SC274-7

https://edwardcurtin.com/quoth-the-vultures-evermore/

Quoth the Vultures “Evermore”

On the short roof outside the bedroom window, two black vultures sit, staring in.  They have come to remind me of something.  I put my book down and peer back at these strange looking creatures. The book: Our War: What We Did in Vietnam And What It Did to Us by David Harris.  I had read it when it was first published in 1996 and it has stuck with me, as has the utterly savage U.S. war against Vietnam that killed so many millions, what the Vietnamese call The American War.

I am of the same generation as Harris, the courageous draft resister and anti-war campaigner who died on February 6.  Like him, many of us who were of draft age then have never been able to extricate the horror of that war from our minds.  Most, I suppose, but surely not those who went to Vietnam to fight, just moved on and allowed the war to disappear from their consciousness as they perhaps tried to think of it as a “mistake” and to live as if all the constant American wars since weren’t happening.  As for the young, the war against Vietnam is ancient history, and if they learned anything about it in school, it was erroneous for sure, a continuation of the lie.

But it was no mistake; it was an intentional genocidal war waged to torture, kill, and maim as many Vietnamese as possible and to use drafted (enslaved) American boys to do the killing and suffer the consequences.  It’s Phoenix Program, the CIA’s assassination and torture operation, became the template for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA black sites, hybrid wars, terrorist actions, etc. up to today.  Harris writes:

[that] . . . . “calling the war a mistake is the fundamental equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. . . . Let us not lose sight of what really happened.  In this particular ‘mistake,’ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans.  These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen; they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet through the throat, consumed by sizzling phosphorous, burned alive by jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumps, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers.  They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of who had even less idea than that.

That’s the truth.  Unvarnished.  But such historical truth hurts to consider, for it reminds us that the belief in the U.S.A.’s good intentions is a delusion. The war against Vietnam was immoral, but even that word fails to grasp it.  Pure evil is truer.  And to consider that war on military terms alone, one must accept the fact the U.S. lost the war despite all its military technology.

Time, that truly mysterious bird, forces us back to the past as it perpetually opens to the future – all in the meditative present.  I look out the window and think how each of us lives in the time circles of our days, morning till night and then the same again and again as these small carousels carry us like arrows to the day time runs out for us. Time is a circle and an arrow within a circle and . . . pure mystery. It encloses us. And when we are gone, as is dear David Harris, the circle game goes on and on as yesterday’s wars are resurrected today.  An unbroken circle of human madness.  Yet many carry on in hope because conscience calls.  And now is all the time we have.

I am writing this on Ash Wednesday, the day Christians begin Lent and take ashes on our foreheads to remind us of our mortality – dust to dust.  Six weeks later comes Easter, the Resurrection from the dead, the day of hope.  Six circular weeks celebrated every spring within the circle of every year on a calendar that moves straight ahead with the clicking of the numbers.  Death, hope, and resurrection, even as history suggests it is hopeless to stop wars. That the vultures always triumph.  Yet many carry it on in hope because conscience calls.  And all time is now.

Yes, I look out and the vultures’ gaze reduces me to a cataleptic state for a few moments. Then the thought of David Harris and his book on the table transports me back to the past, while my vulture visitors mouth the words “Evermore, Evermore” to remind me that the same war vultures are here now and are eager for prey in the future.  They devour the dead.  They have never left, just as the truth about the U.S. war against Vietnam has not, if one allows it to sink in. It is a lesson not too late for the learning, for the United States warfare state has continued to wage wars all around the world.  None are mistakes.  It would be a terrible mistake to think so.

Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Nicaragua, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Chile, Indonesia, China, Afghanistan, Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all intentional and all based on lies.  It’s the American Way, just as it was for Vietnam.

Quoth the vultures “Evermore.”

Like David Harris, I refused to go to the war but the war came to me.  When I became a conscientious objector from the Marines, I avoided killing Vietnamese but their killing by my countrymen has haunted me to this day. Unlike David, who was far more courageous than I, I didn’t go to prison, although I was prepared to do so. But I learned then, and have never forgotten, that my country is controlled by blood-thirsty vultures.

Flying back in time, I remember a conversation I had with a friend on the plane to Marine boot camp at Parris Island, that infamous torture chamber in South Carolina where boys are made into professional killers.  I told him how confused I was since I hadn’t been raised to kill people.  Actually the opposite.  As a good Catholic boy, I was taught to love others, not to kill them.  No one I knew ever said they saw a contradiction.  Yet here I was going to do that.  It was insane.  I kept conflating the slogan “The Marines Build Men: Body, Mind, and Spirit” with the advertising jingle I grew up hearing from the New York Yankees’ announcer, Mel Allen, who would intone the sponsor’s (Ballantine Beer) slogan: remember fans “The Three Ring Sign: Purity, Body, and Flavor – So Ask the Man for Ballantine.”  Then there was the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: let us pray; men built by the Marines; purity and impurity, body, God’s body, bodies denied and maimed, killing other bodies, “In the Name of the Father and the Son and… “  It all felt so bizarre and my mind was a confused whirligig of contradictions.  What the hell was I doing on that plane, I thought.  Whose life was it anyway?

October 6, 1966.  Zippo Squads on CBS News, setting fire to peasant huts in Vietnam.  When I was younger, a Zippo lighter seemed so cool and manly.  Silvery and clicky, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth.  A real tough guy.  John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart.

Memories.  That’s what vultures can do.  One look and you are gone.

In the 1960s, things were simpler.  Although there were many newspapers then, and people read much more, it was television with its few major networks that fixated people.  Unlike today – when there is no military draft, the realities of U.S. wars are hidden from television viewers, and the internet is regularly scrubbed of the grizzly truth of our wars – in the 1960s, bloody images from Vietnam became a staple of the evening news shows.  Harris writes:

We must not forget: it was a more simpleminded age, the information superhighway was still a deer trail, and network television was taken as reality, giving the folks back home a vivid, utterly riveting look at what some of their boys were going through, a kind of visceral access available to no previous generation of Americans.

To accompany those sights and sounds, the folks back home were also given a running explanation of what was going on from their government. And the latter created the war’s second front.  Unprecedented visibility ensured that in this war, the government fought one war in the paddies against its NLF and North Vietnamese adversaries and another over the U.S. airwaves, trying to put the appropriate spin on events and convince America that there really was some important reason for going through all this. There wasn’t enough political support for the war to do otherwise, and television had too much impact. The obvious consequence was that Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon spent a good deal of their energy playing to the cameras, just trying to make the war look like what America thought its wars should look like.

More simpleminded it may have been, but that so-called simplemindedness together with the visual imagery from Vietnam – despite all the government propaganda – did help turn many people against the war despite Nixon’s ruthless ability to keep it running so long.

Everything is different today, except for the propaganda and the wars.  A look back to Vietnam is crucial for understanding what’s happening now, for it makes absolutely clear that the U.S. government has no compunction about killing millions of innocent people for its evil ends, whatever they may be.

Then, it would destroy a village in order to save it; today, it will destroy the world in order to save it.  It is the logic of madmen in the grip of evil beyond description. Yet most people repress the thought that nuclear war is very close.

All the mainstream media headlines about Ukraine echo the U.S. propaganda about the American War against Vietnam.  Just substitute the word Russian for National Liberation Front or Viet Cong.  They are suffering extraordinary casualties.  The tide is turning.  “The enemy was being taught the hard way,” writes Harris, “that aggression does not pay.  We were steadily destroying their capacity to fight . . . . Victory was just around the corner.”

It’s easy to laugh at the parallels until a vulture comes calling.  The seeming unreality of their visitation is only equaled by the delusional nature of what passes for news today.

Quoth the Vultures “Evermore.”

David Harris was right about the 1960s when he said, “All that craziness had compromised the nation’s epistemology, rendering our accustomed patterns of knowing dysfunctional.”  This is true a thousand times over today.  If the ‘60s were simpler times, the digital internet revolution and AI have scrambled many people’s minds into a morass perfectly suited for today’s government lies.  “Not only was it hard to know what was really going on,” he writes of Vietnam, “but it was even hard to know how we would know what was really going on if we stumbled over it.”

Then came a shocking surprise: the Tet Offensive that began on January 31, 1968 when everything became quite clear.  This massive attack by the NFL and VC was “the mother of all such epiphanies.”  All official lies were exposed and any prominent dissenter to these lies about the war had to be eliminated, thus Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in quick order by the government that would go on for seven more years to wage its genocidal war against the Vietnamese and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

That was long ago and far away, but it’s worth contemplating.  No one knows what exactly is around the corner in Ukraine.  But then, I didn’t expect two vultures to visit me with their warning.

I’m just passing on their message.  Epiphanies happen.  But so do cataclysms.

All time is now.

Although David Harris has died, he and the many others, such as Randy Kehler,  who were caged in federal prisons for resisting the draft and opposing the war against Vietnam, live on to inspire us to believe that if we resist the warmongers, someday all free birds might chant in unison “Nevermore.”

Here’s their story, a revelatory film about David and those who refused the siren song of evil: The Boys Who Said No

True patriots.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-sends-troops-taiwan-after-general-threatens-war-china-2025/5810166

US Sends Troops to Taiwan After General Threatens War with China by 2025

The United States will quadruple the number of US forces stationed on Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, in an effort to provoke a war with Beijing along the lines of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The United States is actively turning Taiwan into a military base just dozens of miles off the coast of mainland China, with the aim of goading China into invading the island, and painting the ensuing war as the result of “Chinese aggression.”

The announcement gives context to the Biden administration’s unprecedented decision to attack a Chinese research balloon that had been blown over the United States earlier this month, the first time that any aircraft had been shot down over US territory or its coastal waters.

The attack, and the media frenzy that preceded it, was used in an attempt to whip up public hysteria and fear of China, justifying a massive US military buildup on the other side of the world.

In January, Gen. Mike Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command, sent a letter to his subordinates stating, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” and urging them to get their “personal affairs” in order in preparation for a conflict with China.

In both May and September of last year, US President Joe Biden categorically asserted the US would be willing to go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan.

The announcement of the troop surge follows the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act at the end of last year. It effectively rendered the US’s decades-old “One China policy,” under which Washington de facto recognized the Beijing regime as the sole government of all China, including Taiwan, a dead letter by sending direct military aide to Taipei.

Knowing it is acting without a mandate from the American population, the Biden administration is seeking to carry out the massive expansion of US troops on Taiwan with minimal public attention.

In a choreographed series of steps repeated any time the White House takes actions that move the world closer to nuclear annihilation, the White House leaked its plans to increase US troops on Taiwan to the press on Thursday, refused to comment on the initial reports, and will likely formally announce the moves in a “Friday night news dump” either the following day, or several weeks down the line.

In an article entitled “U.S. to Expand Troop Presence in Taiwan for Training Against China Threat,” the Wall Street Journal reported: “The U.S. is markedly increasing the number of troops deployed to Taiwan, more than quadrupling the current number to bolster a training program for the island’s military.”

All factions of the US financial oligarchy are united behind preparations for a military conflict with China. On Wednesday, Republican Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who chairs the House’s new select committee on China, declared himself “even more convinced that the time to arm Taiwan to the teeth was yesterday.”

The media is actively working to promote US war planning against China. Earlier this month, Chuck Todd, moderator of “Meet the Press,” asked Democratic Senator Cory Booker, “Are you going to be supporting whatever it takes to prepare for war with China over Taiwan? Do we need to do more to prepare for that potential?”

The Journal wrote that “The U.S. plans to deploy between 100 and 200 troops to the island in the coming months, up from roughly 30 there a year ago, according to U.S. officials. The larger force will expand a training program the Pentagon has taken pains not to publicize as the U.S. works to provide Taipei with the capabilities it needs to defend itself without provoking Beijing.”

The Journal continued, “Beyond training on Taiwan, the Michigan National Guard is also training a contingent of the Taiwanese military, including during annual exercises with multiple countries at Camp Grayling in northern Michigan, according to people familiar with the training.”

The United States has seized upon the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to massively expand its defense spending, targeting China no less than Russia.

In December, the US House and Congress voted overwhelmingly to approve an $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is $45 billion larger than that requested by the White House, which was in turn larger than the request by the Pentagon.

The budget marks an eight percent increase over last year and a 30 percent increase in military spending over the 2016 Pentagon budget. The massive surge in military spending comes as the typical US household saw its real income fall by three percent in the past 12 months.

The bill increases funding for every single military department and weapons program. The US Navy will get $32 billion for new warships, including three Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class nuclear submarines. And the Pentagon is authorized to purchase a further 36 F-35 aircraft, each costing approximately $89 million.

“This year’s NDAA takes concrete steps towards preparing for a future conflict with China by investing in American hard power, strengthening American posture in the Indo-Pacific, and supporting our allies,” Republican Representative Gallagher said.

The NDAA will upend Washington’s previous One China policy by providing $10 billion in direct military funding to Taiwan for the first time. The bill will also institute no-bid contracting, typically used only in wartime, allowing defense contractors to charge the US government whatever they want.

The bill transforms Taiwan into a frontline proxy for conflict with China, in a manner similar to the way Ukraine is serving as a US proxy for war with Russia. In a press statement, Gallagher praised the fact that the bill “provides similar drawdown authority to arm Taiwan as we have Ukraine.”

The uncontrolled US militarization of Taiwan and US preparations for war with China make clear the extent to which the US war with Russia over Ukraine, now over one year old, is metastasizing into a global military conflagration.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/01/it-is-the-mass-medias-job-to-help-suppress-anti-war-movements/

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements 

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

The mass media are not telling the public about the many well-documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.

The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.

SC274-6

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/27/there-has-never-in-history-been-a-greater-need-for-a-large-anti-war-movement/

There Has Never In History Been A Greater Need For A Large Anti-War Movement

Things are escalating more and more rapidly between the US-centralized power structure and the few remaining nations with the will and the means to stand against its demands for total obedience, namely China, Russia, and Iran. The world is becoming increasingly split between two groups of governments who are becoming increasingly hostile toward each other, and you don’t have to be a historian to know it’s probably a bad sign when that happens. Especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

The US State Department’s Victoria Nuland is now saying that the US is supporting Ukrainian strikes on Crimea, drawing sharp rebukes from Moscow with a stern reminder that the peninsula is a “red line” for the Kremlin which will result in escalations in the conflict if crossed. On Friday, Ukraine’s President Zelensky told the press that Kyiv is preparing a large offensive for the “de-occupation” of Crimea, which Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since its annexation in 2014.

As Anatol Lieven explained for Jacobin earlier this month, this exact scenario is currently the one most likely to lead to a sequence of escalations ending in nuclear war. In light of the aforementioned recent revelations, the opening paragraph of Lieven’s article is even more chilling to read now than it was when it came out a couple of weeks ago:

The greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe that humanity has ever faced is now centered on the Crimean peninsula. In recent months, the Ukrainian government and army have repeatedly vowed to reconquer this territory, which Russia seized and annexed in 2014. The Russian establishment, and most ordinary Russians, for their part believe that holding Crimea is vital to Russian identity and Russia’s position as a great power. As a Russian liberal acquaintance (and no admirer of Putin) told me, “In the last resort, America would use nuclear weapons to save Hawaii and Pearl Harbor, and if we have to, we should use them to save Crimea.”

And that’s just Russia. The war in Ukraine is being used to escalate against all powers not aligned with the US-centralized alliance, with recent developments including drone attacks on an Iranian weapons factory which reportedly arms Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and Chinese companies being sanctioned for “backfill activities in support of Russia’s defence sector” following US accusations that the Chinese government is preparing to arm Russia in the war.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been holding multiple meetings with top military officials regarding potential future attacks on Iran to neutralize the alleged threat of Iran developing a nuclear arsenal, a “threat” that Netanyahu has personally been lying about for years.

If you’ve been reading Antiwar.com (and if you care about this stuff you probably should be), you’ve been seeing new articles about the latest imperial escalations against China on a near-daily basis now. Sometimes they come out multiple times per day; this past Thursday Dave DeCamp put out two completely separate news stories titled “US Plans to Expand Military Presence in Taiwan, a Move That Risks Provoking China” and “Philippines in Talks With US, Australia on Joint South China Sea Patrols“. Taiwan and the South China Sea are two powderkeg flashpoints where war could quickly erupt at any time in a number of different ways.

If you know where to look for good updates on the behavior of the US-centralized empire and you follow them from day to day, it’s clear that things are accelerating toward a global conflict of unimaginable horror. As bad as things look right now, the future our current trajectory has us pointed toward is much, much, much worse.

Empire apologists will frame this trajectory toward global disaster as an entirely one-sided affair, with bloody-fanged tyrants trying to take over the world because they are evil and hate freedom, and the US-centralized alliance either cast in the role of poor widdle victim or heroic defender of the weak and helpless depending on which generates more sympathy on that day.

These people are lying. Any intellectually honest research into the west’s aggressions and provocations against both Russia and China will show you that Russia and China are reacting defensively to the empire’s campaign to secure US unipolar planetary hegemony; you might not agree with those reactions, but you cannot deny that they are reactions to a clear and deliberate aggressor.

This is important to understand, because whenever you say that something must be done to try and avert an Atomic Age world war, you’ll get empire apologists saying “Well go protest in Moscow and Beijing then,” as though the US power alliance is some kind of passive witness to all this. Which is of course complete bullshit; if World War III does indeed befall us, it will be because of choices that were made by the drivers of the western empire while ignoring off-ramp after off-ramp.

This tendency to flip reality and frame the western imperial power structure as the reactive force for peace against malevolent warmongers serves to help quash the emergence of a robust anti-war movement in the west, because if your own government is virtuous and innocent in a conflict then there’s no good reason to go protesting it. But that’s exactly what urgently needs to happen, because these people are driving us to our doom.

In fact, it is fair to say that there has never in history been a time when the need to forcefully oppose the warmongering of our own western governments was more urgent. The attacks on Vietnam and Iraq were horrific atrocities which unleashed unfathomable suffering upon our world, but they did not pose any major existential threat to the world as a whole. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq killed millions; we’re talking about a conflict that can kill billions.

Each of the World Wars was in turn the worst single thing that happened to our species as a whole up until that point in history. World War I was the worst thing that ever happened until World War II happened, and if World War III happens it will almost certainly make World War II look like a schoolyard tussle. This is because all of the major players in that conflict would be armed with nuclear weapons, and at some point some of them are going to be faced with strong incentives to use them. Once that happens, Mutually Assured Destruction ceases to protect us from armageddon, and the “Mutual” and “Destruction” components come in to play.

None of this needs to happen. There is nothing written in adamantine which says the US must rule the world with an iron fist no matter the cost and no matter the risk. There is nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which says nations can’t simply coexist peacefully and collaborate toward the common good of all beings, can’t turn away from our primitive impulses of domination and control, can’t do anything but drift passively toward nuclear annihilation all because a few imperialists in Washington convinced everyone to buy into the doctrine of unipolarism.

But we’re not going to turn away from this trajectory unless the masses start using the power of our numbers to force a change from warmongering, militarism and continual escalation toward diplomacy, de-escalation and detente. We need to start organizing against those who would steer our species into extinction, and working to pry their hands away from the steering wheel if they refuse to turn away. We need to resist all efforts to cast inertia on this most sacred of all priorities, and we need to start moving now. We’re all on a southbound bus to oblivion, and it’s showing no signs of stopping.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/plan-wreck-america/5809998

The Plan to Wreck America. “The Globalist Billionaires

In America, we have an oligarch problem, and it’s much bigger than the oligarch problem that Putin faced when he became president in 2000. The entire West is now in the grips of billionaire elites who have a stranglehold on the media, the political establishment and all of our important institutions. In recent years we have seen these oligarchs expand their influence from markets, finance and trade to politics, social issues and even public health. The impact this group has had on these other areas of interest, has been nothing short of breathtaking. Establishment elites and their media not only stood foursquare behind Russiagate, the Trump impeachment, the BLM riots and the January 6 fiasco, they also had a hand in the Covid hysteria and the host of repressive measures that were imposed in the name of public health. What we’d like to know is to what extent this group is actively involved in the shaping of other events that are aimed at transforming the American Republic into a more authoritarian system?

In other words, are the mandated injections, the forced lockdowns, the aggressive government-implemented censorship, the dubious presidential elections, the burning of food processing plants, the derailing of trains, the attacks on the power grid, the BLM-Antifa riots, the drag queen shows for schoolchildren, the maniacal focus on gender issues, and glitzy public show-trials merely random incidents occurring spontaneously during a period of great social change or are they, in fact, evidence of a stealthily orchestrated operation conducted by agents of the state acting on behalf of their elite benefactors? We already know that the FBI, the DOJ and the intel agencies were directly involved in Russiagate –which was a covert attack on the sitting president of the United States. So, the question is not “whether” these agencies are actively involved in other acts of treachery but, rather, to what extent these acts impact the lives or ordinary Americans, our politics and the country? But before we answer that question, take a look at this quote from from a recent interview by Colonel Douglas MacGregor:

I was reading a document that was authored by George Soros over 10 years ago in which he talks specifically about this all-out war that would ultimately come against Russia because he said this ‘was the last nationalist state that rests on a foundation of orthodox christian culture with Russian identity at its core. That has to be removed. So I think that the people who are in charge in the west and the people in charge in Washington think they have successfully destroyed the identities of the European and American peoples, that we have no sense of ourselves, our borders are undefended, we present no resistance to the incoming migrants from the developing world who essentially roll over us as though we owe them a living and that our laws do not count. Thus, far I would say that is an accurate evaluation of what we’ve been doing. And I think that’s a great victory for George Soros and the globalists, the anti-nationalists; those who want open borders what they call it an “Open Society” because you end up with nothing, an amorphous mass of people struggling to survive who are reduced to the lowest levels of subsistence … (Soros) even goes so far as to talk about how useful it would be if it was east Europeans whose lives were expended in this process and not west Europeans who simply won’t take the casualties. This is not a minor matter. This is the kind of thinking that is so destructive and so evil, in my judgement, that that’s what we’re really dealing with in our own countries and I think Putin recognizes that.” (Douglas Macgregor – A Huge Offensive”, You Tube;, 11:20 minute)

The reason I transcribed this comment from MacGregor was because it sums up the perceptions of a great many people who see things the same way. It expresses the hatred that globalist billionaires have toward Christians and patriots, both of which they see as obstacles to their goal of a borderless one-world government. MacGregor discusses this phenom in relation to Russia which Soros sees as “the last nationalist state that rests on a foundation of orthodox Christian culture with Russian identity at its core.” But the same rule could be applied to the January 6 protestors, could it not? Isn’t that the real reason the protestors were rounded up and thrown into the Washington gulag. After all, everyone knows there was no “insurrection” nor were there any “white supremacists”. The protestors were locked up because they’re nationalists (patriots) which are the natural enemy of the globalists. The MacGregor quote lays it out in black and white. Elites don’t believe that nationalists can be persuaded by propaganda,. They must be eradicated through incarceration or worse. Isn’t that the underlying message of January 6?

The other underlying message of January 6, is that ordinary people are no longer allowed to challenge the authority of the people in power. Again, political legitimacy in the US has always been determined by elections. What January 6 indicates, is that legitimacy no longer matters. What matters is power, and the person who can have you arrested for questioning his authority, has all the power he needs. Check out this excerpt from a post on Substack by political analyst Kurt Nimmo:

“Klaus Schwab, a student of the war criminal Henry Kissinger, is a mentor to power-hungry and narcissistic sociopaths. The WEF “Great Reset” is designed to turn the world into an impoverished social concentration camp, where destitute serfs “own nothing” and this, in true Orwellian fashion, will set them free…

I challenge people to investigate the WEF’s Global Redesign Initiative. According to the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands, this “initiative” proposes

a transition away from intergovernmental decision-making towards a system of multi-stakeholder governance. In other words, by stealth, they are marginalizing a recognized model where we vote in governments who then negotiate treaties which are then ratified by our elected representatives with a model where a self-selected group of ‘stakeholders’ make decisions on our behalf. (Emphasis added.)

In other words, large transnational corporate “stakeholders” will be deciding where you live, what you eat (insects and weeds), how you reproduce (or not reproduce; children produce carbon emissions), and what you can “rent” from them, or not be allowed to rent if you complain about an unelected globalist “economic” cartel driving humanity into serfdom, worldwide poverty, and depopulation.” (“WEF Calls for Destruction of America’s Middle Class“, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics)

What Nimmo is saying is that these billionaire elites are now so powerful, that they can openly say they’re going to “transition away from intergovernmental decision-making” (ie– representative government”) to a system of “multi-stakeholder governance.” If I’m not mistaken, that is a pretty unambiguous declaration of a new form of supra-national government, in which only the billionaire stakeholders have a vote in what policies are implemented. But isn’t that the way things work already? On any number of topics from ESG, to digital currencies, to vaccine passports, to AI, to gain-of-function research, to 15-minute cities, to transhumanism, to war with Russia; the decisions are all being made by a handful of people of whom we know very little and who were never voted into office.

And that brings us back to our original question: How many of these oddball events (in recent years) were conjured up and implemented by agents of the deep state to advance the elitist agenda?

This seem like an impossible question since it’s hard to find a link between these dramatically divers events. For example, what is the link between a Drag Queen Children’s Hour and, let’s say, firebombing a food processing plant in Oklahoma? Or the relentless political exploitation of gender issues and the January 6 public show trials? If there was a connection, we’d see it, right?

Not necessarily, because the link might not have anything to do with the incident itself, but instead, with its impact on the people who experience it. In other words, all of these events could be aimed at generating fear, uncertainty, anxiety, alienation and even terror. Have the intelligence agencies launched such destabilizing operations before?

Indeed, they have, many times. Here’s an excerpt from an article that will help you to see where I’m going with this. It’s from a piece at The Saker titled Operation Gladio: NATO’s Secret War for International Fascism.” See if you notice any similarities with the way things have been unfolding in America for the last few years:

Yves Guerin-Serac: the Black Ops Grandmaster behind Operation Gladio…. wrote the basic training and propaganda manuals which can be fairly described as the Gladio order of battle.”…

Guerin-Serac was a war hero, agent provocateur, assassin, bomber, intelligence agent, Messianic Catholic, and the intellectual grandmaster behind the ‘Strategy of Tension’ essential to the success of Operation Gladio. Guerin-Serac published via Aginter Press the Gladio manual, including Our Political Activity in what can aptly be described as Gladio’s First Commandment:

“Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favoring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s structures…In our view the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist and pro-Soviet activities…Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups.”

Guerin-Serac continues:

“Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation [breakdown of the state]: blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons)…

This destruction of the state must be carried out under the cover of ‘communist activities.’ After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus. Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation.”

Anarchic random violence was to be the solution to bring about such a state of instability thus allowing for a completely new system, a global authoritarian order. Yves Guerin-Serac, who was an open fascist, would not be the first to use false-flag tactics that were blamed on communists and used to justify more stringent police and military control from the state….” (“Operation Gladio: NATO’s Secret War for International Facism”, The Saker)

Repeat:

the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favoring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s structures… This destruction of the state must be carried out under the cover of (communist) activities…. Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation.”

In other words, the objective of the operation is to completely disrupt all social relations and interaction, cultivate feelings of uncertainty, polarization and terror, find a group that can be scapegoated for the wide societal collapse, and, then, present yourself (elites) as the best choice for restoring order.

The Pentagon, Big Pharma, and Globalist War

Is this what’s going on?

It’s very possible. It could all be part of a Grand Strategy aimed at “wiping the slate clean” in order to “transition away from intergovernmental decision-making” to a system of “multi-stakeholder governance.”

That could explain why there has been such a vicious and sustained attack on our history, culture, traditions, religious beliefs, monuments, heroes, and founders. They want to replace our idealism with feelings of shame, humiliation and guilt. They want to erase our past, our collective values, our heritage, our commitment to personal freedom, and the very idea of America itself. They want to raze everything to the ground and start over. That is their basic Gameplan writ large.

The destruction of the state is being carried out behind the cover of seemingly random events that are spreading chaos, exacerbating political divisions, increasing the incidents of public mayhem, and clearing the way for a violent restructuring of the government.

They can’t build a new world order until the old one is destroyed.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/its-coming/

It’s Coming”

“It’s Coming.” That’s what Elon Musk said a while back apropos of the Twitter files that show all the US government suppression of Covid-19 information mis-labeled as “misinformation.” Think of whatever the truth is as mis-misinformation. Get it?  You might have to read that sentence more than once to comprehend what went wrong with the American consensus the past three years. And then you’ll begin to understand why the operation is called mind-fuckery.

      “It” comes out in weird ways now. For instance, Woody Harrelson’s little prank on Saturday Night Live. The A-List actor opened the show acting stoned, talking about how much he likes weed and getting stoned, and, at the very end of his routine, spoke of a “movie script” that spun out in his stoned head:

      The biggest drug cartels in the world get together, and buy up all the media and all the politicians… and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes… and people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drug… and keep taking them over and over. I threw the script away. I mean, who’s gonna believe that crazy idea?”

     One can also imagine the NBC lawyers’ iPhones lighting up and emitting a cacophony of ring-tones in the late-night hours following Woody’s little gaucherie. After all, this is the TV network that still employs the likes of Rachel Maddow, Misinformation-Informer-in-Chief of the whole USA who, for years, has performed as the icon representing how the political Left thinks of itself, and what it thinks. What the Left thinks of itself, of course, is that it’s collectively the smartest person in the world. And what the Left actually thinks is exactly what Woody’s movie script implied: believe everything that the government, the news media, and the drug companies tell you, and act accordingly, and destroy anyone who says otherwise.

    Woody’s gag offended the news media hugely and instantly, said media being scaffolded on the Internet. The response was wildly censorious. Vanity Fair’s insta-bulletin said, “Uncle Woody… taking the stage to float conspiracy theories disguised as provocative humor is both intellectually dishonest and tedious.” Tedious? As if you’ve heard that come out of A-list actors’ mouths a thousand times? I doubt it. Who is being “intellectually dishonest” exactly?

     Rolling Stone, likewise headlined: “Woody Harrelson Spreads Anti-Vax Conspiracies During SNL Monologue.” (Just how anti-anti-establishment now is the old counter-culture rag I once worked for?) The Daily Beast, The Left’s house organ, echoed that: “Woody Harrelson Spews Anti-Vax Conspiracies in Rambling SNL Monologue.” Notice, “spews,” as in the most vile and disgusting bodily function imaginable, you revolting piece of filth….

     Now, what Woody actually didn’t say in that little riff, if you’re paying attention, is that the vaxxes in question are ineffective and dangerous. Yes, he actually left that part out, though there were enough dots in the monologue to connect that message, if you were of a mind to. The problem for the smartest people in the world is that their minds stopped working about five years ago — mainly when a certain DJT stepped onstage to declare that the Left’s management of national affairs was corrupt, depraved, and dangerous. This enraged the management class to the max.

     Graduates of Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the rest of the elite service academies went nuts over that and, in a bizarre switcheroo for the ages, became the staunchest defenders of anything the government decided to impose on the people of this land, starting with a series of political hoaxes — RussiaGate, Ukraine phone call impeachment — cresting with the Covid-19 hysteria and its vaccination cherry-on-top. The smartest people in the world were all-in on all of that, and knocked themselves out enforcing and defending it.

     And now… it’s coming… out. They were played. Absolutely snookered. All. These. Brilliant. Morally unassailably upright. Good. People. Taken for a ride. Spoofed. Put-on. Conned. And they sold out their country in the process. And now they cower on the verge of being unmasked for the mendacious fools they are. One might empathize at how horribly painful this is, the ethical wreckage of a whole social demographic! But don’t confuse empathy with sympathy. They are about to sink in historic disgrace and ignominy, and that’s why their official interlocutors react so harshly.

     Another part Woody left out is what happens after the suckered people take the cartel’s drug over and over. They get sick and many of them die. We are just getting started with that chapter of the story and, as statistical investigator Edward Dowd said recently, the mRNA “vaccines” have already killed more Americans than all the wars this country ever fought. This is the kind of mis-misinformation that the managing elite really don’t want to face. But get ready. It’s coming.

SC274-5

https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/26/chris-hedges-the-trump-russia-saga-and-the-death-spiral-of-american-journalism/

The Trump-Russia Saga and the Death Spiral of American Journalism

The media caters to a particular demographic, telling that demographic what it already believes — even when it is unverified or false. This pandering defines the coverage of the Trump-Russia saga. 

Reporters make mistakes. It is the nature of the trade. There are always a few stories we wish were reported more carefully. Writing on deadline with often only a few hours before publication is an imperfect art. But when mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. To cover them up, to pretend they did not happen, destroys our credibility. Once this credibility is gone, the press becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for a selected demographic. This, unfortunately, is the model that now defines the commerical media.

The failure to report accurately on the Trump-Russia saga for the four years of the Trump presidency is bad enough. What is worse, major media organizations, which produced thousands of stories and reports that were false, refuse to engage in a serious postmortem. The systematic failure was so egregious and widespread that it casts a very troubling shadow over the press. How do CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mother Jones admit that for four years they reported salacious, unverified gossip as fact? How do they level with viewers and readers that the most basic rules of journalism were ignored to participate in a witch hunt, a virulent New McCarthyism? How do they explain to the public that their hatred for Trump led them to accuse him, for years, of activities and crimes he did not commit? How do they justify their current lack of transparency and dishonesty? It is not a pretty confession, which is why it won’t happen. The U.S. media has the lowest credibility — 26 percent — among 46 nations, according to a 2022 report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And with good reason.

The commercial model of journalism has changed from when I began working as a reporter, covering conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s. In those days, there were a few large media outlets that sought to reach a broad public. I do not want to romanticize the old press. Those who reported stories that challenged the dominant narrative were targets, not only of the U.S. government but also of the hierarchies within news organizations such as The New York Times. Ray Bonner, for example, was reprimanded by the editors at The New York Times when he exposed egregious human rights violations committed by the El Salvadoran government, which the Reagan administration funded and armed. He quit shortly after being transferred to a dead-end job at the financial desk. Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge, which was the basis for the film “The Killing Fields.” He was subsequently appointed metropolitan editor at The New York Times where he assigned reporters to cover the homeless, the poor and those being driven from their homes and apartments by Manhattan real estate developers. The paper’s Executive Editor, Abe Rosenthal, Schanberg told me, derisively referred to him as his “resident commie.” He terminated Schanberg’s twice-weekly column and forced him out. I saw my career at the paper end when I publicly criticized the invasion of Iraq. The career-killing campaigns against those who reported controversial stories or expressed controversial opinions was not lost on other reporters and editors who, to protect themselves, practiced self-censorship.

But the old media, because it sought to reach a broad public, reported on events and issues that did not please all of its readers. It left a lot out, to be sure. It gave too much credibility to officialdom, but, as Schanberg told me, the old model of news arguably kept “the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher.”

The advent of digital media and the compartmentalizing of the public into antagonistic demographics has destroyed the traditional model of commercial journalism. Devastated by a loss of advertising revenue and a steep decline in viewers and readers, the commercial media has a vested interest in catering to those who remain. The approximately three and a half million digital news subscribers The New York Times gained during the Trump presidency were, internal surveys found, overwhelmingly anti-Trump. A feedback loop began where the paper fed its digital subscribers what they wanted to hear. Digital subscribers, it turns out, are also very thin-skinned. 

“If the paper reported something that could be interpreted as supportive of Trump or not sufficiently critical of Trump,” Jeff Gerth, an investigative journalist who spent many years at The New York Times recently told me, they would sometimes “drop their subscription or go on social media and complain about it.” 

Giving subscribers what they want makes commercial sense. However, it is not journalism.

News organizations, whose future is digital, have at the same time filled newsrooms with those who are tech-savvy and able to attract followers on social media, even if they lack reportorial skills. Margaret Coker, the bureau chief for The New York Times in Baghdad, was fired by the newspaper’s editors in 2018, after management claimed she was responsible for its star terrorism reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, being barred from re-entering Iraq, a charge Coker consistently denied. It was well known, however, by many at the paper, that Coker filed a number of complaints about Callimachi’s work and considered Callimachi to be untrustworthy. The paper would later have to retract a highly acclaimed 12-part podcast, “Caliphate,” hosted by Callimachi in 2018, because it was based on the testimony of an imposter. “‘Caliphate’ represents the modern New York Times,” Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor,said in announcing the launch of the podcast. The statement proved true, although in a way Dolnick probably did not anticipate.

Gerth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who worked at The New York Times from 1976 until 2005, spent the last two years writing an exhaustive look at the systemic failure of the press during the Trump-Russia story, authoring a four-part series of 24,000 words that has been published by The Columbia Journalism Review. It is an important, if depressing, read. News organizations repeatedly seized on any story, he documents, no matter how unverified, to discredit Trump and routinely ignored reports that cast doubt on the rumors they presented as fact. You can see my interview with Gerth here.

The New York Times, for example, in January 2018, ignored a publicly available document showing that the FBI’s lead investigator, after a ten month inquiry, did not find evidence of collusion between Trump and Moscow. The lie of omission was combined with reliance on sources that peddled fictions designed to cater to Trump-haters, as well as a failure to interview those being accused of collaborating with Russia.

The Washington Post and NPR reported, incorrectly, that Trump had weakened the GOP’s stance on Ukraine in the party platform because he opposed language calling for arming Ukraine with so-called “lethal defensive weapons” — a position identicalto that of his predecessor President Barack Obama. These outlets ignored the platform’s support for sanctions against Russia as well its call for “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning.” News organizations amplified this charge. In a New York Times column that called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” Paul Krugman wrote that the platform was “watered down to blandness” by the Republican president. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, described Trump as a “de facto agent” of Vladimir Putin. Those who tried to call out this shoddy reporting, including Russian-American journalist and Putin critic Masha Gessen were ignored.

After Trump’s first meeting as president with Putin, he was attacked as if the meeting itself proved he was a Russian stooge. Then New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote of the “disgusting spectacle of the American president kowtowing in Helsinki to Vladimir Putin.” Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s most popular host, said that the meeting between Trump and Putin validated her covering the Trump-Russia allegations “more than anyone else in the national press” and strongly implied — and her show’s Twitteraccount and YouTube page explicitly stated — that Americans were now “coming to grips with a worst-case scenario that the U.S. president is compromised by a hostile foreign power.” 

The anti-Trump reporting, Gerth notes, hid behind the wall of anonymous sources, frequently identified as “people (or person) familiar with” — The New York Times used it over a thousand times in stories involving Trump and Russia, between October 2016 and the end of his presidency, Gerth found. Any rumor or smear was picked up in the news cycle with the sources often unidentified and the information unverified.

A routine soon took shape in the Trump-Russia saga. “First, a federal agency like the CIA or FBI secretly briefs Congress,” Gerth writes. “Then Democrats or Republicans selectively leak snippets. Finally, the story comes out, using vague attribution.” These cherry-picked pieces of information largely distorted the conclusions of the briefings. 

The reports that Trump was a Russian asset began with the so-called Steele dossier, financed at first by Republican opponents of Trump and later by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The charges in the dossier — which included reports of Trump receiving a “golden shower” from prostituted women in a Moscow hotel room and claims that Trump and the Kremlin had ties going back five years — were discredited by the FBI.

“Bob Woodward, appearing on Fox News, called the dossier a ‘garbage document’ that ‘never should have’ been part of an intelligence briefing,” Gerth writes in his report. “He later told me that the Post wasn’t interested in his harsh criticism of the dossier. After his remarks on Fox, Woodward said he ‘reached out to people who covered this’ at the paper, identifying them only generically as ‘reporters,’ to explain why he was so critical. Asked how they reacted, Woodward said: ‘To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.’”

Other reporters who exposed the fabrications — Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Aaron Mate at The Nation — ran afoul of their news organizations and now work as independent journalists.

The New York Times and The Washington Post shared Pulitzer Prizes in 2019 for their reporting on “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connection to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

The silence by news organizations that for years perpetuated this fraud is ominous. It cements into place a new media model, one without credibility or accountability. The handful of reporters who have responded to Gerth’s investigative piece, such as David Corn at Mother Jones, have doubled down on the old lies, as if the mountain of evidence discrediting their reporting, most of it coming from the FBI and the Mueller Report, does not exist. 

Once fact becomes interchangeable with opinion, once truth is irrelevant, once people are told only what they wish to hear, journalism ceases to be journalism and becomes propaganda.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/hydra-heads-armageddon-man/5807430

The Nuclear Armed Madhouse

[This morning on January 24, 2023, the science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock to read 90 seconds to midnight, 10 seconds closer than it’s ever been before. This essay examines some of the forces making this clock tick.]

Situational Awareness at Our Future’s Edge

“Madness is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups.”– Friedrich Nietzsche

“You have to understand, the nuclear industry and the people that run it   – and I say this advisedly – they have a religious belief in nuclear power.  So facts don’t interfere.  You know, religion is belief.  They believe in nuclear power….” – S. David Freeman – 2011 – Former Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority

“A striking characteristic of leading figures throughout America’s Atomic Brotherhood is an almost religious devotion to atomic energy and all for which it stands. These men share a deep faith in the essential goodness and above all the historical inevitability of atomic energy.” – Mark Hertzgaard, Nuclear Inc., 1983

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together…. We must also be alert to the…danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell address. 1961

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” – James Madison

The Age of Cognitive Dissonance

Worldwide data indicate that the commercial nuclear power industry has been in decline since at least the turn of the century. Construction schedule and budget overruns, combined with cheaper and faster deployment of wind and solar energy sources make the nuclear energy future look increasingly dim.

According to the World Nuclear Association, there are 425 active reactors worldwide, providing approximately 10% of the world’s electricity supply, about the same as three decades ago.

Once upon a time, amid breathless predictions of a “nuclear renaissance,” 34 new reactor projects were announced. Of those, only two in Georgia are expected to eventually come on-line, years behind schedule and at costs more than double the initial estimate.

Back in 2016, the Nuclear Energy Insider warned,

 “Nuclear plant operators should start decommissioning activities of shutdown reactors as early as possible as the deferral of decontamination and dismantling (D&D) exposes operators to delay-related costs, investment risks and loss of crucial expertise as workers leave the industry, Geoffrey Rothwell, Principal Economist at the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, told Nuclear Energy Insider.”

The highest number of nuclear reactor closures happened in 2021, and, according to Reuters, a ‘Green Surge’ of renewable power sources is going on, far out-competing nuclear developent on spead and costs.

In a 2019 Forbes article American physicist Amory Lovins wrote,

“Most U.S. nuclear power plants cost more to run than they earn. Globally, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2019 documents the nuclear enterprise’s slow-motion commercial collapse—dying of an incurable attack of market forces. Yet in America, strong views are held across the political spectrum on whether nuclear power is essential, or merely helpful, in protecting the Earth’s climate—and both those views are wrong.

In fact, building new reactors, or operating most existing ones, makes climate change worse compared with spending the same money on more-climate-effective ways to deliver the same energy services. Those who state as fact that rejecting (more precisely, declining to bail out) nuclear energy would make carbon reduction much harder are in good company, but are mistaken.”

“Today’s hot question,“ Lovins presciently noted, “is not about new US reactors, which investors shun, but about the 96 existing reactors, already averaging about a decade beyond their nominal original design life. Most now cost more to run—including major repairs that trend upward with age—than their output can earn.

“They also cost more just to run than providing the same services by building and operating new renewables, or by using electricity more efficiently.”

Nevertheless, a recent, breathless Newsweek opinion piece optimistically effused, “The Nuclear Energy Renaissance Has Arrived!”  

Quill Robinson, the article’s ‘conservationist’ author cited reports that California’s legislators – faced with the ‘threat of looming blackouts in the face of climate change’ – voted to extend the operation of Diablo Canyon’s reactors. He also reported that twice nuclear-devastated Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently announced that – because of the ‘threat of looming blackouts in the face of climate change’ – nuclear energy is “essential to proceed with a green transformation.”

The euphoric Newsweek opiner went on to confidently assert – in denial of all accumulating evidence to the contrary – that “high-profile accidents are the exception to the rule; nuclear is incredibly safe and getting safer.”

The uniformity of ‘talking points’ he cited – a currently standard script – is a clue that there is a concerted psychological operation, or psyop, going on here.  Why tout a moribund industry suffering from what energy expert Amory Lovins long ago diagnosed as “an incurable attack of market forces?”

What powerful institution with global reach has the most highly developed and sophisticated state-of-the-art psyop strategies and information warfare technologies at its disposal?

Known as the Fifth Gradient of War, or 5GW, “Moral and cultural warfare is fought through manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the world is perceived…. The ability to shape the perception—and therefore the opinions—of a target audience is far more important than the ability to deliver kinetic energy, and will determine the ultimate victor in tomorrow’s wars.”

Why would these well-honed, state-of-the-art, ‘cognitive warfare’ tools be unleashed on the U.S. population in support of a faltering civilian nuclear energy industry?

WTF is going on here?

Welcome to the Nuclear Armed Madhouse

The United States is the most militarized – and nuclearized – nation, society and culture in the history of the world.

Just pause, take a few deep breaths, and let that fact – plus the sobering, omni-directional implications of it – sink in for a moment.

According to ExecutiveGov, the country’s projected Department of Defense budget – not counting the so-called ‘Dark Budget’ (see below) – reached $778 billion in 2022, up 14% from 2017. This compares to the second ranking military budget of China, which has a military budget of $229 billion.

The Congressional Budget office reported:

• “If carried out, the plans for nuclear forces delineated in the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) fiscal year 2021 budget requests, submitted in February 2020, would cost a total of $634 billion over the 2021–2030 period, for an average of just over $60 billion a year, CBO estimates.
• “Almost two-thirds of those costs would be incurred by DoD; its largest costs would be for ballistic missile submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. DOE’s costs would be primarily for nuclear weapons laboratories and supporting activities.”

You don’t have to be a Ph.D.-certified, think tank situational analyst to get the picture.

For a country that, as of Oct. 8, 2022, had a total national debt of $31.1 trillion, U.S. expenditures on means of mass destruction are clearly illogical, immoral, unethical and suicidal.

Here’s a brief, enlightening snapshot.

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook: United States nuclear weapons, 2023 by Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, as of this year the US Department of Defense maintains an estimated ‘stockpile’ of approximately 3,708 nuclear warheads for delivery by land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and aircraft. The authors state that US nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 24 geographical locations in 11 US states and five European countries, and that the US has deployed 659 strategic launchers with 1,420 warheads in various locations.

The American arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems are in a perpetual process of renewal and modernization which is set to continue to 2039 and beyond, with a budget of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades. A so-called ‘Family of Strike Plans’ is maintained and constantly revised, with their main current targets being China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The US Navy runs a fleet of 14 Ohio-class nuclear powered submarines which constantly prowl the world’s oceans, each capable of carrying up to 20 Trident sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Each SLBM can carry up to eight individually targetable nuclear warheads. A new generation of even larger US Columbia-class nuclear submarines is under development with a project budget of $112 billion.

Meanwhile – not to be outdone – the US Air Force operates a network of 400 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs with a total force of 800 always available – with a constant upgrade program going on – as well as a fleet of over 40 nuclear capable strategic bombers carrying nuclear bombs and air-launched cruise missiles in constant motion from bases around the world. The bomber fleet’s command and control system interfaces with the constellation of MILSTAR satellites operated by the US Space Force.

This globe-spanning mobile ‘Doomsday Machine’ – as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Dan Ellesberg calls it – interfaces with NATO partner militaries in a system which is also constantly in a process of ’modernization’ and ‘harmonization’ of ‘interoperable’ nuclear and conventional weapons systems of mass destruction, dominated by the United States and its complex of ‘defense’ industries, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

As we will see in what follows, this system is seamlessly integrated and co-dependent with America’s civilian commercial nuclear power industry and its infrastructure, trained labor pool, and radioactive waste (mis-) management industry.

Hegemonic Military Nuclearism

Like fish, oblivious of their surrounding liquid environment, we Americans are enveloped in a ubiquitous militarist/nuclearist complex that is all-pervasive, yet virtually invisible to the average citizen, outside the collective domain of public awareness, and therefore immune to informed democratic oversight and control.

The core of its dominion is its development, monopoly control and deployment of advanced biological, directed energy and thermonuclear weapons.  Worth noting is that it also exercised chief administrative control of the ‘warp speed’ roll-out of the Covid-19 genetic therapy inoculations – purportedly, of course, all in the interest of efficiency, public health and national defense.

The July 30 Operation Warp Speed organizational chart obtained by STAT details about 90 of the officials involved in the initiative. Roughly 60 work for the Department of Defense.

Virtually all elements of social and economic activity as well as of the environment – from education to philanthropy to health care to weather modification – can be weaponized under the rubric of ‘defense,’ and therefore, increasingly have been.

The World as Battlespace

The 1974 book, The Permanent War Economy by Seymour Melman had as its sub-title: American Capitalism in Decline.  In it Melman demonstrated how the so-called ‘defense industry’ had became the core of what amounted to a state capitalism dominating the entire economic system by means of government control over both capital and technological research and development.

He explained, “The fact that the war economy of World War II was useful for ending the Great Depression became the basis for a theory that there was no other way to get a full-employment economy.”

Melman went on to show that, “By 1971 the government-based managers of the U.S. military system had superseded the private firms of the American economy in control over capital.”  He argued that the squandering of funds and resources on weapons development – which in fact decreased national security – was leading to a hollowing out of the country’s once vibrant and productive economy.

Embedded inextricably within that Military Matrix – and equally penetrative in its power and influence – is the Nuclear-Energy-Weapons-Radioactive-Waste Complex.  The components of this nuclear triad are as intricately entangled as the strands of the proverbial Gordian Knot.

In the 1979 book The new tyranny: How nuclear power enslaves us,  Austrian writer Robert Jungk identified that triad as quintessentially totalitarian because its is based from its inception on secrecy, deceit and technocratic control.   He warned that by following the path of nuclear energy nations would be forced to surrender their liberties one step at a time and become regimented societies.

Jungk’s warning, like Melman’s and Eisenhower’s was prescient, but went unheeded.

In fact, Eisenhower himself had unwittingly laid the foundation for what he came to fear the most in his 1959 Fireside Chat announcing the Atoms for Peace program.  This cover-story/psyop at the beginning of the Atomic Age succeeded in putting a happy face on “Our Friend the Atom” and “Reddy Kilowatt.”  It also – as Alfred Meyer explains in his recent Progressive article It’s All About the Bomb – “placed nuclear materials and reactors in more than forty countries, including Iran. This generated ongoing business for many American nuclear enterprise companies while supporting and expanding the U.S. military’s nuclear infrastructure and capacity in the United States.”

Atoms for Peace became the origin myth for the First Church of Nukes Forever; a cult, a culture, and an industry based – as we will discuss below – on a Big Lie.

Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, Ike, Melman and Jungk each had a grasp on one appendage of a larger beast the total extent of which remained beyond their ken.

An Updated Situational Awareness

As investigative reporter Whitney Webb has shown in her two volume revelatory opus One Nation Under Blackmail, by Ike’s era, starting early in the 20th century, there had developed a seamless integration of the military-industrial-intelligence complex with the international network of organized crime and the transnational banking cartel that enabled it.

It was, and is, a command and control matrix far superseding the reach of democratic institutions of government.  Those who buck this system pay a price.

James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he died and why it matters, finally unpacked the complicated story of how John Kennedy’s immersion in and opposition to that dominating matrix led inexorably to his 1963 assassination in Dallas. It was a coup from which the country has yet to recover – or, indeed even recognize.

Throughout the last century, the ‘military-industrial complex’ that Eisenhower famously glimpsed, named and warned about in his 1961 presidential farewell broadcast has metastasized throughout all the organs and neural pathways of the American body politic and penetrated all its institutions… and beyond.

It might now more accurately be termed the “Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Big Tech-Economic-Academic-Media-Communications-Medical-Pharmaceutical-Organized-Crime-Surveillance-Population-Control Complex.”

The subsets of this meta-matrix, the permanent war economy and the plutonium-based nuclear energy, weapons and waste economy symbiotically merged.  Together they have become the medium in which we now swim.

Dark Budgets Mask Dark Doings

In their recent study of pandemic criminality in government, co-authors David A. Hughes, Valerie Kyrie and Daniel Broudy point out that,

“Lawlessness has been germinating in the United States ever since the birth of the national security state in 1947, with its founding myth of “national security” enabling the intelligence agencies to operate outside of any meaningful democratic oversight. …The history of US foreign policy since the birth of the CIA has been a tale of near continuous violations of international law and war crimes (Hughes 2022a), operating under cover of propaganda and psychological warfare in the name of “national security” and a range of exceptionalist myths (Blum 2006; Chomsky 2007; Hughes 2015).

“Eye watering amounts of money have been funneled from US federal budgets into black budgets that the public is not allowed to know about. For example, an estimated US$21 trillion cannot be accounted for in the financial records of the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development between 1998 and 2016 (Skidmore & Fitts, 2019). The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB), which sets the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for the US federal government, introduced Standard 56 on 4 October 2018, allowing national security concerns to override the need for public financial transparency. FASAB-56, according to Fitts and Betts (2021), “permits the federal government by administrative action—without formal legislative, regulatory, judicial, or executive approval—to keep secret books as determined by a secret group of people pursuant to a secret process.” In other words, it provides for the clandestine pillaging of public wealth. The US government, in Fitts and Betts’ (2021) opinion, is “operating sufficiently outside the Constitution and financial management and other laws to be called a ‘criminal enterprise.’”

In his report for Solari.org, The Going Direct Reset, analyst John Titus notes that it became clear by 5 years after the 2007/8 financial crisis that, “it was a matter of record that crimes on Wall Street weren’t even being investigated, much less prosecuted.” What Titus sees as the“criminal immunity enjoyed by banks,” leads him to question if the U.S. can any longer be considered a constitutional republic under the rule of law.

Sociologist William Robinson, in his recent book Global Civil War – Capitalism Post-Pandemic, postulates that the world’s people now live under a dictatorship of transnational ‘gangster capitalists.’

This article will explore the hypotheses that gangster capitalists have actually amalgamated with gangster spooks and militarists, and gangster nuclearists in an attempted grab for global governance.

We begin with the observation that the business of America is war, and that the U.S. has all the earmarks of a company town....