Showing posts with label Madeleine Albright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Madeleine Albright. Show all posts

Sunday, 17 October 2021

Nations Built on Lies – How the US Became Rich

October 16, 2021

Nations Built on Lies – How the US Became Rich

Foreword, Prologue, Introduction:  This is Part 1 of 6 and will form a complete ebook that will be available for download with part six.

Foreword

From: James Bacque

Date: Saturday, Jan 5, 2019 9:13 PM

Dear Larry

Thanks for the information–as you guessed I have encountered much of it myself already. I wish you good luck . . . Be as moderate as you can in expressing your very important findings. Remember that hardly anyone knows as much as you do and some of your findings are very upsetting.

All the best

Jim

Prologue To Volume One

A Brief History of America That You Won’t Learn in a University

One of the more popular historical myths embedded in the American consciousness by the propaganda machine relates to the migration of settlers to the New World, the narrative detailing how hundreds of thousands of the virtuous oppressed flocked to the dockyards in a headlong rush for freedom and opportunity. There may indeed have been five or six such persons, but a much larger group was there to escape the hangman and jailer and an even larger selection were slave traders, hookers, and budding capitalist scam artists looking for greener pastures. When we add in the vast numbers hoping to escape justified persecution for their perverted witches-brew versions of Christianity, the first Americans were hardly role models for a new nation. The evidence is more clearly on the side of criminals, losers and misfits, religious whackos and opportunists than on the mythical oppressed. And, for the record, there is no evidence whatever of settlers emigrating to America in search of either “freedom” or “opportunity”, at least not within the current meaning of these words.

Good mental health was not a prerequisite for European settlers emigrating to the New World. We are fond of reminding ourselves that Australia was (and mostly still is) populated primarily with murderers, thieves and sexual perverts, but the immigrants to America were not noticeably better. Indeed, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty got the words more or less correct in referring to “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. While the Australians had their serial killers and muggers, the Europeans went one better with their Christian extremists who spent their weekdays burning witches and killing Indians, and their Sundays in church thanking God for the opportunity. The Australians have marginally improved their habits over the centuries while the Americans have not.

America is widely accepted, and indeed even prides itself, on being a deeply Christian country, with 65% or more of the population declaring religion important in their lives. This would be supported by history, since the major migrations to the New World consisted of a long list of flaky religious sects whose primary goal in emigration was the opportunity to build a society entirely based on those isolationist and extremist heresies. It is probably safe to say that Salem witchcraft was the seedbed in which the peculiarly American version of Christian theology sprouted and flourished, and which also served as a practical introduction to mass hysteria which would later be so usefully applied to the concepts of patriotism and democracy. The enduring echoes of this religious ancestry have been highly influential in all of subsequent American history.

The Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (“The most famous words in the English language”, if you’re American; just another Hello Kitty greeting card, if you’re not), states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all White Men were created superior and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, the most important of which is slavery”. In the recent history of the modern world, only two nations of people have so thoroughly embraced slavery as to have practiced it on an immense scale for hundreds of years: the Christians in America and the Dalai Lamas in Tibet. And only these two groups so cherished slavery in their hearts they fought a civil war over the right to maintain it. It is hardly a moral selling point that both sets of racist bigots lost the war and, while Mao cleaned up Tibet, the racism and bigotry persisted in America, often violently, for another 200 years and is still widely in evidence today. Christian virtue does not die easily.

Internationally, the American government and its leaders function with an absolute amorality, driven primarily by their commercial Darwinism, their law-of-the-jungle, might-makes-right philosophy. Yet individually most Americans accept all this as somehow being righteous and pleasing in the eyes of their god. The vast network of torture prisons, the numerous governments overthrown, the countless brutal dictatorships installed and supported, the commercial and military enslavement of so many populations, the 10 to 20 million civilians massacred, the constant meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, the so-frequent destabilisation of governments, the plundering of the resources of so many nations. All of these are excused, justified, forgiven, often praised, then quickly forgotten by these moral Christians. Americans may be comfortable with all this cognitive dissonance, but as Jiddu Krishnamurti aptly wrote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.

Hypocrisy has always been a prominent, if not quite endearing, feature of Americans, and especially of their government. It is Americans who preach democracy and freedom at home while installing brutal puppet dictators all over the world, who preach free trade at home while practicing savage mercantilistic protectionism abroad. It is Americans who espouse human rights at home while building the largest network of torture prisons in the history of the world. And of course, preaching that human life is precious at home while murdering millions in other nations in trumped-up wars of liberation. It is only Americans who moan about “the appalling loss of 5,000 American lives” in Iraq while killing one million Iraqis, half of whom were children. It is only the Americans who use the CIA, NED, USAID and the VOA to pay and prod individuals in other countries to create internal political dissent, then condemn a government for cracking down on “innocent dissidents”. Maybe one day Americans will lose their stomach for all this creation of worldwide instability and have another American revolution. And not before time.

Most Americans are only dimly aware of their own sordid past, a situation abetted by all the blank pages in the history books. The portions of US history contained in these pages have mostly been excised from the historical memory of Americans because they don’t fit the mythical narrative. Most Americans fervently believe their country was founded on God and Christian virtue, liberty, democracy, human rights and free trade, but when we dig beneath the propaganda and jingoism we discover the United States of America was founded on religious extremism, racism, slavery, genocide, a brutal imperialism and a virulently predatory strain of capitalism.

These volumes contain a capsule history of the United States of America with selections that will not be found in any history book, but that nevertheless consists of facts which are not in dispute. From here, we will look at some specifics, beginning with how America became rich. From this point forward, ideology and reality will be in constant conflict, presenting stark challenges to our uninformed beliefs.

Quiz on American History

a. Which US Secretary of State holds the World Record for being the most prolific baby-killer in recorded history?

b. Which US General holds the World Record as the greatest pathological mass killer in modern history?

c. Fidel Castro listed in the Guinness Book of Records as surviving 638 murder attempts by the US government. For what was he being punished?

d. The father of which recent US President conspired with a group of Jewish bankers and industrialists in 1933, engaging a famous General to amass an army of 500,000 troops to overthrow the US government and install a fascist dictatorship in America?

e. How many times has the US invaded Canada?

f. The US has been a nation for about 245 years. For how many of those years has the US been at war?

g. How many democracies has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime? How many brutal dictatorships has the US installed in other nations during its lifetime?

h. Japan conducted abominable human experimentation in China during WWII – Shiro Ishii’s infamous Unit 731. Why was Japan spared war crimes trials?

i. How many Presidents, Prime Ministers and senior government officials of other countries has the US assassinated for disobedience or obstruction to hegemony?

j. Which country operates the only Torture University in the world?

k. For several hundred years, slave-trading was the highest-paying job in America. What was the second-highest-paying?

l. Which government for about 100 years paid a lifetime salary to any citizen who could steal patents and processes from other countries?

m. Which revered US Supreme Court justice recommended killing off all Americans of low IQ?

n. The government of which country for decades silenced political dissidents by performing frontal lobotomies and turning them into vegetables?

o. Which famous American institution recommended “mercy killings” of the economically unfit, these to be performed in local gas chambers?

p. Which American Defense Secretary gathered 500,000 young men with an average IQ of about 65 and sent them to Vietnam? How many returned? What was his punishment?

q. Which American Military physician appeared before Congress in what year, asking for $10 million to fund the creation of the HIV virus? Did he receive the money?

r. When and where was Coca-Cola was invented?

s. Which famous person invented the incandescent light bulb? Which the telephone? The most famous American inventor was Thomas Edison. How many things did Edison invent?

t. We are told Germany killed some 6,000,000 Jews during WWII. How many Germans were killed in Germany AFTER the end of WWII?

u. Which famous physicist wrote to Roosevelt, offering to fund the entire unknown cost of creating the atomic bomb, stating the funds were already confirmed available?

v. Which famous US President was the illegitimate son of a Jewish slave trader?

w. Abraham Lincoln’s wife was an inveterate opium addict. Who was her opium supplier?

x. In what year was slavery abolished in the US?

y. Which US President exposed tens of millions of US citizens to radiation from open-air atomic tests, then instructed medics to inform women experiencing leukemia, hair loss, miscarriages, that they were suffering from “housewife syndrome”?

z. Which famous shoe did Nike design that set Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman on the road to fame and glory?

Answers

a. Madeleine Albright; Iraq, 500,000

b. Cutis LeMay; about 20 million, give or take

c. Expelling the Jews from Cuba

d. George Bush

e. Five so far

f. 235

g. Zero. More than 50, and counting

h. Ishii and his entire unit were transported to the US to teach Americans the pleasures of live vivisections and other atrocities. Ishii was a Professor at the University of Maryland until his death decades later.

i. More than 150, and counting (including Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN)

j. The US of A; the “University of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia

k. Killing Indians

l. The US of A. Amounts of $20,000 to $50,000, in the 1800s

m. Oliver Wendell Holmes

n. The US of A. (FBI)

o. Carnegie

p. Robert McNamara. Not many, but the Defense Dept. refuses to release statistics. Made President of the World Bank.

q. Dr. Donald MacArthur, Deputy Director, Research and Engineering, Department of Defense. 1969. Yes.

r. The Spanish town of Aielo de Malferit, 40 years before Coke stole the patent.

s. Joseph Swan, USA, five years before Edison stole the patent. Antonio Meucci, Italy, five years before Bell stole the patent. None. All Edison’s patents were either stolen, bullied, extorted or purchased.

t. Between 12 million and 14 million; some by execution, the bulk by starvation.

u. Albert Einstein, funds offered by Rothschild and other European Jewish bankers.

v. Abraham Lincoln; the son of A. A. Springs(tein) and Nancy Hanks. Adopted by the Lincoln family.

w. A Jewish drug dealer named John Wilkes Booth.

x. Slavery was never abolished in the US. It just changed form.

y. Eisenhower

z. The Japanese Onitsuka Tiger. Nike stole the design and began manufacturing in the US. American courts ruled Onitsuka and Nike could “share” the patent.

Introduction to the Series

David Edwards was quoted in the Third World Traveler as having written:

“Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Howard Zinn and Susan George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again.”

This is the condition we face in dealing with America and Americans today: a blind faith and conviction based on a century of clever marketing and nationalistic propaganda that is almost inevitably contradicted by the facts. In truth, there is little about the US today that is not based on fabricated historical mythologies, buried history, biased presentations, facts twisted so badly as to be often unrecognisable. Probably 95% of what Americans ‘know’ about their nation, its history and its conduct in international affairs, is wrong, and often violently wrong. I am not so much concerned with what Americans believe about their own country, but it is a concern that this enormous compendium of historical fiction has been marketed to the rest of the world as truth, with peoples in many other nations believing the same fairytales as do the Americans and holding that nation in a level of regard that is to say the least undeserved, and often dangerous for the absence of truths.

These truths are the content of these books, the history of the US as it really was then and still is today, harsh provable truths and documented realities without the vast comforter of propaganda, jingoism, patriotism and misinformation that blankets the nation we know as the United States of America. Coincident with what is truly an almost incomprehensible volume of rose-tinted misinformation about the US is an equal volume of black-tinted information about the world outside the US. To the same extent that Americans have been subjected to a century or more of positive and unforgivably false propaganda about their own nation, they have also been subjected to enormously false negative propaganda and misinformation about the world outside their borders.

This series of books was to a large extent an accident of circumstance which began with my extended stay in China and the almost immediate realisation that the voluminous negative flood about China persistently emanating from the Western Zionist media was entirely false; demonisation and propaganda at their worst, giving Americans wholly unrealistic and often vicious misinterpretations and misunderstandings about the realities of China. After viewing a decade or more of this onslaught, and after writing many series of articles in attempts to correct some of the more egregious falsehoods, it seemed a book might be a more appropriate format. But then during ten years or more of historical research, it became apparent that Americans had been subjected to an even greater campaign of misinformation about their own nation than about China and other foreign countries.

I then seemed faced with a two-fold task: to correct – in the eyes of Americans, and perhaps Westerners generally – some of the more glaring misinformation about China, but then to correct – in the eyes of Americans – the even more glaring misinformation about their own country. To further complicate the issues, it gradually became clear that the world outside the US had been so contaminated by American historical mythology, jingoism and propaganda that foreigners were largely living in the same fairyland, insofar as the realities of America were concerned, as were the Americans themselves. To add to the confusion, it eventually emerged that the US-based power of the media, of advertising, of propaganda and misinformation, had contaminated not only the American view of other nations but the views of the peoples within those nations – to the point where Russians or Chinese or Vietnamese had been excessively exposed (thanks in no small part to malignancies like the VOA and Radio Free Europe) to both the glorified but false images of the US and the comparatively derogatory but false images of their own nations that had been so heavily propagated by the American government and the Zionist media to their own people. One book thus became five.

These books are intended to provide only a summary of the related topics. Full volumes can, and have been, written on many of the topics in these chapters. We have seen many books on the CIA involvement in narcotics or in Tibet, volumes on the discrepancies in the official 9-11 narrative or the Bush regime torture prisons, others on the various failings of US democracy or the American educational system. But these individual offerings, useful as they are, treat the segments as essentially disparate and unrelated issues where in reality most of them are integral parts of a deeply-connected whole. My purpose in these volumes is to present a unified picture to enable readers to see the entire landscape as a single canvas and appreciate the inter-relationships of the parts. It is this unified image that will provide a comprehensive understanding of world events and the forces driving them.

Preface To Volume One

Almost every individual or family has what we call ‘skeletons in the closet’, a collection of perhaps embarrassing or even shameful events, regrettable actions, unsavory family members, sins we committed that we would rather not confess in public, things we do not dwell on and would prefer to forget, recognition not only of our imperfections but reflecting the reality that we not so much make mistakes as sometimes act with less than honorable motives.

Included in this category are lies that we tell. Many of these are what we call ‘white lies’, usually small avoidances of truth often done for convenience or even a good cause. No doubt all of us lie on occasion, but there are precious few of us for whom lies constitute the foundation of our lives, where we are in a real sense “living a lie”. We occasionally encounter people who lie about their educational credentials or work history, sometimes greatly exaggerating their accomplishments, and in these instances the lies may serve as an important part of the foundation of a person’s life, perhaps obtaining a highly-paid position based on entirely false credentials, a life that would in part disintegrate if all the truths were known. We find this sometimes with con artists, whose very existence seems built on a vast and intricate weaving of lies, with lives that would indeed disintegrate if the truths were made public. These latter people are, in some real sense, “living a lie”.

Moving from individuals to nations, there are a few countries in the world that fit this latter category, one being the United States of America – a nation and a people that are in every sense living a lie, with virtually the entire foundation of beliefs, of actions, of history, of national pride, of citizenship, based on things that are not only not true but constitute an all-encompassing network of fabricated historical myths. This is not an idle claim, and is not an accusation that can be made against many other countries. I know of no place regarding the US where we can look and not find the landscape littered with falsehoods and supported by an enormous scaffolding of myths, half-truths, buried facts, boldly revised history, nationalistic propaganda and magnificent outright lies. It is true that most nations sugar-coat some parts of their history, but the US is almost unique in the world in being a nation that is genuinely built – and almost entirely built – on a foundation of lies.

With most other nations, if all their historical and political lies were fully exposed with all truths openly documented, they would still survive. But for Americans, the existential threat would be unbearable and I do not believe the US could survive as a nation if all its historical truths were unveiled and confirmed, in a manner by which Americans were compelled to confront them as fact, where denial was not an option.

As two minor examples, we have the now well-documented fact that the US government abandoned several thousand prisoners of war in Vietnam, men held back by the Vietnamese pending the American payment of the agreed war reparations of several billions of dollars. The US government had no intention of paying the money and so walked away from the table, leaving the men behind. Many veterans attempted to bring this to public attention, even testifying before Congress; many had unshakable proof of their claims, but the government – and the media – ignored them until recently when all the factual details emerged in second-tier internet news sites and could no longer be avoided. A much greater existential threat lies in the truth of Pearl Harbor, where it is no longer a secret, except to Americans, that Roosevelt knew not only of the impending Japanese attack (which he had carefully and deliberately provoked), but that he knew precisely the location and course of the Japanese fleet and the date and time of the attack. Roosevelt and his aides held back this information from their own high-level military at Pearl Harbor, sacrificing those lives for the greater objective of a “justified” entry into both theaters of the Second World War.

I believe there are almost no Americans with the emotional capacity to face this brutal truth, either philosophically or emotionally, and yet similar evidence virtually floods the available information sources. I would repeat here David Edwards’ words that “we will become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply ‘can’t be true’.” Yet these things have always been true about the American government. It wasn’t so long ago that declassified documents revealed Operation Northwoods, where the CIA proposed to shoot down a planeload of American college students and a US space shuttle launch, using those as justification to invade Cuba and remove Castro. The US government has both proposed and executed dozens of these atrocities over the years, all hidden from the American mind and heart with the compliance of the media. Pearl Harbor was by no means the worst of these, but few Americans will be able to deal with these truths of their nation.

Many other events are perhaps less brutal but no less breathtaking in their dishonesty. All the tales of how the US became rich, the jingoistic mantras of ingenuity and innovation, of wealth resulting from freedom and democracy, hard work and fair play, are entirely false, and repugnantly so. America became rich through a program of organised violence encompassing hundreds of years, through centuries of unpaid slave labor, military invasions, and the bullying and plundering of weaker nations. The propaganda of the benefits of American-style capitalism follows this same pattern, but Americans are fed this pulp from birth and no longer have the intelligence to see the truth. The US government statistics on items like inflation, unemployment, GDP and more, are the most misleading and dishonest of all nations today. The propaganda machine tells us otherwise, but one need only look at the facts. The US has for the last century been the largest perpetrator of espionage in the world, this activity provably including commercial espionage on a grand scale for more than a century, but the propaganda machine lays this accusation on other nations while claiming a desire to collect only information on terrorists. An enormous lie of a magnitude almost too large to comprehend or refute.

Thomas Edison, revered in American history books as one of the most prolific inventors of all time, never invented anything. The stories about him are fabricated historical myths, as are the cherished legends of the Wright Brothers making the first powered flight or Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone. Coca-Cola was a world-famous Spanish product stolen and patented by US pharmacist John Pemberton, with the US government refusing to recognise the prior patents. Tales of American inventiveness and IP are almost 180 degrees from the truth, with solidly documented proof that the US stole more IP from more countries than did any other nation, by orders of magnitude, paying $20,000 to $50,000 to anyone who could accomplish such a theft, at a time when even $20,000 was a lifetime salary for an average person. This pattern is consistent in every area and every field of endeavor in American society. The entire history of the US, as described in the history books and repeated incessantly by everyone from Hollywood to various Presidents, is almost all false, and the parts not false are almost always misrepresented. The nation of America and all of its people, are truly living a lie.

The entire thread of “Democracy” and “democratic values” is one of the greatest serial lies ever told. American history books, and American minds, are filled with tales of the US “making the world safe for democracy” by battling tyranny everywhere and installing democratic governments, but this has never happened even one time. While the propaganda machine was flooding the imaginary world with tales of democracies, the US was flooding the real world with brutal military dictators that would permit US multinationals and banks to pillage their countries. All the theory of the US’ fabled democracy, the government by the people, the checks and balances, is false, with the truth in the open but Americans so indoctrinated nobody seems able to see. Furthermore, the US government has made it illegal to teach many of these truths in America’s public schools.

All the propaganda of moral superiority, of concern for human rights, are, as we will see, lies in their entirety. The US is not only not morally superior, but has the worst human rights record of all nations excepting one, in recent centuries. Americans have many tales – almost all false – of other nations committing wartime atrocities while their own government and military were committing far worse and heavily censoring the media to prevent that knowledge from escaping custody. Almost no Americans know of the vast massacres committed by their military in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Iraq. Human rights atrocities began from the first days of the white settlers landing in North America, and have never ceased. Ever since the US outsourced to other countries its human rights atrocities, it has boasted to the world of its moral righteousness in human rights leadership, but all was based on lies, deception and marketing. The world’s only “torture university” – the infamous School of the Americas, the decades of cruel and even savage atrocities inflicted on so many of the world’s nations, have been lost in the American propaganda of goodness.

The US heavily promotes its fictitious position as the world’s policeman, but it has never once acted in such a capacity. No nation has ever been protected or defended from anything by the US, but many dozens have instead been ravaged and destroyed by this same imaginary angel of mercy. Everything about the US protecting any part of the world, is an outright lie. American heads are filled with tales of American goodness rescuing these populations from tyranny, but the hundreds of US military interventions have been undertaken to beat down indigenous populations who were rebelling against American imperialism, poverty and death. The US Congressional Record lists these interventions as “protecting American interests” without providing details on precisely what interests were being protected, by what means this “protection” was being inflicted and, most importantly, why America had any “interests” in those nations in the first place.

The US government has not only lied about every war and foreign military intervention, but has most often created false-flag events to accompany the lies and create fictitious justifications for belligerent action. The American entry to World War One was promoted by perhaps the greatest woven tapestry of lies ever created, thanks to Lippman and Bernays, a project that involved literally millions of lies told over a period of years, sufficient to brainwash an entire population into hating an innocent country. The promotion of World War Two was not better in any respect. The Americans have done this since the destruction of the warship Maine in Cuba’s harbor more than a century ago, and have never ceased these enormous self-inflicted injuries. Lies used to justify more lies.

It is now well-known and not in dispute that US officials told more than 900 separate lies to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq. The same is true with Libya, and with Syria today. The same is true of the destruction of Yugoslavia, another devastating military adventure based 100% on lies. All of the so-called “color revolutions” and other similar were not initiated to protect local populations from dictators but to punish unwilling nations for resisting the brutal American-style capitalism that was ravaging their shores. Ukraine, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and so many more nations have been under attack by the US government simply for resisting colonisation, but stillborn American minds believe they are God’s representatives pressuring “the bad guys”. Every part of American foreign policy and foreign involvement is covered with a carpet of lies, the media assisting in subversion and burying of the truths.

It would be useful to collect a catalogue of lies told by American presidents, Secretaries of State and other high officials, and publish these alongside the true facts. Consider this statement by George Bush made in 2003, just as his vast international kidnapping and torture regime was running at top speed: “The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.” Name one president of any country that has told a greater lie than this one by George Bush.

The US government and its agencies boast to the world about their freedom of speech while condemning censorship in other nations, yet the US is probably the most heavily censored of all countries. The fact that the media are willing conspirators does not change the fact that all news and public content is heavily controlled and that 95% of what Americans “know” about their own nation and the world, is false. The US news media invariably present only one side of events that proselytise the current political agenda, leaving the American people hopelessly in the dark about the true facts. This is so true that one US columnist noted that only 4% of Americans have any awareness of the immense brutality perpetrated on the people of Palestine by the state of Israel for the past 70 years. American history books and other educational materials consist largely of historical myths, propaganda about the goodness of America, about the badness of other nations, lies about the foundation and entire history of America itself. Hollywood is one of the worst criminals in this regard, with virtually every movie containing historical content being little more than a twisted propaganda film, satisfying one ideology or another while totally misleading Americans on the truths of their own nation. Stephen Spielberg’s recent ‘Lincoln’ movie is one such example, but there are hundreds of others.

The US, the one nation in the world stridently claiming an absolute freedom from propaganda, brainwashing and censorship, is in fact and reality the nation most overwhelmed with precisely these attributes. We will see irrefutable evidence that American schoolchildren are exposed to extensive indoctrination virtually from birth in terms of politics, capitalism, consumerism, patriotism, moral superiority, American exceptionalism and so much more. We will see that this indoctrination and brainwashing are so extensive that the American view of itself and its place in the world bear almost no comparison to reality, to the extent that this vast gulf between beliefs and reality constitutes a national mental illness. Given the enormous cognitive dissonance in America today, one can conclude only that Americans are the most deluded people on earth.

And in the end, this is the reason the US Department of Homeland Security has built its 800 detention centers and purchased its three billion bullets, the same reason that many (Western) columnists are openly suggesting that the rampant abuse of power, the entrenched corruption and feeding from the public trough, the persistent plundering and terrorising of nations with civilian casualties in the millions, “has become so widespread, so deeply entrenched and so increasingly bold, that the only possible remedy is a revolution”. American and European columnists are becoming increasingly vocal in actually recommending another American revolution, convinced that only a popular uprising of the population acting in concert would have the power to reverse this tide. Until then, America, unlike almost every other nation in the world, will continue to be a nation built on lies.


Part Two of Six will contain:  Colonisation, Labor and Slavery

Image credit:  https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/17/WS6143dbbda310e0e3a6822281.html


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Sunday, 4 April 2021

The Endless War: Afghanistan Goes On and On

 All indications are that the Pentagon will be able to manoeuvre more effectively in Washington than on the battlefield.

APRIL 02 ,2021

By Philip Giraldi

Source


Given the present atmosphere in Washington in which there is no lie so outrageous as to keep it out of the mainstream media, a great deal of policy making takes place without even key players in the government knowing what is going on behind their backs. Of course, there is a long tradition of government lying in general but most politicians and officials have probably convinced themselves that they are avoiding the truth because complicating issues might lead to endless debate where nothing ever gets done. There may be some truth to that, but it is a self-serving notion at best.

The real damage comes when governments lie in order to start or continue a war. The Administration of George W. Bush did just that when it lied about Iraq’s secular leader Saddam Hussein seeking nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists and developing delivery systems that would enable Iraq to attack the U.S. with the nukes. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice knew she was not telling the truth when she warned that “the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” She also was a key player in the Bush team approval of the CIA’s use of torture on captured al-Qaeda.

Rice is, by the way, not in jail and is currently a highly esteemed elder statesman serving as Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Likewise for her friend and patron Madeleine Albright who famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. imposed sanctions were worth it. In the United States the only ones who are ever punished are those who expose the crimes being committed by the government, to include a number of whistleblowers and journalists like Julian Assange.

The active American military role in lying probably started at Valley Forge but it came into prominence with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was an alleged attack by the North Vietnamese on U.S. Navy ships that led to an escalation in Washington’s direct role in what was to become the Vietnam War, which produced 58,000 American dead as well as an estimated three million Vietnamese. No one was punished for faking the casus belli and today Vietnam is a communist state in spite of the martial valor of the U.S. Army.  Overall commander of US forces in Vietnam General William Westmoreland, who died in 2005, repeatedly advised the media and the White House that the American military was “winning” and there would be victory in six more months. General Westmoreland knew he was lying, as the Pentagon Papers subsequently revealed, and he also proved reluctant to share his plans with the White House. He even developed a contingency plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam without informing the president and Secretary of Defense.

Prize winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter has written an article “Trump Administration Insider Reveals How US Military Sabotaged Peace Agreement to Prolong Afghan War” that describes how the brass in the Pentagon currently are able to manipulate the bureaucracy in such a way as to circumvent policy coming out of the country’s civilian leadership. The article is based in part on an interview with retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat arms officer who served as an acting senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense during the last months of Donald Trump’s time in office.  He would have likely been confirmed in his position if Trump had won reelection.

Porter describes the negotiations between the Taliban and Trump’s Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, which began in late 2018 and culminated in a peace agreement that was more-or-less agreed to by both sides in February 2019. The Pentagon, fearing that the war would be ending, quickly moved to sabotage a series of confidence building measures that included disengagement and cease fires. In short, US commanders supported by the Pentagon leadership under Secretary of Defense Mike Esper as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued to attack Taliban positions in spite of the agreements worked out by the diplomats, blaming all incidents on the Taliban. They also used their “perception management” media contacts to float fabricated stories about Taliban activity, which included the false account of Russians paying Taliban fighters bounties for every American they could kill.

After the 2020 election, which Donald Trump appeared to have lost, Esper, Central Command chief General Kenneth McKenzie and the senior field commander General Scott Miller took the offensive against any withdrawal by sending a memo to the president warning that no troops should be removed from the country until “certain conditions” had been met. An enraged Trump, who believed that the disengagement from Afghanistan was the right thing to do, then used his authority to order a withdrawal of all US troops by the end of the year. He also fired Esper, replacing him with Christopher Miller as SecDef and brought in Macgregor, who had openly expressed his belief that the war in Afghanistan should be ended immediately as well as the wars in the Middle East.

Macgregor and Miller reasoned that the only way to remove the remaining troops from Afghanistan by year’s end would be to do so by presidential order. Macgregor prepared the document and President Trump signed it immediately. On the next day November 12th, however, Colonel Macgregor learned that Trump had subsequently met with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Acting Secretary Miller. Trump and Miller were told by Milley and O’Brien that the orders he placed in the memorandum could not be executed because a withdrawal would lead to a surge in violence and would damage chances for an eventual peace settlement. Trump was also told that an ongoing US presence in Afghanistan had “bipartisan support,” possibly a warning that he might be overruled by Congress if he sought to proceed. Trump later agreed to withdraw only half of the total, 2,500 troops, a number that has continued to remain in place under President Joe Biden. A current agreement has the US withdrawing those last soldiers, together with allied NATO troops, by May 1st but it is under attack from Congress, think tanks, the mainstream media and the military leadership for the same reasons that have been cited for staying in Afghanistan over the past twenty years and predictably Biden has folded. Last week he announced that some American soldiers will remain in country to maintain stability after the deadline.

The story of Trump and Afghanistan is similar to what took place with Syria, where plans to withdraw were regularly reversed due to adroit maneuvering by the Pentagon and its allies. It remains to be seen what Joe Biden will do ultimately as he is being confronted by the same forces that compelled Trump to beat a retreat. The more serious issue is, of course, that the United States of America portrays itself as a nation that engages only in “just wars” and which has a military that is under control and responsive to an elected and accountable civilian government. As Afghanistan and Syria demonstrate, those conceits have been unsustainable since the US went on a global dominance spree when it launched its War on Terror in 2001. All indications are that the Pentagon will be able to maneuver more effectively in Washington than on the battlefield. It will continue to have its pointless wars, and its bloated “defense” budgets.

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Wednesday, 24 March 2021

22 Years Ago: NATO’s Illegal and Criminal Invasion of Yugoslavia

 By Nebojsa Malic

Global Research, March 23, 2021

Global Research 26 March 2005

This article by renowned author Nobojsa Malic was first published on March 26, 2005

In the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For some reason, many in the targeted nation thought the name of the operation was “Merciful Angel .” In fact, the attack was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker. For, however much NATO spokesmen and the cheerleading press spun, lied, and fabricated to show otherwise (unfortunately, with altogether too much success), there was nothing noble in NATO’s aims. It attacked Yugoslavia for the same reason then-Emperor Bill Clinton enjoyed a quickie in the Oval Office: because it could.

Most of the criticism of the 1999 war has focused on its conduct (targeting practices, effects, “collateral damage”) and consequences. But though the conduct of the war by NATO was atrocious and the consequences have been dire and criminal , none of that changes the fact that by its very nature and from the very beginning, NATO’s attack was a war of aggression: illegal, immoral, and unjust; not “unsuccessful” or “mishandled,” but just plain wrong.

Illegal

There is absolutely no question that the NATO attack in March 1999 was illegal . Article 2, section 4 of the UN Charter clearly says:

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Some NATO members tried to offer justification. London claimed the war was “justified” as a means of preventing a “humanitarian catastrophe,” but offered no legal grounds for such a claim. Paris tried to create a tenuous link with UNSC resolutions 1199 and 1203 , which Belgrade was supposedly violating. However, NATO had deliberately bypassed the UN, rendering this argument moot.

Article 53 (Chapter VIII ) of the UN Charter clearly says that:

“The Security Council shall, where appropriate, utilize such regional arrangements or agencies for enforcement action under its authority. But no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council.” (emphasis added)

Furthermore, Article 103 (Chapter XVI ) asserts its primacy over any other regional agreement, so NATO’s actions would have been illegal under the UN Charter even if the Alliance had an obligation to act in Kosovo. Even NATO’s own charter – the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 – was violated by the act of war in March 1999:

“Article 1

“The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. […]

“Article 7

“This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” (emphasis added)

The attack violated other laws and treaties as well: the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 (violating the territorial integrity of a signatory state) and the 1980 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (using coercion to compel a state to sign a treaty – i.e., the Rambouillet ultimatum ).

Yugoslavia had not attacked any NATO members, nor indeed threatened the security of any other country in the region; it was itself under an attack by a terrorist , irredentist organization. What NATO did on March 24, 1999 was an act of aggression, a crime against peace .

Illegitimate

Perfectly aware that the bombing was illegal, NATO leaders tried to create justifications for it after the fact. They quickly seized upon a mass exodus of Albanians from Kosovo, describing it as “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide .” But as recent testimonies of Macedonian medical workers who took care of Albanian refugees suggest, the Western press was engaging in crude deceit , staging images of suffering refugees and peddling the most outrageous tall tales as unvarnished truth.

Stories abounded of mass murder, orchestrated expulsions, mass rapes, seizure of identity papers, even crematoria and mine shafts filled with dead bodies. Little or no evidence was offered – and not surprisingly, none found afterwards. The stories were part of a Big Lie , aimed to justify the intervention, concocted by professional propagandists, and delivered by the KLA-coached refugees. The KLA ran every camp in Macedonia and Albania, and there are credible allegations they organized the exodus in many instances. Albanians who did not play along were killed.

Eventually, the “genocide” and other atrocity stories were debunked as propaganda. But they had served their purpose, conjuring a justification for the war at the time. They had allowed NATO and its apologists to claim the war – though “perhaps” illegal – was a moral and legitimate affair. But there should be no doubt, it was neither .

Unjust

Even if one can somehow gloss over the illegal, illegitimate nature of the war and the lies it was based on, would the war still not be justified, if only because it led to the return of refugees? Well, which refugees? Certainly, many Kosovo Albanians – and quite a few from Albania, it appears – came back, only to proceed to cleanse it systematically of everyone else. Jews, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Ashkali, Gorani, no community was safe from KLA terror , not even the Albanians themselves. Those suspected of “collaborating” were brutally murdered, often with entire families.

According to the Catholic doctrine of “just war ,” a war of aggression cannot be just. Even if one somehow fudges the issue, “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

The evil conjured by NATO’s and KLA’s propaganda machine was indeed grave. But it was not real. In contrast, what took place after the war – i.e., under the NATO/KLA occupation – is amply documented. At the beginning of NATO’s aggression, there were fewer dead, fewer refugees, less destruction, and more order than at any time since the beginning of the occupation. NATO has replaced a fabricated evil with a very real evil of its own.

Monument to Evil

What began six years ago may have been Albright’s War on Clinton’s watch, but both Albright and Clinton have been gone from office for what amounts to a political eternity.

For four years now, the occupation of Kosovo has continued with the blessing – implicit or otherwise – of Emperor Bush II, who launched his own illegal war in Iraq . Kosovo is not a partisan, but an imperial issue; that is why there has been virtually no debate on it since the first missiles were fired.

Albright and KLA leader Hashim Thaci, Rambouillet, 1998

Six years to the day since NATO aircraft began their onslaught, Kosovo is a chauvinistic, desolate hellhole.

Serbian lives, property, culture, and heritage been systematically destroyed , often right before the eyes of NATO “peacekeepers.” Through it all, Imperial officials, Albanian lobbyists, and various presstitutes have been working overtime to paint a canvas that would somehow cover up the true horror of occupation.

Their “liberated” Kosovo represents everything that is wrong about the world we live in.

It stands as a monument to the power of lies, the successful murder of law, and the triumph of might over justice. Such a monument must be torn down, or else the entire world may end up looking like Kosovo sometime down the line. If that’s what the people in “liberal Western democracies” are willing to see happen, then their civilization is well and truly gone


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Monday, 1 February 2021

 January 31, 2021

[Note by the Saker: as most of you know, I don’t do reposts (see here why).  This time, however, I decided to make a small exception to this rule and I emailed William and asked him for the permission to repost his excellent article on the hardcore russophobic elements inside Biden’s team.  William has very kindly allowed me to do so, so here it is below]

The Destructive Plan Behind the Biden Russia Agenda

by William Engdahl, reposted by special permission

source: http://www.williamengdahl.com/englishNEO29Jan2021.php

The new Biden Administration has from day one made it clear it will adopt a hostile and aggressive policy against the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin. The policy behind this stance has nothing to do with any foul deeds Putin’s Russia may or may not have committed against the West. It has nothing to do with absurd allegations that Putin had pro-US dissident Alexei Navalny poisoned with the ultra-deadly Novichok nerve agent. In has to do with a far deeper agenda of the globalist Powers That Be. That agenda is what is being advanced now.

The Cabinet choices of Joe Biden reveal much. His key foreign policy picks–Tony Blinken as Secretary of State and Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; Bill Burns as CIA head; Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor ; Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence—all are from the Obama-Biden Administration and all have worked closely together. As well, all see Russia, not China, as the prime security threat to the United States’ global hegemony.

As candidate, Joe Biden stated this often. His key foreign policy choices underscore that the focus with the Biden Administration, regardless how fit Biden himself is, will shift from the China threats to that of Putin’s Russia. Biden’s CIA head, Bill Burns, is a former Ambassador to Moscow and was Deputy Secretary of State during the Obama CIA coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014. Notably, when Burns left State in November 2014 he was succeeded by Tony Blinken, now Secretary of State. Blinken reportedly formulated the US State Department response to Russia’s Crimea annexation.

Nuland is key

All Biden choices are uniformly clear in blaming Putin’s Russia for everything from US election interference in 2016 to the recent SolarWinds US government computer hack, to every other claim aired against Russia in recent years, whether proven or not.

In trying to determine what the new Biden Administration and the US intelligence agencies have in store towards Putin and Russia, however, the best indication is the prominent role being given to Victoria Nuland, the person, together with then-Vice President Joe Biden, who ran the political side of the US coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2013-14. She infamously was wire-tapped in a phone call to the US Ambassador in Kiev during the Maidan Square 2013-14 protests, telling the Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, regarding EU choices for a new Ukraine regime, “F**k the EU.” Her husband, Robert Kagan is a notorious Washington neocon.

On leaving government on Trump’s election in 2016, Nuland became a Senior Counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, headed by former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright who is also chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) affiliate, National Democratic Institute. Nuland also joined the Board of the NED, after 2016, keeping in close contact with NED regime change operations. She is a Russia expert, fluent in Russian and a specialist in toppling regimes.

As Obama Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian and European Affairs in 2013, Nuland worked closely with Vice President Joe Biden to put into power Arseniy Yatsenyuk in a US-friendly and Russia-hostile Ukraine coup. She fostered months of protest against the regime of the elected President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, to force his ouster after his decision to join the Russian Eurasian Economic Union. Founder of the private intelligence group Stratfor, George Friedman, in an interview just after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, called it “the most blatant coup in (US) history.”

New Initiatives

In a major article in the August, 2020 Foreign Affairs, journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Nuland outlines what most likely will be US strategy for undermining Russia in the coming months. She complains that, “resignation has set in about the state of US-Russian relations, and Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to change the game.” In other words, she is about “changing the game” with Putin. She charges that in the past 12 years, “Russia has violated arms control treaties; fielded new, destabilizing weapons; threatened Georgia’s sovereignty; seized Crimea and much of the Donbass; and propped up despots in Libya, Syria, and Venezuela. It has used cyber-weapons against foreign banks, electrical grids, and government systems; interfered in foreign democratic elections; and assassinated its enemies on European soil.”

She goes on to say the repeated US economic sanctions on select Russian banks and companies as well as Putin backers have done little to change Russian policy, claiming that, ”US and allied sanctions, although initially painful, have grown leaky or impotent with overuse and no longer impress the Kremlin.”

But Nuland suggests that Putin’s Russia today is vulnerable as never in the past 20 years: “the one thing that should worry the Russian president: the mood inside Russia. Despite Putin’s power moves abroad, 20 years of failing to invest in Russia’s modernization may be catching up with him. In 2019, Russia’s GDP growth was an anemic 1.3 percent. This year, the coronavirus pandemic and the free fall in oil prices could result in a significant economic contraction…Russia’s roads, rails, schools, and hospitals are crumbling. Its citizens have grown restive as promised infrastructure spending never appears, and their taxes and the retirement age are going up. Corruption remains rampant, and Russians’ purchasing power continues to shrink.”

In her CFR article Nuland advocates using, “Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms… there is no reason why Washington and its allies shouldn’t be more willing to give Putin a dose of his own medicine inside Russia, while maintaining the same deniability.” She adds that because Russians widely use the Internet and it is largely open, “Despite Putin’s best efforts, today’s Russia is more permeable. Young Russians are far more likely to consume information and news via the Internet than through state-sponsored TV or print media. Washington should try to reach more of them where they are: on the social networks  Odnoklassniki and VKontakte; on Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube; and on the many new Russian-language digital platforms springing up.”

Navalny

Around the time Nuland submitted her July-August Foreign Affairs article, perennial Putin opponent, Alexey Navalny was in Berlin, ostensibly recovering from what he claims was an attempt by Putin’s intelligence to kill him with highly toxic nerve agent, Novichok. Navalny, a US-educated opposition figure who was a Yale University Fellow in 2010 has been trying to gain a strong following for well over a decade, has been documented receiving money from Nuland’s National Endowment for Democracy, whose founder in the 1990s described it as doing, “what the CIA used to do, but privately.” In 2018 according to NPR in the US, Navalny had more than six million YouTube subscribers and more than two million Twitter followers. How many are bots paid by US intelligence is not known. Now, five months after exile in Berlin, Navalny makes a bold return where he knew he faced likely jail for past charges. It was obviously a clear calculation by his Western sponsors.

The US government’s NGO for Color Revolution regime change, the NED, in a piece published on January 25 echoes Nuland’s call for a social media-led destabilization of Putin. Writing about the Moscow arrest of Navalny just three days before the Biden inauguration, the NED states that, “By creating a model of guerrilla political warfare for the digital age, Navalny has exposed the regime’s utter lack of imagination and inability….” They add, “Putin is in a Catch-22: If Putin kills Navalny, it could draw more attention to the problem and exacerbate unrest. If Putin lets Navalny live, then Navalny remains a focus for resistance, whether he is in prison or not… Navalny has very much outmaneuvered Putin at each turn since the poisoning. It’s becoming a bit humiliating for him.”

Since his alleged botched poisoning in August in Russian Far East, Navalny was allowed by the Russian government to fly to Berlin for treatment, a strange act if indeed Putin and Russian intelligence had really wanted him dead. What clearly took place in the intervening five months in exile suggests that Navalny’s return was professionally prepared by unnamed Western intelligence regime change specialists. The Kremlin has claimed intelligence that shows Navalny was directly being tutored while in exile by CIA specialists.

On Navalny’s Moscow arrest January 17, his anti-corruption NGO released a sophisticated YouTube documentary on Navalny’s channel, purporting to show a vast palace alleged to belong to Putin on the Black Sea, filmed with use of a drone, no small feat. In the video Navalny calls on Russians to march against the alleged billion dollar “Putin Palace” to protest corruption.

Navalny, who clearly is being backed by sophisticated US information warfare specialists and groups such as the NED, is likely being told to build a movement to challenge United Russia party candidates in the September Duma elections where Putin isn’t a candidate. He has even been given a new tactic, which he calls a “smart voting” strategy, a hallmark NED tactic.

Stephen Sestanovich, New York Council on Foreign Relations Russia expert and former board member of the NED, suggested the likely game plan of the new Biden team. On January 25 Sestanovich wrote in the CFR blog, “The Putin regime remains strong, but nationwide protests in support of Alexei Navalny are the most serious challenge to it in years. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is showing a political creativity and tactical skill that Putin has not previously faced. If the protests continue, they could reveal vulnerabilities in his decades-long hold on power.” This was two days after Russia-wide protests demanding Navalny’s release from jail. “With his bold decision to return to Moscow and the release of a widely viewed video purporting to expose regime corruption, Navalny has shown himself to be a capable and imaginative political figure—even from jail, perhaps the most formidable adversary Putin has faced,” he wrote. “The strategic sophistication of Navalny’s team is underscored both by its video release and, before that, by its exposé of the Federal Security Services (FSB) personnel who poisoned him last summer.”

The clear decision of the Biden team to name a former Moscow ambassador to head the CIA and Victoria Nuland to No. 3 position at the State Department, along with his other intelligence choices indicate that destabilizing Russia will be a prime focus of Washington going forward. As the NED gleefully put it, “Navalny’s arrest, three days before Biden’s inauguration former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul says, has all the makings of “Biden’s first foreign policy crisis. Whatever was in their transition documents, this is now front and center for them.”

The reason however is not because of domestic corruption by Putin’s inner circle, true or not. Biden could care less. Rather it is the very existence of Russia under Putin as an independent sovereign nation that tries to defend that national identity, whether in military defense or in defense of a traditionally conservative Russian culture. Ever since the US-backed NED destabilization of the Soviet Union in 1990 during the Bush Administration, it has been NATO policy and that of the influential financial interests behind NATO to break Russia into many parts, dismantle the state and loot what is left of its huge raw materials resources. The globalist Great Reset has no room for independent nation states like Russia is the message that the new Biden team will clearly convey now.
——-
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”


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The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!