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https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/29/chris-hedges-aaron-bushnells-divine-violence/

Aaron Bushnell’s Divine Violence

Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation was ultimately a religious act, one that radically delineates good and evil and calls us to resist.  

Aaron Bushnell, when he placed his cell phone on the ground to set up a livestream and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., resulting in his death, pitted divine violence against radical evil. As an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, he was part of the vast machinery that sustains the ongoing genocide in Gaza, no less morally culpable than the German soldiers, technocrats, engineers, scientists and bureaucrats who oiled the apparatus of the Nazi Holocaust. This was a role he could no longer accept. He died for our sins. 

“I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said calmly in his video as he walked to the gate of the embassy. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Young men and women sign up for the military for many reasons, but starving, bombing and killing women and children is usually not amongst them. Shouldn’t, in a just world, the U.S. fleet break the Israeli blockade of Gaza to provide food, shelter and medicine? Shouldn’t U.S. warplanes impose a no fly zone over Gaza to halt the saturation bombing? Shouldn’t Israel be issued an ultimatum to withdraw its forces from Gaza? Shouldn’t the weapons shipments, billions in military aid and intelligence provided to Israel, be halted? Shouldn’t those who commit genocide, as well as those who support genocide, be held accountable?

These simple questions are the ones Bushnell’s death forces us to confront.

“Many of us like to ask ourselves,” he posted shortly before his suicide, “‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

The coalition forces intervened in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds following the first Gulf War. The suffering of the Kurds was extensive, but dwarfed by the genocide in Gaza. A no-fly zone for the Iraqi air force was imposed. The Iraqi military was pushed out of the northern Kurdish areas. Humanitarian aid saved Kurds from starvation, infectious diseases and death from exposure. 

But that was another time, another war. Genocide is evil when it is carried out by our enemies. It is defended and sustained when carried out by our allies. 

Walter Benjamin — whose friends Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson committed suicide in 1914 to protest German militarism and the First World War — in his essay “Critique of Violence,” examines acts of violence undertaken by individuals who confront radical evil. Any act that defies radical evil breaks the law in the name of justice. It affirms the sovereignty and dignity of the individual. It condemns the coercive violence of the state. It entails a willingness to die. Benjamin called these extreme acts of resistance “divine violence.”  

“Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope,” Benjamin writes.

Bushnell’s self-immolation — one most social media posts and news organizations have heavily censored — is the point. It is meant to be seen. Bushnell extinguished his life in the same way thousands of Palestinians, including children, have been extinguished. We could watch him burn to death. This is what it looks like. This is what happens to Palestinians because of us.

The image of Bushnell’s self-immolation, like that of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Vietnam in 1963 or Mohamed Bouazizi, a young fruit seller in Tunisia, in 2010, is a potent political message. It jolts the viewer out of somnolence. It forces the viewer to question assumptions. It begs the viewer to act. It is political theater, or perhaps religious ritual, in its most potent form. Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh said of self-immolation: “To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people.”

If Bushnell was willing to die, repeatedly shouting out “Free Palestine!” as he burned, then something must be terribly, terribly wrong. 

These individual self-sacrifices often become rallying points for mass opposition. They can ignite, as they did in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, revolutionary upheavals. Bouazizi, who was incensed that local authorities had confiscated his scales and produce, did not intend to start a revolution. But the petty and humiliating injustices he endured under the corrupt Ben Ali regime resonated with an abused public. If he could die, they could take to the streets.

These acts are sacrificial births. They presage something new. They are the complete rejection, in its most dramatic form, of conventions and reigning systems of power. They are designed to be horrific. They are meant to shock. Burning to death is one of the most dreaded ways to die.

Self-immolation comes from the Latin stem immolāre, to sprinkle with salted flour when offering up a consecrated victim for sacrifice. Self-immolations, like Bushnell’s, link the sacred and the profane through the medium of sacrificial death.

But to go to this extreme requires what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “a sublime madness in the soul.” He notes that “nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and spiritual wickedness in high places.” This madness is dangerous, but it is necessary when confronting radical evil because without it “truth is obscured.” Liberalism, Niebuhr warns, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

This extreme protest, this “sublime madness,” has been a potent weapon in the hands of the oppressed throughout history.

The some 160 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 to protest Chinese occupation are perceived as religious rites, acts that declare the independence of the victims from the control of the state. Self-immolation calls us to a different way of being. These sacrificial victims become martyrs.

Communities of resistance, even if they are secular, are bound together by the sacrifices of martyrs. Only apostates betray their memory. The martyr, through his or her example of self-sacrifice, weakens and severs the bonds and the coercive power of the state. The martyr represents a total rejection of the status quo. This is why all states seek to discredit the martyr or turn the martyr into a nonperson. They know and fear the power of the martyr, even in death.

Daniel Ellsberg in 1965 witnessed a 22-year-old anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, douse himself with kerosene and light himself on fire — the flames shot 10 feet into the air — outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at The Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War. Ellsberg cited the self-immolation, along with the nationwide anti-war protests, as one of the factors that led him to release the Pentagon Papers.

The radical Catholic priest, Daniel Berrigan, after traveling to North Vietnam with a peace delegation during the war, visited the hospital room of Ronald Brazee. Brazee was a high school student who had drenched himself with kerosene and immolated himself outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse, New York to protest the war.

“He was still living a month later,” Berrigan writes. “I was able to gain access to him. I smelled the odor of burning flesh and I understood anew what I had seen in North Vietnam. The boy was dying in torment, his body like a great piece of meat cast upon a grill. He died shortly thereafter. I felt that my senses had been invaded in a new way. I had understood the power of death in the modern world. I knew I must speak and act against death because this boy’s death was being multiplied a thousandfold in the Land of Burning Children. So I went to Catonsville because I had gone to Hanoi.”

In Catonsville, Maryland Berrigan and eight other activists, known as the Catonsville Nine, broke into a draft board on May 17, 1968. They took 378 draft files and burned them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. Berrigan was sentenced to three years in a federal prison.

I was in Prague in 1989 for the Velvet Revolution. I attended the commemoration of the self-immolation of a 20-year-old university student named Jan Palach. Palach had stood on the steps outside the National Theater in Wenceslas Square in 1969, poured petrol over himself and lit himself on fire. He died of his wounds three days later. He left behind a note saying that this act was the only way to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had taken place five months earlier. His funeral procession was broken up by police. When frequent candlelit vigils were held at his grave at Olsany cemetery, the communist authorities, determined to stamp out his memory, disinterred his body, cremated it and handed the ashes to his mother. 

During the winter of 1989, posters with Palach’s face covered the walls of Prague. His death, two decades earlier, was lionized as the supreme act of resistance against the Soviets and pro-Soviet regime installed after the overthrow of Alexander Dubček. Thousands of people marched to the Square of Red Army Soldiers and renamed it Jan Palach Square. He won.

One day, if the corporate state and apartheid state of Israel are dismantled, the street where Bushnell lit himself on fire will bear his name. He will, like Palach, be honored for his moral courage. Palestinians, betrayed by most of the world, already look to him as a hero. Because of him, it will be impossible to demonize all of us. 

Divine violence terrifies a corrupt and discredited ruling class. It exposes their depravity. It illustrates that not everyone is paralyzed by fear. It is a siren call to battle radical evil. That is what Bushnell intended. His sacrifice speaks to our better selves.

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/29/patrick-lawrence-the-cia-in-ukraine-the-ny-times-gets-a-guided-tour/

The CIA in Ukraine —  The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour 

If you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never, brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.

And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados: Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly lost to it.

Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times. You have Chuck Schumer in Kyiv last week trying to show House Republicans that they should truly, really authorize the Biden regime to spend an additional $61 billion on its proxy war with Russia. “Everyone we saw, from Zelensky on down made this very point clear,” the Democratic senator from New York asserted in an interview with The New York Times. “If Ukraine gets the aid, they will win the war and beat Russia.”

Even at this late hour people still have the nerve to say such things.

You have European leaders gathering in Paris Monday to reassure one another of their unity behind the Kyiv regime—and where Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending NATO ground troops to the Ukrainian  front. “Russia cannot and must not win this war,” the French president declared to his guests at the Elysée Palace.

Except that it can and, barring an act of God, it will.

Then you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too late.”

Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels, is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like World War III.

What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry from The New York Times? Given the extent to which The Times has abandoned all professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.

The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61 billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text, numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story that goes with it is other than usual.  

Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I mean some: We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this piece. But what The Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells us more than had been previously made public.

Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions.

In a recent commentary I reflected on the mess The Times landed in when it published a thoroughly discredited p.o.s.—and I leave readers to understand this newsroom expression—on the sexual violence Hamas militias allegedly committed last Oct. 7. I described a corrupt but routinized relationship between the organs of official power and the journalists charged with reporting on official power, likening it to a foie gras farmer feeding his geese: The Times’s journalists opened wide and swallowed. For appearances’ sake, they then set about dressing up what they ingested as independently reported work. This is the routine.

It is the same, yet more obviously, with this extended piece on the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack. They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed, equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Entous and Schwirtz, it is time to mention, are not based in Ukraine. They operate from Washington and New York respectively. This indicates clearly enough the genesis of “The Spy War.” There was no breaking down of doors involved here, no intrepid correspondents digging, no tramping around in Ukraine’s mud and cold, unguided. The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.

Are we supposed to think these reporters found the underground bunker and all the other such installations by dint of their “investigation”—a term they have the gall to use as they describe what they did? And then they developed some kind of grand exposé of all the agency wanted to keep hidden? Is this it?

Sheer pretense, nothing more. Entous and Schwirtz opened wide and got fed. There appears to be nothing in what they wrote that was not effectively authorized, and we can probably do without “effectively.”  

There is also the question of sources. Entous and Schwirtz say they conducted 200 interviews to get this piece done. If they did, and I will stay with my “if,” they do not seem to have been very good interviews to go by the published piece. And however many interviews they did, this must still be counted a one-source story, given that everyone quoted in it reflects the same perspective and so reinforces, more or less, what everyone else quoted has to say. The sources appear to have been handed to Entous and Schwirtz as was access to the underground bunker. 

The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence, which goes by HUR. In this the piece reads like a difficult courtship that leads to a happy-at-last consummation. It took a long time for the Americans to trust the Ukrainians, we read, as they, the Americans, assumed the SBU was thick with Russian double agents. But the Ukrainian spooks enticed them with stacks and stacks of intelligence that seems to have astonished the CIA people on the ground and back in Langley.

So, a tale with two moving parts: The Americans helped the Ukrainians get their technology, methods, and all-around spookery up to snuff, and the Ukrainians made themselves indispensable to the Americans by providing wads of raw intel. Entous and Schwirtz describe this symbiosis as “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” Here is how a former American official put it, as The Times quotes him or her:

The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—our station there, the operation out of Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia. We couldn’t get enough of it.

As to omissions and commissions, there are things left out in this piece, events that are blurred, assertions that are simply untrue and proven to be so. What amazes me is how far back Entous and Schwirtz reach to dredge up all this stuff—even to the point they make fools of themselves and remind us of the Times’s dramatic loss of credibility since the current round of Russophobia took hold a decade ago.

Entous and Schwirtz begin their account of the CIA–SBU/HUR alliance in 2014, when the U.S. cultivated the coup in Kyiv that brought the present regime to power and ultimately led to Russia’s military intervention. But no mention of the U.S. role in it. They write, “The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Neat, granular, but absolutely false. The coup began  three days earlier, on Feb. 21, and as Vladimir Putin reminded Tucker Carlson during the latter’s Feb. 6 interview with the Russian president, it was the CIA that did the groundwork.

I confess a special affection for this one: “The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Entous and Schwirtz write. And later in the piece, this:

In one joint operation, a[n] HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

Wonderful. Extravagantly nostalgic for that twilight interim that began eight years ago, when nothing had to be true so long as it explained why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Donald Trump is No. 1 among America’s “deplorables.”   

I have never seen evidence of Russian government interference in another nation’s elections, including America’s in 2016, and I will say with confidence you haven’t, either. All that came to be associated with the Russiagate fable, starting with the never-happened hack of the Democratic Party’s mail, was long ago revealed to be concocted junk. As to “Fancy Bear,” and its cousin “Cozy Bear”—monikers almost certainly cooked up over a long, fun lunch in Langley—for the umpteenth time these are not groups of hackers or any other sort of human being: They are sets of digital tools available to anyone who wants to use them.

Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is The Times’s purpose in publishing this piece?

We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.

Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.

More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.  

To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.

Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media  and broadcasters.

Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.

The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”

We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep

Comment to article:

" Thank you again Patrick for revealing the hypocritical NYTs and its stupid support for this insane discreditable war. Just one question surely there are some intelligent people left even in the upper echelons of the CIA and US “intelligence” community (an oxymoronic term to be sure today) that must see the danger and insanity of prolonging this conflict? The fact that F16s being dispatched to Ukraine or even the ridiculous talk of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil literally means WWIII as you stated and likely nuclear war. Is this not being communicated to Zombie in Chief Biden and his thugs or are they just too stupid to see this for themselves and naively thinking this prolongation will get Biden back into the White House? "

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2024-02-23/fates-gaza-assange-sealed/

The fates of Gaza and Julian Assange are sealed together

Two legal cases posing globe-spanning threats to our most basic freedoms unfolded separately in Britain and the Netherlands this week. Neither received more than perfunctory coverage in western establishment media like the BBC. 

One was the last-ditch appeal of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in London against efforts by the United States to extradite him so he can be locked away for the rest of his life. 

Assange’s crime, according to the Biden administration, is that he published leaks exposing the systematic war crimes signed off on by the US and British establishments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The British government, perhaps not surprisingly, has assented to his extradition. 

The other case was heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Weeks after the World Court judges deemed it plausible that Israel was carrying out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the US client state was back in the dock on a separate matter. 

The judges have been asked by the United Nations General Assembly to provide an advisory opinion on whether Israel’s now-permanent occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian territories amounts to an illegal annexation of territory where it has established an apartheid regime. 

Separately, Israel also has to report back on whether it has adhered to the court’s earlier ruling that it cease activities that might amount to genocide. 

While the cases of Assange and Israel might appear to share little in common, they are, in fact, intimately connected – and in ways that have underscored the degree to which the West’s so-called “rules-based order” is being exposed as a hollow sham.

Media silence

One telling similarity is the limited media coverage each case has attracted despite the gravity of what is at stake. The BBC’s main evening news dedicated mere seconds to the first day of the Assange hearing, and near the end of its running order. 

If the US gets its way, the courts would effectively hand the White House the power to seize any publisher who shines a light on US state crimes, and then disappear them into its draconian incarceration system. 

The purpose of reclassifying investigative journalism as espionage is to further chill critical reporting and free speech. Any journalist contemplating taking on the US national security state would remember Assange’s cruel fate.

But in truth, much of the establishment media appears to need no such threats, as confirmed by the many years of obedient, near-non-existent reporting on Assange’s mistreatment by British and US authorities.

Meanwhile, if The Hague rules in its favour, Israel would be emboldened to accelerate its theft and colonisation of Palestinian land. The ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians would deepen, with the risk that current regional tensions could further escalate into a wider war.

A win for Israel would rip up the legal framework written after the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, stripping the weak and vulnerable of the protections supposed to be afforded to them by international humanitarian law. Conversely, it would signal to the strongest and most belligerent that they can do as they please. 

The legal clock would be set back eight decades or more.

Stinging hypocrisy

Yet strangely, both of these momentous cases – critical to the preservation of a modern liberal democratic order and the rule of law – have received barely a fraction of the interest and media attention dedicated to the death of Alexei Navalny, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In flaunting their concerns about Navalny, the western media have once again echoed rather than tackled the all-too-obvious hypocrisies of western governments. 

US President Joe Biden this week announced sanctions against Moscow for the targeting of the Russian political dissident. That is the very same Biden seeking, at the same time, to lock a dissident Australian journalist, Assange, out of sight for up to 175 years for bringing to light US war crimes. 

For years, the western media have paraded their horror over Navalny’s treatment and various attempts on his life, which they always ascribe to the Kremlin. But there has been barely an eyebrow raised over reported discussions by the CIA in 2017 plotting potential ways to abduct and assassinate Assange. 

Few have highlighted the fact that Assange has already suffered a stroke amid his persecution and the 15-year confinement imposed on him by US and UK authorities. He was too unwell to attend this week’s court hearings or even to watch the proceedings via a digital link from the court. 

The former UN special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, has long warned that Assange is being slowly “crushed” through isolation and psychological torture, with grave consequences for his health. 

Assange’s lawyers warned the High Court in London this week that there was a serious danger the US would add more charges once Assange was extradited, including ones warranting the death penalty. This threat to the life of a western journalist fell under the media radar. 

According to medical experts, and accepted by the first judge to hear the extradition case, Assange is in danger of committing suicide should he end up in the strict isolation of a US super-max prison. 

The media’s tears for Navalny sting with their hypocrisy.

Blank cheque

Another revealing similarity between the Assange and Israel cases is that both are in front of the courts only because Washington has dug in its heels and refused to resolve the legal issues, despite their deeply ominous implications.

Were the US to withdraw its extradition request, Assange could be set free immediately. The oppressive cloud hanging over the future of a free society, one that has the right and ability to hold its officials to account for wrongdoing, would instantly lift. 

Basic freedoms, such as those enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, are being shredded only because a consensus reigns among the US political class – from Democrats to Republicans – to snuff out such rights.

Similarly, were the US to insist that the mass slaughter of children in Gaza stop – more than 12,000 have died so far – Israel’s guns would fall silent immediately.

Were it to demand that Israel bring to an end its occupation of the Palestinian territories and 17-year siege of Gaza, and were the US to take a genuinely even-handed approach to peace talks, the World Court could set aside its hearings against Israel. Its opinion would be superfluous. 

Washington, whatever its protestations, has such power. It is the US and its allies supplying Israel with bombs and ammunition. It is the US and its allies providing the military aid and diplomatic cover that allows Israel to act as an attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East. 

Israel’s intransigence, its hunger for others’ land, its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, and its constant resort to military options would have to be abandoned, however unwillingly, were it not being written a blank cheque by the US.

Instead, the US cast a veto this week at the Security Council, blocking efforts to impose a ceasefire to end the genocide. The UK abstained. 

Also this week, US officials told the World Court’s judges they should not call for Israel to end its occupation anytime soon. In Orwellian fashion, decades of violent oppression by Israel and the illegal settlement of Palestinian land were characterised by the US as “Israel’s very real security needs”. 

Intimidation campaign

The cases are connected in yet another way. 

In the Assange case, the US demands an absolute global legal jurisdiction to hound critics, those who wish to pull away the veil of secrecy that shields western officials from accountability for their crimes. 

It wishes to silence those who would expose its lies, deceptions and hypocrisies. It hopes to be able to disappear into its prison system those seeking to enforce the West’s self-professed commitment to a democratic order and lawful behaviour. 

In parallel, and for similar reasons, Washington demands the opposite for itself and client states such as Israel. It insists on absolute global legal immunity, whatever they do. 

Its veto at the Security Council is wielded to that effect, and so is its campaign of intimidation against judicial authorities who entertain the fanciful notion that the same international law used to rein in enemies might constrain Washington and its allies.

When the ICJ’s sister court at The Hague, the International Criminal Court, sought to properly investigate the US for war crimes in Afghanistan, and Israel for atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories, Washington went on a rampage.

It placed financial sanctions on leading figures of the ICC and blocked entry to its investigators so they could not carry out their duties. Israel has similarly barred a series of UN special rapporteurs from entering the occupied Palestinian territories to report on human rights abuses there. 

Just as the persecution of Assange is meant to terrorise other journalists from considering holding US officials to account for their crimes, the bullying of the highest legal authorities on the planet is intended to send a clear message to national court systems. Certainly, that message appears to have been loudly received in London.

Information void

Another connection is perhaps the most significant. Assange once observed: “Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.”

It is only because of a void of real information – whether omitted by journalists for fear of upsetting powerful actors, or shielded from view by those same powerful actors’ self-serving secrecy policies – that states can persuade their publics to get behind wars and violent resource grabs.  

The only people to gain from these wars are a tiny, wealthy elite at the top of society. All too often it is ordinary people who pay the price: either with their lives or through damage to the parts of the economy on which the public depends.

The continuing proxy war in Ukraine – a Nato-funded and armed war with Russia, using Ukraine as the battlefield – is a perfect illustration. It is ordinary Ukrainians and Russians who are dying. 

Despite the West spurring on the bloodshed, European economies have been wrecked and further deindustrialised, while as a direct result of the fighting, yet another surge in consumer prices has hit the most vulnerable.

But a few – including major energy corporations and arms manufacturers, as well as their shareholders – have reaped a large windfall from the war. It has been precisely the same game plan in Gaza.

It is the job of the media to connect the dots for western publics by serving as a watchdog on power. But once again, they have failed in this, their most important professional and moral duty. The villains have yet again gotten away with their crimes.

It is the war criminals and genocide enablers in Washington who are free, while Assange is locked up in a dungeon and the people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.

Assange’s project was designed to reverse all that. It was about bringing the war criminals in western capitals to book through truth-telling and transparency. It was about pulling back the veil.

Were Assange free, and were the whistleblowers and people of conscience in the corridors of power emboldened rather than terrorised by his treatment, we might live in a society where our leaders dared not arm a genocide; and dared not conspire in the starvation of two million people.

This is why the fates of the people of Gaza and Julian Assange are so tightly sealed together.

....

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-02-20/bbc-panorama-hamas-genocide/

Feeble BBC Hamas ‘exposé’ achieved one thing: obscuring genocide

With 10,000s of Palestinians slaughtered, Panorama chose to hand the microphone over to the very military – Israel’s – doing the killing

Israel was put on trial for committing genocide in Gaza last month by the judges of the International Court of Justice. So far western governments have not only done nothing to intervene but are actively assisting in that slaughter. They have supplied arms and turned a blind eye to Israel’s denial of humanitarian aid. The people of Gaza are slowly being starved to death.

But it was at this moment, as the world watches in horror, that the BBC’s chief news investigation programme, Panorama, chose not to scrutinise that massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians but to hand the microphone over to the very military doing the killing.

On Monday it aired a programme titled “Hamas’s Secret Financial Empire” headed by reporter John Ware.

It leant heavily on Israel’s military spokesman, on documents that had almost certainly been supplied by Israeli military intelligence, on video footage from the Israeli military, and an Israeli survivor of the Hamas attack of October 7.

Ware and Panorama have worked together before, most notably on a special hour-long edition that doubtless equally delighted Israel.

Broadcast shortly before the 2019 general election, the programme served as little more than a hatchet job on Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that the then Labour leader had allowed antisemitism to run rampant in his party.

Serial failures in the programme were exposed, including by me at the time.

Quotes and interviews had been edited misleadingly, including one that implied an antisemitic incident had happened inside the Labour party when it had not.

Basic fact-checking had not been carried out, which led to the complete misrepresentation of a key incident the programme wrongly claimed as antisemitic.

The programme concealed the identities of those claiming to have suffered antisemitism in Labour, when most were in fact members of a highly partisan, pro-Israel group openly committed to the ousting of Corbyn as leader for his pro-Palestininan views. One had trained with the Israeli army.

Another unnamed, tearful interviewee, Ella Rose, had previously worked for the Israeli embassy, though the audience was not told. The programme also did not refer to the fact that she had admitted to being a confidante of an Israeli undercover agent, Shai Masot, who was later exposed trying to bring down a British government minister for his critical views of Israel – views far less critical than Corbyn’s.

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Preposterous premise

One might have assumed that, given this disastrous outing for Panorama by Ware and his producers, they would have been considered by the BBC as a very unwise pick indeed to follow up with an investigation into another issue so close to Israel’s heart. But such an assumption would be wrong.

Much as the Corbyn “investigation” presented a distorted picture of what was taking place in Labour, the latest Panorama “investigation” completely obscured the reality of what is taking place in Gaza. Not least, Monday’s audiences would have been barely aware that Israel is currently under investigation by the World Court after its panel of 17 judges accepted that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

The Panorama narrative, following the BBC’s usual script, suggested instead that this was simply another round of fighting in a long-standing “conflict” in which, the programme limply conceded, both sides are suffering.

The only non-official interviewed was an Israeli survivor of Hamas’s October 7 attack, a young woman present at the Nova festival. She felt betrayed that “people only look at the side of Hamas. We are invisible to them.”

Bizarrely, the BBC team took this patently preposterous view as the programme’s central premise. It was, said Ware, Hamas’s nefarious goal to “project itself as a resistance movement and Israel as a terrorist state”.

The BBC seemed to have forgotten that it was also the World Court, not just Hamas, seriously considering the idea that the Israeli military is flagrantly acting outside the laws of war. If, in the eyes of the BBC, a campaign of genocide does not constitute state terrorism – or worse – one has to wonder what does.

Former Foreign Office official Sir John Jenkins was given centre stage by Panorama to claim that Hamas, not the prolonged slaughter of children in Gaza, was fomenting the “delegitimisation of Israel”.

All of this served as the prelude to the programme’s efforts to delegitimise Hamas and any of its activities in creating a network of tunnels to resist Israel’s occupation and siege at a time when western capitals are more actively than ever assisting Israel in destroying Gaza.

If Israel posed no real threat to the people of Gaza, as the programme implied throughout, then Hamas apparently did not need to fortify the enclave to defend it from an Israeli attack. Its money could have been better used for the benefit of ordinary Palestinians.

Elephant in room

The elephant in the room was genocide. Ware and the BBC had to keep treating Israel’s slaughter of at least 30,000 Palestinians over the past four months as an aberration – a reaction to the unprecedented events of October 7 – rather than as an intensification of Israel’s well-documented abuse of the Palestinian people spanning over decades.

The reference to Hamas’s “secret” financial empire was meant to sound sinister. But, as the programme-makers struggled to hide, there is nothing secret about Hamas’s funding.

After all, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the flow of money to Hamas, wishing to keep the group just strong enough to ensure it could prevent the more compliant Palestinian Authority (PA), based in the West Bank, from re-establishing itself in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s goal – one he never concealed – was to keep the two rival Palestinian groups permanently feuding, the two territories split, and thereby undermine the case for any kind of Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Ware informed us that Hamas’s “financial empire” derived from various funding sources: directly from Iran and Qatar, but also from humanitarian aid provided by international donors. The programme concluded that these donors were effectively “subsidising Hamas’ war machine” by easing the economic burden on Hamas in providing – in so far as was possible given Israel’s siege – essentials such as food, water and power to Gaza’s civilians.

Predictably, Ware’s argument echoed one of the main claims made by Israel in its current campaign to intensify the genocide in Gaza by destroying the United Nations’ refugee body, UNRWA. The relief agency is the last lifeline to a population of 2.3 million people brought to the point of starvation by Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid.

Israeli officials have consistently implied that the Palestinian population of Gaza may justifiably be starved to death as the price to be paid to avoid any risk that some of that aid ends up in the hands of Hamas fighters. Such a denial of assistance is not only patently immoral but constitutes a war crime.

If journalists are ever brought to the Hague accused of complicity in the current genocide, there should surely be a place reserved in the dock for Ware and his BBC team for breathing credibility into this monstrous argument.

Context stripped out

Panorama’s central narrative was that Hamas had used parts of its revenues to build a network of resistance fortifications such as tunnels – money that, as Ware and his interviewees kept stressing, could have been spent on building schools and homes to aid the people of Gaza.

Ware omitted to mention, of course, that, more often than not, schools and homes actually needed rebuilding, not building, because Israel blew them up every few years with its bombs.

Again, all too predictably, the programme stripped out obvious context.

Hamas chose to build these fortifications, such as its extensive network of tunnels, because Israel is an offensive, occupying power that enjoys absolute control over Gaza’s borders, as well as its airspace and sea. Israel can bomb and invade Gaza any time it chooses. It can drag people off to “arrest” them – or take them hostage, as we would call it were the roles reversed.

Not only can it do those things, it did and does them regularly. And with complete impunity.

Pretending that Hamas had no reason to build a tunnel network, as Panorama does, is to rewrite history – to excise Israel’s decades of crimes against the Palestinians and their legitimate desire to struggle against that oppression.

It is to unthinkingly regurgitate Israel’s claim that these are simply “terror tunnels” rather than a way for Hamas to survive as a resistance organisation, as it is fully entitled to do under international law.

Hamas made it a priority to build a tunnel network to resist a violent, occupying army. Given limited resources and room to manoeuvre – after all, Gaza is a tiny territory and one of the most overcrowded places on the planet – Hamas had little choice but to move underground to avoid Israel’s sophisticated surveillance technology where it could build an arsenal of largely improvised, homegrown weapons.

Its historic popularity among ordinary Palestinians – at least compared to the supine, endlessly complicit PA in the West Bank – derives precisely from its refusal to submit to Israeli control. Panorama forgot to mention this too.

By contrast, and confounding Panorama’s thesis, the PA’s exclusive reliance on international diplomacy has won no tangible concessions from Israel – unless winning a reprieve from genocide, at least until this point, is considered such a concession.

Also inconveniently for Panorama, the PA’s standing with the Palestinian public continues to be dismal.

Proof of ‘wickedness’

Bizarrely, Ware was equally troubled by the fact that Hamas raised import taxes on the limited goods that Israel did allow into Gaza.

That is all the stranger given that the programme’s implicit – and entirely bogus – assumption is that Gaza is not under a belligerent Israeli occupation. Hamas, it therefore suggested, should have behaved more like a normal country.

But raising taxes on the import of goods is precisely what normal countries do. Why would Ware expect Hamas to behave differently?

And why would it be strange or sinister for it to use some of those revenues to build Gaza’s defences, as best it could, against an aggressive occupier?

Does Britain not also spend the money it raises from taxes to buy weapons and “subsidise its war machine”? And it does so, even though the UK is not under belligerent occupation and is unlikely to be invaded any time soon.

In dramatic fashion, Ware declared ominously: “We have obtained documents that Israeli intelligence say are from inside Hamas and shine a light on how it makes some of its millions.”

It is hard not to conclude that those words mean Panorama was fed those documents by the Israeli intelligence services. Nonetheless, with utter credulity, the programme treated the papers as though they were infallible proof of Hamas’ wickedness.

What they actually showed, assuming they are real, is that Hamas had gained a modest income stream from investments in Middle Eastern companies and ventures. Should Hamas not make investments to raise income, as countries and funds do around the world? And if not, why?

Moving money out of Gaza and investing it overseas seems eminently sensible given that Israel has so regularly laid waste to the enclave – and is doing so once again and on an unprecedented scale.

In similar credulous fashion, Ware accepted unquestioningly the claim that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was known to “hate Jews”. On what basis? Because a former Israeli security officer who proudly admitted that years ago he interrogated Sinwar for “between 150 and 180 hours” said so. Interrogation of Palestinians by Israel typically includes lengthy periods of torture.

Misused public funds

All of this was depressingly familiar. The BBC and Panorama rarely dig into issues that might reflect badly on Israel and risk a backlash of criticism, including from the British government. That toothlessness when a genocide is unfolding in Gaza is especially egregious.

But the BBC is not just overlooking that horrifying crime but using its resources – funds provided by British taxpayers – to actively obscure Israel’s campaign of genocide and implicitly rationalise it as warranted.

A programme whose thesis is that Hamas misused public funds for nefarious purposes is, paradoxically, doing the very thing it condemns. It has misused British taxes to make a entirely bogus case that provides cover for the slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/technocensorship_when_corporations_serve_as_a_front_for_government_censors

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, the government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

....

https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/02/27/the-axis-of-asymmetry-takes-on-the-rules-based-order/15/

The Axis of Asymmetry takes on the ‘rules-based order’

World War III is here, playing out asymmetrically in military, financial, and institutional battlefields, and the fight is an existential one. The western Hegemon, in truth, is at war against international law, and only ‘kinetic military action’ can bring it to heel.

The Axis of Asymmetry is in full swing. These are the state and non-state actors employing asymmetrical moves on the global chessboard to sideline the US-led western rules-based order. And its vanguard is the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah. 

Ansarallah is absolutely relentless. They have downeda $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone with just a $10k indigenous missile.

They are the first in the Global South ever to use anti-ship ballistic missiles against Israel-bound and/or -protecting commercial and US Navy ships. 

For all practical purposes, Ansarallah is at war with no less than the US Navy.

Ansarallah has captured one of the US Navy’s ultra-sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), the $1.3 million Remus 600, a torpedo-shaped underwater drone able to carry a massive payload of sensors. 

Next stop: reverse engineering in Iran? The Global South eagerly awaits, ready to pay in currencies bypassing the US dollar. 

All of the above – a maritime 21st-century remix of the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War – spells out that the Hegemon may not even qualify as a paper tiger, but rather as a paper leech.

Lula tells it as the Global South sees it 

Into the Big Picture – linked to the relentless ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza – steps a true leader of the Global South, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. 

Lula spoke in the name of Brazil, Latin America, Africa, BRICS 10, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South when he cut to the chase and defined the Gaza tragedy for what it is: a genocide. No wonder the Zionist tentacles across the Global North – plus its Global South vassals – went bonkers. 

The genocidals in Tel Aviv declared Lula as persona non grata in Israel. Yet Lula did not assassinate 29,000+ Palestinians – the overwhelming majority of whom were women and children.

History will be unforgiving: it’s the genocidals that will eventually be judged as personae non grata to all of humanity.

What Lula said represented BRICS 10 in action: this was obviously cleared before with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and, of course, the African Union. Lula spoke in Addis Ababa, and Ethiopia is now a BRICS 10 member.

The Brazilian president was extremely smart in timing his Gaza fact-check to be on the table during the G20 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Rio. Way beyond BRICS 10, what’s happening in Gaza is a consensus among the non-Western G20 partners – who are actually a majority. No one, though, should expect any serious follow-up inside a divided G20. The heart of the matter remains in the facts on the ground. 

Yemen’s fight for “our people” in Gaza is a matter of humanistic, moral, and religious solidarity – these are foundational tenets of the rising eastern “civilizational” powers, both domestically and in international affairs. This convergence of principles has now created a direct link – extrapolating to the moral and spiritual spheres – between the Axis of Resistance in West Asia and the Slavic Axis of Resistance in Donbass. 

Extreme attention should be paid to the timescale. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) forces and Russia have spent two hard-fought years in Novorossiya just to arrive at the stage where it becomes clear – based on the battlefield and cumulative facts on the ground – that “negotiations” mean only the terms of Kiev’s surrender.

In contrast, the job of the Axis of Resistance in West Asia has not even started. It’s fair to argue that its strength and full sovereign involvement have not been deployed yet (think Hezbollah and Iran). 

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, with his proverbial subtlety, has hinted there’s, in fact, nothing to negotiate on Palestine. And if there would be a return to any borders, these would be the 1948 borders. The Axis of Resistance understands that the whole Zionist Project is unlawful and immoral. But the question remains how to throw it, in practice, into the dustbin of History?

Possible – avowedly optimistic – scenarios ahead would include Hezbollah taking possession of the Galilee as a step toward the eventual retaking of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Yet the fact remains that even a united Palestine does not have the military capability to reconquer stolen Palestinian lands. 

So the questions posed by the overwhelming majority of the Global South that stands with Lula may be: Who else, apart from Ansarallah, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, will join the Axis of Asymmetry in the fight for Palestine? Who would be willing to come to the Holy Land and die? (After all, in Donbass, it’s only Russians and Russophones who are dying for historically Russian lands)

And that brings us to the way towards the endgame: only a West Asian Special Military Operation (SMO), to the bitter end, will settle the Palestinian tragedy. A translation of what happens across the Slavic Axis of Resistance: “Those who refuse to negotiate with Lavrov, deal with Shoigu.”

The menu, the table, and the guests

That out-of-his-depth closet neocon, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, let the cat out of the bag when he actually defined his much cherished “rules-based international order”: “If you’re not on the table, you are on the menu.”

Following his own hegemonic logic, it’s clear that Russia and the US/NATO are on the table while Ukraine is on the menu. What about the Red Sea? The Houthis defending Palestine against US–UK–Israel are clearly on the table, while Western vassals supporting Israel in a maritime way are clearly on the menu. 

And that’s the problem: the Hegemon – or, in Chinese scholarly terminology, “the crusaders” – have lost the power to place the name cards on the table. The main reason for this authority collapse is the build-up of serious international meetings sponsored by the Russia–China strategic partnership during the past two years since the start of the SMO. It’s all about sequential planning, with long-term targets clearly outlined. 

Only civilizational states can do that – not plutocratic neoliberal casinos.   

Negotiating with the Hegemon is impossible because the Hegemon itself prevents negotiations (see the serial blocking of ceasefire resolutions at the UN). Additionally, the Hegemon excels in instrumentalizing its client elites across the Global South via threats or kompromat: see the hysterical reaction of Brazilian mainstream media to Lula’s verdict on Gaza. 

What Russia is showing the Global South, two years after the start of the SMO, is that the only path to teach a lesson to the Hegemon has to be kinetic, or “military-technical.”

The problem is no nation-state can compare to nuclear/hypersonic/military superpower Russia, in which 7.5 percent of the government’s budget is dedicated to military production. Russia is and will remain on a permanent war footing until Hegemon’s elites come to their senses – and that may never happen.

Meanwhile, West Asia’s Axis of Resistance is watching and learning, day after day. It’s always crucial to keep in mind that for all the resistance movements across the Global South – and that also includes, for instance, West Africans against French neo-colonialism – the geopolitical fault lines could not be starker.

It’s a matter of the collective West versus Islam; the collective West versus Russia; and sooner rather than later, a substantial part of the West, even reluctantly, versus China.

The fact is we are already immersed in a World War that is both existential and civilizational. As we stand at the crossroads, there is a bifurcation: either escalation towards overt “kinetic military action,” or a multiplication of Hybrid Wars across several latitudes. 

So it’s up to the Axis of Asymmetry, cool, calm, and collected, to forge the underground corridors, passages, and trails capable of undermining and subverting the US-led, unipolar, rules-based international order. 

....

https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/26/whitney-webb-manufacturing-consent-the-border-fiasco-and-the-smart-wall/

Manufacturing Consent — The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”

....Agenda 2030 and Global Policing Goals

The bipartisan consensus around an Anduril-built “smart wall” likely has its roots in the same global agenda that is spurring the rapid implementation of biometric entry/exit systems at ports of entry throughout the Western world. For instance, this is the year where the European Union’s biometric entry/exit system is due to launch, whereby travelers crossing the EU’s new “digital border” system – whether terrestrial or aerial – will have to provide their fingerprints and submit to facial scans if they wish to enter an EU member state. Despite claims that the “digital border” would facilitate easier travel and reduce wait times, current estimates reveal that the new system is likely to take almost ten times longer per entry. The UK, despite leaving the EU, is also poised to “make its borders digital” by 2025, i.e. next year, with Canada implementing similar policies.

In the US, the move toward the “real ID” system, which is to come into force in 2025, will see biometric collection in the US become a requisite for domestic flights and any other “official purposes” that the DHS Secretary can unilaterally determine require a “real ID.” The “real ID” also provides favorable provisions for digital IDs, such as digital drivers licenses (such as the “Florida smart ID” being piloted in Ron DeSantis-governed Florida) and other “mobile digital documents and digital cards.” Elsewhere in the US, in airports, the push for digital IDs and facial biometric scans continues to rapidly advance.

It is quite obvious that the “smart wall” being built on the US’ southern and northern borders is intended to be part of the same “digital border” system that DHS has been designing and gradually implementing for most of the past 20 years. For instance, CBP currently utilizes the same biometric facial comparison technology used at numerous land, sea and air ports of entry throughout the country and plans to continue to expand its use nationwide. As noted above, Anduril’s towers or its affiliated drones could easily be equipped with facial recognition or other related technologies, while official terrestrial port of entries are already using the same biometric system being rolled out at American airports. In addition, many of those seeking to cross the southern border are being onboarded to the CBP One app, which CBP initially claimed would result in a “safe, orderly and humane” border processing when it was launched in January 2023. That app also collects biometric information from applicants of certain nationalities, a functionality CBP will likely expand in the future as reliance on its app increases.

The apparent global coordination of biometric entry/exit systems is no coincidence, as it is a policy initiative deeply connected to the UN’s Agenda 2030, or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, it is tied to the implementation of SDG 16, which contains provisions for digital identity systems, among other things. The UN has chosen the global law enforcement entity Interpol as its “implementing partner” of SDG 16, a decision that ultimately spawned Interpol’s SDG-aligned Global Policing Goals (GPGs). The GPGs were approved and adopted by Interpol’s 196 member countries in 2017. As previously noted by Unlimited Hangout, Interpol is a dangerous organization to trust with the vast power these goals and their associated policies will bestow upon them, as they operate as a “pay-to-play” organization and have been embroiled in several significant corruption scandals.

One of the GPGs, GPG No. 2, is to “promote border security worldwide.” Interpol specifically notes that the implementation of this goal will involve establishing “advanced global standards for an intelligence-led border management, including standards for border surveillance, border checks and related equipment.” These standards, they continue, “should be underpinned by technology and digital advancement and risk analysis.” Elsewhere, they discuss how the implementation of this goal will also involve “managing and sharing biometric data, including with the use of the Interpol’s Biometric Hub [“a state-of-the-art system for identifying criminals˝] and other hubs.” Interpol has teamed up with biometric digital ID companies Idemia and Onfido as part of this effort. Both of those companies facilitated vaccine passports during Covid-19 and are currently helping to create digital driver’s licenses in some US states.

Interpol is mainly funded by the European Commission and the governments of Germany, the US and Canada, all of which – as noted above – are implementing the same biometric entry/exit systems on similar timelines. However, many other Interpol member countries are similarly ramping up their adoption of biometric, digital IDs for foreign travel and domestic use, including the West’s ostensible adversary countries, like Russia and China. The vast majority of the world’s countries, whether West or East, have signed onto Interpol’s GPGs and the UN’s SDGs, both of which push for comprehensive, biometric digital IDs interfaced with a digital currency wallet (whether a CBDC or private sector-issued equivalent). Globally, these agendas are being rolled out rapidly, forming the foundation for the next era of highly centralized global governance.

However, in some countries, such as the United States, where a significant portion of the population has become wary of digital IDs and digital, programmable money, unprecedented efforts are being made to sell these globalist policies via right-leaning talking points in contrast to years prior. For instance, digital, programmable money is being developed in the US, not as a CBDC, but a mix of regulated stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits. Even global carbon markets are being framed, not as being about climate change, but about innovation and profiting off a new class of assets. Now, it seems, the biometric “digital border” tied to the UN’s SDGs – a key component of the infrastructure for digital ID – is being sold mainly to the populist right and being rolled out under the guise of tackling illegal immigration. Not unlike Israel’s “smart wall,” these walls can be “turned off” when a crisis needs to be manufactured and, just like so much else, used to sell the same agendas that are pushing us all into a global, public-private panopticon.