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https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/08/patrick-lawrence-what-is-said-and-what-is-done/

What Is Said and What Is Done

U.S. Policy as Spectacle  

Those Israelis: They are too honest sometimes, aren’t they? It is damnably inconvenient when they explain in perfectly plain terms that the Israel Defense Forces’ intent in Gaza is to ethnic-cleanse the territory of Palestinians, or that they think Palestinians—invoking the language of the Reich—are subhuman animals who ought to be slaughtered, or that the IDF’s brutality, referencing the violently forced removals of 1948, is meant to be Nakba 2.

You can’t, after all, go around saying what you mean if you want to work with the Americans, whose leadership cliques long ago took up the practice of obscuring what they mean and what they are doing. If these people are going to run an imperium their own citizens are not supposed to see, the last thing required is clarity.

Senior Israeli officials have made this mistake repeatedly since the Hamas incursion into southern Israel three months ago prompted the barbarity we now witness daily. As has been well reported, they made it again this week, when two of them came out and said the Gaza project is indeed an ethnic cleansing, the objective of which is to scatter the Gaza Strip’s 2 million–plus people to the winds.

Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, national security minister and finance minister respectively, are senior figures in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s freak-show coalition government. Here is some of what they said when addressing their far-far-far right parties on New Year’s Day. Ben-Gvir: 

The war presents an opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza…. [This is] a correct, just, moral, and humane solution. We cannot withdraw from any territory we are in in the Gaza Strip. Not only do I not rule out Jewish settlement there, I believe it is also an important thing ….

And from Smotrich the same day:

The correct solution [is] to encourage the voluntary migration of Gaza’s residents to countries that will agree to take in the refugees…. Israel will permanently control the territory of the Gaza Strip, including through the establishment of settlements.

“Encouraging migration” and “voluntary migration” are preposterous phrases under the circumstances, the sort of language, say, Secretary of State Antony Blinken would favor under different circumstances. In this case these and other such phrases seem to have made matters only worse given the instant outrage. The two officials were describing an ethnic-cleansing operation comparable, indeed, with al–Nakba—a point not lost on the American secretary of state.  Here is the statement issued by the State Department January 2, the day after Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spoke. It is brief and I will quote it in full:

The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.

We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.

We do not like inflammatory rhetoric, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn’t either it is Gaza for Palestinians when this slaughter is over: This is the gist of the State Department response. The second of the above summaries is patently untrue, given Netanyahu has said things in line with the most racist of his ministers on numerous occasions. Israel is, indeed, reportedly negotiating resettlement agreements as we speak with Egypt and other nations in the region. As to the thought that Gaza “will remain Palestinian land,” it is cruelly nonsensical at this point.

We are left with, “The United States rejects recent statements” and, “They should stop immediately.” The significance here lies in what is not said. As the Biden regime continues to fund and supply Israel’s criminal conduct in Gaza, as it refuses even to call for a ceasefire (which 79 percent of the U.N. General Assembly recently endorsed), the State Department’s primary concern, we have to conclude, is with presentation. Keep doing what you are doing but stop talking so plainly about what you are doing: Is there another way to read State’s official response next to actual policy, text and subtext?

Tony “Guardrails” Blinken is now on his fourth journey to the Middle East and its surround since hostilities between Israel and Hamas broke out October 7. In Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and, of course, Israel, Blinken will attempt to get the Israelis to improve the aesthetics of its attacks and to keep the war-that-is-not-a-war from igniting a regional conflict. He will face “tough issues” and “difficult choices,” according to Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman who signed the January 2 statement. But he, Blinken, will not announce any shift in U.S. policy.

That will remain as it is. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” to borrow Joe Biden’s assurance to Wall Street during his 2020 campaign. America supports the Israelis as they ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip, but it wants a better presentation out of the Israelis and it wants others to accept this presentation quiescently. For all we know—consider Blinken’s itinerary—he could be assisting in resettlement negotiations between Israel and other nations.

Six months into the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine, by which time things were already going other than brilliantly for the Kyiv regime, those paying attention began to notice the widening discrepancies between the war as it was presented in Washington and in corporate media and the war as it actually was so far as one could make out by way of the reports of independent journalists. As 2022 drew to a close, I made this observation in a commentary headlined, “War as Presentation:” 

It is open-and-shut evident at this point that we witness two wars as the Armed Forces of Ukraine face off with the Russian military. There is the presented war, the meta-war, you might say, and there is the waged war, the war taking place on the ground, nothing meta about it.

True enough, there is a long history of official misrepresentations in times of war. But as the late and missed John Pilger remarked in a speech delivered just after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv in 2014, “The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.” Pilger nailed something important with these observations: Some qualitative difference in the way the world is presented to us, such that we cannot easily discern it, has been increasingly evident over the past decade or so.

As I have thought about this weird condition at various times since reading Pilger’s speech, delivered at a California symposium, my mind has gone back repeatedly to none other than Guy Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle, published a year before the 1968 événements in Paris, has proven since an enduring influence on a lot of people. Debord’s book was in essence a left-libertarian critique of consumer capitalism and the dreamlike state into which commodity fetishism leads us. He argued that late-stage capitalism had, already by the 1960s, turned people in the West into spectators and events into mere representations of reality—spectacle in his very useful term. Images were all, or nearly all:

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation…. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

Debord’s concerns ran to art, culture, society, theory (and drinking, he was pleased enough to note in Panegyric, a brief book he wrote late in life). He seems to have had no mind for foreign policy or foreign affairs altogether—although he designed and published a war game with his wife, Alice Becker–Ho, in the 1980s. Taking I hope not too much license, we find now that the theory of representation, of the spectacle, of the social and political centrality of image are very apt to those of us who follow international relations, war and, to get specific about it, late-imperial America.

Foreign policy as spectacle, as representation: I do not know fully the implications of this reality because I can hardly grasp its metaphysical aspect. America has a set of policies, which rest by and large on violence or the threat of it, on coercion, or on one or another form of bribery. And then we have the presentation of American policy, which rests on its dedication to human rights, the self-determination of all peoples, its commitment to democracy, and so on. Read again the State Department response to the Israeli officials’ truth-telling statements of Israel’s intent in Gaza: This is what you are reading. It is foreign policy as spectacle. Note the reference to “the international rules-based order”: This is the name Antony Blinken et al. put on their representation of American foreign policy. 

If John Pilger announced a new era during which war is waged via information, we will see over time where this will lead us. Again, I am not yet certain about this. But the space between policy and its representation will grow ever wider, it seems to me, leaving ordinary citizens less and less able to discern what America does in the world, or events altogether, with any kind of clarity. The structure of the spectacle, as it increasingly obscures reality, will license the policy cliques to conduct America’s relations ever more objectionably. Of a piece with all this are the incessant intrusions into our minds in the name of “cognitive warfare,” which NATO, having coined the term, describes as “the battle for the human brain.”

A few days ago I edited a colleague’s piece on the famous commencement address President Kennedy delivered at American University on June 10, 1963. I was shocked as I read again his remarks on world peace not as some angelic ideal but as an achievable reality, by his vigorous argument that a violent, divided, disorderly world is not so inevitable as was commonly thought at the Cold War’s midpoint. Peruse the speech and see what you think: For me the true shock was the sheer reality of Kennedy’s thinking and his account of his thinking. There was no spectacle, no representation in it as I use this term.  

Kennedy, then with five months to live, said what he meant, and as you read the speech you are dead certain he meant what he said. How far those who purport to lead us have strayed, how pitiful their minds, how formidable the work of recovery when there will be a chance to begin it.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-great-taking-exposes-the-financial-end-game/

The Great Taking Exposes the Financial End Game

 

One of the very best exposés of the covert, very well-hidden, bellicose attempts to rob all of humanity – barring the miniscule number of psychotic individuals comprising the inimical opposition – of their material possessions and their ‘immaterial’ freedom, was published fairly recently. It is accurately titled The Great Taking (2023), and was written by David Webb, one of the most courageous and finance-savvy authors I have ever come across. He introduces the book on p. 1 in uncompromising terms: 

What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history. 

We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.

In the Prologue of the book Webb paints a richly textured, autobiographical picture of his provenance as finance guru, obviously with exceptional intelligence and, it turned out, courage. His knowledge of finance and economics has been the result of long years of work in the field, but he recalls the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, before the start of his professional career, when he was a child, and what he calls (witnessing) the subsequent “industrial collapse” of the US in Cleveland, where the family lived, culminating in “the complete destruction of everything we had known” (p. vii). Before he gets into the details of his life, he commences the Prologue with an indirect intimation of his reasons for writing the book (p. vi): 

Presently, as we well know, families are divided. People are experiencing a kind of isolation, perhaps not physically, but in spirit and mind. This has been made to happen through the dark magic of false news and narrative. This alone has been a great crime against humanity. The tactical purposes are many: to confuse and divide; to cause disengagement; to demoralize; to instill fears and to introduce false focal points for these fears; to manipulate the historical narrative; to create a false sense of the present reality; and ultimately, to cause people to acquiesce to what has been planned.

It is impossible to overstate the urgency of Webb’s message – everyone who reads this article should download the book (free) at the link provided above, or at least view the documentary based on it at CHD.TV, Rumble and (I don’t know for how long) YouTube. It makes for compulsive reading – a kind of non-fictional, real-world detective story, where you, the reader, are both the victim of the crime and the one looking over the detective’s shoulder at the evidence that he is digging up.

And is there persuasive evidence! In the ‘court of human justice’ – which should be established, if it does not exist – the primary documentary evidence adduced by Webb would be sufficient to incarcerate all of these culprits, if not condemn them to capital punishment (recalling that, etymologically, ‘capital,’ or ‘of the head’ in Latin, relates to one’s head, which was usually implicated in hanging and decapitation; it also echoes in ‘wearing a cap’). That Webb knows only too well how he has exposed himself (and his family) with this book – and earlier, in addresses where he shared his findings with audiences in Sweden and the US – is clear where he writes, against the backdrop of the two occasions where he presented his insights, together with evidence (p. xxx):

Less than a month after speaking at that conference in the U.S., a man contacted me who asked to meet in Stockholm. He had been the Chairman of a U.S. political party, and had a long career related to the defense establishment. He stayed at a hotel within a short walking distance from my apartment. We had lunch. He suggested a pint of ale. He asked me to explain the subject of which I had spoken at the conference. I went through the evidence and implications. The odd thing is that he then asked no questions about the subject. Instead, he fixed me in the eye and said, ‘Does your family know you are doing this?’ He said nothing more; that was the end of the meeting. I paid the bill and left. Perhaps it had been a ‘courtesy call.’ We all have to die sometime, and being assassinated must be among the most honorable ways to do it. One must have been doing something right! Made a difference! No classier way to die, really. I always wanted to be like John Lennon!

One could easily be fooled by Webb’s debonair shrugging-off of what could indeed have been a thinly veiled death threat from his dinner guest, but the fact remains that anyone who has the courage to oppose the psychopaths trying to hijack the world runs a tremendous risk, the more high-profile such opposition becomes. This is shown in the recent death ‘by suicide’ (yeah, right!) of Janet Ossebaard, who made the series, The Fall of the Cabal, and was involved in the unmasking of a network of pedophiles. The chances that she committed suicide, as reported, are pretty slim, I would say; she was evidently a thorn in the side of the murderous cabal.

Returning to Webb’s book, he tellingly recounts how, after 9/11, when he saw all the signs of a deteriorating US economy everywhere, concomitantly there were undeniable indications that the Bush administration was spreading disinformation on this, covering it up by disseminating spurious reports of American economic strength. 

In reality, however, the opposite was the case, symptomatic of which was the rapid shutting down of American manufacturing capacity and outsourcing it to China (which was obviously in on the deal). Nothing less than the (planned) loss of the American industrial base was occurring, while, accompanying this, Alan Greenspan was lauding the putative “productivity miracle” resulting from technology investment and development. It was a masterly performance of pulling the wool over Americans’ eyes. 

Simultaneously, the impression of prosperity was further solidified by projecting the illusion that there was no risk in borrowing money; the ability to repay loans was ostensibly guaranteed. Webb’s persistent, perspicacious sleuthing has uncovered the trail which reveals the steps taken years ago to prepare for the global economic collapse we are facing now. This included the 2008 financial collapse, of which he writes wryly (p. xxviii): 

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis it eventually became known that tens of trillions in losses in derivative positions were housed in the biggest banks, which were then bailed out with newly created money. The prime brokers would have failed, but to prevent that they were made banks and also received direct injections of created money from the Fed. No one was prosecuted. On the contrary, the perpetrators were rewarded with enormous bonuses. It was almost as if it had all gone according to plan.

If I understand Webb correctly, this is the strategy that has been repeated several times, at least since the second half of the 19^th century, resulting in the rich getting (much) richer and the poor getting (much) poorer. In brief, focusing on “Velocity of Money” (VOM) – “Velocity multiplied by Money Supply = GDP. Lower Velocity results in lower GDP” (p. 3) – Webb shows that, given the cyclical collapse of economies and empires in the 20th century, following the Great War, and the demonstrable benefit, despite all this hardship, of certain banking interests regarding control (and creation) of money, as well as of key institutions, the contemporary ‘heirs’ of all this control knew that a similar collapse would recur. They have been preparing for it. And they are determined to remain in control. Hence the supposed ‘Great Reset.’ 

 During the Dot-com bubble and bust period Webb studied the relationship between financial markets and the Federal Reserve bank, and realised that the latter was deliberately influencing the former by manipulating the money supply – that is, routinely printing more money than, correlatively, GDP growth. If money supply growth is more than GDP growth, a financial bubble develops, divorced from any real economic growth. By the end of 1999 the money supply had increased by more than 40% of GDP annually, signaling that VOM was imploding. 

Does this sound familiar? Since the start of the plandemic trillions of US dollars have been printed, accelerating the widening of the gap between money supply and real economic productivity, and thus hastening the financial collapse. This is what the cabal wants. After all, as Webb tersely remarks (p. 4), “Crises do not occur by accident; they are induced intentionally and used to consolidate power and to put in place measures, which will be used later.” Rather apocalyptically, he continues (pp 5-6):

VOM has now contracted to a lower level than at any point during the Great Depression and world wars. Once the ability to produce growth by printing money has been exhausted, creating more money will not help. It is pushing on a string. The phenomenon is irreversible. And so, perhaps the announcement of the ‘Great Reset’ has been motivated not by ‘Global Warming’ or by profound insights into a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ but rather by certain knowledge of the collapse of this fundamental monetary phenomenon, the implications of which extend far beyond economics.

Just how far becomes increasingly clear as one reads through this densely documented book – not a book with many pages, but a ‘big’ book as far as the importance of its theme (and its substantiation) is concerned. Given the number of reports and other sources which Webb cites, it is impossible to do justice here to all their details and their pertinence for Webb’s argument, that the so-called elites have spent years to prepare for a ‘super-cycle’ collapse that will necessitate the transition to a New World Order, with them still in control. I can therefore only lift out the salient parts of his argument. The first is neatly captured where he writes (p. 7):

There are now no property rights to securities held in book-entry form in any jurisdiction, globally. In the grand scheme to confiscate all collateral, dematerialization of securities was the essential first step. The planning and efforts began over half a century ago.

Not only was the CIA intimately involved in this “dematerialization” – which essentially meant moving from paper-based stock certificate archiving, to a computer-based system – but the CIA project leader was moved to a senior position in the banking sector without any banking experience. Webb raises the possibility, interrogatively, that the ensuing “paperwork crisis” was “manufactured” to justify the dematerialisation process, which paved the way for the present electronic archiving system worldwide.

Small wonder the epigraph for this chapter is a quote from Sun Tzu (which is just as applicable to today): “All warfare is based on deception.” This also covers the topic of the next chapter: “Security Entitlement,” of which Webb writes (p. 9): “The greatest subjugation in world history will have been made possible by the invention of a construct; a subterfuge; a lie: the ‘Security Entitlement.’”

And indeed, having informed one that, since their inception more than 400 years ago, these “tradable financial instruments” were recognised, by law, as personal property, he hits the reader with the news that this is not the case any longer. In practice, Webb explains, this implies that even if, wishing to avoid the complications of a car dealership possibly going bust after purchasing a car on an installment plan, one has bought it for cash, this will no longer work. Security entitlements have been changed legally to permit creditors of the bankrupt car dealership to seize your car as an asset that still belongs to the dealership. 

Webb sums this legal coup up as follows (p. 10): “Essentially all securities ‘owned’ by the public in custodial accounts, pension plans and investment funds are now encumbered as collateral underpinning the derivatives complex…” The “protected class” have legally stolen all our assets from us even before the anticipated (and engineered) global financial implosion occurs (if it does). Moreover, through additional legislation, this has been ‘harmonised’ to ensure that “secured creditors” be guaranteed that their assets be protected through “cross-border mobility of legal control of such collateral” (p. 16). Furthermore, ‘safe harbour’ provisions were made timeously to protect the ruling class (p. 32): 

In 2005, less than two years before the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, ‘safe harbor’ provisions in the U.S. Bankruptcy code were significantly changed. ‘Safe harbor’ sounds like a good thing, but again, this was about making it absolutely certain that secured creditors can take client assets, and that this cannot be challenged subsequently. This was about ‘safe harbor’ for secured creditors against demands of customers to their own assets.

It gets worse. It turns out that, if something called Central Clearing Parties – tasked with providing “clearing and settlement for trades” in a variety of financial transactions – is insufficiently capitalised to prepare for the eventuality of failing, and such a failure occurs, “it is the secured creditors who will take the assets of the entitlement holders. This is where it is going. It is designed to happen suddenly, and on a vast scale.” Webb goes on to disabuse readers of the belief that the so-called “Bank Holiday” ended the Great Depression (Chapter VIII), and of believing Ben Bernanke’s promise, in 2002, that the Federal Reserve “won’t do it again” (i.e. make its mistakes regarding what led to the Great Depression). Instead, he cautions (p. 46):

Is the Fed indeed ‘very sorry?’ Can one believe the promise that ‘we won’t do it again?’ They have studied the lessons of the past in detail; however, their purpose has been to prepare a new and improved global version for the spectacular end of this debt expansion super-cycle. That’s what this book is about.

Webb’s elaboration on The Great Deflation (Chapter IX) is a salutary reminder that this kind of thing has happened before, in the 1930s, albeit not on the scale that is being planned this time. In the Conclusion (p. 64) he drives his point home by confronting readers with the stark reality of what is happening; I feel like quoting the whole of this powerful chapter, but obviously that is redundant, because the book can (and should) be downloaded free via the link provided near the beginning of this article – please read it; it is imperative to read all the detail that cannot be supplied here. Here is a smattering of citations from it:

As a human being, should this not concern you? What part of the organized slaughter of vast numbers of innocent people can you find acceptable? Do you believe that you are special in some way, that you were being protected, or that you will be protected now?

 There has been abundant evidence of great evil at work in the world, throughout time and in our present time. Do you really wish to be ignorant of its existence and operation? (p.64.)

To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse. 

 Willful ignorance of the existence and operation of evil is a luxury even the wealthy can no longer afford. 

We are in the grip of the greatest evil humanity has ever faced (or refused to acknowledge, as the case may be). Hybrid war is unlimited. It has no bounds. It is global, and it is inside your head. It is never-ending. (p. 65.)

We have witnessed designs and real attempts to exert physical control over every person’s body, globally, and this is continuing…Why is this happening? 

 I will make a startling assertion. This is not because the power to control is increasing. It is because this power is indeed collapsing. The ‘control system’ has entered collapse. 

 Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse. This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive. And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation? (pp. 67-68.)

Never before has a system benefitted so few at the great expense of so many. Is this not inherently unstable and unsustainable? Physical control, as opposed to rule by deception, requires enormous energy. Can this be sustained while destroying all economies, and abusing all people, globally? They do not know how to ‘build back better.’ Look at their footprint around the world—the destruction, the economic devastation. (p. 68.)

Let me close with John F. Kennedy’s own words: 

Our problems are man-made;

therefore, they can be solved by man. (p. 70.)

In turn, I shall conclude with the last paragraph of Webb’s Prologue; let us take this to heart, spread the link to his book far and wide, and, to quote Naomi Wolf’s recent book’s title, ‘face the beast’ bravely and resolutely:

It is my hope that in making this unpleasantness explicit, and doing so at this time when developments are becoming more apparent, that awareness might spread, and that the worst might be averted. Perhaps this Great Taking might not be allowed to happen if we each hold up our end—even the investment bankers—and say forcefully: we will not allow this. It is a construct. It is not real.