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https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/27/hedges-the-greatest-evil-is-war/

The Greatest Evil Is War

Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia’s border and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno.

I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from in the hopes you can avoid being hit.

I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.

I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language. Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croatian. Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.

I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.

I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.

The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.

“We were expendable,” Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a marine in the South Pacific in World War II. “It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.”

The landscape of war is hallucinogenic. It defies comprehension. You have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours. War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life. You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about liberty and democracy and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.

War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life – familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly. There are no good wars. None. This includes World War II, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity, and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with the crippling sanctions meant to bring down Vladimir Putin’s government, is infantile and dangerous. The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.

There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo when we were being hit with hundreds or Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city. It made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He never recovered.

Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.

The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2022. The Biden administration has asked Congress to provide $6.4 billion in funding to assist Ukraine, supplementing the $650 million in military aid to Ukraine over the past year. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two-decade-long quagmire in the Middle East. It is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce,  the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict, one that now flirts with the nuclear holocaust that would terminate life on earth as we know it.

The dangerous and sadly predictable provocation of Russia — whose nuclear arsenal places the sword of Damocles above our heads — by expanding NATO was understood by all of us reporting in Eastern Europe in 1989 during the revolutions and the break-up of the Soviet Union.

This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia’s border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. This does not, however, excuse the invasion of Ukraine. Yes, the Russians were baited. But they reacted by pulling the trigger. This is a crime. Their crime. Let us pray for a ceasefire. Let us work for a return to diplomacy and sanity, a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country. Let us hope for an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all. 

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http://edwardcurtin.com/the-new-york-times-disgraceful-and-deceitful-attack-on-robert-f-kennedy-jr/

The New York Times’ Disgraceful and Deceitful Attack on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

The New York Times, floundering in the deep waters of truth and desperately trying to stay afloat in the shallows by continuing its history of lying for its CIA masters, has just published a front page of propaganda worthy of the finest house organs of totalitarian regimes.  Right below its February 26, 2022 headline denouncing Russia and Putin as evil dogs pursuant to the American empire’s dictates concerning Ukraine, it posts an unflattering photo of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sandwiched between American flags with the title of its hit piece, “A Kennedy’s Crusade Against Covid Vaccines Anguishes Family and Friends.”

It’s an exquisite juxtaposition: Putin as Hitler and Kennedy as a junior demon, suggestive of the relationship between C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters.  Evil personified.

The Times is big into anguish these days, not only for Nazis in Ukraine and upper class apartment hunters who can’t find a place for less than a few million, but for Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s family and friends.  It’s very touching.  That his sister, Kerry Kennedy, would harshly criticize him once again is genuinely pathetic, but of course she has to add how much she loves him, ostensibly to take the sting out of her inability to remain sisterly silent.

If he is so wrong about his work with Children’s Health Defense and his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, rather than ripping him to the press, why doesn’t she or her siblings, who agree with her, write a comprehensive article or book refuting his facts?

They don’t because they can’t; so the next best thing is to criticize their brother to media glad for any way to disparage the Kennedys.  One senses a very weird masochistic family dynamic at work.

Kennedy’s siblings do not seem to understand why the media have been attacking him for years.  His stance on vaccines and Anthony Fauci are the cover story they use to criticize him, and his siblings don’t get it.  That their brother has become a major thorn in the side of the CIA escapes them, the CIA that has caused so much devastation to their family and the world.  The CIA that has been deeply involved in the global vaccine push, working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc.  Calling your brother brilliant while ignoring his book’s searing, evidence-based indictment of the intelligence-run Covid-19 operation is more than sad, especially when doing so to The New York Times, the CIA’s paper of record together with The Washington Post.

Character assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is what the CIA and its media mouthpieces have been doing for years. This has become more and more necessary as they have realized the great growing danger he poses to their agenda. Calling him an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and names far worse, is part of a concerted smear campaign to turn the public away from his message, which is multi-faceted and supported by deep research and impeccable logic. Like his father and uncle, he has become an irrepressibly eloquent opponent of the demonic forces intent on destroying the democratic dream.

The Times article by Adam Nagourney is a blatant hatchet job filled with sly jabs, innuendos, and ignorant lies.  As is par for the course, his hack piece completely avoids Kennedy’s arguments but relies on a form of social gossip that substitutes for logic and evidence.  He seems to have learned much from The National Enquirer and The New York Post’s “Page Six” whose styles the NY Times has emulated.

Nagourney tells the reader that RFK, Jr.’s work as the face of the vaccine resistance movement has “tested,” “rattled,” “anguished,” and “mystified” family, friends and his Hollywood crowd; that this man “of the often troubled life” …. “has effectively used his talent and one of the most prominent names in American political history as a platform for fueling resistance to vaccines that could save countless lives.”

Translation: Kennedy, a Hollywood hobnobber and former drug addict, is so mentally unbalanced that he will betray his family and friends and kill people with medical advice that runs counter to the truth.

No evidence is required to establish this “truth,” just Nagourney’s word and those of those he can get to say the same thing, in other words.  Such as:

His conduct ‘undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see [sic] anyone else do it,’ said Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. ‘He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.’

Notice the implication:  that these experimental mRNA so-called vaccines have been around 50 years and Kennedy is against all vaccines, both of which are false.

Furthermore, Nagourney says RFK, Jr. not only “inveighs” against vaccines, especially Covid vaccinations, but has adopted other weird “unorthodox” views (implication: orthodox views are good) over the years.

One is his claim that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father Senator Robert F. Kennedy.  Nagourney might do a smidgen of research and discover that Kennedy is correct; but doing so would disrupt the flow of his ad hominem attack.  All serious writers on the case know that the senator was not shot by Sirhan; they know there are deep CIA connections to the assassination. The evidence conclusively proves, as the autopsy has shown, that Sirhan was in front of the senator when he fired his pistol but RFK was shot from the rear at very close range with all bullets entering his body from the rear.  Nagourney either knows nothing about the assassination or is dissembling the facts, which must be “unorthodox.”

Sounding like a U.S. government spokesmen telling the press something is true without an iota of evidence, he writes the following sentence as if it were true simply because he wrote it, while making sure not to mention the book’s title – The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy – a brilliant, deeply researched and sourced book The Times will not review:

In a best-selling new book, he claimed that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who is President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus pandemic, and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to profiteer off dangerous vaccines.

Notice Nagourney’s insidious method.  State RFK’s claim as if it’s false because Nagourney stated it, when in fact it is so abundantly true and backed up by massive evidence that if Nagourney dared to engage in actual journalism by checking Kennedy’s book he would discover it.  But his job is not to search for truth but to defile a man’s reputation. He accuses Kennedy of circulating false information on the coronavirus and the vaccines but of course doesn’t say what that is or why it is false.

His entire article is an ad hominem attack by statement with the author cunningly hidden behind deceitful objectivity.

He writes:

To the public distress of his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, Mr. Kennedy invoked Anne Frank, the young German-Dutch diarist who died in a Nazi prison camp, as he compared government measures for containing the pandemic with the Holocaust at that rally in Washington.

However, that is not what he said.  He said that during the Holocaust Anne Frank could hide for a while and others could flee out of Germany, but with the new “turnkey totalitarianism” being introduced today, which is technological, it will be harder to escape, for every aspect of life will be monitored by the authorities in a digital dystopia. Such a perspective is in no way unusual, for it is shared by many scholars of technology and only the most naïve would consider it eccentric. His point and words were twisted to serve others’ purposes and to paint him as an insensitive Holocaust denier.  Here’s what he said:

What we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we’ve never seen before. It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state since the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity.

Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died … but it was possible.

Yet his sister Kerry also ripped him for making a statement that was clearly true if you accept his argument about the technological lockdowns in progress.  You can disagree (I don’t) but to impugn his intentions and his words is really despicable, but Nagourney adds it to his ad hominem attacks, making sure to include his sister Kerry’s Tweet:

Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and repulsive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric.

Nagourney: “ Even his most prominent critics say they do not doubt his sincerity, even as he has become one of the most prominent spreaders of misinformation on vaccines.”

Translation: RFK, Jr. means well but he’s deluded.

Big Daddy Fauci is introduced to tell the young whippersnapper the following after Kennedy delivered a briefing at The National Institutes of Health:

When it was over, Dr. Fauci walked Mr. Kennedy out of the conference room.

“I said, ‘Bobby, I’m sorry we didn’t come to any agreement here,’” he said. “‘Although I disagree factually with everything you are saying, I do understand and I respect that deep down you are really concerned about the safety of children.’ I said that in a very sincere way.”

Condescension and sincerity overflow as the “conspiracy theorist” patient is told by the good doctor that he means well but needs help.

Then, making sure to include The New York Times endlessly repeated CIA talking point, our no-nothing author writes:

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his uncle, in 1963, when Robert was 9, helped foster a modern culture of conspiracy theories. Now, many of the arguments that Mr. Kennedy has embraced — including that Dr. Fauci is part of a “historic coup d’état against Western democracy” — recall the theories of a secret assassin helping Lee Harvey Oswald from the grassy knoll in Dallas.

That it was the CIA that weaponized the use of the term “conspiracy theory” in a 1967 dispatch – #1035-960 – in order to disparage those questioning The Warren Commission and it’s cover-up of the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination is another fact that our fair-minded scribe conveniently omits while insidiously implying that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.  Yes, there are magic bullets and magical tricks used to make sure RFK, Jr. is seen as a “sincere” nutcase.

RFK, Jr. has been and is an astute critic of the CIA and all its machinations, including its involvement in the assassinations of his uncle JFK, his father Senator Robert F. Kennedy, its involvement in the COVID propaganda, and in its extensive deadly deeds and disinformation at home and abroad.  His critical siblings praise him for his great intelligence and political acumen but seem clueless themselves.  So they ally with the same media that have been stenographers for the CIA.  The Kennedy family may be very well known, but in these ways they are very typical of American families that are divided by those who know and those who don’t know who the real devils are.

But let me make two final points about this sickening piece of character assassination.

RFK, Jr. has spent decades as an environmental lawyer fighting the pollution of our air, earth, and water.  In other words, the pollution also of human beings who live in nature while nature lives in us. Some people know the outside and the inside are connected.  Yet Nagourney bemoans the tragic turn he took from such good work with the environment to such terrible work with Children’s Health Defense and vaccines. He writes:

The swerve in Mr. Kennedy’s career, from the environment to vaccines, is particularly startling because for many family members and other Kennedy associates, Robert Kennedy Jr. is the sibling who most recalls the level of charisma and political appeal of his late father.

Startling?  No, very consistent for one who can think.  There is an obvious link between the major corporate polluters of the outside environment and the major polluters of human bodies.  Big pharmaceutical, oil, chemical, agribusiness, military, etc. are an interrelated lot of criminal enterprises despoiling all life on earth.  Kennedy’s lifetime work has followed a natural trajectory and underlying it all is his critique of the CIA and its media accomplices, such as The New York Times.

Yes, those family and friends who say he’s brilliant are right, and he is following in his father’s footsteps in ways they do not grasp; for he is able to connect the dots, diagnose the patterns, and expose with facts the criminal syndicates that are destroying democracy and so many lives.

The reason The New York Times publishes hit pieces like this and does not review his recent books is because his critique of these nefarious forces has gained a large audience and as a result many people are awakening to the truths concealed by the likes of “the paper of record” with its propaganda.

Hit pieces like Nagourney’s should cause anyone reading it intense “anguish.”  There is nothing “mystifying” about it.

It’s simply disgraceful and deceitful.