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https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57763.htm

Leopold's Ghost Redux

Mark Twain said history never repeats itself but often rhymes.

In the 19th century era of voracious, predatory colonialism, King Leopold II of Belgium appropriated a vast African area he called The Congo Free State. With icy indifference to human suffering and horrific cruelty, he ran a slave domain there, maiming and killing natives and looting its ivory and rubber for his enrichment.

Though excessively vicious, his gross inhumanity was ignored by Europe because most of its empires were engaged in the same murderous exploitation of Africa by violent conquest. Colonies, covering most of the continent, were run as possessions, mere sources of wealth, without regard for indigenous folk, which toxic race prejudice refused to regard as people at all, and which held them undeserving of human rights or compassionate treatment.

For a century Europe siphoned off obscene, illicit wealth from the natural bounty of Africa before there was even any nascent sense that this piracy and rapine might not be justifiable. It took two world wars’ cataclysmic impact on the consciousness of the world to shake and begin to break the deeply tyrannical hold European colonial powers had on their militarily raped colonies there, a struggle only won in blood and misery over decades.

Franz Fanon, in “The Wretched Of The Earth”, told the bitter and suppressed story of colonialism’s savage, sanguinary inhumanity to millions of subject peoples. After colonialists were battered by world wars, the tide of revolution ran high in Africa and the world, with one victim state after another breaking the failing grip of its arrogant, alien rulers. Vietnam was last, with America throwing its full weight against its fight for freedom after beaten, humiliated France was kicked out. America’s defeat marked the end, not of colonialism, but of the old type built on military conquest.

A new method of subverting and looting the world was needed for Capitalism, since raw conquest obviously no longer served. America, morphing into empire, created that superior technique. It’s key elements were money and subversion, the one growing naturally from the other, jointly applied in many invisible, insidious colonial takeovers implemented by rankest corruption.

The way it worked in target countries was that ruling class thugs were paid great quantities of money to overthrow or eliminate leaders whose efforts for their people opposed the interests of U.S. Capital. This was an immense improvement over conquest: it was far cheaper than invasion and occupation, and it created no adverse publicity, at least not in the wholly-owned U.S. press.

The new game took breaking in, and there was predictable bungling by ham-handed CIA boys trained in war. Their first effort, in Iran, they nearly blew, but in spite of amateur hour chaos, with blind luck they managed to run Mossadegh—who had nationalized Iran’s oil—out, and turn the industry back over to the Brits and jokingly named Anglo-Iranian Oil. In Guatemala, they floundered and bollixed their play but, again, their money was better than they were, and they ousted Arbenz, who only represented his people, to balm the bitter hatred of United Fruit.

The operators of the, by now, burgeoning American Empire and their owners and directors, the Lords of Big Capital, were so pleased with these scores, that the money spigot fueling the CIA’s iffy subversion fairly gushed by the 60s, and their off-the-books budget expanded hugely by the time it set up the snatch and murder of the wildly popular, fierce nationalist Premier of The Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Fearful of being exposed, their great watchword became “plausible deniability”. It bought Chilean Generals to destroy the Socialist Premier, Salvador Allende, who had nationalized American-owned copper mines. They killed him, but Kissinger was fine with that. Those things happened.

In parallel with our manky spook program, which had various notable pratfalls, such as failing to kill Fidel, American Capitalism effected massive structural changes in world finance to support in the open what they did in the dark with the CIA. The World Bank and IMF, American run entities, were allegedly created to foster Third World “development”. In fact, they were agents of Disaster Capitalism, pace Naomi Klein. Using autocratic, native male whores who raked off millions signing for huge loans, their lending loaded poor states with unrepayable debt, indenturing them to the banks in perpetuity. This scam became the key form of colonial control, and sleazy black bag jobs and “terminating with extreme prejudice” fell clean out of favor.

Nothing works forever, though, and it’s clear that after murdering Qaddafi, and insisting “Assad must go” without the stones to make it happen, America, and its decayed, degenerate European lapdogs, are losing their stranglehold on Africa. In a rerun of the breakouts of Algeria, Libya, and Kenya in the first great wave of liberation from the old bayonet and bullet colonialism, central Africa across the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Red Sea is rising against the corrupt and fraudulent “aid”, and “assistance” from The American Empire and its sleazy Capitalist shysters.

In Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso, junior officers revolted to oust their Western puppets, all deep in the pockets of American-backed Capitalism, on the take and greasing the dirty sell-out of their people’s resources and futures. Niger has now erupted in defiance of The Empire and its diseased punk, France, to control its own destiny. The psychotic Harpy, Victoria Newland, sent to spank the naughties, was told to bugger off, they didn’t want her money, let her spend it on a weight-loss program instead. The four nations vowed that, if challenged, they will fight united for their independence. In the world of evil darkness The Empire has imposed, it is heartening to see that some victim nations are, as Sandino said, long ago, not for sale and not surrendering.

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https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57778.htm

Come On, Ukraine, Learn from the U.S. Military

Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, U.S. Officials Say

American strategists say Ukraine’s troops are too spread out and need to concentrate along the counteroffensive’s main front in the south.

Listen to the U.S. military, Ukraine! Don’t be casualty-averse! Concentrate your forces. Take the fight to the Russian enemy. Use all those cluster munitions we’ve sent you. Commit your armored reserve and punch a hole in the Russian lines. Break through, break out, and drive toward Crimea. You know: just like Americans would do in your place.

One might forgive Ukrainians if they asked, When was the last war you “experts” won for America? Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Korea? What about ongoing military commitments to Syria and Somalia? If you’re so good at winning wars, how come the U.S. military didn’t win in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam where you had overwhelming materiel and firepower superiority?

With respect to why Ukraine has its forces “too spread out”: perhaps Ukraine needs to garrison its lines so that it can fend off Russian counterattacks? If Ukraine concentrates its strategic reserve and uses it in a big counteroffensive that stalls, what’s to stop Russia from a decisive riposte? Think of Kursk for Nazi Germany in 1943. Once that huge offensive failed for Germany, using up its strategic reserve, the Red Army seized the initiative on the eastern front and never lost it.

At Kursk in 1943, the Germans committed their reserves in a desperate gamble to seize the initiative from the Soviet Union. When the offensive failed, the Red Army counterattacked and proved unstoppable.

Headlines like the one posted above from the New York Times are intended to be exculpatory for the U.S. If the war turns worse for Ukraine, U.S. “experts” can point to articles like this, casting blame on the Ukrainians for not following sage American advice.

If “we” win in Ukraine, it will be because of generous U.S. aid and especially vaunted U.S. and NATO weaponry; but if they (the Ukrainians) lose, it’s all their fault for not following the advice of America’s master strategists. And, obviously, even if Ukraine loses, plenty of weapons manufacturers in the U.S. are winning and will continue to win. Indeed, a Russian victory could be just the thing to propel even more weapons spending by NATO countries as well as even larger and more monstrous Pentagon budgets.

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https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57777.htm

In A World Ruled By Propaganda, A Sane Worldview Will Necessarily Be A Fringe Worldview

One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to begin with the assumption that the truest and most accurate position must lie somewhere near the center of the two major political perspectives you see laid out all around you. 

It’s a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy (the correct position between “Drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health” and “Drink zero bleach daily for good health” is not “Drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health”); it’s also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful.

It’s a well-documented fact that the rich and powerful pour vast fortunes into manipulating the political and media landscape in ways that serve their interests. Their control over the news media and Silicon Valley tech platforms is used to set the agenda and influence public perception by determining what issues will receive attention and which won’t in ways that preserve the political status quo they’ve built their empire upon, thereby shrinking the Overton window of acceptable debate down to a very narrow spectrum whose outcomes can’t threaten their interests in any way.

We just discussed this dynamic with regard to US aggressions against Russia and China; the Overton window is being narrowed to a debate between which US enemy should be the target of the most imperial aggressions, with voices who advocate detente with both countries finding no platform in mainstream politics or media. This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

People assume there must be truth in the mainstream worldview because so many others are invested in the mainstream worldview, when really the only reason that worldview is mainstream in the first place is because so much wealth and influence has gone into making it mainstream. In reality the assumption that the truth exists anywhere in either of the two mainstream political viewpoints promoted by the managers of the western empire is an example of the bandwagon effect, which describes the cognitive bias in which humans tend to take on beliefs, behaviors, styles and attitudes solely because that’s what the people around them are doing.

This bias would have had evolutionary advantages early on in our development as a species. Back when our evolutionary ancestors were prey for prehistoric carnivores, it was a survival advantage to start running for your life if you saw other members of your tribe running, even if you personally didn’t see what they were running from. As primates whose survival depended on social cohesion, being rejected by the tribe would mean almost certain death by predation or starvation, so it was necessary to conform in whatever ways prevented that rejection from happening.

But we don’t live in prehistoric times anymore. We live in a civilization with a highly complex information environment that is being continually manipulated away from truth and accuracy and toward the advantage of powerful people who rule over us. If you go along with the herd, you’ll be deceived.

In truth the so-called “centrists” or “moderates” of our world are really violent extremists, because they support the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on our planet, and are only regarded as moderate because they sit in the mid-range of a completely artificially created spectrum. A perspective that is actually sane will be about as far away from their perspective as you can get.

Because the majority of people have been duped by propaganda into espousing mainstream political perspectives, those with an accurate read on things will necessarily be a small fringe minority until that dynamic changes. As long as your entire civilization is structured around deceit-based perspectives which serve the powerful, going along with the crowd will prevent you from forming a truth-based perspective that serves human interests.

So you’ll have to get comfortable rejecting mainstream orthodoxies, dismissing mainstream media, and shunning mainstream politics, because those things are all inseparably interwoven with the matrix of deceit by which our rulers have pulled the blindfold over this civilization. This won’t be a sign that you’re out of touch or a kooky crackpot or some snobby hipster who rejects all things mainstream out of a pathological need to be different, it will be a sign that you are seeing things clearly.

This can set you apart from your tribe at times; as Terence McKenna said, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” But we can still find each other online, so we’re never really alone, and the cost is definitely worth it. The sincere pursuit of a truth-based perspective is ultimately the surest path not only toward a healthy society, but toward lasting happiness as an individual as well.