https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/2022s_danger_signs_from_totalitarian_paranoia_to_authoritarian_madness
2022’s Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia to Authoritarian Madness
The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.
Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.
The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.
Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”
Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
Kill switches aimed to turn off more than just your car. Vehicle “kill switches” were sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they were a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives. For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.
Currency went digital. No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government came up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank account. In an Executive Order issued in March 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a form of digital money. Digital currency will provide the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
The government spoke in a language of violence. Police violence killed three people a day. Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—did not make us or themselves any safer. Despite this, President Biden’s pledged to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention through a $30 billion “Fund the Police” program.
Cancel culture became more intolerant. Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything has now become fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
Homes were invaded. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.
Political theater kept the public distracted. Having devolved into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population, the political scene provided ample diversions with its televised Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, and more.
Bodily integrity was undermined. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Although the Supreme Court overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, it did nothing to resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.
The government’s fiscal insanity reached new heights. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) hit $30 trillion. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer. It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051.
Surveillance got creepier. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. With every new AI surveillance technology that was adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry were marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Precrime became more fact than fiction. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies were used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating was done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. Where this becomes particularly dangerous is when the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime or abuse, or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time.
The government waged psychological warfare on the nation. The government made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded. Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government weaponized violence; surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns; digital currencies, social media scores and censorship; desensitization campaigns; fear; genetics; and entertainment.
Gun confiscation laws put a target on the back of every American. Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) gained traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The burden of proof was reversed. Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
The Supreme Court turned America into a Constitution-free zone. Although the Court’s rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating. The bottom line: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.
The FBI went rogue. The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people ran the gamut from surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, and intimidation tactics to harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
The government waged war on political freedom. In more and more cases, the government declared war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
The military industrial complex waged more wars. America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.
The Deep State went global. We’ve been inching closer to a new world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations. This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Authoritarian madness escalated. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to recognize the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate. When any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and an utter disregard for the rights of the individual, there should be reason for concern.
The takeaway: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with “we the people."
Unless we work together to push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse, 2023 will be yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-deadly-strategy-tension-destroy-russia/5803128
CIA’s Deadly “Strategy of Tension” to Destroy Russia
The USG planned subversion operations inside Russia well before Putin’s SMO
On Monday, the Russian Federation Engels airbase in the Saratov region, nearly 400 miles from Ukraine, was attacked for a second time since the beginning of Russia’s SMO.
“Russia’s Defense Ministry said the incident took place in the early hours of Monday, and three servicemen were killed by debris at the Engels airbase, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in launching strikes on Ukraine in the 10-month-old war,” reports the Associated Press.
There have been a number of attacks inside Russia—in Kursk, the city of Bryansk, the village of Staraya Nelidovka in the Belgorod region, and the military airfields at Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region, in addition to Engels.
The attacks on gas infrastructure occurred prior to Russia announcing it would resume deliveries to Azerbaijan via the Yamal-Europe pipeline.
The corporate war propaganda media has attributed the attacks to Ukraine. However, according to the Daily Express, Jack Murphy, described as a former “US Army Special Operations operative,” said last week
that NATO and US intelligence agencies have been running agents inside Russia, directing them to target critical infrastructure in a bid to create “chaos.” Shopping centres, gas pipelines and fuel depots have all suffered damage across Russia in recent months with Mr Murphy pointing to a CIA-directed campaign of covert “sabotage.”
On his website, Murphy writes the “campaign involves long standing sleeper cells that the allied spy service has activated to hinder Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine by waging a secret war behind Russian lines.”
While no American personnel are involved on the ground in Russia in the execution of these missions, agency paramilitary officers are commanding and controlling the operations, according to two former intelligence officials and a former military official. The paramilitary officers are assigned to the CIA’s Special Activities Center but detailed to the agency’s European Mission Center, said the two former intelligence officials. Using an allied intelligence service to give the CIA an added layer of plausible deniability was an essential factor in U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the strikes, according to a former U.S. special operations official.
There is plenty of evidence the CIA has long been involved in precisely these kinds of sabotage operations. Prior to the establishment of the national security state and the CIA, the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), produced a sabotage manual in 1944.
“Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform,” states the manual in its introduction.
Since that time, the CIA has honed its sabotage techniques. In “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,” Thomas C. Reed, a former U.S. Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, writes the CIA, under its notorious boss, William Casey, was responsible for a natural gas pipeline explosion that crippled the flagging Soviet economy in 1982.
“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” Reed writes.
The National Security Archive has a large number of documents detailing CIA sabotage operations. From the introduction:
The covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency are one element of the forward edge of power in U.S. foreign policy. But the CIA is not a lone ranger, shooting up saloons on its own account. A senior interagency group within the United States government acts as the high command of the secret war.
As Murphy notes, any “covert action undertaken by U.S. agencies must be authorized by a presidential finding,” thus we can accurately assume President Biden signed off on sabotage operations inside Russia. Moreover, President Obama, well before Russia’s SMO, signed “a finding for covert action against Russia before he left office,” and the finding “included language about sabotage operations, according to a former CIA official.”
In other words, the USG had planned subversion operations inside Russia well before the SMO, basically a continuation of decades of sabotage and covert operations targeting the Soviet Union and, after its fall, the Russian Federation.
Following the USG-orchestrated coup in Kyiv, an “allied spy service” began running sleeper cells in Russia, an “extensive network” that included “front companies that were established as platforms to support such behind-the-lines operations,” many that go back at least 20 years, thus revealing the sabotage operations predate the Russian SMO by at least two decades.
The CIA had formed “stay behind armies,” ostensibly to resist an unlikely Soviet invasion of Europe, and these were involved in terrorist acts designed to frighten populations away from voting for socialist, communist, and other leftist political parties.
The covert branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination, under the direction of Frank Wisner, set up Europe’s stay-behind armies. Dubbed Operation Gladio, the CIA established paramilitaries in France (“Plan Bleu”), Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Germany (led by former SS officer Hans Otto), Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Turkey, all apparently trained by NATO in “unorthodox warfare” to be levied against Russia.
During the Cold War, the CIA worked closely with the neo-Nazis in Ukraine and emigre groups. Project AERODYNAMIC (formerly CARTEL, ANDROGEN, AECARTHAGE, between 1949 and 1970) concentrated on anti-Soviet operations, largely confined to propaganda. This entailed working closely with ultranationalists that have long had one goal in mind—the murder of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
As early as 1949, the CIA used Ukraine—and Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics—as a base of operations to undermine the Soviet Union. The goal of Operation Red Sox was to provide “unprecedented insight into Moscow’s designs in Eastern Europe—and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself,” according to Politico. In addition, the CIA was “stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine” and across the Balkans.
Elsewhere in Europe, the CIA recruited rightwing extremists to engage in various terrorist attacks, as revealed during the trial of Italian fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo (“New Order”), a far-right cultural and extra-parliamentary political and paramilitary organization. It shared a motto with the Nazi Waffen SS.
The Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo staged terror attacks blamed on leftists. The attacks include the 1969 bombing of the Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 16 people, and in 1970, the bombing of the Rome-Messina train, killing 6 and wounding 100. These terror attacks were called a “strategy of tension.”
The recent CIA-NATO sabotage operation, Murphy explains, is but one of many such efforts to undermine and take down Putin and the Russian Federation.
The NATO ally’s campaign overseen by the CIA is only one of several covert operations efforts being undertaken by Western nations in Russia, according to two former U.S. special operations officials. Alarmed by Russia’s February invasion, other European intelligence services have activated long-dormant resistance networks [Operation Gladio] in their own countries, who in turn have been running operatives into Russia to create chaos without CIA help, according to a former U.S. military official. In addition, as has been widely reported, Ukrainian intelligence and special operations forces are running their own operations behind Russian lines.
In short, there is a multi-nation concerted effort to attack Russia from within, an effort Russia undoubtedly considers a threat to its national security. Vladimir Putin has said on several occasions Russia will respond to existential threats with tactical nuclear weapons.
Putin and his generals will further escalate in Ukraine as the CIA and its saboteurs target civilian and military targets deep inside Russia. “President Putin is actually attempting to retain some semblance of stability in the increasingly destabilized world that’s been thrown into chaos by America’s apocalyptic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony,” writes Andrew Korybko for the Oriental Review.
Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was commenced as a last resort to uphold the integrity of its national security red lines in that country in particular and in the region more broadly that were being crossed by the US-led West in pursuit of its grand strategic plot to restore its declining unipolar hegemony.
That plot, imperative for the USG and its so-called partners, will pull out all the stops in an effort to destroy Russia and China, two major competitors working to establish a multipolar world free of the coercive and often deadly politics of the neoliberal order and its enforcers, the USG national security state, the CIA, the Pentagon, and domestically with the FBI, DHS, and additional “partners,” including Silicon Valley’s social media behemoths excommunicating heretics and megaphoning the state’s forever war narrative.
The war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine—masterminded by the USG following its orchestrated coup against a democratically elected and Russian-friendly government in 2014—will continue until, like Afghanistan, stalemate and defeat present reality as stubbornly unavoidable and the decision is made to retreat (while calling it something else), leaving behind billions of dollars worth of military equipment, and forsaking the lives of abandoned collaborators.
For the indeterminate future, the CIA will attempt to raise an underground army of neo-Nazis and likeminded to fight a low-intensity guerrilla war in Russian “annexed” (by popular vote) Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, and soon Mariupol, Zaporizhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Odesa (the latter four also overwhelmingly voted to be “annexed” by Russia).
This will be the next phase of the war as it dawns on the panhandler Zelenskyy and his USG debt-straddled patron that defeating Russia on its own border is impossible short of lobbing a few thermonukes in the direction of Moscow.
Putin did not decide to use nuclear weapons when the war propaganda media declared triumphantly (and falsely) that he was painted into a corner. As for the USG, if and when it is painted into a corner as the world turns multipolar in rejection of poverty-inducing neoliberalism, there is no guarantee it will not lash out with nukes and begin the process of ending life on the planet.
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