http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-the-great-acquiescence-glory-to-ukraine/
The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine
Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them.
The other day I ventured forth from my remote village to a lively market town called Great Barrington to shop for Easter lunch — spring lamb, a decent bottle of Bourgogne. Easter is much marked in my household, one of the few feasts we allow ourselves, and it is a reminder this year of a truth that could scarcely be more pertinent to our shared circumstances: After all our small and large crucifixions, there is new life to come.
Great Barrington lies in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, a fashionable little burg dense — as you can tell simply by walking around in it —with righteous liberals. No place, you remind yourself, is perfect.
And there along the streets and avenues as I arrived were what I had anticipated: Ukrainian flags hanging off front porches, in shop windows, on flagpoles just below the Stars and Stripes. Somebody has painted the bit of board displaying their house number in the blue and yellow we all now recognize. Father, forgive them, I thought, for they know not what blood-soaked horrors and hate-filled killers they enthusiastically endorse.
Not in my lifetime have Americans, purporting to be thoughtful, intelligent people, been so wide-eyed, so stupefied as those who are pretending to lead them and to inform them by seeking to bury them in ignorance.
We now read that investigators are diligently “documenting the catalog of inhumanity perpetrated by Russia’s forces in Ukraine” — a U.S. diplomat’s remark. Nobody stops to think the investigators are all from nations that are acting against Russia.
“Where else should they come from?” they shrug in Great Barrington.
Nobody notes that the essential question has been crudely removed from public discourse as these sham investigations get under way. The atrocities in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere are beyond all dispute, but we must never ask who is responsible for them.
I hear the good citizens of Great Barrington quaking with rage as The New York Times convicts the Russian leadership, as our president describes the Bucha tragedy as a Russian war crime not two hours after it came to light.
We now read, in Friday’s editions of the Times, all about the joint American–Ukrainian campaign to inundate Russian discourse with propaganda intended to demoralize the public. The government-supervised Times explains, “Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.–funded but independent news organization founded decades ago, is trying to push its broadcasts deeper into Russia.”
U.S.–funded but independent. Priceless, and don’t miss the slide into passive voice to avoid the truth, a recurrent Times trick I have grown very fond of — “founded decades ago.”
Radio Free Europe was founded by a C.I.A. front Allen Dulles cooked up in 1949, the National Committee for a Free Europe. It received agency funding until at least the 1970s, when the funding function was transferred elsewhere in the Washington bureaucracy for the sake of appearances.
What RFE/RL is doing in Russia today is exactly what American liberals, in paroxysms of horror, accused Russians of doing during the 2016 election campaigns. But it is O.K. because we’re doing it, they say in the charming bistros along Railroad Street. We must fight for democracy.
Brute Censorship
We are not reading in the corporate press, by contrast, that a new wave of brute censorship is now upon us, as social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube “suspend,” “cancel,” “de-platform” — whatever this radically antidemocratic business is called — dissenting writers and analysts who have taken the trouble to examine the facts on the ground in Ukraine such as we have them with professional disinterest.
We must defend democracy at home, the good of Great Barrington insist, just as we must in Ukraine.
Since the Russiagate farrago overcame liberal America in 2016, there has been much debate as to whether our McCarthyesque circumstances are as bad as, similar to, or not as bad as things got during the Cold War decades.
This no longer seems to me the useful question. In various important ways we have passed beyond even the worst of the Cold War’s many dreadful features.
Our better reference is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, wherein the English novelist pictured a society of incubated beings — programmed from birth, hooked on a happiness-inducing drug called soma, devoid of everything we now consider human, wholly incapable of connection, of responsibility, and, indeed, desiring neither. Infantile gratification is all that matters to those populating the World State Huxley imagined — such as anything matters.
We are not there yet, let’s not exaggerate. But we ought to honor Huxley for his prescience, for we are heading in the direction of his unlivable world of mind-deprived children watched over by a small, chosen, diabolic elite.
I am not surprised that it is Ukraine that brings us to what I consider a collective psychological crisis. After 30 years of post–Cold War triumphalism, Washington has decided to use Ukraine and its people in a go-for-broke attempt finally to subvert Russia. Stepping back for a better look, this is the decisive event in the imperium’s confrontation with the 21st century — its grand roll of the dice, its now-or-never moment.
Broke it will be when all this is over, however far in the future that will prove. A little like Cú Chulainn, the Irish hero who drowned swinging his sword in a rage against the incoming tide, we cannot win this one. And we are falling apart as the realization of our loss arrives subliminally among us.
Whoever wins the war in Ukraine, the non–West will win. Whoever wins, the 21st century will win, burying the mostly awful 20th at last. As for Americans, we have already lost.
Our Condition
What of our condition, then? What has become of us, why, and what shall we do about it? If I am correct about America’s psychological crisis, its connection to the on-the-ground, in-our-faces crisis in Ukraine is not immediately apparent.
Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 and published it a year later. Let us take the cue. Let’s look back to consider the thoughts of a few people who, unlike most of us, took life seriously and so applied themselves to an understanding of their time.
Steve Fraser brought out The Age of Acquiescence in 2015. Fraser is among the best labor economists now active, an honorable man of the 1960s, and his subtitle tells us his line of inquiry: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Why and when, Fraser wanted to discover, had American workers rolled over in surrender? What happened to all those fine New Dealers who, with good minds, fought hard for the kind of society they knew was possible?
Labor isn’t our topic, but his book has implications far beyond his specific interests.
Fraser situates himself “peering back into the past at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle.” The New Deal years, the battles waged against the anti–Communist paranoia of the postwar decades, the antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s: The people animating these movements had memories and experience.
They remembered what American society could be in its potential because they had lived for and acted on that potential. They knew another kind of America was possible.
Most of us have forgotten all that. Younger people never shared that consciousness in the first place. Very few of us have any memory or experience of living under anything other than pervasive corporate domination and a government, in its profound corruption, that serves corporate capital and does as little as it can otherwise.
There is nothing to wage struggle for, in other words. Our relations with those who hold power over us are not very different from the relations Huxley’s children had with the sequestered elites who controlled their lives. This is the root of our prevalent assumptions.
The work of any social or political campaign worth mounting is now rendered too imposing even to attempt. It is best to acquiesce to power, contenting ourselves — as if we all live in Great Barrington — with finding the best olive oil.
Mass acquiescence largely leads us to an explanation of the preposterous support most Americans have for the criminal regime in Kiev. But we’re beyond Steve Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence now. Americans don’t merely acquiesce to all that the imperium imposes on the world — wars, interventions, collective punishments, assorted other deprivations. Americans actively embrace the conduct of empire.
Please pass the kale chips.
The Sovereignty of Good
Iris Murdoch, the minor English philosopher and second-rate novelist, published The Sovereignty of Good, a gathering of three essays on morality, in 1970. I would be pleased to observe that nobody reads this ridiculous book anymore and few take Murdoch’s philosophic ruminations at all seriously.
But Murdoch’s arguments in favor of a moral clarity that lies beyond dispute have a great deal to do with what we’ve become. Right and wrong and goodness are objective realities for Murdoch – and how too many of us now live.
Human beings have no purpose so far as Murdoch was concerned. There are no ideals to strive for, no telos to use the Greek term she preferred. People are innately selfish. “Our destiny can be examined but it cannot be justified or totally explained,” as she put it. “We are just here.”
Here are a few snippets to give a taste of Murdoch’s prose and thinking:
“It is more than a verbal point to say that what should be aimed at is goodness, and not freedom or right action….
The Good has nothing to do with purpose, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose.
I assume that human beings are naturally selfish and that human life has no external point or telos…. The psyche is a historically determined individual looking after itself…. The area of its vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great.”
As Murdoch sees it, there is but one thing to do as we sit stranded on the universe’s beach. We must recognize the inarguable reality of goodness and do our best to be good. This does not involve choices, as we have none to make. (Murdoch despised Sartre and the existentialists.) We are not, if I read Murdoch correctly, responsible for making judgments. Kindness, compassion, love — these are moral values, universal values. They’re all we’ve got.
Who decides what is good and worthy of kindness, and how? Who decides what is right and wrong? Murdoch didn’t address these essential questions because, being an empiricist, what is good, right, and wrong is simply there for us to see. “Good is non-representable and indefinable,” Murdoch writes — slithering, it seems to me, out the side door.
Here’s my question: Would Iris Murdoch have made an excellent “content monitor” — a censor this is to say — at YouTube? CEO at Twitter, maybe?
Readers may now suspect where all this is leading: to the main drag in Great Barrington. There we find people who are intent only on self-fulfillment and being good and kind and compassionate, while taking no responsibility for the events of their time because, after all, there is no purpose in life and “we are just here.” Being seen to be good and kind and compassionate is, of course, the essential thing. They too are empiricists.
Joe Biden denounced the Bucha atrocities at 10:30 am Eastern time on April 4, at the very moment word came of them. At that moment he could not possibly have had any knowledge of what had transpired. His reference here is to Russian President Vladimir Putin:
“Well, the truth of the matter — you saw what happened in Bucha. This warrants him — he is a war criminal.… This guy is brutal. And what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it.”
Pictures often require a thousand words and certainly they do in the Bucha case, but never mind that. The important thing is, we’ve all seen some images. It is a straight-ahead case of right and wrong: Ukrainians suffer. Let us be kind to them. Russians have intervened into their country. Let us condemn them.
Let us acquiesce. Let us be good.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/uncle-sams-bio-weapons-extravaganza/5778699
Uncle Sam’s Bio-Weapons Extravaganza
Question– Is the US making bio-weapons in Ukraine?
Answer– That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Unfortunately, there’s no simple “yes or no” answer. It’s more complicated than that.
Question– Can you explain what you mean?
Answer– Sure, but some people might find it a bit confusing.
First, most of what we know comes from the Russians who investigated the bio-labs that were abandoned following the invasion of Ukraine. These are the people who uncovered the pathogens and other toxic substances that were kept at the 30-or-so facilities around the country.
The Russian team has also studied the documents “they received from employees of Ukrainian laboratories on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States.” In other words, the Russians have compiled evidence that the US is violating its obligations under the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Second, we know that the Pentagon –through various channels– pumped $32 million into laboratories located in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov. These biolabs were chosen to oversee a “project aimed at studying the pathogens of the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis and hantaviruses.”
The Russians believe that interest in these pathogens is due to the fact “their use can be disguised as natural outbreaks of diseases”, which is why the project received additional funding. In other words, the Russians think that the US funding was mainly aimed at biological weapons development. The Chinese appear to agree with Russia on this matter. Here’s what China’s FM said:
“Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian … asked the US to release “relevant details as soon as possible” regarding alleged US biological laboratories in Ukraine….“The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone. It should give a full account of its biological military activities at home and abroad and subject itself to multilateral verification.”
“According to reports, in these facilities, large quantities of dangerous viruses are stored. Russia has found during its military operation that the US uses these facilities to conduct military plans. (“China… demands ‘full account of its biological military activities“, opindie.com)
You can see that there’s considerable concern among many of the countries the US sees as its rivals. And, their concern is not limited to the fact that the US is fooling around with all manner of highly-contagious and lethal pathogens but, also, that these 336 bio-labs are part of an integrated network under the operational control of the Pentagon. That is the biggest red flag of all!
The Russians have been quite blunt about what they think is going on. Here’s a clip from their official statement: “We believe that components of biological weapons were created on the territory of Ukraine.”
That sums it up perfectly. And they should know, too, after all, it’s the Russians who uncovered the stockpiles of pathogens and the documentation that supports their analysis. Of course, all of this could just be more “Russian disinformation”, that’s what the media would like you to believe. But what the media fails to acknowledge is that a lot of the documents gathered by the Russians have been signed by “real officials and are certified by the seals of their organizations.” In other words, the Russians can verify their analysis with hard evidence.
Here’s another excerpt from the Russian report that helps to shed light on what’s really been going on at these Ukrainian virus factories:
“During the implementation of these projects, six families of viruses (including coronaviruses) and three types of pathogenic bacteria (pathogens of plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) were identified. This is due to the main characteristics of these pathogens that make them favourable for the purposes of infection: resistance to drugs, rapid speed of spread from animals to humans, etc…..
A study of the documents in the part of the P-781 project on the study of ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats showed that the work was carried out on the basis of a laboratory in Kharkov.” (“Russia Mod: Briefing on analysis of documents related to US military and biological activities in Ukraine“, The Saker)
Nice, eh? So, the researchers at these facilities chose the pathogens that they believed were:
- The most infectious
- The most deadly
- The most drug resistant
When does it become appropriate to use a term like “diabolical”? Is that too much of a stretch? Here’s more:
“Within the framework of the FLU-FLYWAY project, the Kharkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine studied wild birds as vectors for the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza. At the same time, the conditions under which spread processes can become unmanageable, cause economic damage and pose risks to food security have been assessed.
These documents confirm the involvement of the Kharkov Institute in the collection of avian influenza virus strains with high epidemic potential and capable of overcoming the interspecific barrier….” (“Russia Mod: Briefing on analysis of documents related to US military and biological activities in Ukraine”, The Saker)
Do you understand what they’re saying? The researchers were looking for ways to use migratory birds to transport lethal pathogens to the territories of Washington’s enemies. This is beyond diabolical.
The Russian report goes on to explain how much of the documentary evidence of potentially-criminal activity was destroyed following Russia’s invasion. Check it out:
“The materials that our Defense Ministry got hold of prove that all serious high-risk research in Ukrainian biolabs was directly supervised by US experts… Our Defense Ministry reports that at this moment the Kiev regime…. hastily covers up all traces so that the Russian side could not get hold of direct evidence of the US and Ukraine violating Article 1 of the BTWC. They rush to shut down all biological programs.
Ukraine’s Health Ministry ordered to eliminate biological agents deposited in biolabs starting from 24 February 2022. We infer from the instructions to lab personnel that the order of elimination of collections suggested that they should be destroyed irrevocably. Having analyzed the destruction certificates, we can say that the Lvov lab alone destroyed 232 containers with pathogens of leptospirosis, 30 – of tularemia, 10 – of brucellosis, 5 – of plague. The total of more than 320 containers was eliminated. Pathogens’ titles and excessive amounts give reason to think that this work was done as part of military biological programs.” (“USNC biolabs in the Ukraine”, The Saker)
In other words, the Russian invasion triggered a mad-dash at the labs where these killer pathogens were being stored. Researchers had to quickly dispose of the evidence before the Russians arrived and figured out what was going on. The lab personnel were performing the same sketchy ritual as a serial killer who scrupulously wipes the bloody fingerprints off the murder weapon before the cops arrive. In other words, they were “covering their tracks.” At the same time, the researchers were told to blame everything on “Russian propaganda.” (But you probably knew that already.)
Question— How have these bio-labs effected the lives of the people living in Ukraine?
According to the Russian MOD: “… attention is drawn to the fact o f a sharp increase in cases of tuberculosis caused by new multi-resistant strains among citizens living in Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics in 2018. …, more than 70 cases of the disease were detected, which ended in a rapid fatal outcome. This may indicate a deliberate infection, or an accidental leakage of the pathogen from one of the biolabs located on the territory of Ukraine.” (“Russian MOD”, The Saker)
So, a number of people who lived around these facilities mysteriously died from weird strains of tuberculosis and other oddball diseases, but we’ll never know for sure whether the deaths were deliberate or not. And, naturally, the perpetrators of these crimes will never be held accountable. It’s tragic.
Of course, it could all be a big coincidence, but I suspect not. I suspect that the Ukrainians are the unwitting lab rats in Uncle Sam’s deadly science project. And there’s more, too. Check out this blurb from Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin:
“It is also no secret to the leadership of our country that the purpose of these biological experiments conducted by the Pentagon using biomaterials obtained from Slavic subjects in Ukraine and other countries neighboring Russia is to develop ‘ethnic weapons’ against the Russian population of Russia.” (“Rogozin: Bioweapons developed in Ukraine…”, The Saker)
This idea that the US is developing bio-agents that selectively target particular ethnic groups is a recurrent theme among critics of America’s mysterious bio-projects. According to Chinese military expert, Song Zhongping,
“The United States kept setting up biological laboratories around rival countries with the goal of developing targeted viral weapons against those countries…The US insists on developing weapons of mass destruction to seek hegemony, which is a gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and an assault on human civilization.” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert.” (“US shuns UN meeting on biological security”, Global Times)
And here’s how author M.K. Bhadrakumar summed it up in a recent article titled “Migratory birds of mass destruction”:
“Russia had released a number of documents related to the biological military activities of the Pentagon, which pointed toward a worldwide project to set up biological laboratories in rival countries with the goal of developing targeted viral weapons against those countries.”…
(According to) General Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, that Washington is creating biological laboratories in different countries and connecting them to a unified system.”(“Migratory birds of mass destruction”, Indian Punchline)
Finally, there is this from author Matthew Ehret who explains the probable origins of “ethnic targeting” with biological weapons. Here’s what he said in an article at the Unz Review:
“The
earlier October 2000 RAD document emphasized the importance which the
neocon cabal placed on bioweapons ..stating: “Combat will likely take
place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of
microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target”
specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of
terror to a politically useful tool”. (“The Project for a New American Century and the Age of Bioweapons: 20 Years of Psychological Terror“, Matthew Ehret, Unz Review)
Further along in the article, Ehret points to evidence that researchers may have achieved their goal of “selectively targeting particular ethnic groups.” Here’s the money-quote:
“…leading medical specialists like Dr. Shankara Chetti of South Africa, Dr. Soňa Peková of the Czech Republic) and Dr Meryl Nass of the USA having delivered bountiful evidence that the various waves of the pathogen were not only NOT naturally occurring, but ethnic specific and lab-generated.
After evaluating over 7,000 patients, Dr. Chetty observed early on that the patients who suffered the greatest during each of the four waves encountered in South Africa were ethnic specific with the first wave targeting only blacks, the second only Indians and the third Caucasians and Arabs.” (“The Project for a New American Century and the Age of Bioweapons: 20 Years of Psychological Terror“, Matthew Ehret, Unz Review)
Is that where all this is headed: Ethnic specific bioweapons to help usher in the New World Order?
One can only wonder.
We’re also curious about the fact that these 300-plus bio-labs (around the world) are part of a “unified system” that is under the Pentagon’s control. What’s that all about? Why would the Pentagon want a unified system of biological laboratories?
I can think of one reason, although I’m sure there are many more. Let’s say, powerful elites wanted to change our democratic system to a more authoritarian model (The Great Reset) by creating a global crisis that could be used as a pretext for terminating personal freedom, enforcing mandatory vaccination and imposing martial law. If they had a network of biological labs at their disposal, they could easily release the same-identical pathogen in locations around the world creating the perception of a rapidly-spreading virus. In other words, a widespread network of bio-labs could be used to simulate a global pandemic.
Is such a thing even possible?
You bet it is, in fact, the last two years might provide us with an example of how the system actually works.
One last thing: The UN Security Council recently convened an emergency meeting to address the issue of Ukraine’s biological labs. (Arria Formula Meeting on Biological Security.) But did anyone from the Biden administration attend the confab?
No one. The administration boycotted the meeting entirely , which means the US was given the opportunity to make its case before the international community, but decided to pull a no-show instead. Why would that be, we wonder?
A member of the Chinese delegation said it was a sign of a “guilty conscience.”
That sounds about right to me.
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