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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/79583/usnato-vs-russiachina-in-a-hybrid-war-to-the.html

US-NATO vs Russia-China in a hybrid war to the finish

The unipolar moment is six feet under, the hegemon will try to break Eurasian integration and there’s no grownup in the room to counsel restraint...

Let’s start with comic relief: the “leader of the free world” has pledged to prevent China from becoming the “leading” nation on the planet. And to fulfill such an exceptional mission, his “expectation” is to run again for president in 2024. Not as a hologram. And fielding the same running mate.

Now that the “free world” has breathed a sigh of relief, let’s return to serious matters – as in the contours of the Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics.

What happened in the past few days between Anchorage and Guilin continues to reverberate. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that Brussels “destroyed” the relationship between Russia and the EU, he focused on how the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership is getting stronger and stronger.

Not so casual synchronicity revealed that as Lavrov was being properly hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guilin – scenic lunch in the Li river included -, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was visiting NATO’s James-Bondish HQ outside Brussels.

Lavrov made it quite clear that the core of Russia-China revolves around establishing an economic and financial axis to counterpunch the Bretton Woods arrangement. That implies doing everything to protect Moscow and Beijing from “threats of sanctions by other states”; progressive de-dollarization; and advances in crypto-currency.

This “triple threat” is what is unleashing the Hegemon’s unbounded fury.

On a broader spectrum, the Russia-China strategy also implies that the progressive interaction between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) will keep apace across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of South Asia, and Southwest Asia – necessary steps towards an ultimately unified Eurasian market under a sort of strategic Sino-Russo management.

In Alaska, the Blinken-Sullivan team learned, at their expense, that you don’t mess with a Yoda such as Yang Jiechi with impunity. Now they’re about to learn what it means to mess with Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council.

Patrushev, as much a Yoda as Yang Jiechi, and a master of understatement, delivered a not so cryptic message: if the US created “though days” for Russia, as they “are planning that, they can implement that”, Washington “would be responsible for the steps that they would take”.

What NATO is really up to

Meanwhile, in Brussels, Blinken was enacting a Perfect Couple  routine with spectacularly inefficient head of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen. The script went something like this. “Nord Stream 2 is really bad for you. A trade/investment deal with China is really bad for you. Now sit. Good girl.”

Then came NATO, which put on quite a show, complete with an all-Foreign Minister tough guy pose in front of the HQ. That was part of a summit – which predictably did not “celebrate” the 10th anniversary of NATO’s destruction of Libya or the major ass-kicking NATO “endured” in Afghanistan.

In June 2020, NATO’s cardboard secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg – actually his US military handlers – laid out what is now known as the NATO 2030 strategy, which boils down to a Global Robocop politico-military mandate. The Global South has (not) been warned.

In Afghanistan, according to a Stoltenberg impervious to irony, NATO supports infusing “fresh energy into the peace process”. At the summit, NATO ministers also discussed Middle East and Northern Africa and – with a straight face – looked into “what more NATO could do to build stability in the region”. Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Libyans, Malians would love to learn something about that.

Post-summit, Stoltenberg delivered a proverbially somnolent press conference where the main focus was – what else – Russia, and its “pattern for repressive behavior at home, aggressive behavior abroad”.

All the rhetoric about NATO “building stability” vanishes when one examines what’s really behind NATO 2030, via a meaty “recommendation” report written by a bunch of “experts”

Here we learn the three essentials:

1. “The Alliance must respond to Russian threats and hostile actions (…) without a return to ‘business as usual’ barring alterations in Russia’s aggressive behavior and its return to full compliance with international law.”

2. China is depicted as a tsunami of “security challenges”: “The Alliance should infuse the China challenge throughout existing structures and consider establishing a consultative body to discuss all aspects of Allies’ security interests vis-à-vis China”. The emphasis is to “defend against any Chinese activities that could impact collective defense, military readiness or resilience in the Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s (SACEUR) Area of Responsibility.”

3. “NATO should outline a global blueprint (italics mine) for better utilizing its partnerships to advance NATO strategic interests. It should shift from the current demand-driven approach to an interest-driven approach (italics mine) and consider providing more stable and predictable resource streams for partnership activities. NATO’s Open Door Policy should be upheld and reinvigorated. NATO should expand and strengthen partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia.”

Here’s to The Triple Threat. Yet the Top of the Pops – as in fat, juicy industrial-military complex contracts – is really here:

The most profound geopolitical challenge is posed by Russia. While Russia is by economic and social measures a declining power, it has proven itself capable of territorial aggression and is likely to remain a chief threat facing NATO over the coming decade.

NATO may be redacting, but the master script comes straight from the Deep State – complete with Russia “seeking hegemony”; expanding Hybrid War (the concept was actually invented by the Deep State); and manipulating “cyber, state-sanctioned assassinations, and poisonings – using chemical weapons, political coercion, and other methods to violate the sovereignty of Allies.”

Beijing for its part is using “force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience.”

The Global South should be very much aware of NATO’s pledge to save the “free world” from these autocratic evils.

The NATO interpretation of “South” encompasses North Africa and the Middle East, in fact everywhere from sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan. Any similarity with the presumably defunct “Greater Middle East” concept of the Dubya era is not an accident.

NATO insists this vast expanse is characterized by “fragility, instability, and insecurity” – of course refusing to disclose its own role as serial instability perpetrator in Libya, Iraq, parts of Syria and Afghanistan.

Because ultimately…it’s all Russia’s fault: “To the South, the challenge includes the presence of Russia and to a lesser extent China, exploiting regional fragilities. Russia has reinserted itself in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2015, it intervened in the Syrian Civil War and remains there. Russia’s Middle East policy is likely to exacerbate tensions and political strife across the region as it extends an increasing amount of political, financial, operational, and logistical assets to its partners. China’s influence across the Middle East is also growing. It signed a strategic partnership with Iran, is the largest importer of crude oil from Iraq, wedged itself into the Afghanistan peace process, and is the biggest foreign investor in the region.”

Here, in a nutshell, and not exactly in code, is the NATO road map all the way to 2030 to harass and try to dismantle every relevant nook and cranny of Eurasia integration, especially those directly linked to New Silk Roads infrastructure/connectivity projects (investment in Iran, reconstruction of Syria, reconstruction of Iraq, reconstruction of Afghanistan).

The spin is on a “360-degree approach to security” that will “become an imperative”. Translation: NATO is coming for large swathes of the Global South, big time, under the pretense of “addressing both the traditional threats emanating from this region like terrorism and new risks, including the growing presence of Russia, and to a lesser extent China.”

Hybrid war on two fronts

And to think that in a not so distant past there used to be some flashes of lucidity emanating from the US establishment.

Very few will remember that in 1993 James Baker, former Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, advanced the idea of expanding NATO to Russia, which at the time, under Yeltsin and a gang of Milton Friedmanesque free marketeers, was devastated, but ruled by “democracy”. Yet Bill Clinton was already in power, and the idea was duly discarded.

Six years later, no less than George Kennan – who invented the containment of the USSR in the first place – determined that the NATO annexation of former Soviet satellites was “the beginning of a new Cold War” and “a tragic mistake”.

It’s immensely enlightening to re-live and re-study the whole decade between the fall of the USSR and the election of Putin to the presidency through the venerable Yevgeny Primakov’s book Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millenium, published in the US by Yale University Press.

Primakov, the ultimate intel insider who started as a Pravda correspondent in the Middle East, former Foreign Minister and also Prime Minister, looked closely into Putin’s soul, repeatedly, and liked what he saw: a man of integrity and a consummate professional. Primakov was a multilateralist avant la lettre, the conceptual instigator of RIC (Russia-India-China) which in the next decade evolved towards BRICS.

Those were the days – exactly 22 years ago – when Primakov was on a plane to Washington when he picked up a call by then Vice-President Al Gore: the US was about to start bombing Yugoslavia, a slav-orthodox Russian ally, and there was nothing the former superpower could do about it. Primakov ordered the pilot to turn around and fly back to Moscow.

Now Russia is powerful enough to advance its own Greater Eurasia concept, which moving forward should be balancing – and complementing – China’s New Silk Roads. It’s the power of this Double Helix – which is bound to inevitably attract key sectors of Western Europe – that is driving the Hegemon’s ruling class dazed and confused.

Glenn Diesen, author of Russian Conservatism: Managing Change Under Permanent Revolution, which I analyzed in Why Russia is Driving the West Crazy , and one of the best global analysts of Eurasia integration, summed it all up: “The US has had great difficulties in terms of converting the security dependence of the allies into geoeconomic loyalty, as evident by the Europeans still buying Chinese technologies and Russian energy.

Hence permanent Divide and Rule, featuring one of its key targets: cajole, force, bribe and all of the above for the European Parliament to scotch the China-EU trade/investment deal.

Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University and author of the best made in China book about the New Silk Roads, clearly sees through the “America is back” bluster: “China is not isolated by the US, the West or even the whole international community. The more hostility they show, the more anxiety they have. When the US travels around the globe to frequently ask for support, unity and help from its allies, this means US hegemony is weakening.”

Wang even forecasts what may happen if the current “leader of the free world” is prevented from fulfilling his exceptional mission: “Don’t be fooled by the sanctions between China and the EU, which is harmless to trade and economic ties, and EU leaders won’t be that stupid to totally abandon the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, because they know they would never get such a good deal when Trump or Trumpism returns to the White House.”

Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics, as configured in these crucial past two weeks, spells out the Unipolar Moment is six feet under. The Hegemon will never admit it; hence the NATO counterpunch, which was pre-designed. Ultimately, the Hegemon has decided not to engage in diplomatic accommodation, but to wage a hybrid war on two fronts against a relentlessly demonized strategic partnership of peer competitors.

And as a sign of these sorry times, there’s no James Baker or George Kennan to advise against such folly.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/79596/the-unvaccinated.html

The “Unvaccinated” Question

So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.

There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so.

We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation.

In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process.

In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF,

will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.)

In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.)

In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

In the USA, we are being banned by universities. Our children are being banned from public schools.

In New York, the new “Excelsior Pass” will allow New Normals to attend cultural and sports events (and patronize bars and restaurants, eventually) secure in the knowledge that the Unvaccinated have been prevented from entering or segregated in an “Unvaccinated Only” section.

The pass system, designed by IBM, which, if history is any guide, is pretty good at designing such systems (OK, technically, it was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, IBM’s Nazi-Germany subsidiary), was launched this past weekend to considerable fanfare.

And this is only the very beginning.

Israel’s “Green Pass” is the model for the future, which makes sense, in a sick, fascistic kind of way. When you’re already an apartheid state, what’s a little more apartheid? Here’s a peek at what that looks like…

After all (as the New Normals will sternly remind me), no one is forcing us to get “vaccinated.” If we choose not to, or can’t for medical reasons, all we have to do is submit to a “test” — you know, the one where they ram that 9-inch swab up into your sinus cavities — within 24 hours before we want to go out to dinner, or attend the theater or a sports event, or visit a museum, or attend a university, or take our children to school or a playground, and our test results will serve as our “vaccine passports!”OK, I know what the New Normals are thinking. They’re thinking I’m “misleading” people again. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t really segregation, and certainly nothing like “medical apartheid.”

We just present them to the appropriate Covid Compliance Officer, and (assuming the results are negative, of course) we will be allowed to take part in New Normal society just as if we’d been “vaccinated.”

Either way, “vaccine” or “test,” the New Normal officials will be satisfied, because the tests and passes are really just stage props. The point is the display of mindless obedience.

Even if you take the New Normals at their word, if you are under 65 and in relatively good health, getting “vaccinated” is more or less pointless, except as a public display of compliance and belief in the official Covid-19 narrative (the foundation stone of the New Normal ideology).

Even the high priests of their “Science” confess that it doesn’t prevent you spreading the “plague.” And the PCR tests are virtually meaningless, as even the WHO finally admitted. (You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit…but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.)

In contrast to the “vaccine” and the “test” themselves, the forced choice between them is not at all meaningless. It is no accident that both alternatives involve the violation of our bodies, literally the penetration of our bodies. It doesn’t really matter what is in the “vaccines” or what “results” the “tests” produce. The ritual is a demonstration of power, the power of the New Normals (i.e., global capitalism’s new face) to control our bodies, to dominate them, to violate them, psychologically and physically.

Now, don’t get all excited, my “conspiracy theorist” friends. I haven’t gone full QAnon just yet. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are not sitting around together, sipping adrenochrome on George Soros’ yacht, dreaming up ways to rape people’s noses. This stuff is built into the structure of the system. It is a standard feature of totalitarian societies, cults, churches, self-help groups, and…well, human society, generally.

Being forced to repeat a physical action which only makes sense within a specific ideology reifies that ideology within us. There is nothing inherently diabolical about this. It is a basic socialization technology. It is how we socialize our children. It is why we conduct weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. It is how we turn young men and women into soldiers. It is how actors learn their blocking and their lines. It is why the Nazis held all those rallies. It is why our “democracies” hold elections.

It is also basic ceremonial magic…but that’s a topic for a different column.

The issue, at the moment, is the Unvaccinated Question, and the public rituals that are being performed to make the New Normal ideology “reality,” and what to do about those of us who refuse to participate in those rituals, who refuse to forswear “old normal” reality and convert to New Normalism so that we can function in society without being segregated, criminalized, or “diagnosed” as “sociopathic” or otherwise psychiatrically disordered.

For us “conspiracy-theorizing reality deniers,” there is no getting around this dilemma. This isn’t Europe in the 1930s. There isn’t anywhere to emigrate to … OK, there is, temporarily, in some of the US states that have been staging rebellions, and other such “old normal” oases, but how long do you think that will last?

They’re already rolling out the “mutant variants,” and God only knows what will happen when the long-term effects of the “vaccines” kick in.

No, for most of us denizens of the global capitalist empire, it looks like the New Normal is here to stay. So, unless we are prepared to become New Normals, we are going to have to stand and fight. It is going to get rather ugly, and personal, but there isn’t any way to avoid that.

Given that many New Normals are our friends and colleagues, or even members of our families, it is tempting to believe that they will “come to their senses,” that “this is all just a hysterical overreaction,” and that “everything will go back to normal soon.”

This would be a monumental error on our parts…very possibly a fatal error.

Totalitarian movements, when they reach this stage, do not simply stop on their own. They continue to advance toward their full expressions, ultimately transforming entire societies into monstrous mirror-images of themselves, unless they are opposed by serious resistance. There is a window at the beginning when such resistance has a chance. That window is still open, but it is closing, fast.

I can’t tell you how best to resist, but I can tell you it starts with seeing things clearly, and calling things, and people, exactly what they are.

Let’s not make the same mistake that other minorities have made throughout history when confronted with a new totalitarian ideology. See the New Normals for what they are, maybe not deep down in their hearts, but what they have collectively become a part of, because it is the movement that is in control now, not the rational individuals they used to be.

Above all, recognize where this is headed, where totalitarian movements are always headed. (See. e.g., Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.)

No, the Unvaccinated are not the Jews and the New Normals are not flying big Swastika flags, but totalitarianism is totalitarianism, regardless of which Goebbelsian Big Lies, and ideology, and official enemies it is selling. The historical context and costumes change, but its ruthless trajectory remains the same.

Today, the New Normals are presenting us with a “choice,” (a) conform to their New Normal ideology or (b) social segregation. What do you imagine they have planned for us tomorrow?

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-believe-in-magic/

Do You Believe in Magic?

The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.

Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.

But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.

Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly. They are about to call in the financial four horsemen of apocalypse: 1) Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 2) a command economy, 3) Universal Basic Income (UBI, “helicopter” money for the people), and 4) the “Build Back Better” infrastructure scheme.

MMT is the idea that a nation which claims a monopoly on issuing money can “create” new money ad infinitum with no negative consequences. That is, we can “lend” ourselves money (borrow it into existence) without having to worry about paying it back. The theory caught on only because that’s what we’ve done for two decades and, so far, it hasn’t destroyed the banking system — though debt turned exponential, which is to say ruinous, only recently — so we won’t have to stand by long to see how this experiment works out. Note this too: MMT completes the divorce between productive activity and capital formation, that is, prosperity without wealth.

A command economy means that government increasingly attempts to takes over economic enterprise, to replace x-million individual economic choices of freely-acting people in a society with bureaucratic central planning. (Have you already said ha-ha-ha, knowing how that has worked out through history?)

UBI is the primary feature of that because, in a command economy, production is mostly pretend, so you just have to give people money (for nothing). Remember the old basic operating system of the Soviet Union, stated succinctly as: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Got that?

The idea behind “Build Back Better” is to renovate the infrastructure of a hyper-tech economy that actually no longer exists because we are in the contraction phase of an historic pulsation or cycle, leaving us with lots of tech and less production, tending toward zero. Nobody flogging this slogan actually knows what it ought to mean under the circumstances, which is to go with the flow of the reality of this contraction: to downsize, downscale, and re-localize all our activities to bring them back into sync with actual productivity — that is, raising food, making real stuff, and trading it. Again, it’s the energy dynamic, stupid.

To get to that point, we’re going to shed the massive over-burden of financial game-playing that has pretended to represent our economy. That means stock valuations and bond prices will vaporize along with the derivative activities concocted for trading gainfully in these now-phantom representations of capital. If that happens sooner rather than later, we won’t even be able to pretend to Build Back Better the interstate highways, the electric grid, airports, and all the other stuff in the “infrastructure” folder.

Indeed, a lot of that would be malinvestment folly now because we’re nearing the end of mass motoring and commercial aviation as we’ve known them. If we even have electricity twenty-five years from now, it will come from much-reduced grids on a much more regional basis. The bottom line for all this is that pretty soon every corner of the country will be on its own amid quite a bit of social disorder and financial wreckage. So, whatever energy you actually can marshal to Build Back Better, save it for your town or your local community. And remember, all of the attempts by a national government to control these events, and coerce its citizens in the service of that, will only lead to a more ineffectual and impotent national government that nobody has faith in, confirming the fact that you are on your own.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/21/want-to-serve-the-empire-help-circulate-its-propaganda-narratives/

Want To Serve The Empire? Help Circulate Its Propaganda Narratives!

Hey kids! Wanna do your ol’ Uncle Sam a big honkin’ favor? Wanna serve the US empire like a good little lickspittle? Wanna help kill other people’s kids in far off lands for fun and profit?

You do?? Well bust my britches, that’s just swell!

It’s actually really easy. You don’t even need to be smart to do it — heck, it’s actually a whole lot easier if you’re not. Just shut off that pesky little lightbulb inside your noggin and listen up.

All you have to do to help ol’ Uncle Sam spark off them shiny lil’ Tomahawk missiles and incinerate those goofy foreigners for geostrategic control and Raytheon shareholder profits is this: just go around repeating the same stuff your buddies at the US State Department say about governments we don’t like.

That’s it! That’s all there is to it. It really is that simple.

Now I know you young ‘uns don’t do all your talkin’ to each other like us old timers do. You like to get on them newfangled apps and internets with your iPods and your talking dongle widgets and your fancy America Online CD-ROMs. And that’s just great! We need lots and lots of that stuff.

Just get on that there Tweeter machine and tell all your friends that Russia is real, real bad. Or maybe make one of them TikTak dances about how China wants to harvest everyone’s organs. Or heck, you can just share plain ‘ol online news articles about how bad the governments we don’t like are, since them outlets all say the same stuff we say anyhow.

Y’see kids, it’s like this: Before we launch missiles, we launch narratives. Before we drop bombs, we drop stories. Before we invade, we propagandize. We need to make sure everyone’s on our side before we can roll in their and kill those evil terrorists and babies and grandmas, otherwise we risk turnin’ everyone in America and our client states into a buncha stinkin’ anti-war hippies.

And we definitely can’t have none of that. If Americans decide they don’t like war they start making a big scene in front of everybody, holding protests and telling everyone really nasty stuff about your ol’ Uncle Sammy. Then before you know it we got us a real leftist revolutionary movement on our hands, and I ain’t talkin’ about any of that cutesy Bernie Sanders stuff. I’m talking about an actual uprising against the rich folks who run this here blessed country and tearing down the whole empire bolt by bolt.

I know we talk a big game about the scary bad guys being the jihadis and the North Koreans and whatnot, but really the folks who are most dangerous to our enterprises here are the folks who are going around telling everyone that we’re up to no good up in Langley and Arlington. The last thing we need is a buncha hoodlums running around sharing a lot of unauthorized stories about how we’re doing bad things and not really telling the truth about our military agendas. That’s why we’re trying to censor them offa the internet for good.

So get out there and grease the wheels of imperialism, sonny boy! Tell ’em Maduro is starving his people! Tell ’em Assad must go. Tell ’em them Iranians are the world’s worst sponsors of terrorism instead of us and the Saudis! Whatever you see them saying on Fox or CNN about governments we don’t like, you just pick up that torch and run with it, because anything negative you share about them helps us. That’s the best way you can help keep them big ol’ expensive gears of war turning, ya little stormtrooper.

Heck, if you help share our propaganda narratives about the nations that disobey us, you’re could pretty much even say you’re like one of our soldiers. If you think about it, there’s hardly any difference between you and the guy who actually hits the switch to deploy the bombs. You’re just showing up a little earlier in the process, laying down a little storytellin’ so we can rev up our war engines and get the real party started.

So hold your head up high, soldier! By helping us market our wars at home and abroad, you’re helping to make sure we can keep on killin’ until there’s no one left to kill. You just keep talking online about how bad them Russians and Chinese and all them are and keep your tongue lickin’ the imperial boot nice and clean, and you’ll have done your ol’ Uncle Sammy proud.

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https://scheerpost.com/2021/03/27/congress-demands-tech-ceos-censor-the-internet-in-despotic-hearing/

Congress Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet in Despotic Hearing

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”

Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way human beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed by a team of public speaking consultants that it is customary to address members of the Committee as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” He thus began literally every answer he gave — even in rapid back and forth questions — with that word. He just refused to move his mouth without doing that — for five hours (though, in fairness, the questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and unreasonable). His brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no matter how appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for several seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place in the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back, uttered the word “Congressman” or “Congresswoman,” stopped for several more seconds to search for the next applicable spot in the spine-cassette, and then proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words slowly transmitted into his neurons. One could practically see the gears in his head painfully churning as the cassette rewound or fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely consumed roughly thirty percent of the hearing time. I’ve never seen members of Congress from across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by visceral contempt for Zuckerberg’s non-human comportment:

But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted.

There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power. Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation pending in Congress with bipartisan support (including in the House Antitrust Subcommittee before which I testified several weeks ago) that would make meaningful and productive strides toward diluting the unaccountable and undemocratic power these monopolies wield over our political and cultural lives. If these hearings were about substantively considering those antitrust measures, they would be meritorious.

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the “unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they dislike removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on Google-enabled podcasts:

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56500.htm

The Native Land of the Hypocrite

In a recent TV interview, President Joseph Biden was asked if he believed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a killer. In a display of foreign policy bravado and with little hesitation he replied, "yes." It is telling that commentators rarely question the violent behavior of America’s presidents.

The United States has assumed the role of arbiter of good and evil, casting itself inevitably as a most decent nation with the right to condemn and punish others.

History has demonstrated that America’s belief in exceptionalism has bred an arrogance that has accustomed its leaders to believe they have the right to use their political and military power destructively around the world.

Before condemning the behavior of other nations, America needs a national truth and reconciliation reckoning with its own violent past and present. For a country to chart a new course it must make its injustices visible. One has only to consider the recent murders ordered by a U.S. president, former president, Donald Trump.

In violation of international law and existing U.S. executive orders, Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. In addition to Soleimani, nine others died in the attack at the Baghdad International Airport. And in November 2020, Trump, with Israel as the conduit, assassinated Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

America’s pattern of violence was ramped up with President George W. Bush’s war on terror – military assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, rendition, CIA black sites (secret prisons), Guantanamo and the use of torture.

When President Barack Obama took office he expanded Bush’s use of "kill lists" – lists of human targets. Obama authorized hundreds of military drone strikes, which killed countless non-combatant civilians, including children. Without trial, he imposed the death sentence on alleged terror suspects. Trump continued his predecessors’ practices, with even fewer safeguards. The Biden administration is currently reviewing whether it wants to continue the policy of secretly killing people in countries around the world.

American presidents have ordered coups, invasions and wars in which millions have died. Some of the most obvious cases include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq (1991and 2003), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and U.S. support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs civilians in Yemen.

Murder is not the only form of violence the United States has used to get its way.

Economic sanctions that deprive people of food, medicine and the ability to make a living have become the primary weapon of U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died as a result of U.S. embargoes and economic sanctions on countries such as Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, countries that have refused to acquiesce to U.S. demands.

The United States has been playing the role of global policeman since the Second World War. The people of one region in particular, the Middle East, have suffered immensely from Washington’s bluster, bullying, military aggression and financial pressures.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the Middle East has overwhelmingly come under U.S. control. American warships, bombers, drones and missile batteries and over 100,000 American troops blanket the region. Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen are among the regional holdouts. Because of their refusal to bow to U.S.-Israeli pressure, they have faced devastating economic and military assaults.

To cement its hegemony, Washington has enlisted despotic Arab regimes and apartheid Israel as regional satraps. Despite the abysmal human rights records of its Arab Gulf allies, the United States provides them with access to the most lethal weapons to crush internal dissent. To maintain its imperial partnership with Israel,

America’s leaders have acquiesced to the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, and they have made certain that the Palestinians will continue to suffer and die in their own country.

Quite a record.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56479.htm

Global Britain, Global Delusions

In a strategic review, the British government says the United States will remain its closest ally because of “shared values” which are allegedly attributed as being democracy, rule of law and human rights.
Far more realistic than these panegyrics is the way Britain and the US routinely trash those purported “shared values” by launching illegal wars of aggression (for example, Iraq, Afghanistan); subvert foreign nations for regime change (for example, Syria, Libya); and arm despotic regimes to the teeth which suppress human rights (for example, Saudi Arabia).

The 111-page British strategic review makes for painful yet hilarious reading. It is full of delusional self-flattery.

Another “shared value” is the way Britain and the US gratuitously label other nations as enemies and security threats. This scaremongering is invoked primarily against Russia and China but also other smaller nations like Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.

This preposterous demonization of others is of course a form of psychological projection by the British and American ruling class to distract from the fact they are the biggest security threat to the world.

Scaremongering is also an essential precursor for warmongering and the continuance of militarized economies which underpins Anglo-American capitalism. Just imagine if the British and Americans tried to live in peace and cooperation with the rest of the world. Their economies would totally collapse from the absence of militarism and weapons industries.

In its so-called strategic review, it is apparent more than ever that the British rulers suffer from delusions of grandeur. Prime Minister Boris Johnson talks fancifully as if Britain is a global dynamo for economic growth and development. No longer content to exaggerate Britain’s international image as “Great Britain”, it is now referred to as “Global Britain”.

This is partly about promoting Britain to the rest of the world to make better its post-Brexit isolation from the European Union. And so by talking up its presumed power “to shape the world”, the British ruling class are obliged to pose as flexing muscles.

This would explain the policy reversal on decreasing its nuclear arsenal. Britain is now planning to increase its stockpile of nuclear warheads over the next decade from around 180 up to 260. This is in violation of Britain’s obligation to disarm under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Johnson talks about Britain being a “beacon of democracy” to the world when in reality it is a rogue state which is dangerously destabilizing international security by its wanton militarism.

    Yet the British rulers have the brass neck to accuse Russia and China of jeopardizing global security and to assert that they will “prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon”.

On Russia, the British are particularly vociferous, claiming that “Russia will remain the most acute direct threat” to the United Kingdom (Britain’s other fanciful name for itself).

    The strategic review document states, “we will actively deter and defend against the full spectrum of threats emanating from Russia”.

But it does not substantiate what these alleged “full spectrum of threats” from Russia are.

For rogue-state Britain it is apparently sufficient to simply make an accusation and then proceed to “justify” plans for increasing its nuclear arsenal.

Russia and Iran condemned the British state planners for blatant hypocrisy. So should all other nations.

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, nailed it when she said that Britain’s “imperial ambitions” are based on illusions. It’s as if the arrogant British rulers think they have turned the clock back a 100 years to a time when “the sun never set on their empire”. Even then British power was also over-rated.

Today, Britain may have nominally the fifth-biggest economy in the world, but it also is broken-down nation with rampant poverty and inequality. A third of its children struggle with poverty and hunger, and the numbers are increasing. Look at the shambles of its public health service, yet its ruling class is planning to spend £24 billion over the next four years to increase its military forces, including the number of nuclear weapons.

The reprehensible and reckless move to increase its nuclear arsenal is an absurd and grotesque waste of public finances. It is criminal in the face of such harrowing social needs among ordinary Britons.

But what’s also criminal is that British rulers are undermining global security – all for the vain purpose of posing as a global power instead of actually being a global power.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/in-the-shadows-of-shadowland/

In the Shadows of Shadowland

Is there some kind of game on in the USA? Have our public affairs ever looked so false and disordered? Is it ever more wondrous that Joe Biden somehow managed to win the Super Tuesday primary, let alone the national election?

The country has gotten exactly what it saw all through the autumn of 2020: the empty shell of a broken politician. Back in October, Ol’ Joe hiding in his basement was played as a bad joke in a nervous zeitgeist. Nothing to see, according to the captive news media. Wasn’t that exactly it, though? Nothing to see and nobody home, the essence of our now-president, Joe Biden. How on earth did this happen?

My own theory: it was the strange byproduct of the political establishment fumbling to cover up its crimes, an endeavor so transparently inept that the rest of the world goggles at us in nauseated incredulity, watching our leadership flounder, our institutions fail, our economy vaporize, and our power dissolve, like a some dying blob in an epic horror movie. Even our most devoted adversary, North Korea, marvels out loud at the spectacle of American collapse. They joke about it, but it must make them awfully uncomfortable to realize that the USA runs under a shadow government, and runs so ineptly!

Who or what is this shadow government? I’d say it amounts to a small group around former president Obama and former attorney general Eric Holder, plus a coterie of Intel Community figures led by John Brennan, all awkwardly funneling instructions through Susan Rice to the hacks in the White House, who form a flimsy cocoon around the barely-pulsating organism within: Mr. Biden. I will boldly suggest that this cabal is actually controlling the executive branch of the government, and doing it with stunning incompetence. If it sounds like a conspiracy, that’s probably because it is a conspiracy.

What were those crimes of theirs? Mainly the actions they took the past four years to cover-up their intense and sedulous ongoing corruption of previous years, especially all the channels of moneygrubbing that ran from Wall Street and K Street through the halls of Congress, and secondarily their political agenda to destroy by any means necessary the opposition vested in a weak and ineffectual Republican Party at odds with its own elected leader, Mr. Trump.

The “means” turned out to be one dishonest exploit after another aimed at disabling and eliminating the uncontrollable Mr. Trump: RussiaGate, the Flynn case, the Mueller Investigation, Ukraine Phone Call Gate (impeachment No. 1), Coronavirus hysteria, identity politics hysteria (including the 2020 summer riots), the social media companies’ censorship and “cancellation” initiative, and, finally, the engineered ballot fraud in the 2020 national election, with a re-play in the Georgia senatorial special election of January, 2021. How did you miss all this?

I think it worked this way: John Brennan’s CIA enlisted a desperately failing news media in an ideological campaign to propagandize and lie to the American public based on Brennan’s own past ideological disposition as a self-declared “communist.” Yes, he actually said that about himself, though his Marxism and that of his allies was a mash-up of foolish utopianisms used to cover a sheer wish to annihilate any opposition frustrating their will-to-power. I’d venture to suppose that Mr. Brennan continued to influence and even direct these agit-prop operations long after he was removed as CIA Director, even as he fought off accusations for his role in helping Hillary Clinton gin up RussiaGate.

Hillary’s crimes in particular, especially her Uranium One deal and the Skolkovo scam, involved large networks of accomplices in the State Department and in Intel, including the FBI when it was under Robert Mueller, and since they were conducted under the Obama administration, they implicated Mr. Obama too, and many around him. People-of-color and the gender-muddled were useful idiots in the game to bamboozle the public, and were allowed to turn their own grievances into lucrative hustles. Thus, everything became a “racist” and “sexist” boobytrap used to nullify anybody seeing through this game, while garnering new social advantages and large sums of money for the aggrieved, especially the Black Lives Matter org.

All of these cynical power games were, and still are, playing out against the very real collapse of America’s economy and culture. That is the part of the story that nobody controls or can even hope to control. The manufacturing part of the economy has been going-going-gone for forty years, but Coronavirus paranoia has been mobilized to destroy any remaining small business or service, leaving the shell of a commercial sector represented only by rapacious chain stores. The oil industry is on the ropes, confounded by the high costs of getting shale oil out of the ground and the shortage of investor money for an obviously profitless activity. All that’s really left are the financial rackets tied to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street — and they amount to the sheerest vapor given the de-linking of capital formation from genuine productive activity.

Last week’s antics featured two dazzling failures of American diplomacy under the Obama-Biden shadow government: the president’s stupid obloquies against Vladimir Putin, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s feckless negotiation with China — in which China nullified our “human rights” complaints involving the Uyghurs on account of America’s incessantly self-declared “systemic racism.” Coming up this week, Joe Biden’s long-delayed premiere “news conference.” Even though the “questions” are all pre-submitted and vetted, and the answers will be scrolling on a teleprompter, Mr. Biden will be working without a net. His handlers must be cross-eyed with anxiety over what might happen. Pretty soon, the game will be up. The election fraud story won’t go away against all efforts to suppress it. The shadow government will get outed as the nation sinks deeper into economic and civil disorder, and some people will have to do something.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-corona-crisis-and-the-war-of-the-super-rich-against-the-earths-citizens/5741000

The “Corona Crisis” and the War of “The Super-Rich” against the Earth’s Citizens

Corporations, multinational investment banks, and the super-rich that hide behind them have launched the final stage this year of a ruthless war of a tiny few against the great majority of humanity.

Although they pay off their puppets in the media to float happy tales of some happy resolution to the dire situation of the moment, they already know that the die is cast, that they are committed to a strategy of distracting, seeding division, undermining rational thinking and using a combination of blatant intimidation with open bribery to slowly, systematically, overpower and reduce to slavery 99.98% of the Earth’s population.

They know already, according to the calculations of their supercomputers, what will happen if they are not successful in this plan. They also know that catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss will make it impossible for them to monopolize the wealth and the resources for long.

There is literally no limit to how far they will go.

The tools they use to pursue this war against the citizens of the Earth are technology, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, threats against individuals who display leadership skills and massive bribes for the leaders who are allowed to be covered in the media to represent the conservative and the progressive causes.

They also employ as part of this strategy an intimate knowledge of certain key weaknesses in the brain, and the potential for exploiting the human inclination to determine truth based on a vague sense of the mood of the herd, rather than logic. That is to say they are investing billions in hidden money to systematically create social pressure that makes citizens conform with pointless mandates for masks or vaccines that are launched from diverse platforms as a means of inducing the population to police itself.

Without such a strategy, the super-rich could not possibly seize control of the entire Earth.

There has been extensive research by corporations, and by the CIA and Department of Defense (government organizations exploited to hide the true entities demanding such research) into how humans can be manipulated without their knowledge, and compelled through imperceptible persuasion to permit, or even aid, their own disenfranchisement without us even being aware of this silent and invisible takeover.

Such operations have been undertaken before, but never on this global scale. New developments in super-computing and the global integration of, and deregulation of, finance, has made such a master plan possible for the first time.

Recent developments are best viewed as the final acceleration of a process by which corporations bribed and lobbied all authority figures in government and academics to go along with a process of privatization, commercialization, and automation that now means that a tiny handful of people can control every aspect of human experience in an absolute sense while the vast majority of citizens cannot even conceive of what is taking place. We have not reached that state yet, but Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others believe, based on the calculations of supercomputers, that it is now possible.

The super-rich has also invested in the establishment of a panoply of sham activists, or toothless, “feel good, do nothing” NGOs.

These “movements” are allowed to appear in the corporate-controlled media, and they pretend to respond to corporate power, but they purposely discourage citizens from organizing themselves (they ask only for donations, or attendance at protests, but they pointedly do not empower people to form their own groups or achieve financial and ideological independence).

Such NGOs are silent about the mass manipulation of the media and of politics by global finance—even though that is the primary cause of the political problems we face.

If we follow the current trajectory, there will not be a single part of our lives that is completely controlled by a multinational corporation in the next few years.

We do not have that long to act.

Image on the right is from Natural News

The push for mandatory COVID-19 “vaccines” in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence against them is not a matter of mistaken science or bad policy. It is rather a process of preparing government officials, doctors, reporters, and other media figures to follow orders from above that have no rational basis.

After this “softening-up process,” which is carefully calibrated on the basis of secret CIA torture programs designed to test the weaknesses of the human psyche, a rougher and more brutal form of the rule can be implemented.

The mask mandate was the first step in the implementation of this form of massive psychological warfare. It is, to use the technical term, a slow “rape of the mind.”

The enormous restructuring of governance and the economy described by the World Economic Forum as the “Great Reset” is not a secret and anyone who takes the time to read that book, and related documents, can figure out about 70% of what is their agenda is.

The citizen will be convinced that he or she operates within a functional country and that there is some process by which the politicians at the top take actions on their behalf. But the super-rich cares nothing for nation-states and their populations and they use politicians to deflect attention away from themselves. Every time a politician takes a fall, it is to distract you from the predations of the rich. Every attack on minorities is a trick to get you hooked on race and diversity and distracted from the concentration of wealth.

We are increasingly subject to the whims of unaccountable global powers, and they intentionally render us passive, open to persuasion, and therefore incapable of resistance, by the media that is controlled by those powers.

The super-rich relies on two approaches to psychological manipulation that go back to the 1930s and before but have been perfected by recent research.

The first technique is the use of traumatic events that are reported on in a sensationalist and unscientific manner in the media so as to induce a deep sense of shock, disorientation and confusion in the population as a whole. The mental trauma of such events, whether the 9.11 incident, or the hyped-up COVID-19 crisis, or the “armed insurrection” at the Capitol, is used to induce passivity and receptivity to profound institutional shifts that would otherwise be impossible.

Naomi Klein describes this approach as the “shock doctrine” and although she hesitates to delve too deeply into the degree to which it has become national policy, she accurately traces the approach back to the torture programs designed to test the limits of the human psyche.

Such trauma affects the reactive and emotional part of the human brain known as the amygdala, bringing on a “fight or flight” response in the psyche that overrides the rational, integrative, response to external events that would be carried out by the prefrontal cortex in normal conditions.

Because we as individuals, and as populations, are unaware of how the amygdala has taken over decision making from the prefrontal cortex because of these engineered shocks, we are unable to organize, or even conceive of, a response to the real threat. Instead, we focus on the cooked-up threats offered to us by the commercial media like Islamic terrorism in the case of 9.11 or the spread of a dangerous virus in the case of the COVID-19 operation.

The second strategy is to induce a hypnotic state in the brain of the individual, and the population as a whole, through the constant repetition of certain themes and images through advertisements, commercials, images, and themes articulated in movies, TV shows, reporting, and even the packaging of products.

The stimulation alternates between the intentionally boring and distracting images and direct appeals to the pleasure centers of the brain such as the desire for food, for sexual arousal, or for pleasant experiences.

The advertisements promoting the enjoyment of food and encouraging low-level sexual arousal are not only, or even primarily, aimed at selling products. They are intended to induce a state of passivity in the population.

The CIA explains the process,

“Hypnosis is basically a technique which permits acquisition of direct access to the sensory motor cortex and pleasure centers, and lower cerebral (emotional) portions of the right side of the brain following successful disengagement of the stimulus screening function of the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere which functions as the noncritical, holistic, nonverbal and pattern-oriented component of the brain, appears to accept what the left hemisphere passes to it without question. Consequently, if the left hemisphere can be distracted either through boredom or through reduction to a soporific, semi-sleep state, external stimuli to include hypnotic suggestions are allowed to pass unchallenged into the right hemisphere where they are accepted and acted on directly.”

(FOIA document “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” June 9, 1983 (US Army Intelligence and Security Command)

CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5

The scale of this experiment in mass hypnosis to render the citizens of all the world passive, and unable to resist persuasion from authority figures is unprecedented. This process is being undertaken slowly, over months and years, following complex algorithms that are kept secret.

It is critical in this process that individuals be isolated from each other, unable to communicate except through mediums controlled by multinational corporations, and that they be offered only ineffective and superficial organizations to join organizations in which they will be incapable of participating in the decision-making process, or of effecting change. Quarantine, lockdowns, social distancing, and the promotion of a narcissistic consumption culture are critical to that process.

The result is that the citizens of the United States, and around the world, are being reduced to consumers of products supplied by multinational corporations who cannot even conceive of how the world has been radically transformed in this great reset.

They are being rendered passive and unresponsive so that the super-rich can quickly seize complete control of the systems by which countries are governed, by which money and finance are determined, the media by which information is distributed, the universities and research institutes by which authoritative perspectives backed by science are presented, the farms and distribution systems by which food is provided, the aquafers and irritation systems by which water is provided, and every other aspect of human experience.

When we awake from this slumber, if we ever do, we will discover that every aspect of our lives is controlled by unaccountable powers which we cannot understand, which we have no way to challenge and which will increase slowly and systematically the means by which we are made slaves, and, if necessary, destroyed.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/after_a_year_under_lockdown_will_our_freedoms_survive_the_tyranny_of_covid_19

After a Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive the Tyranny of COVID-19?

“The remedy is worse than the disease.”—Francis Bacon

One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.

It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 afflictions.

Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

What started out a year ago as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

Until recently, the police state had been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows.

It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

This coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.

This past year under lockdown was a lesson in many things, but most of all, it was a lesson in how to indoctrinate a populace to love and obey Big Brother.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus, and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

To some, these may seem like small, necessary steps in the war against the COVID-19 virus, but they’re only necessary to the Deep State in its efforts to further undermine the Constitution, extend its control over the populace, and feed its insatiable appetite for ever-greater powers.

After all, whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America healthy again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police. The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention. The war on immigration turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”

This war on COVID-19 could usher in yet another war on the American people, waged with all of the surveillance weaponry at the government’s disposal: thermal imaging cameras, drones, contact tracing, biometric databases, etc.

Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.

The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.

It’s downright Machiavellian.

Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies. It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).

In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) started to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that anything will change for the better under the Biden administration. That’s not how totalitarian regimes operate.

Bear in mind, however, that the powers the government officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. ... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now, not just with active shooter drills and lockdowns and checkpoints and heightened danger alerts, but with a sensory overload of militarized, battlefield images—in video games, in movies, on the news—that acclimate us to life in a totalitarian regime.

Whether or not this particular crisis is of the government’s own making is not the point: to those for whom power and profit are everything, the end always justifies the means.

The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives, which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose, and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the executive branch and its unelected minions.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see.

Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us.

This is how freedom dies.

We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.

Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.

No government willingly relinquishes power. If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

That said, we still have rights. Technically, at least.

We should not voluntarily relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

The government may act as if its police state powers trump individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, outright villains or so-called “extremists.”

Sometimes that is true, but not always.

There is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

Blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government never cedes power willingly. Neither should we.

A year ago, I warned that this was a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

Nothing has changed on that front.

James Madison, the “father” of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, once advised that we should “take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

These COVID-19 restrictions are far from the first experiment on our liberties. Yet if “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the name of so-called national security, we can be assured that things will get worse, not better.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-03-23/fear-police-protest/

We are living through a time of fear – not just of the virus, but of each other

Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.

In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.

Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

‘Too noisy’ protests

It is therefore far from surprising that the UK’s draconian new Police and Crime Bill – concentrating yet more powers in the police – has arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create “unease” in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause “nuisance” or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.

And damaging memorials – totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off danger – could land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.

In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes permanent the current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat of disease.

Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?

What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing “unease”?

The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation – against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest – is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

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From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got drowned out by much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.

Binary choices

What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.

The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.

A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.

The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.

‘Kill the Bill’

Where this heads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did so – in another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our lives – in violation of emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between protesters and police in Bristol.

What are the protesters – most peaceful, a few not – trying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as “anti-lockdown”, appealing to the wider public’s fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be “anti-lockdown” before it can be protest.

The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police and Crime Bill, under the slogan “Kill the Bill”.

There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedoms – the right to protest – deserves to be at the top of the list.

If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.

Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one’s own home – like free speech in a prison cell – is a very stunted kind of freedom. It is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.

Cast out as heretics

Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don’t like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a “nuisance” or are “too noisy” in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy – especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.

In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of authority – the medical establishment.

Because today’s mantra is “follow the science”, anyone who demurs from or questions that science – even when the dissenters are other scientists – can be cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even though it is profoundly dangerous.

Political certainty

Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as individuals.

The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus, and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.

But a politics of “follow the science” implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to it – or how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responses – are purely scientific. That leaves no room for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind the façade of political certainty.

Public coffers raided

In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely insulated from the concerns of ordinary people – precisely the world we live in – protest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and “scientific” priorities against our social and economic priorities.

That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don’t have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say it – and not just in their living rooms, and not months or years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.

The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.

Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science – or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the “responsible” public as they seek to cling to power.

And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic – and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it – for as long as possible.

Selective freedoms

Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are allowed – if we “follow the science” – then neither is justified.

That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to congregate when they feel an urgent need to protest – whether it be against the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs lives – or we do not.

We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence from those in power. They are no freedom at all.

Fight for survival

What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.

The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.

That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost.

It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us permanently locked down – as some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their addiction to easy profits and their own power.

Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellion – just like the sufragettes before them – believe the majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed by noise, if their lives are disrupted.

This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.

What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.

So pray for the “anti-lockdown” protesters whether you support their cause or not – for they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.