“Bear-baiting as foreign policy.”
‘Exploiting Russia’s anxieties.’
In the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, British royal circles enjoyed watching fierce dogs torment a captive bear for the fun of it. The bear had done no harm to anyone, but the dogs were trained to provoke the imprisoned beast and goad it into fighting back. Blood flowing from the excited animals delighted the spectators.
This cruel practice has long since been banned as inhumane.
And yet today, a version of bear-baiting is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale. It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.
United States leaders, secure in their arrogance as “the indispensable nation,” have no more respect for other countries than the Elizabethans had for the animals they tormented. The list is long of targets of U.S. bear-baiting, but Russia stands out as the prime example of constant harassment. And this is no accident. The baiting is deliberately and elaborately planned.
As evidence, I call attention to a 2019 report by the RAND Corporation to the U.S. Army chief of staff entitled “Extending Russia.” Actually, the RAND study itself is fairly cautious in its recommendations and warns that many perfidious tricks might not work. However, I consider the very existence of this report scandalous, not so much for its content as for the fact that this is what the Pentagon pays its top intellectuals to do: figure out ways to lure other nations into troubles U.S. leaders hope to exploit.
The official U.S. line is that the Kremlin threatens Europe by its aggressive expansionism, but when the strategists talk among themselves the story is very different. Their goal is to use sanctions, propaganda, and other measures to provoke Russia into taking the very sort of negative measures (“over-extension”) that the U.S. can exploit to Russia’s detriment.
The RAND study explains its goals:
We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.
Clearly, in U.S. ruling circles, this is considered “normal” behavior, just as teasing is normal behavior for the schoolyard bully, and sting operations are normal for corrupt FBI agents.
This description perfectly fits U.S. operations in Ukraine, intended to “exploit Russia’s vulnerabilities and anxieties” by advancing a hostile military alliance onto its doorstep, while describing Russia’s totally predictable reactions as gratuitous aggression. Diplomacy involves understanding the position of the other party. But verbal bear-baiting requires total refusal to understand the other, and constant deliberate misinterpretation of whatever the other party says or does.
What is truly diabolical is that, while constantly accusing the Russian bear of plotting to expand, the whole policy is directed at goading it into expanding! Because then we can issue punishing sanctions, raise the Pentagon budget a few notches higher and tighten the NATO Protection Racket noose tighter around our precious European “allies.”
For a generation, Russian leaders have made extraordinary efforts to build a peaceful partnership with “the West,” institutionalized as the European Union and above all, NATO. They truly believed that the end of the artificial Cold War could produce a peace-loving European neighborhood. But arrogant United States leaders, despite contrary advice from their best experts, rejected treating Russia as the great nation it is, and preferred to treat it as the harassed bear in a circus.
The expansion of NATO was a form of bear-baiting, the clear way to transform a potential friend into an enemy. That was the way chosen by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and following administrations. Moscow had accepted the independence of former members of the Soviet Union. Bear-baiting involved constantly accusing Moscow of plotting to take them back by force.
Ukraine is a word meaning borderlands, essentially the borderlands between Russia and the territories to the West that were sometimes part of Poland, or Lithuania, or Habsburg lands. As a part of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine was expanded to include large swaths of both. History had created very contrasting identities on the two extremities, with the result that the independent nation of Ukraine, which came into existence only in 1991, was deeply divided from the start. And from the start, Washington strategies, in cahoots with a large, hyperactive anticommunist, anti-Russian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, contrived to use the bitterness of Ukraine’s divisions to weaken first the U.S.S.R. and then Russia. Billions of dollars were invested in order to “strengthen democracy”—meaning the pro-Western west of Ukraine against its semi-Russian east.
The 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych, who was solidly supported by the east of the country, brought to power pro-Western forces determined to bring Ukraine into NATO, whose designation of Russia as prime enemy had become ever more blatant. This caused the prospect of an eventual NATO capture of Russia’s major naval base at Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula.
Since the Crimean population had never wanted to be part of Ukraine, the peril was averted by organizing a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to return to Russia, from which they had been severed by an autocratic Khrushchev ruling in 1954. Western propagandists relentlessly denounced this act of self-determination as a “Russian invasion” foreshadowing a program of Russian military conquest of its Western neighbors—a fantasy supported by neither facts nor motivation.
Appalled by the coup overthrowing the president they had voted for, by nationalists threatening to outlaw the Russian language they spoke, the people of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence.
Russia did not support this move, but instead supported the two Minsk agreements—the Minsk Protocol in September 2014 and Minsk II, signed in February 2015 and endorsed by a U.N. Security Council resolution. The gist of Minsk II was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine by a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in exchange for their local autonomy.
Minsk II set out a few steps to end the internal Ukrainian crisis. First, Ukraine was supposed to immediately adopt a law granting self-government to eastern regions (in March 2015). Next, Kiev would negotiate with eastern territories over guidelines for local elections to be held that year under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE. Then Kiev would implement a constitutional reform guaranteeing eastern rights. After the elections, Kiev would take full control of Donetsk and Lugansk, including border with Russia. A general amnesty would cover soldiers on both sides.
But Kiev, although it signed the agreement, has never implemented any of these points and refuses to negotiate with the eastern rebels. Under the so-called Normandy Format—four-sided talks among France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia—Paris and Berlin were expected to put pressure on Kiev to accept this peaceful settlement, but nothing happened. Instead, the West has accused Russia of failing to implement the agreement, which makes no sense inasmuch as the obligations to implement fall on Kiev, not on Moscow. Kiev officials regularly reiterate their refusal to negotiate with the rebels, while demanding more and more weaponry from NATO powers in order to deal with the problem in their own way.
Meanwhile, major parties in the Russian Duma and Russian public opinion have long expressed concern for the Russian-speaking population of the eastern provinces, suffering from privations and military attack from the central government for eight years. This concern is naturally interpreted in the West as a remake of Hitler’s drive to conquest neighboring countries. However, as usual the inevitable Hitler analogy is baseless. For one thing, Russia is too large to need to conquer Lebensraum.
Germany has found the perfect formula for Western relations with Russia: Are you or are you not a “Putinversteher,” a “Putin understander?” By Putin they mean Russia, since the standard Western propaganda ploy is to personify the targeted country with the name of its president, Vladimir Putin, necessarily a dictatorial autocrat. If you “understand” Putin, or Russia, then you are under deep suspicion of disloyalty to the West. So, all together now, let us make sure that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND Russia!
Russian leaders claim to feel threatened by members of a huge hostile alliance, holding regular military maneuvers on their doorstep? They feel uneasy about nuclear missiles aimed at their territory from nearby NATO member states? Why, that’s just paranoia, or a sign of sly, aggressive intentions. There is nothing to understand.
So, the West has treated Russia like a baited bear. And what it’s getting is a nuclear-armed, militarily powerful adversary nation led by people vastly more thoughtful and intelligent than the mediocre politicians in office in Washington, London, and a few other places.
President Biden and his Deep State never wanted a peaceful solution in Ukraine, because troubled Ukraine acts as a permanent barrier between Russia and Western Europe, ensuring U.S. control over the latter. They have spent years treating Russia as an adversary, and Russia is now drawing the inevitable conclusion that the West will accept it only as an adversary. The patience is at an end. And this is a game-changer.
First reaction: The West will punish the bear with sanctions! Germany is stopping certification of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Germany thus refuses to buy the Russian gas it needs in order to make sure Russia won’t be able to cut off the gas it needs sometime in the future. Now that’s a clever trick, isn’t it! And meanwhile, with a growing gas shortage and rising prices, Russia will have no trouble selling its gas somewhere else in Asia.
When “our values” include refusal to understand, there is no limit to how much we can fail to understand.
....
http://edwardcurtin.com/states-of-emergency-keeping-the-global-populations-in-check/
States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Populations in Check
A Review
This book is a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 crisis and the worldwide states of siege instituted under its cover. Reading it, one cannot help but shake one’s head in outrage at the long-planned nature of the wealthy global elite’s seizure of power under the guise of a germ emergency and the revolutionary crisis it has created.
I say this not only because I am predisposed to the author’s thesis, but because he buttresses his argument with overwhelming documentation that is meticulously sourced and noted. This is a work of genuine scholarship of the highest order, and to read it closely and with an open mind one can’t help but be convinced of its essential truth.
Kees van der Pijl, the author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class and the winner of the 2008 Deutscher Prize for Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, introduces his study with these words:
The psychological shock of the proclamation of a pandemic, like the purpose behind torture, is intended to induce acceptance of a ‘new normal’ and to turn off critical judgment. This state of mind is achieved by withholding information about what is really going on, through the extremely one-sided information by politicians and mainstream media. Divergent views by often highly qualified experts are not mentioned or are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ This can be compared to the sensory deprivation in psychological torture. . . .We are dealing with a biopolitical seizure of power, initiated at the level of global governance and reaching deep into the sovereignty of the individual, a seizure that involves a whole range of forms of violence. [my emphasis]
The reason van der Pijl’s analysis is so powerful is because he clearly sees the historical context for the Covid crisis, how it is linked to issues of geo/economic-politics going back thirty-five years or more, culminating in the 2008 economic crash that ended years of capitalist speculation. Then when President Barack Obama, serving as the front man for the big speculators, banks, and shadow banks, bailed out those entities and created a new financial order, popular revolts, such as those which were brewing on the eve of the New Deal in the 1930s, broke out around the world in the ensuing years and had to be subdued. “Strikes, riots, and antigovernment demonstrations have broken existing records in every category during this period [since 2008].”
The elites knew that such revolts of an uncontrollable world population had to be kept under control, and that the growing numbers approaching 8 billion people had also to be culled. But van der Pijl’s subtitle, while intimating both with its double-entendre, leads him to focus on the former that he deems “much more important.” While popular unrest and rage have been more or less suppressed since 2020 with the Covid crisis effectively used to put down its latest signs of eruption and to replace it with a permanent sense of anxiety, fear and trembling was first introduced on a massive scale with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the connected insider anthrax attacks, the Patriot Act, and emergency propaganda measures used to fuel the war on terror that has no end. This terrorizing of the world has taken multiple forms with an ongoing series of U.S. wars on other countries – Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., not to mention the proxy wars – supported by massive digital propaganda meant to take populations hostage to the lies.
Van der Pijl cogently shows how the Covid crisis fear campaign’s official account is untrue; how it is a political and not a medical emergency; and that it will collapse, as it has, at least temporarily, but how its deeper purpose is to create a permanent authoritarian, surveillance social order controlled by transnational elites through global digital IDs, etc. This “new normal” relies on the corporate mass media to do the dissemination of the propaganda of fear and lies, and so he correctly emphasizes the central importance of the IT revolution and the single complex triangle of intelligence services-IT-media, which are in essence one entity. The information warfare of mind control of the ruling class is fundamental, as he writes:
This is the core around which the ruling class in the West began to regroup after 2008 and which is now waging the information war against the global population by means of the Covid state of emergency.
He sees the elites’ seizure of power as an effort to foreclose a democratic transformation through the Information Technology (IT) revolution that he compares to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which as such could potentially serve as a liberating force. However, he also views IT, digitization, and the Internet from its inception as fundamental to the elites’ repressive control. This double-edged perspective (about which I will return later) raises important questions.
But the body of the book is devoted to all the ways the intelligence-IT-media triangle has conducted its information warfare campaign based on techniques developed years ago in CIA counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam – Operation Phoenix – and its Strategy of Tension operations in Italy and Europe in the 1970s, and Lebanon and Central America in the 1980s.
He shows how these operations, stretching back so many decades, are connected to events today, greatly enhanced by the digital devices – particularly the cell phone.
He shows how Barack Obama’s 2012 initiation of aggressive global cyber operations – Total Information Awareness – whose details Edward Snowden made public, expanded the war against the population through cyber pacification techniques.
He tells the reader how the methods of such warfare that were used in Afghanistan and Iraq were brought home with the return of JSOC commander Stanley McChrystal, who just so happens to head an advisory group, the McChrystal Group, that plays a pivotal role in the Covid crisis by allegedly countering disinformation and promoting the government’s version of Covid truth.
He reminds readers about McChrystal’s journalist enemy, Michael Hastings, who after writing an article about McChrystal that led to his recall from Afghanistan and firing, would just so happen to be killed when his Mercedes was “hacked and detonated by remote control in a collision” in Los Angeles a few years later.
Van der Pijl shows how it just so happened that the new digital technologies were privatized in the defense and intelligence areas to form “Private-Public Partnerships” and how the World Economic Forum (WEF) hosted the UN’s 2030 Vision with all its multivarious connections to the imposition of the Covid crisis from above.
He draws the connections between the WEF, Bill Gates, U.S. intelligence, vaccines, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Carnegie institutions, journalists on the CIA’s payroll, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm), Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Black Rock, and so many other individuals and groups with the goal of establishing The Great Reset when the elites will try to exert total electronic control over people’s lives through a digital world economy, artificial intelligence, etc.
He details the U.S./Nazi connections going back to WW II and the U.S. biological weapons research and warfare targeting China and Russia, including the bio-laboratories in Ukraine. He tells us how:
This goes back to a 2005 agreement between the Pentagon and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health. It prohibits the Kiev government from disclosing sensitive information about the program; Ukraine is required to hand over the dangerous pathogens produced there to the U.S. Department of Defense for further biological research. . . . One of the Pentagon’s laboratories is located in Kharkov where at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers succumbed to a flu-like virus within two days in 2016 . . . . In 2014 there was an outbreak in Moscow of a new, highly virulent variant of the Cholera agent Vibrio Cholera, related to the species identified in Ukraine.
He connects Anthony Fauci, the director of EcoHealth Alliance Dr. Peter Daszak, Christian Drosen of PCR notoriety, Fort Detrick, Wuhan, the World Military Games held in Wuhan between 18-27 October 2019, etc.
He explains how the Covid pandemic and lockdowns are a form of disaster capitalism that is a global project whose tentacles stretch extensively from the Gates Foundation to the Poynter Institute to the McChrystal Group to Philip Zelikow to the pharmaceutical companies and their “vaccine” push and propaganda to DARPA … to… to… He writes:
It appears again and again that behind both the biopolitical and the IT-media power blocs lies the strategy of the American national security complex. . . One of the most alarming aspects of the transition from mechanical to psychological warfare against the population is that the authorities have now set their sights on the human genetic code as well.
In seven densely packed chapters, van der Pijl weaves and documents a vast tapestry of devious conspiratorial forces behind the states of emergency aimed at world control. Reading them and following his sources, one would have to be brain dead to not realize that what is now happening throughout the world is not an accident or the result of things just happening but is a long planned operation conducted by very sophisticated forces interconnected in the group he calls the “intelligence-IT-triangle” that is waging mind control warfare to disguise the truth about their deadly bio/germ-weapons, their military wars around the world, and their economic assault on regular people. It is a world war conducted on multiple fronts whose goal is elite control, the extinguishing of democracy, and the reduction of human being to appendages of the mega-machine.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I think his conclusion may be too optimistic. For even though he argues that the Information Technology revolution is central to elite propaganda and control, he believes IT – this “social brain” – holds revolutionary democratic potential if it can be liberated from elite dominance. I don’t see how this can happen, though I wish he were right. A decentralized, democratic internet seems like a pipe dream to me. A dream not unlike that of so many others who have assumed technology’s beneficence and inevitability even when they sense its insidious, destructive capabilities.
He is right to say that ”everything revolves around the one universal currency, information,” and that digital infrastructure is now at the center of social organization. This is beyond dispute. However, those intelligence/military/IT forces that created and control the internet and digital technologies will not voluntarily cede control. They will wage information war with it, censor it, de-platform people and sites, etc. I believe this technology is intrinsically anti-democratic. Nevertheless, his concluding chapter on this issue is very important for broaching this dilemma and getting people to debate it.
This book should be read by anyone who cares about our world. It is brilliant and extremely timely.
No comments:
Post a Comment