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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/02/27/revealing-what-msm-suppress-about-longstanding-us-war-on-humanity/

Revealing What MSM Suppress About Longstanding US War on Humanity

From sea to shining sea land theft and extermination of Native Americans — to the halls of Montezuma — to the shores of Tripoli — to raping and destroying one nonbelligerent, nonthreatening nation after another for being free from US control — MSM have consistently suppressed hegemon USA’s ugly face — to include the monster regime it created in Kiev by coup d’etat mass murder.

So China’s embassy in Russia stripped off Washington’s post-WW II mask to reveal its perpetual wars of aggression against invented enemies.

“Never forget who’s the real threat to the world,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao stressed.

Since WW II ended, hegemon USA waged over 80% of world conflicts, including all major ones — entirely against invented enemies — in flagrant breach of the UN Charter, other international law, as well as the US Constitution under its Supremacy Clause.

The late William Blum documented US high crimes post-WW II in his must-read books and articles. 

Longstanding US criminality includes assassinating foreign leaders, removing others by coup d’etat, propping up friendly despots, operating secret torture prisons worldwide, and other unlawful practices. 

Washington’s rap sheet includes virtually every conceivable form of criminality imaginable and then some.

It’s not a pretty picture.

US dark forces tried or succeeded in toppling scores of governments worldwide, along with waging perpetual wars, Blum saying: 

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy (throughout) the past century, this is what crawls out: invasions, bombings, (subversion), overthrowing governments, suppressing (popular) movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing ‘news,’ death squads, torture, (chemical), biological (and nuclear) warfare, (radiological contamination), drug trafficking, mercenaries,” police state repression, and endless wars on humanity.

At home, CIA hitmen assassinated JFK, RFK, MLK, JFK Jr., Senator Paul Wellstone and others opposed to US imperial rampaging.

US dark forces were responsible for  the 9/11 mother of all false flags to that time — with plans to rape and destroy seven countries, including:

Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran plus slow-motion genocide in Yemen.

The all things flu/covid mother of all state-sponsored scams exceeded history’s most egregious crimes — with extermination of unwanted billions and elimination of what remains of free and open societies worldwide in mind.

Below is what China called the “USA Bombing List: The Democracy World Tour” post-WW II, what’s indisputable.

North Korea and China 1950-53

Guatemala 1954, 1960 and 1967-69 

Indonesia 1958

Cuba — from 1959 to the present day

Congo 1964

Following the US-staged August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin false flag incident, the rape and destruction of N. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia followed until hegemon USA’s defeat and humiliating Saigon embassy rooftop exit on April 30, 1975.

Grenada 1983

Lebanon 1983-84

Libya 1986, 2011 and 2015

El Salvador and Nicaragua throughout the 1980s

Iran 1987

Panama 1989

Kuwait 1991

Iraq 1991 and 2003 to the present day by occupation and use of ISIS jihadist proxies

Somalia since the 1990s

Bosnia 1994-95

Sudan 1998

Afghanistan 1998 and 2001 – 2021

Yugoslavia 1999

Yemen 2001 to the present day

Pakistan 2007 – 2015

Syria since 2011

The above nations represent about one-third of the world’s population.

US wars by other means have been waged and are ongoing against dozens of nations — for being free from its hegemonic control.

Among others, they include Russia, China, Iran, Syria, N. Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Belarus, Myanmar, Nicaragua, historic Palestine, Bolivia, Somalia, South Sudan, Turkey, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

None of the above nations threaten the US.

Throughout the post-WW II period, its only enemies were invented.

No real ones existed since that time.

The roots of Russia’s demilitarization and deNazification campaign in Ukraine stem from the Obama/Biden regime’s 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev.

US-installed, Nazi-infested, fascist tyranny replaced democratic rule.

For nearly 8 years, US-orchestrated and directed Kiev aggression has been ongoing against the Donbass People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as their long-suffering 4 million people.

What US/Western MSM should report, they suppressed — including mass slaughter of thousands in both republics.

For the US/West and their MSM co-conspirators, they’re non-people, their fundamental rights and suffering ignored.

In stark contrast, Russia’s defensive intervention against Kiev’s aggression in response to help requested by DPR and LPR leaders is being mercilessly assaulted by a blitzkrieg of MSM bald-faced Big Lies and mass deception.

Make no mistake.

The dominant 4th estate supports US hot and cold wars on invented enemies.

It stands with Nazi-infested fascist tyranny in Ukraine.

Ignoring international and US constitutional law — along with abandoning truth and full disclosure journalism as it should be — its reports on events in Ukraine are on the wrong side of history by supporting wrong over right.

A previous article called Russia’s ongoing campaign a noble mission, a liberating struggle to end Kiev’s aggression on Donbass, along with neutralizing the scourge of US-installed Nazified tyranny in Ukraine.

What’s ongoing is also a shot across the bow against hegemon USA’s rage to dominate planet earth, its resources and populations.

A line in the sand was drawn.

No longer will Russia tolerate US hegemonic aims — that threaten world peace, stability and fundamental freedoms — without responding to its menacing scourge.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-our-home-native-dictatorship/5772052

Oh, Canada! Our Home and Native . . . Dictatorship! The WEF is “Trampling Our Freedoms”

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine  

As a former officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, I am appalled at the direction this great nation has taken. If someone had told me twenty-five years ago that one day citizens of Canada would be arrested for peacefully demonstrating in the streets of our nation’s capital, I would not have believed it possible. And yet here we are today, watching the government shred our Charter of Rights and Freedoms by threatening and trampling—sometimes literally with police horses—Canadians who wish to send a message of love and a plea for freedom

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has subjected 38 million people to the first and only invocation of the sweeping Emergencies Act we have ever seen in this country. Shockingly, he has done so without any justification. Even more egregiously, he has asserted these powers in order to solve a problem that he himself created and deliberately exacerbated. 

Both before and after he made this unprecedented motion—which the House of Commons approved on February 21, 2022, but which was rejected by the Senate two days later—Trudeau has been acting equal parts coward and tyrant. He has refused to engage in negotiations—or, for that matter, in any dialogue whatsoever—with representatives for hundreds of thousands of working-class protesters, deeming them a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views.” What he means is that they do not share the vision of his puppet-masters at Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF).

Throughout the thus-far-month-long standoff, the Prime Minister has uttered a string of pejoratives, painting anyone who dares dissent from his (read: the WEF’s) technocratic agenda and totalitarian tactics as a “racist,” a “misogynist,” a “terrorist.” He has even resorted to the vile term “Nazism” as an excuse to dodge face-to-face meetings with his Canadian brothers and sisters from all walks of life. Rather than listening to what they have to say, as a true leader would, he has treated citizens with callous, arrogant disregard for their human rights, their legitimate demands, and their state-imposed suffering.

All of this is to say that, from everything I have seen or studied, the current regime in Ottawa has become the most dangerous, lawless government in Canada’s 155-year history as an independent nation. Over the past two years, it has displayed a wanton disregard for the rule of law and the legislative process, putting in place mandates that have not been voted upon by Parliament. In so doing, Trudeau and his cabinet have illegally and incrementally restricted the rights and freedoms of all Canadian citizens.

To wit: In the last two years, the Prime Minister, his administration, and his Liberal Party have been relentlessly coercing Canadians into being violated with an experimental injection that is neither safe nor effective. 

To wit: In the same two years, rates of small business failures, depression, suicide, domestic violence, and deaths-by-overdose have skyrocketed across the nation.

To wit: In the past month alone, peaceful protestors—including sympathetic military and police veterans—have been beaten, harshly shoved to the ground, psychologically intimidated, and verbally threatened for exercising their constitutional right to assemble and speak freely. 

To wit: In the past week, the Trudeau government has invoked the Emergencies Act and has used it to prepare and execute—even before waiting for ratification by Parliament—a ruthless, privacy-invading plan to track down and disclose the personal information of citizens who financially contributed to Freedom Convoy 2022 or who attended the Ottawa protest—and freeze the bank accounts of some of them.

Thus, even though the Emergencies Act was defeated in the Senate, I believe a new era of authoritarian control is sweeping through our nation’s halls of power. This control grid has been designed to work in concert with the equally authoritarian technocratic agenda of the WEF.

Like most governments in the West, the ruling party in Canada has been heavily infiltrated by members who subscribe to the WEF’s “Great Reset.” Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder and executive chairman, admitted as much in a 2017 interview, when he boasted:

“Yesterday, I was at the reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I would know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are for or are actually Young Leaders of the WEF.”

Sure enough, a list of names on a WEF sister website reveals that both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland are graduates of the influential Forum of Young Global Leaders. (Freeland is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and four years ago gave a talk to that globalist body.) Yet, despite such easily verified evidence, “fact checkers” and Ottawa officials call the existence of this group of globalist technocrats-in-training a “conspiracy theory.” 

Given that the Liberal Party has fallen under the WEF’s spell, it should come as no surprise to see the government now fast-tracking brand-new vaccination regulations to be added to the Canada Labour Code. Once implemented, these regulations will require all federal employers and federally regulated industries to mandate and enforce the COVID-19 “vaccination” of employees as a condition of employment. (I put “vaccination” in quote marks because the mRNA doses are actually a gene-altering therapy, not a traditional vaccine that is said to immunize against a disease.) Never before have Canada’s federal workers been required to undergo vaccination to keep their jobs. 

Of even more concern is that the soon-to-be-adopted federal vaccination regulations will supersede the provincial governments’ longstanding authority over and administration of healthcare.

Why would such a change in the administrative structure be taking place?

I believe it’s because passing the buck to the federal government provides a great excuse for provincial premiers to relax their unpopular vaccine passport requirements for all Canadians who want to travel and enter public spaces.

The impeccable timing of this change in policy will take the pressure off their political fortunes—a kind of sure-win strategy for the upcoming provincial elections set to take place between June and December of 2022. The unsuspecting voters will be deceived into believing they are free from the shackles of the vaccine passport, when in fact only the goalposts have been moved. 

But that is not the worst of it. No, the federal workers’ vaccine mandate and the expected post-elections imposition of a vaccine passport at the provincial and/or federal level are just the beginning of a far more sinister plan.

What Lies Ahead

These envisioned edicts in Canada are simply the initial steps Trudeau and fellow globalist technocrats are taking in their attempt to enslave all the planet’s inhabitants—except, of course, their own kind.

But even if the vaccine passport plan is dropped in Canada and elsewhere, what will definitely come to pass, as sure as night follows day, is a worldwide digital ID system. My confidence in making that claim stems from the constantly articulated aim of the WEF—and of all the central banks—to implement a global system in which everyone’s personal data will be incorporated into the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) network. 

Once that goal is accomplished, every aspect of our lives will be controlled, from womb to crematorium, by the so-called 1% who run the world’s most influential institutions and comprise its bluest bloodlines.

(Yes, bloodlines. As in the Rockefellers, Morgans, du Ponts, Rothschilds, British royals, and Dutch royals, to name a few of the supposedly superior families whose wealth and power have been dominating the global population for centuries.) 

What do I mean by “every aspect of our lives”?

For starters, what we can purchase with our CBDC money.

And from there . . . whom we may—or may not—associate with. How much electricity we can use in our (rental) dwellings. What we are allowed to read, see, hear, say—and even eat.

Whether and where we can travel. The list of “forbiddens” will keep growing. And so will the social demerits we pile up for bad behavior. That is, for disobeying our slave masters. A similar version of this scheme already exists in China. 

I don’t mean to sound hopeless. Despite this bleak peek at an economy being purposely destroyed by the “Build Back Better” architects and engineers at the WEF (and, not to be forgotten, at its parent, the United Nations), I do not think we should despair. For, believe it or not, we are beginning to win the battle for freedom in Canada and in other countries. 

It helps that more of us than ever before are “awake” to the globalists’ intentions. Our ranks will only expand in coming months as more and more of the wrongdoing at the top is exposed. (Thankfully, the sunlight of truth is the best disinfectant.) 

Moreover, Canadian politicians’ wild misuse of state authority is a sure sign of their desperation—a desperation born of their futile attempt to stop the sudden crumbling of the pseudo-pandemic narrative. The COVID-19 story has been a ruse from its inception, planned over many decades and constructed on a bed of lies. In the end, the current Canadian government, like so many rotten regimes in the past, will be relegated to the dustbin of history. 

I implore all active members of Canada’s military and police forces to uphold the highest law of our land.

Promise you will never forget your solemnly sworn oath to defend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Your country is depending upon you to guard it well.

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http://edwardcurtin.com/u-s-nato-is-in-the-grip-of-a-daemonic-death-wish-and-the-entire-world-is-threatened/

U.S./NATO is in the Grip of a Daemonic Death-Wish and the Entire World is Threatened

Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.  Their hypocrisy and nihilistic thirst for death and destruction are so extreme that it boggles my mind.  They accuse Russia of starting a New Cold War when they did so decades ago and have been pushing the envelope ever since.  Now they act shocked that Russia, after many years of patience, has struck back in Ukraine.

In 2017, Oliver Stone released his four part interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  The Putin Interviews were conducted between 2015, the year after the U.S. engineered the coup d’état in Ukraine installing Nazis to power in that country bordering Russia, and 2017.  Stone was of course bashed for daring to respectfully ask questions and receive answers from the Russian leader who the American media has always cast, like all the mythic bogeymen, as the new Hitler intent on conquering the world, when it is the United States, not Russia, that has over 750 military bases throughout the world and has attacked Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria – the list is endless.

In his Putin interviews, Oliver Stone, a man of truth and honor, lets viewers catch a glimpse of the real Vladimir Putin and the matters that concern him as the leader of Russia.  In 2018, I wrote of those interviews:

 . . .  he [Putin] makes factual points that should ring loud and clear to anyone conversant with facts. One: that the U.S. needs an external enemy (“I know that, I feel that.”). Two: the U.S.A. engineered the coup d’état in the Ukraine on Russia’s border. Three: the U.S. has surrounded Russia with US/NATO troops and bases armed with anti-ballistic missiles that can, as Putin rightly says to Stone, be converted in hours to regular offensive nuclear missile aimed at Russia. This is a factual and true statement that should make any fair-minded person stand up in horror. If Russia had such missiles encircling the United States from Cuba, Mexico, and Canada, what American would find it tolerable? What would CNN and The New York Times have to say? Yet these same people readily find it impossible to see the legitimacy in Russia’s position, resorting to name calling and illogical rhetoric. Russia is surrounded with U.S/NATO troops and missiles and yet Russia is the aggressor.

In the years since those interviews, U.S./NATO has consistently tightened the noose around Russia, including fueling the Ukrainian attacks on the Donbass, killing thousands, all the while pleading innocent and expecting no reply. Now the reply has come.

Although I have no inside information, I get the sense that the Western Empire is planning/initiating counter-measures far more extreme than the highly publicized economic sanctions.  While it is true, as many commentators such as Ray McGovern and Pepe Escobar have pointed out, that a paradigm shift is underway and the once dominant U.S./NATO bully boys must now contend with the Sino-Russian alliance that has ushered in a dramatic change, nevertheless, as in the past decades, the so-called leaders of the U.S. are a dumb bunch driven by unquenchable demons.  As McGovern says:

Yet, there remain unsettling indications coming from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan that senior administration ‘dolts’ (copyright North Korean leader Kim Jong Un) in the Washington Swamp still don’t get it.

I’m afraid they don’t and never will.  That is what frightens me.  While it seems counterintuitive and totally irrational that these people would be planning to use some type of nuclear weapon in this current situation, I am not so sure.  They obviously pushed Russia to have no alternative but to attack Ukraine, and now that they have accomplished that goal, it seems to me that they will up the ante.  Diplomacy is not their way; violence is.

Pepe Escobar has just written:

This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.

From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

As usual, his analysis is correct, but it may fail to grasp the unspeakable nature of the madness that drives desperadoes.  If those running U.S. foreign policy feel that a new geo-political order is being born “at breathtaking speed” as a result of Russia’s move into Ukraine, then they are capable of extreme acts. And they have all the mainstream western media behind them, barking out their non-stop propaganda.

We are inexorably moving toward a global war that will become nuclear if an international movement doesn’t quickly arise to stop it.  Most people bemoan the thought of such a war to end all wars, but refuse to analyze the factors leading to it. It seems so unimaginable, but It happens step-by-step, and many steps have already been taken with more coming soon.  It’s so obvious that most can’t see it, or don’t want to.  The corporate main stream media are clearly part of the continuation of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, and those who still rely on them for the truth are beyond reach.  We need to use all alternative means to raise the alarm and make sure the ultimate nightmare never occurs.

Perhaps hyperbole is the only way to do so, for it may be closer to the truth than we want to believe.

Comments to article:

" Russia has been backed into a corner with US/NATO encirclement, installation of missiles 5 minutes away from Moscow, provocative military engagements etc.
China is in the same situation.
The fascist beast cannot be appeased; only understands brute force.
But everyone, even Americans, knows a nuclear war is not survivable, no winners. "

" Good points, it’s always been a story about how a very few in number can leverage enough power to control the many. We’ve seen many systems of leverage in the past, many still in place – dictators, kings & queens, the churches, nation states & governments, monetary & corporate systems, education..
The people are starting to get restless, the world’s population currently stands around eight billion & many of the old systems of leverage are breaking down, especially the monetary (Sept ’19 repo event).
We are witnessing a transition into a completely centralized governing body that will use technocracy to dictate the Unidroit based statutory rules down to the subservient nation states, which are just corporations with their populations deceived into believing they have rights, when in fact they only have privileges since they are corporate ‘citizens & persons’ through the unlawful incorporation of their Christian and Family name.
The incorporation of the Christian & Family name is why they have ‘legal’ jurisdiction & such power over the people who falsely think their feet are on the ‘land’.
The Sept ’19 near financial failure forced their hand and they had to rapidly increase the pace of the transition towards Agenda2030. Events such as Cov_19 & Ukraine act as scapegoat & cover, providing a reason for all the money printing that was necessary to buy themselves enough time to get the new technocratic world system into place before hyperinflation causes uncontrollable social unrest. "

" There is certainly a good deal to ponder regarding where all this might go. I will share just a thought on the odd “timing” of these events, which I must say seems rather fortuitous for Covid-mad leaders, government and institutions across the globe.

We’ve all watched incredulously as Russiagate magically morphed into Trump Derangement Syndrome, which then magically morphed into Covid Derangement Syndrome, and now we seem to have somehow in a heartbeat closed the circle back to “evil bad-bear” Russia (let the ‘derangement’ begin) – and just as the flaming Hindenburg of global Covid propaganda is crashing in such spectacular fashion that a new “diversion” is clearly in order. I suspect I’ll be duly reminded and chastised by MSM talking heads that I’d have to be some sort of heartless cad to insist we might want to look more closely and critically at the massive destruction and death caused by the lockdowns and “vaccines” – when a possible global nuclear war threatens EVEN MORE massive death and destruction.

Our collective “new normal” has clearly become the virtual embodiment of Debord’s – “Society of Spectacle.” It is all clearly “spectacle” 24/7, no thinking allowed. And I really must say that I haven’t the slightest sense of “knowing” where any of this is going – I mean other than clearly into a global techno-feudal totalitarian order IF we somehow avoid an extinction-level global war FIRST.

Meanwhile the war propaganda is replacing the covid propaganda across the MSM.

https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words-e05?r=bb6p0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

How strange that I look at this face (in the link) plastered across Western media and all I can see instead is the face of that little Syrian boy so cynically used by our buddies the White Helmets and MSM in order to sell that latest “humanitarian” regime-change war only a few short years ago. The images and the spectacles run together, each new propaganda operation seemingly even more ham-handed than the last – with events quickly rendered unintelligible by the careful “analysis” of MSM pundits. As to where it will all go – I can only speculate – no where good. "

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/81976/canada-freezing-bank-accounts-is-childs-play-compared-to-the-coming-central-bank-digital.html

Canada Freezing Bank Accounts is Child's Play Compared to the Coming 'Central Bank Digital Currency'

It is not a conspiracy theory. Earlier this month, Canada’s Prime Minister began freezing the bank accounts of protesters who stood against tyrannical mandates and arresting them. Not only did they go after the protesters, but the government went after the bank accounts of those who provided monetary support in the form of donations as well.

For practicing their free speech, Canadians were persecuted and driven into financial ruin by the government who claims to protect them. This was all carried out with zero due process and without any democratic input at all.

Last week, holding no punches Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland announced that “…all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac.” This, she said, is a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.”

When the American political class watched as the Canadian government began financially persecuting individuals for their freedom of speech, it was crickets from the mainstream. This was one of the most tyrannical moves in recent Western history and instead of standing against it, the establishment actually supported it.

In fact, a poll by Trafalger Group for Convention of the States recently found that a super-majority of Democrats, 65%, actually thought Trudeau’s authoritarian move to arrest people and confiscate their life savings — for practicing their freedom of speech — was a good thing.

Just 17% of the establishment left disapproved of it.

This insane authoritarian action was carried out with almost no resistance and private banks in Canada proved they were more than willing to comply with the state’s demands.

Think about the ease with which this was done using the Canadian dollar and real money inside real banks and then consider the implications had the Canadians already adopted the federated digital ID system with a digital asset controlled by the central bank and the state. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it’s not and it will be here before you know it.

But don’t take my word for it, listen to Neil Parmenter, the President and CEO of the Canadian Bankers Association explain how this new system, supported by the World Economic Forum, will work. Plastic credit cards, ID cards, and cash are a thing of the past. Under the Great Reset, your entire financial portfolio will be controlled by the central bank and your assets relegated to a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), that can be turned off in a split second by the tyrannical regime you dare to criticize.

We just witnessed Canada seize the assets of its citizens for peaceful protest and now they are pushing a new system in which the state and central banks literally control everything. And it’s spreading — to America.

Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Board Governor Lael Brainard laid out plans for the United States to adopt a similar system.

“It is essential that policymakers, including the Federal Reserve, plan for the future of the payment system and consider the full range of possible options to bring forward the potential benefits of new technologies, while safeguarding stability,” Brainard said in remarks prepared for delivery to the U.S Monetary Policy Forum in New York. “A U.S. CBDC may be one potential way to ensure that people around the world who use the dollar can continue to rely on the strength and safety of U.S. currency to transact and conduct business in the digital financial system.”

Don’t let the rhetoric about competing in the digital currency age fool you. Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies are a threat to the global banking cartel because they cannot control it. The anonymity and independence fostered by cryptocurrencies on the blockchain are enemies to the ruling class who seek to maintain control through centralization.

This is why China, last year, banned cryptocurrency trading and mining. It is a threat to their totalitarian grip over its citizens. It is also why they have ushered in the digital yuan. China has been working on their own digital currency since 2014 and the e-CNY is already being pushed on its citizens.

The e-CNY is completely controlled by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank and the Chinese Communist Party who exclusively leads the People’s Republic of China. Every single transaction conducted with the e-CNY is a matter of state record.

Given China’s Orwellian social credit system which punishes people for smoking, bad driving, shining a negative light on the CCP, and wasting money on “frivolous purchases,” the idea of the state controlling the whole of an individual’s assets is chilling. Yet this is exactly what has been unravelling in China for the last 8 years. And others are now following suit.

One indicator that CBDCs are an ominous ploy by the banking cartel and the state to take over our lives is the fact that the Atlantic Council is a lead proponent of them. For those who may be unaware, the Atlantic Council is the think tank, who is contracted by Facebook and Twitter to conduct censorship operations on their platforms.

Their censorship arm, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab was suspected to have played a large role in the removal of hundreds of anti-establishment pages in 2018 and the years after.

The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.

The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce.

On their website, the Atlantic Council, advocates for central bank controlled digital currencies and notes how 87 countries, which account for over 90% of the world’s gross domestic product, are exploring a digital currency, and five countries have already launched one.

One of the main reasons the council and others advocate for such a centralization of power is to limit or prevent “illicit activity.” This is a prominent selling point from both the Atlantic Council and the equally dubious World Economic Forum.

In their White Paper Series on a Digital Currency Governance Consortium, the WEF outlines a plan for private entities, ie central banks, and the state to work together to prevent any activity the two deem “illicit” — like protesting forced vaccinations, for example.

An outspoken opponent to the CBCDs is Maajid Nawaz who recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and laid out in shocking detail, the implications for such a system, which as illustrated above, is being pushed by all the world’s power players. In his example, he notes that the vaccine passport system is the gateway through which the digital currency will be pushed.

Nawaz detailed the new system. “So the vaccine passport infrastructure is in place. But now we know that the vaccine doesn’t stop infection or transmission but the Checkpoint Charlie exists everywhere. They bring in digital banking, central banking, digital currencies. You’ve got a scenario now that you’re checking in and out everywhere you go, using vouchers that are programmed and you can only spend where you’re told you can spend them.

“There’s another word for that. That’s called the Chinese social credit system. That’s what it’s called. And anyone who watches Black Mirror will know what I’m talking about,” Nawaz said.

“So what they are telling us, and when I say they, who’s they, people in power, that’s the head of our economy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful person other than the prime minister, and maybe the foreign secretary in the UK, right?

“He’s telling us I just played it there for you. He’s telling us that’s what he, as the UK, the head of the G7 want to bring in for the G7. So a scenario where like in New York at the moment, because the passport infrastructure is in place, you bring in that digital currency, and you’ve got this total control. And if I’m speaking to you the way I’m speaking now, and my employer or government… deems me as saying or doing something inappropriate, suddenly, I can’t actually pay to come here and speak to you anymore. My digital currency won’t even pay for the ticket. Because it will be known that I’m coming to speak to you, ‘sorry, your vouchers don’t allow you to purchase that ticket to go and speak to Joe.'”

This is a system that Hitler, Stalin, or Mao would have relished over. Imagine a dictator having global transaction censorship across their empires and at the touch of a button, they could silence their political enemies and propel them into financial ruin. That is what’s coming.

Over the last two years, politicians and bureaucrats have been exploiting the pandemic and preying on the fears of citizens to usher in systems like the vaccine passport. The groundwork has been laid and the elite — who actually call themselves this now — are ready to strike and they may use this current crisis in Ukraine to do so.

Will we stand up and say no, or will we roll over and allow the state to take complete control over our lives and surrender our voices and freedoms for a false assurance of security? 

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-us-nato-created-mess/5772137

Ukraine: The US and NATO Created this Mess

The US and NATO created this crisis because they tossed aside the reasonable demands of the Russian Federation in two draft treaties submitted on December 21, 2021. One of the key demands was for a neutral Ukraine and a binding pledge that it would never join NATO.

For his part, Ukrainian President Zelensky dismissed the Minsk Protocols, which was the only formula to solve the impasse over the breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Minsk Protocols required the Ukrainian government to negotiate with the breakaway region concerning the restoration of its previous autonomy as well as language and cultural rights, prior to the Maidan coup in 2014.

These failures left the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass alone to suffer the increasing military onslaught of a Ukrainian government, riddled with neo-Nazi parties, egged on by Western arms and money.

The Insanity of the West Accelerates

All of the above are the festering sores of three decades of betrayal by the US and NATO of their pledges in the early 1990’s to Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, that NATO wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward” of a reunited Germany.

However, in the past thirty years, rather than dissolving itself (because it was set up to protect North Atlantic countries from the alleged danger of communism), NATO expanded 800 km. to the east, and admitted fourteen states which had been broken away from the former Soviet Union or were former members of the Warsaw Pact. Western (including Canadian) military and naval forces were stationed in these new NATO member countries and NATO installed missile systems and held massive drills close to Russia’s diminished borders. Clearly, the US plan was for its aggressive military alliance, NATO, to expand right up to all of Russia’s border with a view to further dismembering Russia and consolidating US hegemony over the entire European continent.

Another festering sore for Russia was the US-inspired coup in Kiev of 2014 whose junta thought it could impose its will on the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass.

Russia, in its desire to protect the people of the Donbass Region, decided quite reasonably to recognize their governments and to create a demilitarized zone in the rest of Ukraine.

We believe that the Trudeau government should mind its own business and butt out of Ukraine. It has already caused enough damage by supporting the 2014 Maidan coup and arming and funding the junta to the teeth, not to mention by leveling coercive economic measures against Russia for many years.

Canada should quit the gang of thieves and land destroyers known as NATO and end all of its participation in provocative military adventures in Ukraine, Latvia, Romania, and the Black Sea.

In addition, the Trudeau Government should redirect the $350 billion CAD, proposed for new NATO-inspired fighter jets, warships, and predator drones, towards social programs and defensive weapons for Canada’s sovereign territory.

It should also sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and refrain from admitting as refugees anyone associated with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/02/24/twelve-thoughts-on-ukraine/

Twelve Thoughts On Ukraine

Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the goal of which he claims is not to occupy the country but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” it. We’ve no reason to put blind faith in any of those claims. Only time will tell.

As of this writing dozens have reportedly been killed so far. All war is horrific. We can only hope that this one winds up being the least horrific a war can be.

Some thoughts:

1. This whole thing could very easily have been avoided with a little bit of diplomacy. The only reason that didn’t happen was it would have meant the US empire taking a teensy, weensy step back from its agenda of total planetary domination.

I’ve seen people call it “sad” or “unfortunate” that western powers didn’t make basic low-cost, high-yield concessions like guaranteeing no NATO membership for Ukraine and having Kyiv honor the Minsk agreement, but it’s not sad, and it’s not unfortunate. It’s enraging. That they did this deserves nothing but pure, unadulterated, white hot rage.

2. Narrative managers have been working furiously to quash all discussion of #1, however. Like our good friend Michael McFaul here:

This is one of the most influential Russia “experts” in the western world decrying propaganda while demanding media outlets enact propaganda. Saying what your government wants said instead of objective reporting the truth is the thing that propaganda is.

Please don’t report facts on your media platforms. Don’t let anyone talk about the known actions by NATO powers and Kyiv which experts have long warned would lead to this situation. You’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which demonstrably led us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom.

Your loyalty is to the US empire, not to truth. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

3. It’s funny how everyone keeps referring to this as a “World War 2-style invasion” instead of a “US-style invasion”. It’s not like examples of military invasions ended in the 1940s.

Speaking of which:

4. Look at this.

These people actually believe it’s legitimate to call this “the largest invasion on our planet since WW2.” Just snip out all the pages from the history books between 1950 and 2003 to make western imperialists feel good about themselves. Unbelievable.

5. The primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by miscommunication, malfunction or misunderstanding amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions. This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war.

Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Nobody who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken understands what they really are.

We survived the last cold war by sheer, dumb luck. We were never once in control. We just got lucky. There’s no reason to trust that we’ll get lucky again. We need to abandon this madness and pursue detente immediately.

https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1496708592619110404?s=20&t=jgPpaLgDrfUSO1jWAZPnAA

6. After the bombs drop and I’m dying of radiation poisoning, with my final breath I’m going to thank Joe Biden for denying Putin the moral victory of an assurance that Ukraine won’t join NATO.

7. Probably goes without saying but just in case: anyone who supports any kind of western military confrontation with Russia is an enemy of our entire species.

8. It would now seem the US power alliance has a choice between either (A) escalating aggressions against Russia to world-threatening levels or (B) doing what anti-imperialists have been begging them to do for years and pursuing detente. This is exactly where anti-imperialists have been warning we could wind up if the US didn’t work toward detente with Russia, while being called Kremlin agents and Putin lovers the entire time for years on end.

All the people who’ve called us crazy over the years for warning that cold war brinkmanship against Russia could lead to hot war are the same people calling to ramp up the brinkmanship now that our warnings proved true. Perhaps some serious re-evaluation is in order.

The solution to a crisis that was created by cold war brinkmanship is not more cold war brinkmanship. The solution to a crisis that was created by cold war brinkmanship is detente.

9. Assertions made by secretive government agencies based on classified intelligence should always be subjected to aggressively intense scrutiny, 100 percent of the time, without exception and without apology, regardless of the fact that those assertions occasionally happen to prove true.

10. It sure is a lucky coincidence that westerners have spent the last few years being persuaded to hate Russia by their governments and media. Otherwise the west’s dramatic response to this act of aggression might be difficult to get them to consent to.

11. Remain intensely skeptical of all news coming out of Ukraine. Since 2016 the western empire has been running an extremely aggressive narrative management campaign about Russia the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The news media have been fully complicit in this mass-scale psyop. Watch and wait for hard evidence of every claim made. Recall how snipers were used during the 2014 coup in Kyiv to kill protesters and pin the blame on the ousted Yanukovych government.

12. Unpopular opinion but I think those who are crowing that this marks the dawn of a multipolar world may be jumping the gun a bit. If the US empire can succeed in crippling Russia’s economy and fomenting unrest, balkanization and collapse there, it knocks out a key pillar of China’s support system, and China is the ultimate target in all these unipolarist maneuverings.

If it can do this (and that’s a big if, I know), at that point the empire can set to work on China without its guard bear there to protect it. Which of course would have been the plan all along. Which of course would be why the empire and its propaganda engine have been acting so weird these last few years.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/81942/a-new-age-of.html

A New Age of Barbarism

Political leaders in the US, Canada, Germany, and France – all NATO countries – got back on script yesterday. They could not wait to get to the microphones. They all seemed to have new energy and purpose in life. Politicians are made for this moment! They are vastly more talented at dishing out righteous opprobrium directed at foreign beasts, which make far more compelling enemies, than inveighing against invisible viruses. 

As Russian bombs rained down on Ukriane, Western leaders – having spent the better part of two years bullying their citizens and quelling protests – spoke in soaring tones about freedom, democracy, peace, and human rights. They condemned the brutality of Putin and his revanchist vision of Tsarist restoration. They had a new sense of resolve in their moral superiority as leaders of the free and modern republics that do not invade their neighbors. 

The part we do not see is that many of these people – together with media organs and administrators of many deep-state bureaucracies – are absolutely thrilled to start a new season. 

Away with the appalling mismanagement of the pathogen. Away with public anger toward the lockdowns and mandates. Forget the collapse in children’s literacy, the rise in cancer, the waves of depression, the trucker protests, the collapsing polls of many elected leaders, and forget too the inflation, the federal debt, supply-chain snarls and goods shortages. Forget all the astonishing botches of everything. 

Life was never as good in living memory as when we had a solid foreign enemy named Russia with a leader with a name and a face. Everything wrong with the world could be personalized, and with storybook thematics: good vs evil, freedom vs despotism, democracy vs dictatorship. This great struggle was so good for both sides that they made it last 40 years. There must be a certain nostalgia for those days alive in the hearts of incumbent political establishments today. 

And so, Putin has given Western political elites a wonderful gift. He has created a template that allows them all to say in unison: there is something even worse than us. They can hope for a turnaround in their sagging polling numbers, new respect and appreciation for their strong leadership in a time of crisis, and more reliably depend on a deferential media machine that knows the ways of wartime require parroting whatever powerful foreign-policy experts say in public and private. 

There is some powerful symbolism here with Putin’s outright military invasion. He knew that he could count on both India and China to look the other way, even tacitly approve his move. And he knew for sure that NATO countries would bluster and impose sanctions but were not in a position to do anything beyond that. He further knew that Ukraine was an easy win for him personally and politically. He has finally pushed back against NATO expansionism into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, and caused the opening of a new chapter in world affairs. He has made it clear to the world that the American century is over. 

Even more extraordinary, he has a clean path to retaining that power at home. Anti-war protests broke out in many cities in Russia. God bless these protestors, their resolve, their courage, their love of peace. 

If Putin is looking for a way to deal with them, he need only look at how Justin Trudeau dealt with the protests in Ottawa. Dox them, seize their bank accounts, tow their trucks and cars, and send in heavy armed military-style cops without badges and faces to clear the streets. Use facial recognition technology to follow up with people later, inquiring about their political loyalties.  

The “free world” has lost the moral high ground to preach to the “unfree” world about rights, liberties, and democracy. For two years, most every government in the West experimented with new forms of servitude in the name of public health. They showed how emergency powers can be deployed to lock people in their homes, shut businesses, cancel church, close parks, ban travel, censor speech – massive attacks on essential freedoms all justified simply because the people in power said it was justified. 

Further, the pandemic response revived the utility of nationalism (with travel bans and even vaccine approvals), class demarcations in policy (essential and nonessential businesses and workers), segregation and discrimination based on biology (vaccine passports), and the unquestioned hegemony of the administrative state over the whole of society. The experience further proved that there need be no limits to state ambition: even the absurd promise to eradicate a respiratory virus can serve as justification for a power grab. 

Even the courts went silent, and the media could be relied upon to quell dissident voices and push out propaganda from the bureaucracies. Big Tech, once decried by the establishment for its libertarian ethos, also enlisted on the side of control, censoring and canceling accounts that raised doubts concerning the competence of the managerial elite. 

What a lovely example to display to would-be authoritarians the world over! The pandemic response was brutal. It contradicted all law and tradition. It flew in the face of public-health science from the past. It was an enormous flop from a scientific point of view, of course. But the enterprise did create a political precedent that will resonate for decades. It firmly established that states can do what they want, when they want, provided the leadership maintains a posture of infallibility and the population is sufficiently fearful. 

This was the West’s gift to Putin. Putin is now returning the favor. He has volunteered for the role of scapegoat for political establishments that are desperate for a change of topic, something that enables them to once again reclaim the vocabulary about freedom, no matter how implausible it might seem at first. Everyone knows that the best environment for controlling public opinion is the fog of war. All the better if it involves a far-away dictator with imperial ambitions. 

The last two years have revealed to us what we would rather not have discovered, namely that freedom and rights, along with enlightened ideals and good science, are extraordinarily fragile. They are only guaranteed by a public that believes in them and is willing to stand up for them. When the cultural consensus in favor of liberty decays, terrible beasts are unleashed on the world. 

There are two dates in my adult life that truly seemed darkly shattering of every enlightenment ideal. The first was March 12, 2020, when Donald Trump announced, under cover of emergency, the end of travel from Europe, the UK, and Australia, all in the name of virus avoidance. The second was February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin took the first major steps in the restoration of the 19th-century Russian empire, thumbing his nose at the once-mighty US empire and its pretensions to rule the world. 

It’s a new chapter in a story of what could be a very dark century – unless and until the enlightenment ideals once again ascend to commanding heights.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-party-of-chaos-blows-its-cover/

The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover

It is fair to say that the “Joe Biden” government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the “Joe Biden” government’s war on its own people in the United States. The table was nicely laid for it over many years, including, by the way, Mr. Trump’s vaunted gift of weaponry to Ukraine, which enabled and emboldened the Kiev regime to harass the Russian-speaking population of Donbas without relent. And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of “Joe Biden” and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia’s border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.

You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry’s State Department and John Brennan’s CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully. If you bother to read the recent statements of both “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin, you will see exactly why and how the situation developed. You will also see an appalling difference in the quality of public utterance — as, say, the difference between Zippy the Pinhead and a Metternich.

I’ll get back to all that presently, but first let’s be clear about what “Joe Biden” & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the “Joe Biden” regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America’s own Deep State.

The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA “vaccines” were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA “vaccines” turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus. That last bit of news is now coming out in reports from the life insurance and funeral industries, which are showing an alarming increase in all-causes death, especially in people under 60 years of age.

It is also coming out that the CDC has wildly and recklessly falsified its own data throughout the Covid crisis, and that the “vaccine” safety trials were a complete fraud — which has led to the prospect of Moderna and Pfizer losing their liability shields, and, recently, to the crash of their share prices. The public is also learning that they were cruelly denied early treatments with well-proven off-label drugs that might have saved millions of lives. And yet, knowing all this, “Joe Biden” and his Democratic Party are to this day urging Americans to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted,” in the words last week of the US president. You can’t be faulted if you suspect that they are deliberately trying to kill a lot of people.

The blow-up of the Covid-19 story will come to horrify even those Americans hypnotically locked into mass formation, and will lead to countless lawsuits and prosecutions. But in the meantime, we will be preoccupied with the blow-up of the financial system and the economy it is supposed to serve. The inflation horses are out of the barn and running wild. The Federal Reserve has finally succeeded in destroying the value of the dollar and, consequently, destroying the little that is left of middle-class life in the USA. At the same time, they have unleashed forces that will also destroy the fortunes of many upper-class people, too, as the stock and bond markets go south. Financial collapse is at hand, and “Joe Biden” doesn’t want you to pay attention to it. The Ukraine melodrama is a compelling distraction.

The John Durham special counsel operation gains more disturbing visibility each week. The public has been informed by his court filings that there is no longer any question as to who set the Russian Collusion game in motion (Hillary Clinton), how the FBI, DOJ, and the news media were enlisted to play their roles in it, and how the whole thing amounted to a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the chief executive. It is extremely serious stuff, the worst scandal and the grossest institutional failure in our history. There will be prosecutions and punishments, and half of America will have to process their own guilt in swallowing the story and going along with it.

Then there is the 2020 election narrative: that it was the fairest and most error-free contest in our history. The evidence that the opposite is true waits in several states, hidden in cardboard boxes, thumb-drives, routers, and stacks of depositions. At this late date, it can’t be corrected, but there is a fair chance that the public will realize it was played on that, too, and if we are very lucky, future elections will be held without dastardly Dominion vote tabulation machines or anything like them.

The Party of Chaos, “Joe Biden’s” Party, doesn’t want you to pay attention to any of that, or to a thousand other political insults they have inflicted on the country from BLM / Antifa riots to their dirty deals with social media, to their perversion of law enforcement, to their surveillance and persecution of loyal citizens as “domestic terrorists,” to the gender disorders in schools and sports… and on and on. And so, they invited with open arms the Russian operation against Ukraine to put an end to reckless provocations emanating from there. “Joe Biden” didn’t have to do anything, really, except pretend in bad faith to take part in a diplomatic solution, and then he stopped doing even that. The sanctions he imposed amount to the flimsiest window-dressing.

And now here is what I think is happening and will happen in Ukraine. The Russian aim is to neutralize Ukraine’s military capability — the means for harassing the eastern provinces known as the Donbas. That has been accomplished. Ukraine no longer has an air force, a navy, or a whole lot of weapons and munitions. It is surely in Russia’s interest to complete this operation in as few days as possible to minimize harm to civilian lives and property. The Ukrainians appear to understand that, too. The politicians and NGO organizations groomed by American sponsorship in Ukraine will be deactivated, relieved of their responsibilities, and put out of business. If Mr. Putin is prudent, he will not murder or persecute them. A regime friendly to Russia will eventually be installed. Keep in mind, Ukraine had been a province of Russia one way or another for more than two hundred years — except for the calamitous past thirty years — and Ukraine doesn’t really represent much more than an administrative and fiscal challenge. Russia’s ultimate interest in this matter is to stabilize its border.

We in the USA perhaps can’t appreciate that because our current government shows no interest in stabilizing our own border. (We will in the future, when the Party of Chaos is swept out of power.) I’ll refrain from speculating much on the broader geopolitical repercussions of Russia’s Ukraine operation, since it’s not over and there is still a chance for much to go awry. The general proposition that it represents a milestone in America’s loss of global power and credibility is probably correct. We have spent the last thirty years since the fall of the USSR invading and harassing one country after another, not always with altogether bad intentions, but always with disastrous results. It looks like we will have to take a break from that activity.

We have too much to look after and clean up with our own act. The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was, until we started meddling in it in 2014.

In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.

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https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/hedges-the-chronicle-of-a-war-foretold/

Chronicle of a War Foretold

I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.

There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War. 

How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.

There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.

The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.

In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow. 

The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia. 

The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness.  The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster. 

Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO.  Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable. 

The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader. 

I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start. 

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57008.htm

Russia’s Strategic Swing Drives NATOstan Nuts 

History will register that the birth of the baby twins – Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – only a few hours before 2/22/22, was simultaneous to the birth of the real, 21^st century multipolar world.

As my columns have stressed for a few years now, Vladimir Putin has been carefully nurturing his inner Sun Tzu. And now it’s all in the open: “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

The thunderbolt was months in the process of being meticulously polished. To paraphrase Lenin, who “created Ukraine” (copyright Putin), we did live many decades in only these past few days. It all started with the detailed demands of security guarantees sent to the Americans, which Moscow knew would be rejected. Then there was the Russia-China joint statement at the start of the Winter Olympics – which codifies not only the strategic partnership but also the key tenets of the multipolar world.

The culmination was a stunning, nearly one hour-long address to the nation by Putin shortly after the Russian Security Council live session deliberating on the request for independence by the DPR and the LPR (here is a condensed version.)

A few hours later, at an emergency UN Security Council meeting, Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya precisely outlined why the recognition of the baby twins does not bury the Minsk agreements.

The baby twins actually declared their independence in May 2014. In 2015 they signed the Minsk agreements as one of the interested parties. Theoretically they could even be back within Ukraine if Kiev would ever decide to respect the agreements, which will never happen because the U.S. has vetoed it since 2015. Moreover, the people of Donbass do not want to be subjected to a regime harboring neo-Nazis.

As Nebenzya outlined, “I would like to remind you that at the time of the conclusion of the Minsk agreements, the LPR and DPR had already declared independence. The fact that Russia today recognized it does not change the composition of the parties to the Minsk agreements, since Russia is not one (…) Another thing is that the Minsk agreements have long been openly sabotaged by Ukraine under the auspices of our Western colleagues. Now we see that many colleagues want to sign that the Minsk agreements are dead. But this is not the case (…) We are still open to diplomacy, but we do not intend to allow a new bloody massacre in the Donbass.”

And here’s the clincher, directly addressing imperial support for the killing of ethnic Russians in Donbass: “The main task of our decision [on recognizing independence] was to preserve and protect these lives. This is more important than all your threats.”

There you go: Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a concept invented by the Americans to launch wars, used by Russia for preventing one.

That certified nullity, German chancellor Scholz, deriding Putin’s characterization of a genocide in Donbass as “laughable”, was a decisive factor in the birth of the baby wins. Putin, in his address to the nation, especially took time to detail the Odessa massacre: “We cannot but shudder when we remember about the situation in Odessa, when people were burned alive (…) And those criminals who did this, they are not punished (…) But we know their names, and we will do everything to punish them (…) and to bring them to justice.”

What about China?

Geopolitically, in Eurasian terms, two huge questions stand out: the role of the CSTO and the response from China.

If we look at the Article 19, Chapter VI of the CSTO charter, we learn that, “any state sharing the goals and principles of the Organization and being ready to undertake the obligations containing in this Charter and other international treaties and resolutions effective within the framework of the Organization may become a member of the Organization.”

That would open the door for the baby twins, as soon as they have finalized all the bureaucratic endeavors pertaining to new, independent nations, to request CSTO membership. Incidentally, CSTO secretary-general Pashinian has already gone to Moscow to discuss it.

China is a way more complex proposition. One of the key tenets of Beijing’s foreign policy is the fight against separatism – embedded in the foundation of the SCO. So Beijing cannot possibly recognize the baby twins, or what would amount to Novorossiya – yes, Putin did pronounce the magic word – before Kiev itself does or, a serious possibility, completely disintegrates.

The Foreign Ministry so far has been extremely cautious. Wang Yi has reiterated “China’s long-standing position that the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be respected, and the purposes & principles of the UN Charter must be upheld.”

Further on down the road, presumably after some serious exchanges between Wang Yi and Lavrov, China can always find myriad ways to unofficially help the baby twins – including advancing BRI-related connectivity and sustainable development projects.

As for Kiev disintegration, that’s directly linked to Moscow demanding the immediate stop of the mini-blitzkrieg against Donbass, otherwise they will bear full responsibility. Yes, regime stalwarts will be hunted and punished – complete with a possible War Crimes Tribunal. No wonder all sorts of oligarchic/political rats, big and small, are scurrying away, to Lviv, Poland and the UK.

The Munich effect

The intervention of all 12 members at the Security Council session, combined with Putin’s address to the nation was the stuff of gripping geopolitical drama. Putin’s body language and the look in his eyes testified to the immense gravity of the moment – and it all came to the forefront when he embarked in a concise history lesson spanning a century.

Barely containing his anger at the countless ways Russia has been vilified by the West, and taking no prisoners when referring to communism, what mostly stood out was the clear-cut rendition of the insurmountable antagonism between the Anglo-American islands and the civilizational Heartland – or the clash between maritime powers and land powers. That Eurasia classic was the bulk of his exposition: the recognition of the baby twins took less than three minutes.

The Munich Security Conference, this past weekend, had made it all so explicit. Munich, as terrifying as it was in terms of a congregation of headless chickens posing as eagles, at least confirmed everything is in the open.

The enemy is Russia. NATO infinite expansion – to outer space – is against Russia. And then we had a parade of add-on threats: no disarmament in Eastern Europe, cutting off the Russian economy from the EU, end of Nord Stream 2, Ukraine in NATO, world order built on “universal liberal values”.

Munich spelled out No Compromise Whatsoever – which was exactly what Putin, Lavrov, Patrushev and co. expected, the warmongering rhetoric burying any meaningful discussion of migration, inflation, cyber wars, the European energy crisis and, of course, the only thing that matters for the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, as defined by Ray McGovern): let’s milk this Eurotrash lot for untold billions in new contracts, let’s isolate Russia, let’s destroy Nord Stream 2 to sell them our ultra expensive LNG, let’s keep them on a leash – forever.

So actually it’s not even war against Russia: the $30 trillion-indebted Empire with a woke military attached simply could not afford it. Not to mention the certified freak out in case they receive a phone call from Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Zircon : cue to the spectacular Russian display of “military and technical” superiority, hypersonic and otherwise – staged, irony of ironies, in synch with the circus in Munich.

What we have here is so lame: just a lowlife offer-you-can’t-refuse racket to be inflicted on the EU.

The Indivisible Security dance

The rabid Munich “No Compromise” show; the imperially-ordered Ukro crypto-blitzkrieg against Donbass; and the role of the U.S. Lack of Intelligence Community – an Andrei Martyanov-coined howler – altogether sealed the deal for the Security Council deliberations and Putin’s decision.

Considering the ideological stupidity of the current Brussels gang – Stoltenberg, von der Leyen, Borrell –, incapable of understanding even basic economics, the fact remains that the EU without Russian energy is doomed. Martyanov stresses the algorithm: Russia can afford the break up with Europe. Europe cannot. The U.S. just wants to collect. And we’re not even talking about the dire, incoming ramifications of the systemic crisis across NATOstan.

Even as Moscow plays a very long, calculated game, as it stands that does not necessarily mean that Russia will be “winning” the baby twins while “losing” Europe. Russia’s strategic swing repeatedly baffles the Atlanticist combo. The U.S. lack of intelligence community was predicting a Russian “aggression” every other day – and still is. Instead they got the baby twins as the latest independent republics of the Global South.

Even before Munich, the Ukro crypto-blitzkrieg, and the recognition of the baby twins, Moscow had again warned it may respond with “military and technical measures” to ensure its own security after the U.S. and NATO blatantly ignored key points from its proposal for a long-term European security architecture, and instead “cherry-picked” issues from a package deal.

Moscow will not let the Americans run away from the by now notorious 10-page Russian response. Putin, addressing the Stavka, had already warned “we are in a situation (…) where we are forced to resolve it.” Which bring us to what John Helmer niftly qualified as Russia’s black box defense. The beauty is no one knows what’s inside the black box.

Enter, once again, the “military-technical measures” that will be “reciprocal” (Putin) to what U.S. and NATOstan are already deploying against Russia. They won’t necessarily be implemented in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, in the airspace above Donbass, even in cyberspace. It could be anywhere – from the Syrian theater to Latin America.

Surprise! That’s what strategic ambivalence, ambiguity, or – let’s get down to the rhythm – swing is all about. You don’t believe in the principle of indivisible security? Fine. Now we dictate the security rhythm. You’re not gonna stop deploying nuclear weapons outside your territory? Fine. Here’s some reciprocity. You’re not gonna accept legally binding guarantees of our security? Fine. Meet our “military-technical” measures.

Now dance, suckers.

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

Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are the Enemy of Freedom

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

War is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.

Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world into a state of global authoritarianism, just as the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates seems to have finally worn thin, we are being prepped for the next distraction and the next drain on our economy.

Yet policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

Consider: We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

We are also being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood - including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts—is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

“‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

“This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

We are dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhaul.

Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

It happened in Rome: at the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise.

It’s happening again.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57009.htm

President Joe Biden One Year On… America Is Back, With More Aggression Than Ever

This weekend marks Joe Biden’s first year in office since his inauguration on January 20, 2021, as 46th president of the United States. In that time, it’s quite staggering how rapidly relations have deteriorated between the U.S. and Russia on the one hand and China on the other.

Right now, Europe is on the cusp of a war breaking out between a U.S.-backed regime in Ukraine and Russia. The volatile situation has the potential to drag the U.S. and other NATO powers into a proxy war with Russia, if not a full-blown international military conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Washington’s baleful relations with Beijing have been eclipsed by the recent stand-off with Russia. But make no mistake, U.S.-China tensions have also been heightened with the attendant risk of war. Much of the tension has been increased by the Biden administration’s provocations towards China over the breakaway island province of Taiwan. Under Biden, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have burgeoned as have the large-scale maneuvers of American military forces near Chinese territory – in the name of “freedom of navigation”.

Let’s rewind to Biden’s inauguration on that cold, sunny day of January 20 last year. There was the usual jamboree that often accompanies a new Democrat president. We saw it when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were installed in the White House. Likewise, with Biden’s tenure, there were expectations of a more professional president, a more multilateral president, a more proficient president on foreign policy, and, dare we say, a more refined and law-abiding president. As usual, there was rosy rhetoric about how Biden would recover America’s international image that had been tarnished under his boorish predecessor, Donald Trump.

Biden declared over and over again that “America was back” as he took office. European leaders swooned at the prospect of again having an American ally who respected them. The expectation was that the “adults were back in control” of U.S. policy (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and that the feathers ruffled by Trump would be smoothed.

Strategic Culture Foundation can take pride in not having bought into any of the wishful thinking regarding a Biden administration. We predicted in several articles at an early stage of his presidency that international relations would take a serious turn for the worse under Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Take, for example, this interview on November 23, 2020, with Christopher Black. It was headlined: “A Biden Administration Will Be Dominated by More U.S. Aggression”. It predicted that the world “would see more intensified militarism and aggression under a Joe Biden presidency than under the outgoing Trump administration.”

Another observation in the same interview was “the Biden administration will be bent on war… in particular against Russia and China… we can expect U.S. provocations to accelerate.”

See also our weekly editorial on January 22, 2021, entitled: “President Biden’s New Administration, Old Aggression”.

In a subsequent column, on January 28, 2021, Strategic Culture Foundation highlighted how the Biden administration would ramp up efforts to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 gas project between Russia and the European Union. This unspoken objective has come to a head in the present crisis over Ukraine. It is driving the geopolitical dynamics behind the conflict between the U.S. and Russia, as explained in a later SCF article published on June 8, 2021, – some five months before the crisis erupted in Western media coverage.

Virtually every U.S. president has gone to war or overseen some form of criminal foreign aggression. Barack Obama – the “hope and change president” went on to unleash American wars and bombing in seven countries. Obama’s vice president was Joe Biden who owns some of the past criminality. Donald Trump didn’t start any new American wars but he too was up to his neck in waging aggression abroad.

Republican and Democrat presidents are all the same. They are tools of U.S. imperialism.

So far, Biden hasn’t actually started a new war. He has continued some of the existing militarism. And if he keeps going in the same mode, a war against either Russia or China or both is a “distinct possibility” to use Biden’s words this week about an alleged Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Underpinning the intensified aggression under Biden is the objective historic condition of failing U.S. imperial power. This has nothing to do with whether the president is Democrat or Republican. From the early post-Cold War years we had the Wolfowitz Doctrine, coined under a Republican president as it happened, that set out the objective of staving off U.S. imperial decline and in particular staving off the challenge to U.S. power from a resurgent Russia or an ascendant China.

Under prevailing U.S. establishment politics and the national security state, the Cold War policy against Russia and China would inevitably continue. American power relies fundamentally and intrinsically on confrontation with perceived rivals who must be treated as enemies to be subjugated.

It just so happens that Biden and his administration are more in tune with the U.S. political establishment and the national security state than, for example, the maverick egomaniac Trump. That’s why there has been a more determined and discernible deterioration in U.S. relations with Russia and China over the last year.

Biden hasn’t started a war yet. But he’s still got three years to go and the first one fills the outlook with dread.

One final note: Strategic Culture Foundation has come under fire from the U.S. authorities who have banned America-based writers from publishing articles in our journal. The U.S. government accuses SCF of being an agent of Russian foreign intelligence. See this recent hit-job on ABC news which cites some of our headlines without providing links to the articles. SCF is not an agent of the Russian government. It is an independent journalistic forum for analysis and comment. The prescience of our articles cited above on exposing the criminality of U.S. imperial power would suggest that is the real reason why SCF is being targeted with American slander and sanctions.