SC281-11

https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/02/chris-hedges-they-lied-about-afghanistan-they-lied-about-iraq-and-they-are-lying-about-ukraine/

They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.

The U.S. public has been conned, once again, into pouring billions into another endless war.  

The playbook the pimps of war use to lure us into one military fiasco after another, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, does not change. Freedom and democracy are threatened. Evil must be vanquished. Human rights must be protected. The fate of Europe and NATO, along with a “rules based international order” is at stake. Victory is assured.

The results are also the same. The justifications and narratives are exposed as lies. The cheery prognosis is false. Those on whose behalf we are supposedly fighting are as venal as those we are fighting against. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime, although one that was provoked by NATO expansion and by the United States backing of the 2014 “Maidan” coup which ousted the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych wanted economic integration with the European Union, but not at the expense of economic and political ties with Russia. The war will only be solved through negotiations that allow ethnic Russians in Ukraine to have autonomy and Moscow’s protection, as well as Ukrainian neutrality, which means the country cannot join NATO. The longer these negotiations are delayed the more Ukrainians will suffer and die. Their cities and infrastructure will continue to be pounded into rubble.

But this proxy war in Ukraine is designed to serve U.S. interests. It enriches the weapons manufacturers, weakens the Russian military and isolates Russia from Europe. What happens to Ukraine is irrelevant. 

“First, equipping our friends on the front lines to defend themselves is a far cheaper way — in both dollars and American lives — to degrade Russia’s ability to threaten the United States,” admitted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

“Second, Ukraine’s effective defense of its territory is teaching us lessons about how to improve the defenses of partners who are threatened by China. It is no surprise that senior officials from Taiwan are so supportive of efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russia. Third, most of the money that’s been appropriated for Ukraine security assistance doesn’t actually go to Ukraine. It gets invested in American defense manufacturing. It funds new weapons and munitions for the U.S. armed forces to replace the older material we have provided to Ukraine. Let me be clear: this assistance means more jobs for American workers and newer weapons for American servicemembers.”

Once the truth about these endless wars seeps into public consciousness, the media, which slavishly promotes these conflicts, drastically reduces coverage. The military debacles, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue largely out of view. By the time the U.S. concedes defeat, most barely remember that these wars are being fought. 

The pimps of war who orchestrate these military fiascos migrate from administration to administration. Between posts they are ensconced in think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, The Atlantic Council and The Brookings Institution — funded by corporations and the war industry. Once the Ukraine war comes to its inevitable conclusion, these Dr. Strangeloves will seek to ignite a war with China. The U.S. Navy and military are already menacing and encircling China. God help us if we don’t stop them.

These pimps of war con us into one conflict after another with flattering narratives that paint us as the world’s saviors. They don’t even have to be innovative. The rhetoric is lifted from the old playbook. We naively swallow the bait and embrace the flag — this time blue and yellow — to become unwitting agents in our self-immolation.

Since the end of the Second World War, the government has spent between 45 to 90 percent of the federal budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest sustained activity of the U.S. government. It has stopped mattering — at least to the pimps of war — whether these wars are rational or prudent. The war industry metastasizes within the bowels of the American empire to hollow it out from the inside. The U.S. is reviled abroad, drowning in debt, has an impoverished working class and is burdened with a decayed infrastructure as well as shoddy social services. 

Wasn’t the Russian military — because of poor morale, poor generalship, outdated weapons, desertions, a lack of ammunition that supposedly forced soldiers to fight with shovels, and severe supply shortages — supposed to collapse months ago? Wasn’t Putin supposed to be driven from power? Weren’t the sanctions supposed to plunge the ruble into a death spiral? Wasn’t the severing of the Russian banking system from SWIFT, the international money transfer system, supposed to cripple the Russian economy? How is it that inflation rates in Europe and the United States are higher than in Russia despite these attacks on the Russian economy? 

Wasn’t the nearly $150 billion in sophisticated military hardware, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged by the U.S., EU and 11 other countries supposed to have turned the tide of the war? How is it that perhaps a third of the tanks Germany and the U.S. provided were swiftly turned by Russian mines, artillery, anti-tank weapons, air strikes and missiles into charred hunks of metal at the start of the vaunted counter-offensive? Wasn’t this latest Ukrainian counter-offensive, which was originally known as the “spring offensive,” supposed to punch through Russia’s heavily fortified front lines and regain huge swathes of territory? How can we explain the tens of thousands of Ukrainian military casualties and the forced conscription by Ukraine’s military? Even our retired generals and former CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security officials, who serve as analysts on networks such as CNN and MSNBC, can’t say the offensive has succeeded. 

And what of the Ukrainian democracy we are fighting to protect? Why did the Ukrainian parliament revoke the official use of minority languages, including Russian, three days after the 2014 coup? How do we rationalize the eight years of warfare against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region before the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022? How do we explain the killing of over 14,200 people and the 1.5 million people who were displaced, before Russia’s invasion took place last year?

How do we defend the decision by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to ban eleven opposition parties, including The Opposition Platform for Life, which had 10 percent of the seats in the Supreme Council, Ukraine’s unicameral parliament, along with the Shariy Party, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Left Forces, State, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc? How can we accept the banning of these opposition parties — many of which are on the left — while Zelenskyy allows fascists from the Svoboda and Right Sector parties, as well as the Banderite Azov Battalion and other extremist militias, to flourish? 

How do we deal with the anti-Russian purges and arrests of supposed “fifth columnists”  sweeping through Ukraine, given that 30 percent of Ukraine’s inhabitants are Russian speakers? How do we respond to the neo-Nazi groups supported by Zelenskyy’s government that harass and attack the LGBT community, the Roma population, anti-fascist protests and threaten city council members, media outlets, artists and foreign students? How can we countenance the decision by the U.S and its Western allies to block negotiations with Russia to end the war, despite Kyiv and Moscow apparently being on the verge of negotiating a peace treaty? 

I reported from Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 during the breakup of the Soviet Union.  NATO, we assumed, had become obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev proposed security and economic agreements with Washington and Europe. Secretary of State James Baker in Ronald Reagan’s administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured Gorbachev that NATO would not be extended beyond the borders of a unified Germany. We naively thought the end of the Cold War meant that Russia, Europe and the U.S., would no longer have to divert massive resources to their militaries. 

The so-called “peace dividend,” however, was a chimera.

If Russia did not want to be the enemy, Russia would be forced to become the enemy. The pimps of war recruited former Soviet republics into NATO by painting Russia as a threat. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, reconfigured their militaries, often through tens of millions in western loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware. This made the weapons manufacturers billions in profits. 

It was universally understood in Eastern and Central Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion was unnecessary and a dangerous provocation. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War is a business.

In a classified diplomatic cable — obtained and released by WikiLeaks — dated Feb. 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.

“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . .”

“Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . .” the cable read.  “Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if the western alliance had honored its promises not to expand NATO beyond Germany’s borders and Ukraine had remained neutral. The pimps of war knew the potential consequences of NATO expansion. War, however, is their single minded vocation, even if it leads to a nuclear holocaust with Russia or China. 

The war industry, not Putin, is our most dangerous enemy. 

....

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/85030/uk-is-weaponizing-banking.html

UK is weaponizing banking now

And you think it will not happen here to you? Wake up.

The gloves are off, and bank-government collusion is now in plain sight for all to see. First we had the abrupt, arbitrary and capricious weaponization of the Canadian banking system by the WEF-trained young leaders Justin Trudeau and his (former journalist) finance minister Chrystia Freeland. <By the way, just announced is that Trudeau is promoting Freeland to deputy Prime Minister.> And now we have the British banks directly interfering with British politician and political commentator Nigel Farage (well known as a leader of the Brexit movement). Nigel is being completely frozen out of his accounts and any ability to engage in banking activities in the UK.

 

Just to recap, the short version of this cascade of revealing events is that the Canadian Trucker peaceful protests were so effective that in early 2022 Trudeau detonated the equivalent of a banking neutron bomb by freezing the access to their banking accounts, and also freezing banking access of any who provided support for their protest. <See this link for my Feb 10, 2022 “Open Letter to the Canadian Truckers” essay>. A list of names of those to have their accounts frozen was provided by the Canadian government to Canadian banks, who then acted as instructed. The predictable consequence was that the Canadian banking system almost crashed as there was an (understandable) run on Canadian banks once it was revealed that they are not the international “safe haven” previously assumed by many. <See this link for my Feb 25, 2022 essay “Did Justin Trudeau Just Destroy "Social Credit System" Logic?”>.

You can go even further back in time and readily document the creeping weaponization of banking as a political tool in the actions of the US Government and financial allies in freezing assets of Iran, and then Russia. A direct line can be drawn from those actions both to the formation of the new BRICS alliance network which is threatening the dominance of the US Dollar (or petrodollar, as some call it) as the preferred international medium of exchange, and another line to the deployment of the same political-banking strategy against groups of individuals that are inconveniencing the State (and WEF) and its political objectives via peaceful political protest activities. For more on this, see “Sleepwalking Into a China-Style Social Credit System” published March 2022 by the Heritage Foundation.

And now we have the abrupt, arbitrary and capricious actions of the British/WEF banking system against a single politically active individual, Mr. Nigel Farage. This is yet another boundary event in the creeping deployment and normalization of the weaponization of the global financial system to enforce compliance with social and political objectives. If you are not yet sufficiently alarmed about the likely consequences of national and global deployment of Central Bank Digital Currency, this is yet another wake up call, yet another “Ontological Shock” event.

This is a developing story. Below, please find a full transcript of Nigel’s video statement on Twitter. What we are seeing is the usual gradual, stepwise normalization of the erosion of human rights and government norms that we had all come to take for granted. This is the face of creeping weaponization of the banking system to advance the political interests of both WEF-affiliated/infiltrated governments and the financial interests that back them. This is what happens when a citizenry allows “public-private partnerships” to transmutate into corporatism/fascism. And it clearly demonstrates that there is no line that our opponents will not cross. They recognize no ethical boundaries. Access to what you think you own can be restricted and appropriated at a moments notice, and the deployment of Central Bank Digital Currency will accelerate and operationalize this as a routine practice, just as is the case in Communist China.

The willingness of what were formerly considered “Western Democracies” to deploy advanced military-grade psychological operations technologies, developed for offshore PsyWar combat, on their own citizens is well documented. Mr. Farage’s Twitter post is deluged by attack tweets originating from the UK government troll farm known as the 77th brigade. And now the glove is off of the fist. Weaponized banking was first deployed against nation-states that would not comply with the Imperial mandates of the Administrative State and its WEF partners. And now it is reaching down to the retail level, to individuals. We can clearly see that fist now in the various “social credit system” activities and mandates such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion scorecards (DEI) and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scoring/ranking systems. See “Corporate America's DEI agenda: Fortune 100 companies adopt 'diversity, equity and inclusion' regime” published July 2022 by Fox News.

It has been observed that it was the German people who were defeated during WW II, not the Nazis. If you think that this type of thing, weaponization of banking to control your behavior and speech, cannot happen to you and your children- think again. Read about what the UK government (and Canadian governments) are doing, and in so doing stare right into the face of creeping Fascist (corporatist) totalitarianism.

They have no shame, they have no ethical compass, they believe that the ends truly justify the means, and they will do anything within their power to achieve those ends. Do you care about personal liberty and freedom? If so, it is long past time for you to act. Prepare and protect. Banking is not longer a reliable, stable system. Just like corporate media, it has become a weapon of the Administrative State Leviathan and its corporate partners.

Nigel Farage, in his own words:

Hello there. Now, you would think in the light of this that I'd be pretty happy, News Presenter of the Year. The TRIC Awards was pretty cool and a massive thanks to all of those people out there that voted for me. The establishment were, of course, appalled because they, in their little London bubble, think that I'm incredibly unpopular. Well, in Notting Hill, I might be maybe not quite so in the rest of the country, but actually, truth is I'm not full of the joys of spring. I've been living with something for the last couple of months that may well fundamentally affect my future career going on from here and whether I can even stay living in this country.

I have been with the same banking group since 1980. I've had my personal accounts with them since that date and my business accounts right through the 1990s when I worked in the City of London and in recent years, too. I'm with one of the subsidiaries of this big banking group, one with a very prestigious name, but I won't name them just yet.

I got a phone call a couple of months ago to say, "We are closing your accounts." I asked why, no reason was given. I was told a letter would come, which would explain everything. The letter came through and simply said, "We are closing your accounts. We want to finish it all by a date," which is around about now. I didn't quite know what to make of it. I complained. I emailed the chairman. Alas, he phoned me to say that it was a commercial decision, which I have to say I don't believe for single moment.

So I thought, "Well, there we are. I'll have to go and find a different bank." I've been to six, no, seven banks, actually, and asked them all, "Could I have a personal and a business account?" and the answer has been no in every single case. There is nothing irregular or unusual about what I do. The payments that go in and come out every month are pretty much the same. I maintain in my business account quite a big positive cash balance, which I guess, with interest rates where they are, is pretty good for the bank, too.

So why is this happening to me? Well, one explanation is this. A few years ago, the European Union came up with a definition of somebody called a PEP, a politically exposed person. Now, this could range from anybody from a prime minister down to a local counselor. And I think the reason for it was, were people in politics open to bribery? Could foreign governments from Ukraine or China, or wherever else it may be, could they be pumping money into the accounts of corrupt politicians? So I kind of understand that and get that, but it's all about interpretation, isn't it? And what the banks argue is that to maintain an account for a politically exposed person gives them increase costs of compliance.

Now, I have spoken to the city minister in this country and there is some hope that this EU definition, which came into British law, may be moderated in some way. We'll have to see, but of course, any bank, any organization can choose to interpret a PEP or whether they want the account in any way they choose. To my knowledge, I don't think anybody has been treated like me in the world of politics, but then the banks, you see, themselves, are part of the big corporate structures in this country. These are the organizations who did not want Brexit to happen. And I think, in my case, probably the corporate world will never, ever forgive me because they know, if I hadn't done what I did with the help of thousands of people in our people's army, there never would've been a referendum, let alone a victory. I'm the one that is to carry the blame.

So that's the second possible reason why I can't get a bank account, prejudice that comes from our institutions, but I think there's a third reason. A few months ago in the House of Commons, Sir Chris Bryant, Chairman of the Privileges Committee, said, using parliamentary privilege, that I had received large sums of money directly from the Russian Government and he named the calendar year in which it had happened. Truth is I didn't receive a penny from any source with even any link to Russia. And yet, because he said it, it stands. I wrote to the speaker, I demanded an apology. Nothing has been forthcoming from Sir Chris Bryant. Well, I wonder whether that is what's given me part of the problem.

I have employed a top firm of London lawyers. I'm going through a series of subject access requests to find out what is held on me by the international agencies and by the bank that wants to close me down, but think about it. Without a bank account, you've effectively become a non-person. You don't actually exist. It's like the worst regimes of the mid 20th century, be they in Russia or Germany, you literally become a non-person. And you don't anymore, you did in the past, but you don't anymore actually have a right to be entitled to a bank account.

Now, there is a possibility for a FinTech company that I could find some means of receiving and paying money, which could be a little bit of a lifeline, but it's not a bank account because I won't be able to earn any interest on positive cash balances. I won't be able to borrow money, if I need to at any point, or take out a mortgage, should I so desire. That will be completely denied to me. I won't be able to have a debit card linked directly to my account. I won't really be able to exist and function in a modern 21st century Britain.

So I will tell you more about this on GB News at seven o'clock tonight and as to what my decision is, but I'm beginning to think that perhaps life in the United Kingdom is now becoming completely unlivable because of the levels of prejudice against me. I'll give you more of my thoughts at seven o'clock tonight on GB News.