a wild scene and even managed to escape. Chesimard then vanished off the face of the Earth for 2 years.

Actually she was underground, but you have to realize that the Weathermen, etc. were being helped by a huge network of maybe 1 million people, the vast majority of whom have never been caught and have never even been suspected of a crime. 2 years later, Chesimard mysteriously popped up in Cuba!

In 1981, the remains of the Weathermen had taken up the radical Black cause of the BLA, who were Black separatists who wanted to set up a Black state. The remaining Weathermen apparently felt that Blacks were the leading edge of the revolution.

See the parallels nowadays with BLM? The similarities don’t end there. The leadership of BLM itself and its associated organizations includes the remains of the old Weathermen, now reorganized as the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, still Communists but now apparently pursuing the peaceful road to power.

Another group called the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is also behind a lot of the BLM protests, especially the violent aspects. These are also Communists. I hate to give credit to wild rightwing accusations, but I assure you that the leadership of BLM and its associated organizations are literally Marxists and Communists.

The Weathermen and the BLA robbed a Brinks truck in September 1981 and a wild shootout ensued. Some guards were killed along with a some BLA men. It looks like the BLA were the ones who shot the guards. They were pulled over on the freeway and BLA fighters burst out of the back of the van, guns blazing. More people died. The survivors got away again but were quickly caught. So there ended the saga of the Weathermen.

The FBI conducted raids of activists associated with the Weathermen and the BLA soon afterwards but they came up empty-handed. Everyone had been tipped off and fled ahead of the feds. In one case, the suspects had left so quickly that the coffee kettle was literally still heating on the stove when the FBI burst in. I’m wondering if the Weathermen and BLA had people inside federal law enforcement who tipped them off.

The Weathermen who were arrested in the Brinks robbery, including a few women, are still in prison. One, (((Kathy Boudin))) died in prison of cancer recently. Incredibly, her son, who is probably quite radical himself, recently won the election for District Attorney for the city of San Francisco!

Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers went underground and stayed there for ~20 years (I told you they had a good support network), but were captured after decades on the lam. They were given very short sentences and pretty much let off the hook. I heard Ayers on the radio recently and he was completely unrepentant, defending every bomb the Weathermen ever set off.

They are both now professors in the Education Department of the University of Chicago. They are in deep with the Democratic Party in the area the Democratic city government in Chicago and are pretty much political fixtures in Chicago. Yes, Barack Obama appeared at a couple of roundtables where they were present. Much was made of this by the Retard Right, but there’s less there than their seems. Everyone who is anyone in Democratic politics in Chicago knows Ayers and Dohrn.

They’re cleaned up now anyway and for all intents and purposes, they’re respectable citizens. What’s wrong with this stupid country anyway? In Latin America, former armed Leftist guerrillas lay down arms and then get elected to top posts in the government. The Presidents of Uruguay and Brazil in recent years were both former armed guerrillas from long ago. Why are we so hung up and weird? Let me know when we join the rest of the continent of the Americas, as is our inevitable destiny .

Sarah McLachlan, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”

Probably the best-known cover of this great song by John Lennon from 1971. Of course, it’s an antiwar song against the Vietnam War.

Note the kids’ choir on backup!

(Happy Christmas, Kyoko Happy Christmas, Julian)

So this is Christmas And what have you done? Another year over And a new one just begun And so this is Christmas I hope you had fun The near and the dear ones The old and the young

A very Merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas (War is over) For weak and for strong (If you want it) For rich and the poor ones (War is over) The road is so long (Now) And so happy Christmas (War is over) For black and for white (If you want it) For yellow and red ones (War is over) Let’s stop all the fight (Now)

A very Merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

And so this is Christmas (War is over) And what have we done? (If you want it) Another year over (War is over) And a new one just begun (Now) And so happy Christmas (War is over) We hope you had fun (If you want it) The near and the dear ones (War is over) The old and the young (Now)

A very Merry Christmas And a happy New Year Let’s hope it’s a good one Without any fear

War is over, if you want it War is over, now Happy Christmas Happy Christmas, Christmas Happy Christmas, Christmas

Alt Left: The Roots of the Cultural Left in the Vietnam Antiwar Movement

Let’s talk about Joanne Chesimard, or Assata Shakur of the Black Liberation Army in the late 1970’s.

The Weathermen broke her out of prison in 1979. The plot was ingenious. The group somehow got a hold of a van filled with linens and delivered it to the prison. Somehow they got the prison to let them in to deliver the linens. They then burst out with guns and somehow whisked Chesimard away.

She was hidden well by her comrades for 2 years, while the whole FBI hunted for her and never found her. She popped up suddenly in Cuba two years later, surprising everyone, and has been there ever since. No one has ever explained how she got to Cuba in the first place but as I said this group was very well-trained and were excellent urban guerrillas.

She is actually innocent of this police murder she is being framed with. A vehicle full of BLA members was somehow pulled over by police one night, I think in New Jersey. I’m not sure why they pulled them over. BLA members burst out of the car shooting and a wild gunfight ensued. She was a passenger in this vehicle . The cop was killed by a male BLA member, the driver of the vehicle, who was himself killed in the shootout. Yes, cops were killed but so were people in her group. She herself was badly wounded. I don’t believe she was even armed at the time.

Even badly wounded, she somehow escaped (!) and was on the lam for a bit. She was captured soon after and put on trial for this frame-up for which she was broken out of prison. As you can see, 40 years later and the lying Fed bastards are still trying to frame her for this crime.

I truly hate the FBI. They’re not the cool gumshoes everyone says they are. They’re the worst pigs of them all, and they are sleazy, dirty, and corrupt. They specialize in political prosecutions which are often frame-ups.

And they help the CIA and the US government cover up for its own frame-ups of its enemies, as when the US framed Ghaddafi for the Lockerbie shootdown when actually it was Iran and Syria that did it. The FBI knew full well that the evidence was crap and that Iran and Syria were the  real authors but they were ordered to frame Gaddafi, so that is what they did. They actually tampered with crucial evidence (!) in order to frame Gaddafi. I told you they were scumbags.

I rather like Joanne Chesimard just for being one badass chick and escaping custody over and over. This was back in the days of radical chic when you would go to a hippie chick’s house, and she would have a poster of Leila Khaled (Palestinian plane hijacker and badass chick) with a gun on the wall.

“Assata Shakur,” her crappy new identity, is just another stupid Black nationalist. Oh, and Cuba will never hand her over. Thanks for asking.

On to the famous Brinks robbery in 1981. A mixed group of Weathermen and BLA robbed an armored car and got away with a lot of money. The robbery was somehow botched nevertheless and in this incident and the related freeway stop, two or more policemen and armored car guards were murdered.

I think the Black men from the BLA did most of the shooting. The BLA always were little more than one step above common criminals and sometimes they were indistinguishable from such.

They actually got away with the robbery but were caught on the freeway afterwards where a huge shootout took place. A group of mostly BLA were hidden in the rear of the vehicle and suddenly burst out guns ablaze, catching police unawares. A number of them got away again (!) after this robbery but were only caught a bit later. The BLA were escape artists and masters of the prison break.

Quite of a few of their associates and probable accomplices had their places raided by the FBI soon after this attack. They must have had excellent intelligence or spies in the FBI because when the FBI raided some of these places, the people had left so fast that coffee pots were still on their burners! What the Hell! And the FBI still could not catch them.

There were a vast number of people housing, sheltering, and protecting these radicals, which is how they escaped for so long. Some adopted new identities and were not caught for 30-40 years later. The Red Army Faction (I liked them too) in Germany were protected by ~300,000 people, and police found it extremely hard to infiltrate them because of this.

I would imagine that the Weathermen/BLA were being protected by just as many or maybe more. They may have had ~1 million accomplices and people who fed, housed, sheltered, protected, and spied for them. Almost none of them were ever caught, and many are living with us to this day.

As you can see, Brinks robbery marked the time when the Weathermen made a huge alliance with the Black radicals in the BLA.

It is at this time that this radical anti-White program of the Cultural Left was birthed.

Oh yeah. The saga of the Soledad Brothers and George Jackson was another famous case around the time of the Days of Rage This incident was another major turning point when the antiwar movement got a lot darker real fast. The Soledad Brothers were another case of armed Black radicalism. These men were just common criminals who got radicalized into revolutionaries in prison. They were very radical, much more than the BP.

As part of their saga, Jonathan Jackson, George’s brother, accompanied by radical attorney Angela Davis, smuggled a gun into a courtroom where some Soledad Brothers were being tried. There was a huge shootout ion court, several comrades were freed, and the judge was taken as a hostage.

As they were getting away in a heavily armed vehicle, they were ambushed by police. Another huge shootout took place, most of the freed comrades were killed as was the judge. The judge had a shotgun taped to his cheek as part of the  hostage taking. The escaped convicts probably murdered the judge as punishment for not letting them get away with the hostage.

They never showed how they got the gun in,  but my mother believed that Davis had smuggled it in hidden in her Afro! I believe the consensus now is that Johnathon and not Davis smuggled the gun in, but you are damn right she was in on this bloody plot. Davis was tried for her role in this incident, but she was acquitted though she was surely guilty. Around this time, juries often acquitted these antiwar radicals when they went on trial for whatever reason.

Davis is still around, now allied to these BLM morons.

I doubt if either Davis or the Soledad Brothers hated Whites. White-hating was not a thing back then.

The very radical SDS, the original antiwar group founded by Tom Hayden, also was never anti-White. Hell, most  of them were White. However, the modern SDS is an insane, Cultural Left, White-hating monstrosity. And yes, they are the children of (((Saul Alinsky))) of Rules for Radicals fame..

Alt Left: Martin Luther King Was Killed by the US Government

The Assasination of Martin Luther King (1968)

In 1968, Martin Luther King was absolutely murdered by the Memphis police, the FBI and most importantly the Deep State. The reason the latter had for killing MLK was his opposition to the Vietnam War. Once again the foreign policy establishment of the US had a man murdered.

The man the Deep State framed for Martin’s assassination was a two-bit racist loser named James Earl Ray. Ray always insisted on his innocence up until his deathbed.  Ray’s motive was supposedly racism. Another crazed lone gunmen patsy murdered a prominent US liberal Democrat for a barely credible motive. One crazy lone gunman nutcase here guys, nothing more, nothing to see here, move along.

I never thought MLK was murdered until I did some research on the case and discovered that he was absolutely murdered  by the US Deep State. The King family have always said that Ray was a patsy and accused the US government of having the pastor killed. They even sued the US government for killing the patriarch and a federal judge ruled that the Kings had one their case that the government killed King and that Ray was nothing but a patsy.

Alt Left: We Humans Have Always Been Terrorists from the Very Start

Of course Wars on Terrorism are retarded wars packaged for idiots and dunces. So why do people keep falling for it? Why is the other side always made up of terrorists? Why is your side never made up of terrorists? The word terrorism belongs in a trash can. It literally has no meaning anymore.

This idiot word terrorism is new to us. Before we had other dumb words, not that any come off the top of my head at the moment.

Any non-state guerrilla actor who has taken up arms against you is automatically a terrorist. All armed groups that the US doesn’t like are terrorists. A few countries have been put on the supporters of terrorism list for no conceivable reason at all, as they don’t support any actual terrorists. They might support a few non-state armed groups, but so what? People actually believe that all armed non-state actors are terrorists?

And now even countries are “terrorists.” The IRGC, which is a branch of the Iranian military, has been listed as a terrorist organization by this idiot administration. IRGC is the Iranian government itself, so apparently the Iranian government itself is a terrorist organization!

The groups we don’t like all get called terrorists and the ones we don’t like don’t get the designation and often get guns instead. Everything surrounding this crap word is nothing but political bullshit.

First let’s think up a sane definition for this bullshit word that ought to be put in the grave. How about terrorism is any targeting and killing of unarmed civilians of the opposing group for any reason, ethnic, religious, racial, or due to the fact that they are giving support to the opposing side.

You don’t get to deliberately kill the civilians of the other side. We did a Hell of a lot of it in World War 2 and it was a very bad thing. The Axis was obviously terrorist from Day One. The British engaged in a lot of terrorism. And the Soviets committed a lot of terrorism in their drive to Berlin from the East.

Furthermore, going back in time, apparently most if not all groups of humans were actually terrorists! The US practiced terrorism in most of its wars, certainly in WW2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Panama. We also practiced terrorism in the 2003 Gulf War and in the 2001 Afghanistan War.

And almost all governments are far worse then the US. We at least pretend to follow the rules. No one else even bothers. The Ukrainian rebellion of the early 30’s was put down by terrorism. The anti-Soviet guerrillas after the war were defeated by abject terrorism. In the Russian Civil War, both sides were horribly terroristic.

Thinking back to the armed conflicts of recent years, one side of the other has been practicing terrorism, and most of the states fighting armed groups have used terrorism to fight them.

The horrible conflicts in Europe from 1910-1925 were almost all terrorist. Most attempts by colonists to put down anti-colonial rebellions were heavily terroristic. On the other hand the independence fighters often committed a lot of terrorism themselves.

I don’t know much about how war was fought in Europe in the 1800’s and before, but it sounds like an awful lot of it was pretty terroristic. Most Roman conquests appear to have been seriously terroristic.

The Philippines insurgency was pure terrorism on the part of the US. Going back to the Indian Wars it seems clear that in at least some of the Indian Wars, we practiced terrorism against the Indians. The rest of the time we simply allowed non-Indian settlers to commit terrorism against. And the Indians were terrorists from Day One, as the Founders noted in their documents. Sherman’s March to the Sea was clearly sheer terrorism. Going back to the 1700’s and before it seems that a lot of wars were pretty terroristic. Maybe not all of them. China has been having horrible terrorist wars for centuries. Most settler-colonist invasions and occupations were accompanied by quite a bit of terrorism on the part of the settler-colonists. That’s a fact by the way.

I do not know a lot about wars among primitive peoples but what we do know is not hopeful. For instance if you look at the list on uncontacted people in the world in Wikipedia, you will see that they are almost all in Brazil. A number of groups have vanished with a note saying “genocided in Year X”. These groups often had 50-100 people. They were genocided by some other Amazonian Indians in some tribal war.

But look at the word. Genocided. The tribe that won the tribal war went in and murdered every single one of the opposing tribe, including presumably children, old people and other noncombatants. This leads me to believe that primitive wars were typically viciously terroristic if not outright genocidal. And it also leads me to believe that we humans are basically not only a terrorist species but we are also a genocidal species.

Furthermore, captured rebels are very frequently tortured by state armies.

Nowadays almost all states treat guerrillas as terrorists and try them in civil or military courts under terrorism statutes, mostly because they do not want to abide by the rules of war and treat them as POW’s. That’s if they don’t just out and out execute them. For instance, Syria may have executed 40-50,000 Syrian rebels at military prisons around Syria. And I say that as a supported of Assad.

Even the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are for the most part POW’s. If they’re not, then charge them with terrorism and try them in civilian courts.

The Bush Administration didn’t want to do that because they thought that civilian courts would let the jihadists go free. Bush also wanted to torture those in Guantanamo, probably to get more information out of them in order to prevent future attacks.

Hence a completely fake bullshit category called “illegal combatants” was created in order to accomplish this goal. I spoke to one of the country’s top experts on this, and he laughed and told me that there is no such thing as an illegal combatant under international law, and it was just some fake category the Bush people made up.

Alt Left: 53 Admitted False Flag Attacks

It’s disgusting how the minute you say the phrase false flag, people grab their foreheads and start groaning. All false flags are automatically conspiracy theories and they’re all pathetic nonsense made up by the tinfoil hat crowd. Granted a lot of so-called false flags never happened and instead were actual attacks carried out by whoever claimed responsibility for them. This is particularly true with Islamist terrorist groups.

Their attacks often terribly brutal and aimed directly at civilians. Many of their attacks in the West have been called false flags, but none of them were. It has also been common for a long time to ascribe most of the worst Palestinian terrorist attacks to Israeli false flags.

The truth is that the Palestinians, like the Islamists, are quite depraved enough to do their own horrific terrorist attacks. Their attacks are depraved enough that Israel has no need to fake depraved attacks to frame the Palestinians.

But as you can see, false flags definitely occur. I never thought that the US government did these attacks very much, but we and the rest of the West (NATO) have been going on a wild false flag spree ever since NATO’s war on Russia started heating up.

It’s been one false flag after another and one attempt to blame Russia and pro-Russians for atrocities willfully committed by the other side. This is different from a false flag. In this case, Party A attacks the enemy, typically enemy civilians, or a shell goes astray and there’s an atrocity. 

Instead of admitting that they did it, they blame the enemy who they are fighting, usually for committing an atrocity against their own supporters, which of course makes no sense.

There were many such attacks like this in the Syrian Civil War when the Free Syrian Army committed massacre after massacre of villagers who supported Assad and then turned around and blamed Assad for each and every one of these crimes. 

As it turns out, Assad did not commit any of these civilian massacres because that’s just not his style. His forces don’t rampage into villages, even of rebel supporters, and slaughter civilians in brutal fashion one by one.

If they think a civilian needs to be dealt with, Assad’s forces simply arrest them and may well put them in a military prison, where they could well be tortured and mistreated until death or executed. I’m not saying Assad is a nice guy; it’s more that his style simply does not include savage massacres of entire villages or chemical weapons attacks for that matter.  When it comes to depravity, Assad has his own style.

I can’t believe that number of attacks falsely blamed on the enemy and out and out false flag and fake attacks that the US did in Ukraine and Syria. We seem to be entering into a new era of warfare where false flags are the normal ways to fight wars.

It’s appalling and terrifying because foolish Americans insist that these attacks never happen. By believing that they give their own government carte blanche to do as many false flags and false blaming of the enemy of allied attacks as they wish. And the government knows that in any fake blames or false flags the US or its allies pull off, they know that they can count on the support of every corporate media outlet in the US to go right along.

In fact, every mainstream media outlet in the West period is on board with any false blaming or false flags the West wishes to pull off. In that sense the entire media of the West is completely controlled by the states of the West, their militaries, state departments and intelligence services. It’s downright terrifying.

53 Admitted False Flag Attacks

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published in February 2015.

Not Theory … Admitted Fact

There are many documented false flag attacks where a government carries out a terror attack … and then falsely blames its enemy for political purposes.

In the following 53 instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admitted to it, either orally or in writing:

(1) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931 and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident.”

The Tokyo International Military Tribunal (2) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that under orders from the chief of the Gestapo, he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles to justify the invasion of Poland.

(3) Nazi General Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering (4) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 while blaming the attack on Finland as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(5) The Russian Parliament, current Russian President Putin, and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940 and falsely blame it on the Nazis.

(6) The British government admits that between 1946 and 1948 it bombed five ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the pseudo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see thisthis and this).

(7) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

(8) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(9) The Turkish Prime Minister (10) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(11-21) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO with the help of the Pentagon and CIA carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this).

Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred. And watch this BBC special. They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, and other countries.

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include by way of example only the murder of the Turkish Prime Minister (1960), bombings in Portugal (1966), the Piazza Fontana massacre in Italy (1969), terror attacks in Turkey (1971), the Peteano bombing in Italy (1972), shootings in Brescia, Italy and a bombing on an Italian train (1974), shootings in Istanbul, Turkey (1977), the Atocha massacre in Madrid, Spain (1977), the abduction and murder of the Italian Prime Minister (1978), the bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy (1980), and shooting and killing 28 shoppers in Brabant county, Belgium (1985).

(22) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch “a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro].”

(23) Official State Department documents show that in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(24) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes) and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.

See the following ABC news reportthe official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

(25) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(26) The U.S. Department of Defense even suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo.”

(27) The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964… manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war.

(28) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that as part of its “Cointelpro” campaign, the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(29) A (30) The German government admitted (and (31) A Mossad agent admits that in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya, which broadcast fake terrorist trasmissions recorded by Mossad in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(32) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council (33) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, “French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit against Author”).

(34)    The United States Army’s 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces  updated in 2004 recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA’s “(35) An Indonesian fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998 and determined that “elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked.”

(36) Senior Russian military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion).

(37) According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(38) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(39) As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered seven innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police in order to join the “War on Terror.”

(40) Senior police officials in Genoa, Italy admitted that in July 2001 at the G8 summit in Genoa they planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters.

(41) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks as shown by a memo from the defense secretary as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq War.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties.

Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq War was really launched for oil…not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction. Despite previous “lone wolf” claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government.  

(42) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the White House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country.

(43) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

(44) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers.

Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(45) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(46) Quebec police admitted that in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this).

(47) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plainclothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(48) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts in 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(49) A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat.

(50) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, says that the head of Saudi intelligence Prince Bandar recently admitted that the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.

(51) High-level American sources admitted that the Turkish government – a fellow NATO country – carried out the chemical weapons attacks blamed on the Syrian government, and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government.

(52) The former Ukrainian security chief admits that the sniper attacks which started the Ukrainian coup were carried out in order to frame others.

(53) Britain’s spy agency has admitted (and see this) that it carries out “digital false flag” attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material … and blaming it on the target.

So Common…There’s a Name for It

“False flag terrorism” is defined as a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.

The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations and have been used in peace-time; for example, during Italy’s Strategy of Tension.

The use of the bully’s trick is so common that it was given a name hundreds of years ago. The term comes from the old days of wooden ships, when one ship would hang the flag of its enemy before attacking another ship. Because the enemy’s flag, instead of the flag of the real country of the attacking ship, was hung, it was called a “false flag” attack.

Indeed, this concept is so well-accepted that rules of engagement for navalair and land warfare all prohibit false flag attacks.

Leaders Throughout History Have Acknowledged False Flags

Leaders throughout history have acknowledged the danger of false flags:

“A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people! In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.”
– Adolph Hitler

“Why of course the people don’t want war… But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader.

“The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened.”
– Josef Stalin


Happy 50th Birthday Give Peace a Chance

The official video from the song, no less. Recorded in Montreal, Canada in Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in June 1969 with John and Yoko singing backed by the Plastic Ono Band. The song was released while John was still part of the Beatles.

The other Beatles hated that John was with Yoko. “That Okinawan witch,” Paul McCarthy referred to her. Yoko was a very avant-garde artist from Japan who speak English as a second language. The two were very much in love, though John used to beat her up in the 1970’s when they lived in New York.

One of the greatest antiwar songs of all time. From the anti-Vietnam War Movement of that time. I am wondering. Will we ever have another antiwar movement ever again in this blighted land? I think it will never happen again. Just one more way we have gone backwards in fifty years.

At 1:38, 2:05,3:38, and again at 4:50, guess who that is? None other than Timothy Leary himself! Every time I see Tim Leary,  he’s always got an ear to ear smile across his face.

I saw him once in a video store on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood in 1985. He was renting a copy of Amadeus at 10 PM. My friend said, “Bob! Look! It’s Timothy Leary! The Godhead! And he put his hands together and prayer and started bowing to the Prince of LSD. He was smiling then too, same thing. His teeth lit up the room, and you couldn’t frown if you tried. I guess if you took as much acid as he did, you might have a perma-smile on your face too, right?

Who’s that at 1:52? Allen Ginsberg? Gotta be him. It can’t be anyone else.

Who’s that at 2:48? It’s got to be Tommy Smothers!

And the gorgeous Rosemary Woodruff Leary from the start off and on until :46 and then again in several places. Got to be her. Plus she’s sitting right next to Tim.

Derek Taylor at 1:22. The famous record producer and journalist known as “The Fifth Beatle.”

Tommy Cooper, the comedian and magician, in the background at 1:07 and again at 3:06? Could well be.

Now we have to find Dylan and Mailer, and we’re home free.

They don’t mention her in the song, but can anyone spot the woman at 4:02. I can. It’s Petula Clark, the famous actress!

Ev’rybody’s talking about Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m
All we are saying is give peace a chance All we are saying is give peace a chance
C’mon Ev’rybody’s talking about
Ministers, sinisters, banisters and canisters Bishops and fishops and rabbis and Popeyes And bye bye, bye byes
All we are saying is give peace a chance All we are saying is give peace a chance
Let me tell you now Ev’rybody’s talking about Revolution, evolution, masturbation Flagellation, regulation, integrations Meditations, United Nations Congratulations
All we are saying is give peace a chance All we are saying is give peace a chance
Ev’rybody’s talking about
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan
Tommy Cooper, Derek Taylor
Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg
Hare Krishna
Hare, Hare Krishna
All we are saying is give peace a chance All we are saying is give peace a chance
All we are saying is give peace a chance All we are saying is give peace a chance

1968-1970: A Remembrance of Things Past

At age 11 years old in late 1968 to late 1969, I was a hippie-hater. My parents of course encouraged this pro-Establishment nonsense, being Greatest Generation squares and all.

Around this time, we started playing a game called, “Boy or a Girl?” every time we saw a boy with long hair, who were starting to get more common at that time. I’m not sure who started the game, my parents or my brothers and I (they were 8 and 5), but our parents sure egged us and on and played along with relish. Little did I realize that in a few short years I would be growing my hair out like a girl myself and a year later turning into a bit of a hippie myself.

My father was a good Cold War liberal of the Bernie Sanders type except that he despised the counterculture, especially “Chaar-lie Manson” and “Aaay-bie Hoffman,” the latter of whose disrespectful performance in the courtroom outraged my staid father. That was the hippie movement for my father. Charles Manson and Abbie Hoffman. That was it.

Yes, I grew up with the Manson Murders, the Watts riots, the RFK assassination, the Chicago Convention in 1968, the whole nine yards. In 1968, I walked the streets for “Clean Gene” McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, with my father, who had turned against the war after the Tet Offensive.

I was a bit of a Vietnam War fan, and every day, they would list the battles that took place the day before and how many were killed and wounded in them. American soldiers were getting killed and wounded every single day in significant numbers. I had a really cool map of Vietnam, and I would go look up the battles on my map.

And of course I remember the Mi Lai Massacre. A lot of people were defending Calley and the rest because they said US troops had taken many casualties in that area recently, and even the women and the kids were serving as guerrillas, setting up booby-traps for instance. I’m not sure how true that was, but I doubt if it justifies slaughtering civilians like that.

One week Time Magazine printed the photos and biographies of all the men who had died in Nam that previous week. We were losing ~200 men a week in one of those years, I forget which. There were maybe 200 of them! I remember that really brought the war home.

People heard the numbers of killed and wounded every week or so, but it never really sunk in. When they saw the 200 faces of those very young men in that magazine who had been in only a single week, it really hit home in Middle America in a personal way.

I watched Walter Cronkite all the time, and I remember when he, to everyone’s shock, turned against the war. The turning point for him as for everyone else was the Tet Offensive.

I was a wild LA Dodgers fan, and we went to a lot of games. Don Drysdale was a great pitcher who set some records back then. Sandy Koufax was another great Dodgers pitcher. Willie Mays of the San Fransisco A’s was at the peak of his game. Mickey Mantle was still around.

We also went to LA Rams and even USC Trojans games. We got to meet some of the Rams at some signature gathering meeting at a local Sears outlet. I met OJ Simpson at a game in Candlestick Park in San Francisco once and got his autograph. He had a permanent smile a yard wide. The charm radiated off of him in waves. There was no way to not like him if you still had a real beating warm-blooded heart.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the street, and the old days were always better than today. If we’ve lived a decent and relatively happy life, one thing we can all say is that we all had a once upon a time.

Elton John, Curtains, from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Yes, I bought that album in 1975. One of the greatest rock albums ever made.

I used to know this old scarecrow He was my song My joy and sorrow Cast alone between the furrows Of a field No longer sown by anyone

I held a dandelion That said the time had come To leave upon the wind Not to return When summer burned the earth again

Oh Oh Cultivate the freshest flower This garden ever grew Beneath these branches I once wrote Such childish words for you But that’s okay There’s treasure children always seek to find And just like us You must have had A once a upon a time Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely) Oh (lovely-lovely)

The Rich Only Support Democracy when the Elected State Serves their Class Interests, Otherwise They Try to Overthrow It

Zamfir: Thanks Robert. I appreciate the site, and it’s nice to feel welcome. Obviously one problem in discussing this is that terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ or ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have been given all kinds of different meanings. If economic conservatism is identified with free market ideology then I’m pretty ambivalent about that, at best. And if it’s identified with support for whatever this internationalist economic system is that we have now, I’m against it. I find it very weird that people who are conservative about social and cultural issues often support “economic conservatism” of that kind. It’s so clear that these things are incompatible! Anyway I certainly have no problem with socialism per se. I would only disagree with certain versions, or cases where I believe socialism ends up being destructive of healthy families and cultures (in much the same way that capitalism can be). As for democracy I’m not sure what I think about it. I think I’m a reactionary to the extent that I don’t believe that democracy, or any other specific system or procedure, is always good or always essential to a good society. My sense is that some democracies or kinds of democracy are fine, while others are really bad. It all depends on some many factors aside from the system or procedure itself. I do want a society where the interests of most people, including the poor, are taken into account fairly. But I don’t see any reason why that could never happen in a non-democratic state. Or, more precisely, for anything that’s good about some democracies, I don’t see why certain non-democratic regimes couldn’t also have those good things; it would all depend on other factors such as the culture and history of the people, their typical behavior and beliefs, etc. So I guess I’d support coups against democratic regimes in some cases–though things would have to be pretty bad–and also against non-democratic regimes in some cases. I don’t think coups are always bad. (In fact, that’s one thing that seems silly about a lot of rigid ‘conservative’ ideology–the wish to preserve order and the status quo no matter how terrible it’s become…) You say the rich don’t support democracy. I wonder if that’s true. Maybe they don’t support the ideal of democracy, for the reasons you mentioned. But, again, bearing in mind the looseness of terminology here, they sure do seem to support systems that we normally call “democratic”. Is the US a democracy in your view? Are England or Ireland or Canada democracies? If so, then I don’t agree that the rich never want democracy. My sense is that they long ago figured out how to manipulate these kinds of systems to get the results they want. They manage the perceptions and values of the masses so that they always end up “freely choosing” the same garbage that the elites wanted all along. A good question is whether this is an inevitable feature of democracy. (I don’t know the answer.) It could be that in any feasible form of democracy, no matter how close it gets to the ideal, you end up with powerful interests rigging the process to maximize their own wealth and power. And I don’t like that, because I want the interests of ordinary people to be taken into account. Ironically, then, I’m skeptical about many forms of democracy because I think the masses deserve to have a say. So I’d be against democracy in cases where ‘democratic’ systems are hijacked by elites and used against the people. That’s what’s happening in most of the western world, I’d say. Not to say I’d support a coup in this situation–and certainly not if the point of the coup was to install an even more extreme form of exploitation. But I’m not entirely sure what to say about democracy. I think the reactionary critique has merit. (But then, don’t communists also criticize democracy for roughly similar reasons?)

The Communist view is that seeking power peacefully would be a great idea except the ruling classes will never allow it to happen. They say that power never gives up without a fight, and I believe that they are correct. Nevertheless, most Communists support Venezuela, Nicaragua and only leftwing democratic countries. But the Communists would say, “Look what happens why you try to take power peacefully. You get Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, and even Argentina.” The ruling class will just overthrow the democratic Left state any way they can, always using anti-democratic means to do so. That’s why Lenin called people who supported the peaceful road to socialism “parliamentary cretins.” He thought it was a great idea but it would never work because the rich would never allow the Left to take power peacefully. The Communist view is also that you never have democracy under capitalism anyway, as the capitalists and the rich always ending ruling the state one way or another through all sorts of means. And yes, the rich and the capitalists always take over all the media in any capitalist country as you said, they use it to shape the view of the people to support the class politics of the rich. Such support being called false consciousness. Gramsci said that the ruling class took over the entire culture in capitalist countries and brainwashed the masses into supporting the project of the rich. They did this via cultural hegemony. Marx said that the culture of the rich is always the popular culture in any capitalist country. So the ruling class turns all of us into “little rich people” or “little capitalists” to support their project. They brainwash us into thinking we are the same class as the rich and that we are all capitalists ourselves, so we should support Capital. These are lies, but most Americans are easily fooled. Ralph Nader called this “going corporate” or “thinking corporate.” He says that in the US, most people adopt the mindset of the corporations and think of themselves are part of the corporate structure whether they are or not. If everyone is part of the corporate structure, then what’s good for corporations is good for all of us, which is the project of the Republican Party, neoliberalism everywhere, the Latin American rich, etc. It’s a big fat lie, but people want to be rich and a lot of workers want to think of themselves are busy little capitalist money-making, go-getter, can-do, Bossterist entrepreneurs because it seems to cool to own your own business. And the Communists would call this false consciousness and their argument would be that under capitalism, most people adopt false consciousness. I think in the US, the rich see the tide coming and the rule of the rich is going to end so they want to lock in as much of the state as possible by stacking the courts, gutting the safety net, massive tax cuts that will be impossible to get rid of, and that Constitutional Convention they are two states away from getting where they want to rewrite the whole US Constitution to lock in rule by the rich for as long as possible. The rich see the writing on the wall. That’s why they came up with the computerized elections scam, so they could steal elections as long as people kept voting against the rich. The gerrymandering of districts now makes it almost impossible to get rid of Republican majorities on state representatives in the House and in Senators and Assemblymen in the states. It’s all locked in. So as the rich saw the tide turning and demographics moving against them, they instituted a full court press to do all sorts of extremely anti-democratic stuff to stay in power. If the people would just vote for them anyway, they would not have to do that, but apparently most Americans have now turned away from the politics of the rich, so the rich will have to lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power from now on. Also they elected Donald Trump, by far the most corrupt, authoritarian and even outright fascist leader this country has ever had. And this follows too. Whenever there is a popular movement against the rich and the capitalists, the rich and the capitalists always, always, always resort of fascism to stay in power. This has been proven endlessly over time, even in Europe. Trotsky had some great things to say about this. Check out “Thermidor.” Trotsky truly understood what fascism was all about. It is a desperate last ditch move by the ruling class to seize power in the face of an uprising from the Left. The rich and the capitalists are determined to stay in power, by hook or by crook, by any means necessary, and they will lie, cheat, steal and kill as many people as they have to just to keep the Left out of power. They simply will not allow the Left to rule. They must rule and if they are out of  power, they will use any antidemocratic means to get power back. Which is the story of the CIA, the Pentagon and 10 I mean, we on the Left generally allow the Right to take power if they do so democratically. Sure they destroy everything like they always do, but most of us are committed to the democratic means of seeking power. Even most Communist parties will not take up arms against any rightwing government, saying they prefer to seek power by peaceful means. Typically, the CP will issue a statement that the nation is not in a revolutionary situation right now. There are objective conditions under which a nation is said to be in a revolutionary situation. I’m sure you can recall a few. It is then and only then that most CP’s will go underground and issue a call to take up arms. Frankly, almost all Left insurgencies postwar were defensive. The Left allowed the Right to take power and then the Right started running around killing people. Usually the Left sat there for a while and let themselves get killed before taking up power. I know the Viet Cong just sat there from 1954-1960 while the rightwing Vietnamese government ran amok in the countryside, murdering 80,000 Communists in six years. They kept asking the North Vietnamese for permission to take up arms, but the North kept denying it. The Colombian, Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrillas only took up guns after the state had been running about murdering them unarmed for years. The Salvadoran guerrillas said they got tired of sitting in their homes waiting for the rightwing state to come kill them, and they decided that if the state was going to come kill them anyway, they might as well pick up a gun and defend themselves. They also took up arms because the Right kept stealing elections by fraud. The Right had cut off all methods of seeking power peacefully, so the Left picked up guns. The message is if you elect a leftwing government, sooner or later the Right will overthrow it and then there will be a reign of terror where many Leftists will be murdered. Knowing that, if you were a Leftist in some country, would you not be afraid to put the Left in power knowing you stood a good chance of being murdered once the inevitable rightwing coup took place? The Colombian and Honduran governments only stay in power by killing people. Lots of people. The Greek Communists only took up arms after the government had been killing them for some time. Also once a Left government is overthrown by the rich and the capitalists, the new Rightist government institutes a reign of terror where they slaughter the defeated Left for many years. This went on for decades after 1954 in Guatemala, and it goes on still today. After Aristide was overthrown, the rightwing government murdered 3,000 of his supporters. After Allende was overthrown, Pinochet murdered 15,000 people over a decade and a half. A threat from the Left prompted the Indonesian government to fake a Left coup and murder 1 million Communists in a couple of months. Even before the Korean War broke out, from 1948-1950, the South Korean government killed hundreds of thousands of Communists in the South. As they withdrew when the North attacked, the South Koreans killed South Korean Communists everywhere they went. After the fascist coup in Argentina, the government decimated the Left, murdering 30,000 mostly unarmed supporters of the Left. The same thing happened in Bolivia with the Banzer Plan when Hugo Banzer took power after the tin miners briefly sought power. The new rightwing government in Brazil is already starting to murder members of the former Left ruling party. They’re not going to stop. After the fascist coup in Ukraine, the Communist Party was outlawed and many of its members were murdered. War was declared on labor unions. Workers in one union were chained to a heater inside the building and the building was set on fire. The party supported by half the population (the Russian speakers and their supporters) the Party of Regions, was outlawed, a number of its deputies were murdered and there were attempts to murder the leader of the party, lastly by setting his house on fire which set his neighbor’s house on fire instead. He fled to Russia. Now half the population and all of the Russian speakers had not party to represent them, which is why they took up arms. They were locked out of power.

About That "Stab in the Back"

Many German Jews were very patriotic during World War 1. Quite a few fought and died for their country and its lousy cause. The problem was that the war was a lousy cause, like the Vietnam War and just about every war we ever fought after the Great War. Germany started losing, and a dissident peace movement similar to the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era sprung up in Germany. Some of these people, but many others were just good Germans sink of junkers, kaisers and disgusting mess that was incipient German imperialism and militarism. The antiwar movement helped end the war, which was a good thing. After the war, which ended in Germany’s defeat, this protest movement began challenging many of the traditional views of the land which had dragged the nation into a stupid militaristic adventure that led to the massacre of a generation of European men. Many liberals, media people, comedians, musicians, show business types, politicians and intellectuals joined this movement. Of course some were Jews but most were not. Keep in mind that Jews were maybe 1- This was the “stab in the back” that Hitler referred to. There was no stab in the back anymore than that the Vietnam War Protest Movement was a stab in the back.  Hitler and the Free Officers were reactionary militarists. They were not OK people. They were like McNamara and LBJ on steroids. They were a bunch of lousy killers, militarists fighting for a no good cause. And really the entire liberal intelligentsia stabbed the country in  the back, if anyone did. But the stab in the back more than anything was self inflicted. Germany was losing a lousy war they started for no good reason. The Army and the militaristic state was stabbing its own self in the back in a form of perverse hari kari.

Something Wrong with America? or Why Is America Hated? By A. J. Harvey-Hall

An interesting piece from a reader and financial supporter (thank you!) of this website. Hope you enjoy it.

Something Wrong With America? or Why is America hated?

By A. J. Harvey-Hall, Australia

Where do I start? I originally wrote this in 2013 when I was mad as hell, and here we are in 2015, and I am still mad as hell at you guys. Most of what I have written has come true. Don’t believe me – ask your Remote Viewing (Project Stargate) people to drop in and check me out. It works both ways in case you are unaware. Coming from Australia I can tell you a hell of a lot of where America “went wrong”. I am not saying Australia is/was perfect – it’s just a fact we were the last large island/continent settled by the so-called enlightened Westerners – due to distance we saw where everyone else stuffed up and decided as a whole not to do that (Commonwealth knowledge?). Canada is very similar to Australia, so look to them as well. One thing’s for certain – everyone gets a fair go in this country. We are multicultural and tolerant. Early Western settlers did not treat the Aboriginals appropriately, but in summary, it was probably no different to any superior culture that overtook another at some time in history. It’s easy to look back and say what the Westerners did to Aboriginals was disgraceful. I have a right to tell you how it is because Australia is the only country that has fought every war alongside America all through WW1 and WW2 and several “police” actions. Let’s revisit some words spoken by one of your greatest presidents in the course of the America’s Cup back in 1962 when Australia was still a country of 10 million: Quoting Kennedy –

Ambassador, Lady Beale, Ambassador and Mrs. Berckmeyer, Ambassador and Lady Ormsby Gore, the Ambassador from Portugal, our distinguished Ministers from Australia, Ladies and Gentlemen: I know that all of us take the greatest pleasure in being here, first of all because whether we are Australian or American, we are all joined by a common interest, a common devotion and love for the sea. And I am particularly glad to be here because this Cup is being challenged by our friends from Australia, this extraordinary group of men and women numbering some 10 million, who have demonstrated on many occasions, on many fields, in many countries, that they are the most extraordinarily athletic group in the world today, and that this extraordinary demonstration of physical vigor and skill has come not by the dictates of the state because the Australians are among the freest citizens in the world, but because of their choice… Australia became committed to physical fitness, and it has been disastrous for the rest of us. We have the highest regard for Australia, Ambassador. As you said, we regard them as very satisfactory friends in peace and the best of friends in war. And I know there are a good many Americans of my generation who have the greatest possible reason to be grateful to the Australians who wrote a most distinguished record all the way from the desert of North Africa, and most particularly in the islands of the South Pacific, where their particular courage and gallantry I think met the strongest response in all of us in this country. But I really don’t look to the past. I look to the present. The United States and Australia are most intimately bound together today, and I think that — and I speak as one who has had some experience in friendship and some experience in those who are not our friends — we value very much the fact that on the other side of the Pacific, the Australians inhabit a very key and crucial area and that the United States is most intimately associated with them. So beyond this race, beyond the result, rests this happy relationship between two great people. – President John F. Kennedy, Newport, Rhode Island, September 14, 1962

Let’s go back to the (your) War of Independence: The English were wrong in what they were doing – hence independence – not a problem. In gaining independence however you put in place the building blocks that as of today are not crumbling – they have already crumbled. Every builder in the world knows that unless your foundations are spot on and repaired when cracks appear, a structure cannot live for hundreds of years. You must update and repair as you go to ensure the building is viable for hundreds of years ongoing – not just paper over it. The building I am referring to is the “United States of America”. It has now crumbled as a result of a demarcation dispute between your two political parties that act worse than our Australian Parliament. Each party is only out to make a name for itself and has lost the understanding of “serving the people”. Let’s talk about your constitution – ohhh – am I upsetting you already? Remember I am an outsider who is looking in giving you an unbiased opinion. When your Constitution was framed it was OK, for the day! It is now the oldest ‘out of date’ Constitution in the world. Don’t stand behind your outdated constitution. Start again. Be bold. Yes – you have made amendments, but those amendments are just papering over extensions – you need to go back and look at the foundations and do the work there. Take one example – a right to bear arms. It was OK 200 years ago when things were a bit rough – it is not acceptable in the 20th or 21st Centuries, but you will not remove that right. How many people have died in your country as a result of that one so called right? Your gun culture is one of the bases (not basis) that has crumbled. This is ultimately why you have numerous police forces that are happy to shoot first and ask questions later. Your children and work colleagues will continue to die in massacres as a result of this “right“. They will continue to die in soft target areas such as schools, mass transport, malls, parades (early days – wait for it). Hang on – maybe the British, Russians or Communists are still coming to invade. Pity you don’t update your Constitution the same way you enforce updates to laws you force upon people who want to trade with you. You allow gun lobbyists to “set the course” with government officials, senators and the public. Since when did lobbyists of any ilk run the government? Since when did they represent “the people”? You continue to think of arms as a gun – they are no longer guns – instead are bombs, viruses or maybe even the Internet itself. But it’s OK because you have a right” to bear arms. Let’s talk about your medical care. Actually let’s save time and refer to Michael Moore. He is spot on. How can you allow your own citizens suffer and even die on the streets because they don’t have medical insurance? And some of your citizens applaud this stance. How about your returned veterans – even wounded veterans have to fight to get medical assistance upon return – why – because you outsourced the process and someone applied expiry dates that wounded veterans were not aware of. It then requires an act of Congress or a law to be passed to allowed them back into the system. More veterans have committed suicide upon return that you lost in actual combat. That is an absolute disgrace. Even that poor, small country across from Florida – Cuba – does it better than you. A pissant island makes you look like a disgrace. Ohhh that’s right…you won’t interact with them because they put one over you in the Cuban Missile crisis. Get over it – you eventually did with Vietnam. And that leads me to another chapter – Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia…or shouldn’t I mention all the “minor” illegal wars you waged? You lost LOST the Vietnam War – admit it. You will also lose the Afghanistan and Iraqi Wars. The Middle Eastern wars are also bankrupting your country – why can’t day to day Americans see this? No one (starting with Alexander the Great) has ever conquered Afghanistan – get real or get out. If you think those wars are over, and as G. W. Bush said, “Mission completed”…think again. You have effectively put people in charge who are far worse than the dictators that were already there in Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Afghanistan etc. and now you are trying to do the same in Crimea via the Ukraine. You are responsible for the extremists that are now running around the Middle East, and I don’t mean Al Qaeda. You are responsible for the creation of ISIS. Let’s look at all those African refugees (including Syrians, Lebanese etc.) who are risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea to get to Europe. The USA is totally responsible for all these simply because of WMD lies that resulted in the invasion of Iraq. All Middle East actions from thereon are his fault. He is a war criminal – oopps did I break one of your laws saying he is a war criminal in the land of the free and home of the brave? The land of free speech? Fact – history is written by the victors. The USA is trying to run the Middle East like a corporation – all the top executives from the G. W. Bush era on are criminals lining their own pockets. Starting wars in the 21st century will no longer get a country out of a recession. It’s simply profit-making. Why don’t you take Saudi Arabia to task for 9/11? Ohhh that’s right, they control the oil flow. Don’t upset them – why don’t you find an alternative to Middle East oil? Are you getting a message here? The entire world dislikes and even hates you. You have acted the bully for many years after The Korean War, effectively destroying the good will you established in the early 20th century. You are hated across all lines – economic, religious, social, political and otherwise. What is your obsession with Israel? Fact – Israel was founded by Jewish terrorists. They set off bombs, killed people and destroyed property to achieve their aims. Because the world had ‘sympathy’ for Jews after WW2, it happened and a blind eye was turned. Today Middle America strongly believes in the Bible literally and as such wants to see Israel succeed in order the “Second Coming” results. People – the Bible is a guide. It is not Gospel. Why? In the early centuries, the Roman Catholic Church held conferences and decided which books, writings and teachings ended up in “The Bible”. God did not decide which early Christian books ended up in The Bible – so it is absolute rubbish for someone to state that the Bible guides what the United States should do. Too many real accounts of Jesus’ workings were excluded. The Roman Catholic Church is responsible for closing our eyes to the real Christ. Hopefully Pope Francis can arrest this BS. There are numerous United Nations resolutions that Israel has refused to comply with. By the way – are you (USA) financially paid up with the UN, or do you still refuse to pay in a timely manner in order to attempt to remind them that you rule over them? How about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that lead to invasion? Colin Powell held up a drawing and said – here is the proof. You never found proof and never admitted you were wrong. Yes – Saddam Hussein was a bastard but he had the warring clans under control. It was all ALL about oil and nothing else. When the mud got too deep, you changed tact and said it was all about democracy. How far is Greece from Iraq? – damn closer that the USA. If the Greeks could not influence them – you sure in Hell can’t. You can resolve the Palestinian problem in a matter of weeks, but you won’t due to that “minority” in the Middle East. This bullshit has been going on for 60 years. Everyone knows (sorry – obviously you don’t) – the longer a problem festers, the harder and more costly it is to resolve. I worked in the finance industry for many years and can only say that the number of times “we” (non-Americans) had to change our processes and rules etc. because the USA had set ‘”new standards” makes me sick. The standards set were not improvements – they were changed to line your pockets. Look at Sarbanes Oxley for example – the world spent hundreds of billions of $’s attempting to comply because the USA would not do business with another country unless they did so only to see the USA itself found it too costly to implement itself! What a joke! We now have many European countries in dire straits as a direct result of the exporting of American ways. You destroyed the financial industry with your Subprime rubbish. What about changes to financial models and makes etc. of any product or service that demand that people buy the “updated” version to reline your pockets. This is simply to keep the money wheel turning. You are desperately trying to ensure it keeps turning long enough for your problems to be passed to some other country or the next generation. Ever thought about how much you spend on items such as defense, spying, war, inventing, manufacturing and using machines of war? Just imagine if only half of that was diverted to your health programs, science or to the benefit of other countries less fortunate? What about converting the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into an international force for peace and relief of local and international disasters? How can you allow a company to have a patent on the human breast cancer gene? You have to be kidding the world – but then again that’s your Constitution at work. No one owns human genes! What happened to the “United States” that I remember as a child? That far-off country whose technology was so far advanced we could never dream of equaling. What happened to that country that every county – even Russia in the old days – feared  -a form of respect? Oh – and how long before I get the FBI, CIA, and all your other bullshit muscle agencies to frame me for some rubbish and shut me down… A parting true story: In late 1978/early 1979 my family traveled to Washington state where my father was working on behalf of a company in Australia. Unfortunately, departing Auckland NZ they had an emergency which meant we had to go back, dumping fuel on the way. 24 hours later we took off again after repairs and finally landed in Honolulu. My mother was pretty savvy and said get to the front of the Customs line so we can get to the connecting flight to LA. Well – I was at the front of the queue, 18 years old, looking at an overweight female Customs officer wearing a gun strutting back and forwards. Her welcoming words to the Australians and New Zealanders were, “If you step over that yellow line, I will shoot you!” What a fucking joke – in 1978! No wonder you have a gun problem. Welcome to America! Congratulations to the NRA who lobby the most congressman/women on both sides. Fact – I was born in July 1960, and in November 1963 I still vividly recall my parents being very upset when they heard of the news of Kennedy’s death despite my being three years old. All the more remarkable is the fact that we lived in Papua New Guinea – a protectorate of Australia at the time – literally a colonial backwater. I was too young to understand but remembered the words Kennedy and death and vaguely remembered the Cuba Crisis. We cried in the backwaters of the Pacific! I fully understand that the Kennedys had their dalliances. Small beer in the scheme of things. He and his brother are the standard you must return to. Did Kennedy not say “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country?” And in closing, written on the base of the Statue of Liberty…

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazurus

My country totally lacks world-shaking oratory ,but I think we more than make up with it in our actions.

The Hell with the Pentagon

As the agency which enforces US foreign policy at gunpoint, the Pentagon has always blown. First of all, there is no such thing as the Defense Department. When has the Pentagon ever defended the country? Pearl Harbor? They did a fine job there, huh? Obviously the task of the Pentagon is not to defend the US mainland, which is all it ever ought to do anyway. Its task is to running around the world starting wars and killing people in other countries. Leaving aside whether that is sometimes a good idea (and I think it is,) what’s so defensive about that? The real name of the Pentagon is the War Department.That’s what it was always called until World War 2, which the War Department won. After that in a spate of Orwellian frenzy, we named an army of aggression an army of self-defense and comically renamed its branch the Defense Department. It’s like calling cops peace officers. You see anything peaceful about what a cop does in a typical day? Neither do I? There was a brief glimmer of hope there in WW2 when we finally starting killing fascists and rightwingers instead of sleeping with them, but the ink was barely dry on the agreements before we were setting up the Gladio fascists, overthrowing Greek elections and slaughtering Greek peasants like ants. Meanwhile it was scarcely a year after 1945 when the US once again started a torrid love affair with fascism and rightwing dictators like we have always done. We were smooching it up right quick with Europe’s fascists, in this case the former Nazis of Germany (who became the West German elite), Greek killer colonels, Mussolini’s heirs, actual Nazis in Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, Jew-Nazis in Palestine, Franco (who we never stopped sleeping with anyway), Salazar, the malign Mr. Churchill, the true repulsive Dutch royalty and disgusting European colonists the world over, who we showered with guns and bombs to massacre the colonized. In 1945, a war against fascism, reaction, Nazism and malign colonialism had ended, and for some reason America had fought against these things instead of supporting them as usual. 1946, and we were back in old style again, hiring Nazis by the busload for the CIA, overthrowing democratic governments and putting in genocidal dictatorships, becoming butt buddies with fascist swine everywhere. So you see we have always pretty much sucked. World War 1 was fought amidst one of the most dishonest propaganda campaigns the world had ever seen, the Korean War was a Godawful mess where we turned North Korea to flaming rubble with the population cowering in caves while slaughtering 3 million North Koreans. The horrific catastrophe called the Indochinese Wars, such as the Vietnam War, the Secret War in Laos and the Cambodian Massacre, where we genocided 500,000 Cambodians with bombs, driving the whole place crazy and creating the Khmer Rogue. Panama and Grenada were pitiful jokes, malign, raw, naked imperialism at its worst. The Gulf War was a brief return to sanity but turkey shoots are sickening. Of course that followed on with the most evil war in US history, the Nazi-like war on aggression called The War on the Iraqi People (usually called the Iraq War), the Afghan rabbit hole which started out sensibly enough but turned into another Vietnam style Great Big Mess. I suppose it is ok that we are killing Al Qaeda guys and I give a shout out to our boys over there fighting ISIS or the Taliban and Al Qaeda in South-Central Asia, Somalia and Yemen. Some people need killing. But I sure don’t feel that way about their superiors, the US officers who fund and direct ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. out of an Operations Center in Jordan with Jordanian, Israeli (!), Saudi, UAE, and Qatari officers. And it was very thoughtful of the Pentagon to cover up the Ukrainian Air Force shootdown of the jetliner which we saw on the radar of our ships in Black Sea. And it was nice of the US to relay the flight path of the Russian jet to the Turks 24 hours in advance so they could shoot down that Russian jet and kill that pilot. One hand giveth and the other taketh away. For every good thing we do in Syria and Iraq, we do 10 or 20 bad things. Pretty much the story of the Pentagon. Sure if you fought in WW2 or one of the few other decent wars, you have something to be proud of, and I can even say, “Thank you for your service,” but the main thing is that you signed up for the rightwing army of the rich that is dead set against the people and popular rule everywhere on Earth. Sure, it’s a great army, professional, super-competent and deadly, but it’s generally tasked with doing lousy things. Why anyone would sign up for that reactionary nightmare of an institution is beyond me. America needs to level the Pentagon and put in a true People’s Army instead. Like that would ever happen.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

I participated in a session with this fellow on Academia.edu. I believe the author is a professor at a university somewhere in the UK. I really liked this paper a lot. It’s a bit hard to understand, but if you concentrate, you should be able to understand. If I can understand it, at least some of you guys can too. It is an excellent overview of what exactly neoliberalism is and the effects it has on all of us all the way down to the anthropological, sociological and psychological.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

by Simon During

Over the past decade or so “neoliberalism” has become a word to conjure with. It is easy to have reservations about its popularity since it seems to name both a general object — roughly, capitalist governmentality as we know it today — and a particular set of ideas that now have a well-researched intellectual history.

It also implies a judgment: few use the term except pejoratively. I myself do not share these worries however, since I think that using the word performs sterling analytic work on its own account even as it probably accentuates its concept’s rather blob-like qualities. Nonetheless in this talk I want somewhat to accede to those who resist neoliberalism’s analytic appeal by thinking about it quite narrowly — that is to say, in literary and intellectual historical terms. I begin from the position, first, that neoliberalism is an offshoot of liberalism thought more generally; and second, that we in the academic humanities are ourselves inhabited by an occluded or displaced neoliberalism to which we need critically to adjust.1 Thus, writing as a literary critic in particular, I want to follow one of my own discipline’s original protocols, namely to be sensitive to the ways in which the literary “tradition” changes as the present changes, in this case, as it is reshaped under that neoliberalism which abuts and inhabits us.2 To this end I want to present a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1916). To do this is not just to help preserve the received literary canon, and as such is, I like to think, a tiny act of resistance to neoliberalism on the grounds that neoliberalism is diminishing our capacity to affirm a canon at all. By maintaining a canon in the act of locating neoliberalism where it is not usually found, I’m trying to operate both inside and outside capitalism’s latest form.

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1 Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014, p. 17. 2 This argument is made of course in T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921). Let me begin with a brief and sweeping overview of liberalism’s longue durée.3 For our purposes we can fix on liberalism by noting that it has two central struts, one theoretical, the other historical. As generations of theorists have noted, the first strut is methodological individualism: liberal analysis begins with, and is addressed to, the autonomous individual rather than communities or histories.4 Methodological individualism of this kind is, for instance, what allowed Leo Strauss and J.P Macpherson to call even Thomas Hobbes a founder of liberalism.5 Liberalism’s second strut is the emphasis on freedom as the right to express and enact private beliefs with a minimum of state intervention. This view of freedom emerged in the seventeenth century among those who recommended that the sovereign state “tolerate” religious differences. It marked a conceptual break in freedom’s history since freedom was now conceived of as an individual possession and right rather than as a condition proper to “civil associations” and bound to obligations.6 We need to remember, however, that methodological individualism does not imply liberal freedom, or vice versa. Indeed neoliberalism exposes the weakness of that association. Early in the nineteenth century, liberalism became a progressivist political movement linked to enlightened values. But after about 1850, non-progressive or conservative liberalisms also appeared. Thus, as Jeffrey Church has argued, Arthur Schopenhauer, the post-Kantian philosopher who arguably broke most spectacularly with enlightened humanist progressivism, 3 Among the library of works on liberalism’s history I have found two to be particularly useful for my purposes here: Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: a Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso 2014, and Amanda Anderson’s forthcoming Bleak Liberalism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2016. 4 Milan Zafirovski, Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries: Freedom, Liberalism and Anti-Liberalism in the 21st Century, Amsterdam: Brill 2007, p. 116. 5 Van Mobley, “Two Liberalisms: the Contrasting Visions of Hobbes and Locke,” Humanitas, IX 1997: 6-34. 6 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 23. can be associated with liberalism.7 Likewise Schopenhauer’s sometime disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, no progressivist, was, as Hugo Drochon has recently argued, also an antistatist who prophesied that in the future “private companies” will take over state business so as to protect private persons from one another.8 Liberalism’s conservative turn was, however, largely a result of socialism’s emergence as a political force after 1848, which enabled some left liberal fractions to dilute their individualism by accepting that “a thoroughly consistent individualism can work in harmony with socialism,” as Leonard Hobhouse put it.9 Conrad himself belonged to this moment. As a young man, for instance, he was appalled by the results of the 1885 election, the first in which both the British working class and the socialists participated.10 That election was contested not just by the Marxist Socialist Democratic Federation, but by radical Liberals who had allied themselves to the emergent socialist movement (not least Joseph Chamberlain who, as mayor of Birmingham, was developing so-called “municipal socialism” and who haunts Conrad’s work).11 The election went well for the Liberals who prevented the Tories from securing a clear Parliamentary majority. After learning this, Conrad, himself the son of a famous Polish liberal revolutionary, wrote to a friend, “the International Socialist Association are triumphant, and every disreputable ragamuffin in Europe, feels that the day of universal brotherhood, despoliation and disorder is coming apace…Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism.”12 That prophecy will resonate politically for the next century, splitting liberalism in two. As I say: on the one side, a 7 Jeffrey Church, Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 226. 8 Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016, p. 9. 9 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, London: Williams and Norgate, 1911, p. 99. 10 It was at this point that one of neoliberalism’s almost forgotten ur-texts was written,Herbert Spencer’s Man against the State (1884). 11 For instance, he plays an important role in Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors. 12 Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol 1., ed. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983, p. 16.   progressivist, collectivist liberalism. On the other, an individualist liberalism of which neoliberalism is a continuation. By around 1900, liberalism’s fusion with socialism was often (although not quite accurately) associated with Bismark’s Germany, which gave anti-socialist liberalism a geographical inflection. Against this, individualistic liberalism was associated with Britain. But this received British liberalism looked back less to Locke’s religiously tolerant Britain than to Richard Cobden’s Britain of maritime/imperial dominance and free trade. Which is to say that liberalism’s fusion with socialism pushed socialism’s liberal enemies increasingly to think of freedom economically rather than politically — as in Ludwig von Mises influential 1922 book on socialism, which can be understood as a neoliberal urtext.13 By that point, too, individuals were already being positioned to become what Foucault calls “consumers of freedom.” 14 They were now less understood less as possessing a fundamental claim to freedom than as creating and participating in those institutions which enabled freedom in practice. Crucially after the first world war, in the work of von Mises and the so-called “Austrian school”, freedom was increasingly assigned to individual relations with an efficient market as equilibrium theory viewed markets. This turn to the market as freedom’s basis marked another significant historical departure: it is the condition of contemporary neoliberalism’s emergence. Neoliberalism organized itself internationally as a movement only after world war two, and did so against both Keynesian economics and the welfare state. 15 It was still mainly ideologically motivated by a refusal to discriminate between welfarism and totalitarianism — a line of thought already apparent in Conrad’s equation of socialism with Caesarism of course. As 13 See Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane. New Haven: Yale University Press 1951. 14 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 63. One key sign of this spread of this new freedom is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous appeal to the “free trade in ideas” in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. the US, a judgment which joins together the market, intellectual expression and the juridical. 15 See Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009.   Friedrich Hayek urged: once states begin to intervene on free markets totalitarianism looms because the people’s psychological character changes: they become dependent.16 For thirty years (in part as confined by this argument), neoliberalism remained a minority movement, but in the 1970s it began its quick ascent to ideological and economic dominance. Cutting across a complex and unsettled debate, let me suggest that neoliberalism became powerful then because it provided implementable policy settings for Keynesianism’s (perceived) impasse in view the stagnation and instability of post-war, first-world welfarist, full-employment economies after 1) the Vietnam War, 2) the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement; 3) OPEC’s cartelization, and 4) the postcolonial or “globalizing” opening up of world markets on the back of new transportation and computing technologies.17 In the global north neoliberalism was first implemented governmentally by parties on the left, led by James Callaghan in the UK, Jimmy Carter in the US, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia, and leading the way, David Lange and Roger Douglas in New Zealand.18 At this time, at the level of policy, it was urged more by economists than by ideologues insofar as these can be separated (and Hayek and Mises were both of course). As we know, neoliberals then introduced policies to implement competition, deregulation, monetarism, privatization, tax reduction, a relative high level of unemployment, the winding back of the state’s participation in the economy and so on. This agenda quickly became captured by private   16 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 48. 17 This history is open to lively differences of opinion. The major books in the literature are: Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, London: Picador 2010; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso 2014; Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe; Joseph Vogl, The Spectre of Capital, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2014; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. My own understanding of this moment is informed by Stedman-Jones’s account in particular. 18 It is worth noting in this context that the left had itself long been a hatchery of neoliberal economic ideas just because liberalism’s absorption of socialism was matched by socialism’s absorption of liberalism. See Johanna Brockman, Markets in the name of Socialism: the Left-wing Origins of Neoliberalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011 on the intellectual-historical side of this connection. 6 interests, and from the eighties on, it was woven into new, highly surveilled and privatized, computing and media ecologies, indeed into what some optimists today call “cognitive capitalism”.19 In this situation, more or less unintended consequences proliferated, most obviously a rapid increase in economic inequality and the enforced insertion of internal markets and corporate structures in non-commercial institutions from hospitals to universities. Indeed, in winding back the welfare state, renouncing Keynesian and redistributionist economic policies, it lost its classical liberal flavor and was firmly absorbed into conservatism — a transformation which had been prepared for by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.20 But two more concrete conceptual shifts also helped animate this particular fusion of conservatism and liberalism. First, postwar neoliberalism was aimed more at the enterprise than at the individual.21 Largely on the basis of van Mises’s Human Action (1940) as popularized by Gary Becker, the free, independent individual was refigured as “human capital” and thereby exposed instead to management and “leadership.” At the same time, via Peter Drucker’s concept of “knowledge worker,” which emphasized the importance of conceptual and communication skills to economic production, postsecular management theories for which corporations were hierarchical but organic communities also gained entry into many neoliberal mindsets.22 At that   19 Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity Press 2012. 20 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s influence is no doubt part of why neoliberalism emerged in Austria. Indeed the Austrian context in which contemporary neoliberalism emerged is worth understanding in more detail. In their early work, Hayek and Mises in particular were responding to “red Vienna” not just in relation to Otto Bauer’s Austromarxism but also in relation to its version of guild socialism associated with Hungarians like Karl Polanyi, with whom both Hayek and Mises entered into debate. See Lee Congdon, “The Sovereignty of Society: Karl Polanyi in Vienna,” in The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi, ed. Kari Polanyi-Levitt. Montreal: Black Rose Books 1990, 78-85. 21 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 225. 22 Drucker was another Austrian refugee who turned to capitalism against totalitarianism in the late thirties and his profoundly influential work on corporate management shadows neoliberal theory up until the 1970s.   7 point, neoliberalism also became a quest to reshape as many institutions as possible as corporations. At this point too Foucault’s consumers of freedom were becoming consumers full stop. To state this more carefully: at the level of ideology, to be free was now first and foremost deemed to be capable of enacting one’s preferences in consumer and labour markets. It would seem that preferences of this kind increasingly determined social status too, and, more invasively, they now increasingly shaped personalities just because practices of self were bound less and less to filiations and affiliations than to acts of choice. This helped the market to subsume older gradated social and cultural structures of identity-formation, class difference and cultural capital. At this juncture, we encounter another significant unexpected consequence within liberalism’s longue durée: i.e. the sixties cultural revolution’s reinforcement of neoliberalism. This is a complex and controversial topic so let me just say here that, from the late seventies, neoliberal subjects who were individualized via their entrepreneurial disposition and economic and labour choices, encounters the subject of post-68 identity politics who had been emancipated from received social hierarchies and prejudices, and was now attached to a particular ethnicity, gender or sexuality as chosen or embraced by themselves as individuals. These two subject formations animated each other to the degree that both had, in their different ways, sloughed off older communal forms, hierarchies and values. Governing this ménage of hedonism, productivity, insecurity and corporatization, neoliberalism today seems to have become insurmountable, and is, as I say, blob-like, merging out into institutions and practices generally, including those of our discipline. And it has done this as a turn within liberal modernity’s longer political, intellectual and social genealogies and structures rather than as a break from them. Nonetheless, three core, somewhat technical, propositions distinguish neoliberalism from liberalism more generally:

  1. First the claim, which belongs to the sociology of knowledge, that no individual or group can know the true value of anything at all.23 For neoliberals, that value — true or not — can only be assessed, where it can be assessed at all, under particular conditions: namely when it is available in a competitive and free market open to all individuals in a society based on private property. This is an argument against all elite and expert claims to superior knowledge and judgment: without prices, all assessments of value are mere opinion. In that way, market justice (i.e. the effects of competing in the market) can trump social justice. And in that way, for instance, neoliberalism finds an echo not just in negations of cultural authority and canonicity but in the idea that literary and aesthetic judgments are matters of private choice and opinion. In short, neoliberalism inhabits cultural democracy and vice versa. By the same stroke, it posits an absence — a mere structure of exchange—at society’s normative center.
  2. There is a direct relationship between the competitive market and freedom. Any attempt to limit free markets reduces freedom because it imposes upon all individuals a partial opinion about what is valuable. This particular understanding of freedom rests on the notion of the market as a spontaneous order — its being resistant to control and planning, its being embedded in a society which “no individual can completely survey” as Hayek put it.24 Not that this notion is itself original to neoliberalism: Foucault’s historiography of liberalism shows that, in the mid eighteenth century, this property of markets was thought of as “natural” and therefore needed to be protected from sovereign authority’s interference.25 But as Foucault and others have argued, neoliberalism emerges after World War 2 when the spontaneous market conditions of freedom are no longer viewed as natural (even if they remain immanently lawbound) but as governmentally produced.26
  3. Neoliberalism has specific ethical dimensions too. While it generally insists that individuals should be free to “follow their own values and preferences” (as Hayek put it) at least within the limits set by those rules and institutions which secure market stability, in fact individuals’ independence as well as their relation to market risk, provides the necessary condition for specific virtues and capacities. Most notably, in Hayek’s formulation, a neoliberal regime secures individuals’ self-sufficiency, honor and dignity and does so by the willingness of some to accept “material sacrifice,” or to “live dangerously” as Foucault put it, in a phrase he declared to be liberalism’s “motto”.27 This mix of risk-seeking existentialism and civic republicanism not only rebukes and prevents the kind of de-individualization supposedly associated with socialisms of the left and right, it is where neoliberalism and an older “Nietzschean” liberalism meet—with Michael Oakeshott’s work bearing special weight in this context.28 But as soon as neoliberalism itself becomes hegemonic in part by fusing with the spirit of 1968, this original ascetic, masculinist neoliberal ethic of freedom and risk comes to be supplemented and displaced by one based more on creativity, consumerist hedonism and entrepreneurialism aimed at augmenting choice.29

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23 See Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, p. 55. 24 Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents. The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 212. 25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 19. 26 This is argued in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: on Neoliberal Society, London: Verso 2014. For the immanent lawboundedness in Hayek, see Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, New York: Fordham University Press 2014: pps. 195-220. Vatter’s chapter “Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault” is excellent on how law is treated in neoliberal thought. 27 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 130. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 66. 28 See Andrew Norris’s forthcoming essay in Political Theory, “Michael Oakeshott’s Postulates of Individuality” for this. We might recall, too, that Foucault argues for similarities between the Frankfurt school and the early neoliberals on the grounds of their resistance to standardization, spectacle and so on. See The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 105.   I have indicated that Conrad belongs to the moment when socialist parties first contested democratic elections and which thus split liberalism, allowing one, then beleaguered, liberal fraction to begin to attach to conservatism. In this way then, he belongs to neoliberalism’s deep past (which is not to say, of course, that he should be understand as a proto-neoliberal himself). Let us now think about his novel Victory in this light. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century Indonesia mainly among European settlers and entrepreneurs. Indonesia was then a Dutch colony itself undergoing a formal economic deregulation program, which would increase not just Dutch imperial profits but, among indigenous peoples, also trigger what was arguably human history’s most explosive population growth to date.30 Victory belongs to this world where imperialism encountered vibrant commercial activity driven by entrepreneurial interests, competition and risk. Thus, for instance, its central character, the nomadic, cosmopolitan, aristocratic Swedish intellectual, Axel Heyst, establishes a business— a coal mine — along with a ship-owning partner, while other characters manage hotels, orchestras and trading vessels. Victory is a novel about enterprises as well as about individuals. But Conrad’s Indonesia is other to Europe as a realm of freedom. Importantly, however, its freedom is not quite liberal or neoliberal: it is also the freedom of a particular space. More precisely, it is the freedom of the sea: here, in effect Indonesia is oceanic. This formulation draws on Carl Schmitt’s post-war work on international law, which was implicitly   29 The history of that displacement is explored in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso 2005. 30 Bram Peper, “Population Growth in Java in the 19th Century”, Population Studies, 24/1 (1970): 71-84.   11 positioned against liberal and neoliberal theory. In his monograph The Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt drew attention to the sea as a space of freedom just because national sovereignties and laws did not hold there. But Schmitt’s implicit point was that liberal freedom needs to be thought about not just in terms of tolerance, recognition, rights or markets, but geographically and historically inside the long history of violent sovereign appropriation of the globe’s land masses so that elemental freedom was enacted on the oceans where law and sovereignty had no reach. From this perspective, piracy, for instance, plays an important role in freedom’s history. And from this perspective the claim to reconcile radical freedom to the lawbound state is false: such freedom exists only where laws do not. The sea, thought Schmitt’s way, is key to Conrad’s work. But, for him, the sea is also the home of economic liberalism, free-trade and the merchant marines by whom he had, of course, once been employed, and whose values he admired.31 Victory is a maritime tale set on waters which harbor such free trade at the same time as they form a Schmittean realm of freedom — and violence and risk — which effectively remains beyond the reach of sovereign law. Let me step back at this point to sketch the novel’s plot. Victory’s central character Heyst is the son of an intellectual who late in life was converted from progressivism to a mode of weak Schopenhauerianism or what was then call pessimism.32 Heyst lives his father’s pessimism out: he is a disabused conservative liberal: “he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.”33 Believing this, Heyst leaves Europe to “drift”— circulating through Burma, New Guinea, Timor and the Indonesian archipelagoes, simply gathering facts and observing. But, on an   31 For Conrad and trade in this region, see Andrew Francis, Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015. For Conrad’s affiliations to free trade proper see my unpublished paper, “Democracy, Empire and the Politics of the Future in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”. This is available on this url. 32 Joseph Conrad, Victory, London: Methuen 1916, p. 197. 33 Conrad, Victory, pps. 92-93   12 impulse, while drifting through Timor he rescues a shipowner, Morrison, whose ship has been impounded by unscrupulous Portuguese authorities, and through that act of spontaneous generosity, becomes obligated to Morrison. The two men end up establishing a coalmine in the remote Indonesian island of Samburan, backed by local Chinese as well as by European capital. The company soon collapses. Morison dies. And, living out his Schopenhauerian renunciation of the world, Heyst, the detached man, decides to stay on at the island alone except for one Chinese servant. He does, however, sometimes visit the nearest Indonesian town, Surabaya, and it is while staying there in a hotel owned by Schomberg, a malicious, gossipy German, that he makes another spontaneous rescue. This time he saves a young woman, Lena, a member of a traveling “ladies orchestra,” who is being bullied by her bosses and in danger of abduction by Schomberg himself. Heyst and Lena secretly escape back to his island, causing Schomberg to harbor a venomous resentment against Heyst. At this point Schomberg’s hotel is visited by a trio of sinister criminals: Jones, Ricardo and their servant Pedro. Taking advantage of Schomberg’s rage, they establish an illegal casino in his hotel. To rid himself of this risky enterprise, Schomberg advises them to go after Heyst in his island, falsely telling them that Heyst has hidden a fortune there. Jones and his gang take Schomberg’s advice but disaster awaits them. The novel ends with Jones, Ricardo, Heyst, Lena all dead on Heyst’s island. The novel, which hovers between commercial adventure romance and experimental modernism, is bound to neoliberalism’s trajectory in two main ways. First, it adheres to neoliberalism’s sociology of knowledge: here too there is no knowing center, no hierarchy of expertise, no possibility of detached holistic survey and calculation through which truth might command action. Heyst’s drifting, inconsequential fact-gathering, itself appears to illustrate that absence. As do the gossip and rumors which circulate in the place of informed knowledge, and which lead to disaster. Individuals and enterprises are, as it were, on their 13 own, beyond any centralized and delimited social body that might secure stability and grounded understandings. They are bound, rather, to self-interest and spontaneity. This matters formally not simply because, in an approximately Jamesian mode, the narrative involves a series of points of view in which various characters’ perceptions, moods and interests intersect, but because the narration itself is told in a first person voice without being enunciated by a diegetical character. That first person, then, functions as the shadow representative of a decentered community, largely focused on money, that is barely able to confer identity at all, a community, too, without known geographical or ideological limits just because the narrator, its implicit representative, has no location or substance. This narratorial indeterminacy can be understood as an index of liberalism at this globalizing historical juncture: a liberalism divesting itself of its own progressive histories, emancipatory hopes and institutions. A bare liberalism about to become neoliberalism, as we can proleptically say. More importantly, the novel speaks to contemporary neoliberalism because it is about freedom. As we have begun to see, Heyst is committed to a freedom which is both the freedom of the sea, and a metaphysical condition which has detached itself, as far as is possible, from connections, obligations, determinations. This structures the remarkable formal relationship around which the novel turns — i.e. Heyst’s being positioned as Jones’s double. The generous Schopenhauerian is not just the demonic criminal’s opposite: he is also his twin. Both men are wandering, residual “gentlemen” detached from the European order, and thrown into, or committed to, a radical freedom which, on the one side, is a function of free trade, on the other, a condition of life lived beyond the legal and political institutions that order European societies, but also, importantly, are philosophical and ethical — a renunciation of the established ideological order for independence, courage and nomadism. To put this rather differently: Heyst and Jones’s efforts to live in freedom — to comport themselves as free individuals — combines economic freedom — a freedom of exchange, competition and   14 entrepreneurial possibilities— with a state of nature as a line of flight (or emancipation) from received continental laws, values and social structures. Freedom, that is, which combines that which Carl Schmitt and the early neoliberals imagined, each in their own way. The novel’s main point is that there is, in fact, nothing in this freedom to sustain true ethical substance. It is as if Schmittean freedom has smashed both liberal freedom and pessimistic asceticism, along with their ethical groundings. Or to come at the novel’s basic point from another direction: it is as if the absence at the heart of a free society has transmigrated into these characters’ selves. It is at that level that individual freedom cannot be separated from violence and risk and good from evil. Without an instituted social structure, Heyst cannot stay true to himself: his commitment to freedom and renunciation is compromised because of his spontaneous acts of generosity and sympathy which lead to his and Lena’s death. On the other side, Jones, a homosexual shunned by respectable society, is afflicted by those key nineteenth-century affects, resentment and boredom as well as a quasi-Nietzschean contempt for “tameness”, which drive him towards living outside of society, at contigency’s mercy, and towards reckless, malevolent violence. Heyst and Jones die together almost by accident, in deaths that reveal them not just as entangled with one another at existence’s threshold, but as both attuned to death, even in life. It now look as if while they lived they wanted to die. In that way, the novel makes it clear that the risk, disorder and emptiness which inhabit their striving for a radically liberal practice of life corrode distinctions not just between violence and renunciation, not just between good and evil, but also between life and death. We can put it like this: the freedom that these characters claim and the risks that it entails and which bind them together are inclined more towards death than towards life, just on account of freedom’s own conditions of possibility, namely radical autonomy, absence of sovereign power, and maximum choice.

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15 As I say, this is a reading of the novel which, at least in principle, helps to canonize Victory just because it claims that its form, plot and characters address versions of our current neoliberal social condition, and does so in metaphysically ambitious terms. Victory is a critique of freedom, I think. Conrad is insisting that even in a liberal society devoted to free trade, enterprises and markets, the law — and the sovereign state — comes first. It is, if one likes, beginning the work of detaching liberalism from freedom. To say this, however, is to ignore the most pressing question that this reading raises: to what degree should we today actually accede to Conrad’s ambivalent, pessimistic and conservative imagination of radical freedom? How to judge that freedom’s renunciation of established hierarchies, collectivities and values whether for adventure, risk and spontaneity or for violence and death? It is a condition of the discipline’s neoliberal state that the only answer we can give to that question is that we can, each of us, answer that question any way that we choose.

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

In 2007, NATO, in particular the US, the UK, France, Germany and Turkey all decided to overthrow the government of Bashar Assad for uncertain reasons. In general, the reason for this was given as roll back Iran, defeat Iran, destroy Iran, etc.The targets at the time were:

  • Iran
  • Syria
  • Hezbollah
  • Hamas (sponsored, armed and trained by Iran and Hezbollah)

Later enemies included the Yemeni Houthi, falsely accused of being Iranian proxies. The Iraqi Shia were left out of this anti-Shia jihad for tactical reasons although the Iraqi state is quite close to Iran.

Seymour Hersch’s article called The Redirect describes this change in policy using CIA sources. The US and the rest of the West decided to change focus and take on the Shia states and movements instead of the Sunnis. The reason for doing this is unclear, as Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Houthis are no threat at all to the US or the rest of the West.

They are a threat to the Jews – to Israel. For a very long time now, the Jews have been yelling at the US when they are not whispering in our ear that Iran and its allies are the biggest threat to the US and the West in the Middle East. It’s all a gigantic lie of course, and it’s part of a project to make the enemies of Israel into the enemies of the US, which has been very successful by the way.

For whatever reason, the US and the rest of the West, especially France and the UK, have decided that Iran and its allies are the worst enemies of the West in the Middle East. This has been official NATO policy since 2007 – Iran and its allies are NATO’S enemy #1 in the Middle East. Other than the fact that NATO has decided that the enemies of Israel are the enemies of NATO, it hard to see the logic of this.

For the US at least, one reason may be paybacks. The US is still furious at Iran for the Embassy takeover, and we have never forgiven them. The US Deep State are like the Jews – their motto is “never forgive, never forget,” and so is ours. This is one more way that the US is a “Jewish” country of Judaized Gentiles. America never forgives any attack or slight done to it, and we stay in revenge mode forever until the target of our enmity is destroyed, just like the Jews.

We still refuse to pay Vietnam for the tremendous war damage we did. We won’t even help them clean the place up! This “never forgive, never forget, never back down” mindset is the reason why we will not cooperating with them. We are still furious that the Vietnamese forced us to withdraw from Vietnam while our South Vietnam puppet was overthrown in a severe defeat for America. I do not think we will ever forgive them for that, as America never forgives.

And similar to Vietnam, Iran will always remain a US enemy due to the Embassy takeover until we make them say uncle or regime change them at some point.

By the same token, the US is still furious at Hezbollah for the bombing of the US Marine base in Lebanon in 1983 in which over 300 US Marines died and for the execution of a CIA agent in Beirut several years later.

But this probably not done by Hezbollah. It would be more accurate to say it was done by Iran.

There was also some sort of a Hezbollah plane hijacking that I am not up on. For some reason, this made us very angry.

Also Hezbollah probably set off the bomb at the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, killing ~80 Jews and wounding many more. The group also probably set off a suicide bomb on a bus in Bulgaria, killing ~17 Israeli tourists. Both of these incidents where Jews and Israelis were killed really infuriated the US, which doesn’t seem to make sense, as it was Argentines and Israelis, not Americans, who were killed in both places. But if the US is a in effect a Jewish country filled with 310 million Jews or Judaized Gentiles, and if the enemies of the Jews and Israel really are the enemies of America, then it seems to make a lot more sense.

As such, the West has declared war on much of the Shia of the Middle East because they were aligned with Iran. But it is a mystery why the West feels so threatened by Iran and its allies.

American Exceptionalism Is the Culprit

Found on the Net:

Americans are the Exceptionalist nation.

They can do whatever they want to whomever they want whenever they want – no matter how many millions of people they slaughter (see the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War) or regions of the world they destabilize (see the Middle East and Central Asia).

At base, the West in general suffers from a psychopathic delusion that they are a Force for Good – hence, all their wars of aggression are perfectly justified or at worst an unintended mistake.

At base, Americanism and Westernism are one and the same with Zionism.

Just as the Zionists believe that Jews are God’s Chosen People.

Westerners and Americans believe that their nations are God’s Chosen “Democracy” – which is just their Orwellian way of saying that they are God’s Chosen Empire.

This is the worldview and value system of the American/Western/Zionist threat.

This is 10

Furthermore, the American people either support everything the US government does or simply do not care about US foreign policy, so the US Deep State just does whatever the Hell it wants because the American people say, “Go ahead and do whatever you want to.” Then when the inevitable blowback comes from diabolical US foreign policy, Americans simply get even more exceptionalistic and jingoist and start demanding even more crazy wars and aggression which was what caused the blowback in the first place which in turn creates even more blowback.

When was the last time the American people ever said, “Hey, we really oppose US foreign policy here?” Vietnam. Vietnam was the end of the “bipartisan foreign policy consensus” whereby both the Democratic and Republican Parties agree on the basic of US foreign policy and only differ on how crazy, psycho and hawkish they should be about it. However, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus was reinstated a while afterwards when Reagan came in and it’s been there ever since.

Think about it. Vietnam was the last time we had any real debate about US foreign policy. Ever since then, Americans have been “good Germans.” Vietnam was the last time we marched in the streets to protest US foreign policy.

Don’t think the Deep State doesn’t know this. They know that Americans have given them the green light to go ahead and do whatever the Hell they want to. In fact, they can usually get most Americans to agree on whatever the nuttiness du jour is via the 10

Therefore, polls show that ~7

That a strong majority typically backs the Deep State on whatever it wants to do cannot be a coincidence. The only reason those people can possibly have felt that way is because they have been brainwashed by the media into feeling that way. Since obviously the vast majority of Americans simply blindly allow the media propaganda machine to brainwash them into believing whatever it wants them to believe, it follows that Americans must have extreme faith in the US media and that the media and state is telling them the truth.

After all, if large numbers of Americans thought they were being lied to to 24-7, they would not mimic like Myna birds whatever the media line of the day is. Obviously the vast majority of Americans do not think that the government and media is lying to them all the time.

After all, we live in a free country with free speech and a free press, not a totalitarian state where the media is 10

Why US Liberal Democrats Are Absolutely USeless

Vietnam was the last time we marched in the streets to protest US foreign policy.

There were a few protests around the Iraq War, but they were very weak. I know because I was at a few of those marches. It was incredible how hostile many of the people driving by were. Their faces would turn to hard stone hate when they saw us. Many people flipped us off and threatened us. When I opposed the ramp-up to the invasion and the invasion itself, I was repeatedly threatened by other Americans for not supporting the war. My own father, hardline liberal Democrat and fanatical Zionist, supported the war to the hilt and even threatened me for not supporting it.

I know some liberal Democrats who say, “I opposed the war!” but they were sheepish and more or less silent during the entirety of the war and seemed embarassed to come out against it. For the entirety of the war, I almost never heard one single comment from them against the war. When I called the war “a Nazi-like war of aggression,” I got a lot of animated reaction from liberal Democrats. Even today, they are very reluctant to talk about that war, and when you bring it, they first say they opposed the war, and then they go on to give all sorts of reasons justifying it.

In other words, the antiwar and certainly the anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist movement in the US is dead in the water. When even most liberal Democrats are jingoistic flag-waving exceptionalists, you know the country is history.

Take to the Skies Tonight!

Sky Pilot by the Animals! One of the greatest bands of all time. Eric Burdon!

Angie Cohen just posted a list of Christian songs that you can listen to if you wish. But this was always one of my favorites. The video is about the Vietnam War, but I always thought this was a song about Christianity. Anyone know? Is it about Christianity or Nam?

If it’s a Christian song, it is one of the greatest Christian songs I have ever heard.

The prose that follows the video is my attempt at literary writing, in case you were wondering. This is what I call Flash Fiction. I write some flash fiction things now and again.

You’re welcome.

Sad Song

The rocket, if it was a rocket at all, raced across the sky towards the dawning hours away. The roar split the clouds. We thought the sky would fall down. In its wake, it’s only the two of us, you and me, shuddering in the screeching silence, and you know the the whole damn world can go right to Hell. When it all comes crashing down, we will still be standing here, you and me, shivering amidst the ruins.

How high can we fly?

Sky pilot!

Hilary Clinton, Republican

Evidence. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how low she will stoop. She has also proved herself to be a 10 One of the charges against him was his secret bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed 500,000 people and directly led to the radicalization of the Khmer Rouge and their genocidal takeover of the country. The man who ran that bombing campaign? Hilary’s hero, Henry Kissinger, the man she lauds as promoting “values-driven foreign policy.” Sure he promotes a values driven foreign policy. The values of a psychopath. Apparently sociopath Hilary Clinton thinks a psychopathic foreign policy is the way to go. She would.

A Brief History of the Neoconservatives

Jason Y writes:

How does this relate to the neocons, as some have said they had Trotskyite roots? I always had a hard time understanding this. I mean, how could W. Bush, the furthest thing from a leftist or communist you can think of, could be in with communists?

I am not sure. Many of the Trots were Jewish. For whatever reason, many Trots turned into neocons. They began turning away from Communism with the revelations about Stalin and Stalinism, including Khrushchev’s secret speech. A lot of them simply left Communism and formed the anti-Communist Left, or became anti-Communist liberals like my later father. The CIA set up a number of organizations and journals to work out of starting in the 1950’s. One was called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was during the 6-Day War that many really turned against the Left. As I said, most were Jews, and Jews the world over who had never cared much about Israel rallied round the Israeli flag in 1967. This was the start of this group’s big break with the Left. The Vietnam War was going on too at this time, and many of this group were pro-war. They were sickened by the pro-Viet Cong and what they saw as anti-patriotic attitudes of the antiwar crowd. Many of this crowd were older conservative Jewish guys, and they were disgusted and sickened by the counterculture, especially by the fact that many of its leaders were Jewish, which they saw as bringing shame on the Jews. This group began to merge with Jewish conservatives who had always been around but had not been very common. This goes back to the time when Jews first came here and many were poor and living as renters. Many of their landlords were rich Jews. A lot of these poor Jewish renters became leftwingers and specialized in taking their Jewish slumlords to court all the time. This caused a major split in Jewish society and the Jewish landlords saw the Jewish leftwing tenants as some sort of treasonous “enemies of the people.” This group nevertheless stayed with the Democratic Party, but they had started to become the rightwing of the Democratic Party. In the 1970’s, they began to congregate around Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s office. Jackson was known as “the Senator from Boeing” and he was widely known as a super hawk. He strongly supported Israel and the Vietnam War. Support for Israel and the Vietnam War became intertwined in this crowd. In the 1970’s, some early proto-neoconservative publications came out, mostly published by Jewish rightwing Democrats. When the Reagan Administration came around, many of these proto-neocons got jobs in the Reagan Administration. Most of them specialized in Cold War politics where they become wild, crazed, fanatical Cold Warriors. Particular focus was on ramping up military spending and opposing nuclear arms reduction. They made alliances with such characters as Frank Gaffney, a wild-eyed Cold Warrior. This was the trajectory of characters like Richard Perle who cut their teeth as Cold Warriors under Reagan. Paul Nitze was another proto-neocon from this era. Jean Kirkpatrick can also be seen as a proto-neocon. Really Reagan’s foreign policy was already a neocon activist foreign policy as we supported fascists and mass murderers the world over in the name of opposing the USSR. I am not quite sure what happened to the neocons during the 1990’s. I think they may have formed a lot of their classic neocon organizations. Some of them worked closely with Israel’s rightwing government during this period. With Bush’s selection and theft of the election in 2000, many neocons ascended into power. After 9-11, they gained a lot of prominence. Both Trotskyites and neocons could be seen as radical revolutionaries. Generally conservatives are supposed to be cautious folks. The Trotskyite plan was always “world revolution.” Since socialism in one country was not possible, Communist revolutions the world over would have to be sparked in order to ensure that large states like the USSR could succeed. The neocons are also wild revolutionaries like the neocons and they also believe in a sort of world revolution involving attacking and undermining their enemies all over the world and instituting regime change in many enemies of the US.

America Lied, People Died #'s 32,869 and 32, 870

After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. … After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed. Eduard Galeano.

It isn’t strange that the US lies its way into wars. Many nations do this, the US is not unique. What is a bit odd is that the American people fall for this crap over and over, and tens of millions still think that the word of the lying media is gold. Not only that, but even after their leaders are proven to have lied to them and made them out to be utter fools, they reward the con artists who put one over on them with another term in office. I don’t get it. Is America suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Do we enjoy being made to look like suckers, fools and idiots? The Gulf of Tonkin was in 1964. The Iraq War was in 2003. Over almost 40 years, Americans haven’t learned a damn thing. Truly pitiful. Now we are doing it again, and American fools are falling for the lies one more time. What are Americans but congenital rubes?

False Flags Operations – How They Work

I actually hate to believe in conspiracy theories because I think most of them are nonsense. But sometimes, they are just true. This is particularly true in geopolitics, politics and war when conspiracies are hatched continuously and dishonestly is the order of the day. During wartime, one thing you see a fair amount of is something called false flag operations. They do not happen nearly as often as conspiracy nuts say they do, but false flag operations definitely occur some of the time during warfare. This is considered to be an exceptionally dirty way of fighting, and only the dirtiest nations of all utilize the malign false flag operation. In a false flag operation, the perpetrator either kills their own people or kills innocent people. The attack is structured in such a way as to blame the opposition for killing the perpetrator’s supporters or innocent people. In this way, the enemy is framed and convicted of committing a grave crime during wartime. There is quite a history of such things. The Gulf of Tonkin incident has now been shown to be a complete frame-up. In fact, the recordings that were used to frame the North Vietnamese were recorded by the US one day before the incident even happened. This incident was then used as a casus belli for the US to enter the war with the justification that “North Vietnam attacked us!” Hitler used false flags regularly. The invasion of Poland was preceded by a false flag operation in which Nazis dressed up like Polish forces attacked their own troops and then blamed Poland for the attack. This was used as justification for Germany to invade Poland. The burning of the Reichstag was another false flag. An amateur, bumbling Communist was framed with setting the Reichstag on fire when in fact the Nazis set fire to their own building in order to have justification to institute martial law. Israel has done a number of false flag operations. After the 1948 War, most of the Iraqi Jews stayed in Iraq and refused to go to Israel. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Iraq. Israeli agents went to Iraq and did things like throw grenades into meetings of Iraqi Jews. A number of Iraqi Jews were killed and wounded in this way. Israel then blamed the Arab Iraqi government and began an international campaign agitating for the Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq and come to the US. Almost all of the Iraqi Jews fled Iraq and headed to Israel. Later, in 1954, Israeli agents ran around Cairo bombing movie theaters and American institutions and blamed the attacks on the Egyptian government. The attempt here was to show that the Egyptian government was depraved and to drive a wedge between the US and Egypt. Later in the 1973 War, the Israelis deliberately attacked a US vessel called the USS Liberty that was offshore of Israel. The Israelis claimed it was a terrible accident but actually it was deliberate. The reason was because the ship was spying on the war between the Egyptians and Israel and US sig intel had picked up signals that Israel was getting ready to murder 6,000 Egyptian POW’s in the Sinai Desert. Israel did indeed kill all those POW’s, and they did not have a good excuse for it. The Jewish-controlled US have never properly investigated the incident and the US government has basically said it is cool for Israel to kill Americans or US troops any time they feel like it. We covered up for them. After the bombing of a US army dance in Berlin that casualties among US forces, Israel placed a receiver on the coastline of Libya with recordings that were used as evidence that Libya set the bomb. Libya may indeed have set off that bomb, and on the other hand, maybe they did not. Know one knows. But the recordings were fake. The downing of the Lockerbie flight over Scotland resulted in two competing theories. One said that Libya did it as revenge for trying to kill Qaddafi. The other said that Iran did it via their ally Syria. There was as much evidence for one as for the other, in fact, promoters of the Iran-Syria theory say there was never any evidence of Libyan involvement. Nevertheless, Libya was tried and convicted of a crime they may not have committed, a vast monetary settlement was extorted from Libya and the crime was used as an excuse to overthrow the Qaddafi government with Al Qaeda type Islamists who then murdered Qaddafi after they captured him. During the Years of Lead in Italy, the Italian state, possibly with CIA assistance, used fascist agents to set off numerous bombs in crowded public places which killed a number of Italian civilians. The state then blamed these attacks on the Italian Left in an attempt to destroy them. In 1980, a deranged Turkish gunman named Agta tried to assassinate the Pope in Bulgaria. For a very long time, the Deep State and their controlled media tried to frame the KGB of the USSR for this crime. In fact, they were utterly innocent of this crime and all of the US evidence was simply fabricated. Right before the first Iraq War, part of the propaganda for the war was the false flag lie that Iraq was killing Kuwaiti babies by unplugging their incubators. This was proven to be a lie, but it helped set off a war. Later, before the 2003 War, the US did it again by concocting with deep Israeli assistance an elaborate lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when a cursory look at the evidence showed that he did not. This fake evidence was used to launch a huge war. A British special forces unit was caught with a bomb-rigged car that they were apparently driving somewhere to set off. Although they were let go, it was never adequately explained what they were doing with a bomb car, where they were going to blow it up, who were they trying to kill and for what purpose. There are interesting accusations that the blowing up of the Al Askari Mosque in Iraq in 2006 was the work of Iraqi security forces in league with US special forces. The purpose was supposedly to set off civil war to take the heat off US casualties during a hot political season by redirecting the war from Iraqis kill Americans to Iraqis killing Iraqis. It is an interesting theory, but I regard it as unproven. Turkish intelligence was recently caught planning a huge terrorist attack at the Turkish-Syrian border that killed Turks and Syrians, mostly civilians, as a plot to frame Syria in order to use that as a casus belli for Turkish entry into the war. There were many accusations of false flag attacks during the Algerian Civil War. The government seemed to be allowing terrorists to invade the villages of their own supporters and massacre them in horrible ways. Military bases were often close by, many calls for help were made to them, but the soldiers never moved from their barracks. They sat back and watched while the terrorists massacred their own people. During the US-planned Venezuelan coup of 2002, the coup forces opened fire on both Chavez supporters and their own people in an attempt to blame Chavez’ police for a depraved crime. They were caught, but the false flag was wildly played up in the corrupt US media. False flag attacks are very dirty and most governments who do these attacks are fascist or fascist like states or imperialist states with deep fascist sympathies. False flag attacks are pretty much a part of the fascist playbook. For example, Nazi Germany and Israel were both fascist states, the Venezuelan opposition is a fascist movement, the Italian state in the 1970’s was ruled by rightwing governments, and the Algerian and Kuwait states were deeply authoritarian governments. The justification for false flags is the greater good. If we blow an airplane full of innocent people out of the air and it helps us to get the world against Russia and evaporate support for our rebel enemies, then the false flag was the lesser of two evils. False flag attacks operate on an ends justifies the means basis. There have been many accusations that the 911 attacks were false flag attacks by the US, Israelis or both. Despite quite a bit of evidence being offered, I have not seen any convincing evidence that any group other than Al Qaeda was involved. However, I do believe that there were deep Saudi links to this attack both at the private and state levels. Many assassinations and “accidents” are in a sense false flags. A helicopter crashes with the head of state of Panama, Trujillo, on board. It was just an accident! No it wasn’t. The CIA rigged his copter to crash. The CIA has been involved in a number of killings made to look like accidents. Plane and car crashes are especially popular. The US Deep State often kills people and makes it look like a suicide. The Mossad engages in these “fake suicides” also. In a case associated with the Kennedy Assassination, three prominent witnesses all “committed suicide” by carbon monoxide poisoning in their vehicles at around the same time. The best conclusion is that the National Security Establishment (The Deep State) killed these men. We will probably never know the truth about the Kennedy Assassination, but he was probably killed by the Deep State with a major role for the CIA because he angered the National Security Establishment. The lone gunman theory appears to be a ruse and if anything, Oswald was used as a convincing fall guy. Oswald may indeed have killed Kennedy, but that does not prove that he acted alone. Oswald could have killed Kennedy as part of a Deep State plot. Karen Silkwood was murdered by US law enforcement by putting plutonium in her food. This was then made to look like an accident because she worked with such material, it was assumed she brought it home with her. This was to stop her from blowing the whistle on the nuclear power industry to make her serve as a warning to others who may think of doing something similar. A number of cases of “single car accidents” where the vehicle veers off the road into a ditch killing the driver are actually Deep State or law enforcement homicides. These vehicles are probably run off the road. The best false flags use a controlled media and a corrupted state and intelligence service in order to create a huge propaganda event to further geopolitical goals, often during armed conflicts. Right around the time of the Kennedy Assassination, the CIA waged a massive campaign centered around “conspiracy theory.” They planted the idea in Americans’ minds that conspiracies and false flags never occur, that murders are never made to look like accidents or suicides and that anyone who suggests such a thing is an unhinged lunatic. The controlled media was 10 However, it was very successful. Most Americans refuse to believe that any deadly state conspiracies of any kind ever occur anywhere at any time, and that everyone who suggests this is a mental case, a crank or a kook. A ranting, raving, unstable nutball who should be either laughed at or ignored. Once the American people were convinced that deadly state conspiracies never occur, they and their fascist allies were then free to conduct all of the conspiracy theories that they wanted to with no consequences whatsoever! You see how that works? The problem with false flag theories is that for every 50 false flag cases the conspiracy crowd claims to uncover, perhaps one of them is a real false flag and the rest are either demonstrably not false flags or are lacking in probative evidence and hence cannot be proven one way or the other. Now that we know what false flags are, it will be much easier to imagine that the Ukrainian government may have committed a false flag attack when it deliberately shot down Malaysian Air Lines Flight 17 recently in Ukraine. I believe that the odds are that this is the best explanation for the attack. And following the theory laid out above, the framers of the Russians and Novorussians are accusing those who blew the whistle on the false flag of “conspiracy theory”, opening them to ridicule and dismissal. A completely captive and controlled media has gone along with all of the US and Ukie lies being used to frame innocent Russia and Novorussia with scarcely a single voice in dissent to be heard. The Modern Era is a field day for the conspirator. Modern Man likes to fashion himself as scientific, logical, and sane. He is someone who will not believe wild theories easily. This is useful, but the vast majority of folks playing the Scientific Logical Sane Secular Role are dupes because they refuse to believe that deadly conspiracies ever occur. Hence conspirators can operate with free reign and few hindrances in hatching and carrying out their conspiracies. They also know they will never get caught and their conspiracies will never be proven because they are committing acts which have been proven to never exist. In such an environment, all things are possible.

The Vietnam War and the Land Question

Like the Iraqi police in the previous post, the South Vietnamese army similarly was poorly motivated and relied on the US Army to do their fighting for them. Apparently they felt little or no allegiance to the South Vietnamese state, for reasons of which we will discuss below. Although some ARVN soldiers fought well, many were lousy fighters who either would not advance on the enemy or would cut and run as soon as fighting broke out. They did not seem to have much loyalty to the South Vietnamese state.  And sure enough, soon after the US pulled out, ARVN was rapidly defeated by a highly motivated NVA from North Vietnam along with whatever was left of the Viet Cong after Tet in 1968 and the Phoenix Program after that. Supporters of the US war accuse North Vietnam of invading and interfering in the war, as if North and South Vietnam were valid states. Really there is just one country – Vietnam. The north was trying to reunify the country and had nationalism on its side. The South was corrupt, a regime of landlords and traitors who had previously worked for the French colonials and now worked for the US invaders who more or less colonized Vietnam after the French left. A lot of Left revolutions in the 3rd World have been driven more by the land question than anything else. A land reform is no big deal. You get paid for your land. But many states put it off forever and end up with a FARC, a Chavez, a Morales, an FMLN, Sandinistas, an NPA or a Viet Cong. There’s no putting off the land question. Until you deal with it, your nation will be in continuous turmoil.

Moon of Alabama

This is a superb blog, widely despised by the Lunatic Western (Trot) Left, so you figure it must be good for something. When I saw Louis Proyect, poster boy for the dysfunctional Western (pro-US imperialist Trot) Left, bashing away at Moon of Alabama that seemed like a pretty good recommendation to me. The author of MOA is a fine author and the site has been around for some time. He is actually quite reasonable, which surprised me. His basic position is anti-US imperialism. He opposes the imperialism of both the Liberal Interventionist Left and Neoconservative Right (What’s the difference!?), which is after what I would call “the bipartisan foreign policy consensus.” Vietnam threatened to upset this hoary relic of the Truman Era, so the Vietnam Syndrome had to be destroyed. This was actually cited by monsters like Rumsfeld and Cheney as a major reason to invade Iraq in 2003 – to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome! What the Hell kind of reason is that to stage a Nazi-like war of aggression against a sovereign state? On Ukraine, he supports the self-defense forces in the East and Russia and opposes the Ukrainian Nazis and the Western scum backing them. On Syria, he supports Assad against the diabolical Sunni Islamists. On Iraq, he supports non-intervention. He supports the Palestinians versus the Israeli criminal regime, and for this apparently he gets constantly bashed as an anti-Semite. I have been to his comment section and it is just straight up clean Left anti-imperialists in there with few if any confused or depraved anti-Semites. Sounds like a false charge. The comments are even better than the short posts. The commenters are extremely knowledgeable and very smart. Fascinating stuff, better than anything you get in the Lie Machine called the US MSM media.

Democratic Party Liberals Are Militarists

And they always have been. Their current incarnation in the US is in the form of “The Cruise Missile Left” and “The Humanitarian Bomber Left”. They are the ones who ramped up the Vietnam War and expanded it to its greatest extent. Let us look at the record of the two first post-WW2 Democratic Presidents and their incredible militarism and very rightwing foreign policy. Democratic Party liberals did the following things: Under Democratic Party liberal Harry Truman:

  • Engaged in a massive campaign to hide and secrete away Nazis after World War 2 so the CIA could use them to fight Communism.
  • Installed military rule in Japan. The first act of the military government was outlaw all labor unions.
  • Overthrew the democratic government of Greece with a rightwing monarchist coup and then helped the new Greek fascist government as they murdered 12,000 Greek Communists and threw another 40,000 in prison, thus starting the Greek Civil War.
  • Supported the Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist UNO as it waged its anti-Soviet guerrilla campaign in the Ukraine.
  • Supported and assisted the South Korean government while they murdered 200,000 South Koreans in the face of a Communist insurgency from 1945-1950.
  • Destroyed every city in North Korea, often with firebombs, bombed dams causing rivers to flood. North Korea was so devastated after this that most of the population was living underground in tunnels, shelters or caves. All in all, 3 million North Koreans were killed in the war, mostly by US bombs.
  • Assisted the French colonialists in the fight against the anti-colonialist Viet Minh.
  • Assisted the British colonialists in the fight against the anti-colonialist Malay guerrillas.
  • Assisted Chiang Kai Shek when he consolidated his rule in Taiwan by installing military rule, outlawing all languages but Chinese and murdering 100,000 people, mostly Leftists.
  • Set up the fascist Gladio stay-behind network all across Europe. This was a group of fascists who would “stay behind” after a Soviet invasion to fight an insurgency against the Soviets. The Gladio network subsequently caused all sorts of problems, including a wave of fascist terror bombings in the Years of Lead in the 1970’s.
  • Illegally interfered with the Italian elections after the war to keep the Italian Communist Party from winning.
  • Threatened to drop nuclear bombs on both North Korea and China if they didn’t say uncle.

Under Democratic Party liberal John F. Kennedy:

  • Stepped up the Vietnam War by vastly increasing the number of advisers into the tens of thousands.
  • Invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
  • Supported a savage government and state death squads in Guatemala that slaughtered 5-10,000 people while fighting an insurgency.
  • Supported the French colonists versus the FLN anti-colonialists during the Algerian Civil War.
  • Initiated a violent coup that overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam, killing him because he was getting in the way of US plans.
  • Imposed an embargo on Cuba which idiotically continues to this very day.
  • Waged a guerrilla war called Operation Mongoose in Cuba where 10,000 people were killed, often civilians. They would get in boats and cruise along the beaches on Cuba, killing beachgoers with machine guns. They set off bombs in factories full of workers, killing up to 100 people at a time. The US began its endless efforts to murder Fidel Castro.
  • Started a lying campaign that the Castro government was going to take parents’ children away from so they could be raised by the state. 10,000 Cuban children fled the island with their parents.
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