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https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/31/chris-hedges-a-genocide-foretold/

A Genocide Foretold

The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.  

There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians. 

Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.

Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide —  in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.

Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000. 

Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.

“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”

Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.

These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians. 

The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. 

Zionist leaders are open about their goals.

Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”

The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. 

The specifics are different. The process is the same.

We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.

The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence. 

This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain. 

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.

The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/03/31/liberal-finger-wagging-at-netanyahu-is-a-phony-cynical-charade/  

Liberal Finger-Wagging At Netanyahu Is A Phony, Cynical Charade

We’re seeing more and more of the cynical, obnoxious plan of the western liberal political-media class to try and pin the blame for the entire multinational genocidal campaign in Gaza solely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There is growing opposition to Netanyahu’s war machine,” reads a new tweet by Senator Bernie Sanders. “More Americans than ever are standing up against this horrific war in Gaza, which is causing tremendous suffering amongst the Palestinian people.”

This is on the same day we learned that the Biden administration has quietly signed off on the delivery of billions of dollars worth of 2,000-pound bombs and warplanes for Israel to use in its ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza. There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about “Netanyahu’s war” this far into a US-backed genocide. This is Biden’s war as much as it is Netanyahu’s — and Sanders supports Biden.

Sanders has been at this schtick for a while now, working to insert the idea into public consciousness that what we are seeing from Israel today is some kind of fluke aberration in the apartheid state’s history and not the obvious fulfillment of its inbuilt nature. The other day he publicly griped that “the Israel of today is not the Israel of Golda Meir,” falsely suggesting that there was once some kind of golden age in which Israel was not an abusive ethnostate built on ethnic cleansing, oppression, racism and injustice.

In an Al Jazeera article published earlier this month titled “This is not ‘Netanyahu’s war’, it is Israel’s genocide,” Ahmad Ibsais berates Sanders and his fellow “progressive” senator Elizabeth Warren for this pernicious narrative control campaign, saying that “Blaming Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open celebration of war crimes on Netanyahu alone is nothing but a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders and Warren.”

Ibsais writes the following:

“By blaming Netanyahu for the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, past and present, they keep alive the lie that Israel was built on progressive ideals, rather than ethnic cleansing.

“By blaming Netanyahu, they whitewash their seemingly unconditional support for a state blatantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“By blaming Netanyahu, and casting Israel as a progressive, well-meaning state that would respect international humanitarian law but is currently taken over by a bad leader, they are absolving themselves — and the US at large — of complicity in Israel’s many war crimes.”

But that’s exactly what the Democratic Party has been trying to do in recent weeks. A couple of weeks ago Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drew the ire of the Israeli right wing with a speech on the Senate floor saying that Netanyahu has become a “major obstacle to peace” who has allowed “his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” calling for new elections to oust the prime minister.

In a recent article for Jewish Currents titled “Chuck Schumer and Democrats’ New Line on ‘Netanyahu’s War’,” Alex Kane picks apart the fallacious reasoning behind this trend:

“But despite Democrats’ repeated suggestion that Netanyahu is the impetus for Israel’s war, political analysts say that in reality the prime minister’s actions are in step with Israel’s political mainstream. ‘Schumer is operating in this fantasy that if you get rid of Netanyahu, you might be able to get somebody else who’s more moderate who could then save the relationship between the US and Israel under the pretense of support for progressive values and democracy,’ said Omar Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst. But this narrative ignores how Israeli politicians almost across the board agree with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as do the majority of Israelis. Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the Israeli opposition, supports the ongoing assault, as does war cabinet member Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and the man who, according to polling, would become prime minister if Israel held elections today…

“Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior.”

Portuguese author and journalist Bruno Maçães recently tweeted that “One possible outcome of this is 200,000 Palestinians will be dead, Gaza will be destroyed, hundreds of thousand will be expelled and everyone will blame Netanyahu and move on.”

Would it surprise you if this happened? Would it not be entirely in keeping with what we have been seeing from the US empire in recent years? Would it be very different from what happened after the US destroyed Iraq, blamed George W Bush and Dick Cheney, and then moved on without anyone having been held responsible or any meaningful policy changes implemented?

That’s the entire goal here. The empire managers want nothing to change about Israel, nothing to change about Washington’s relationship with Israel, nothing to change about US foreign policy or the US war machine in general, and for the mainstream public to be thrown some cognitive bone to chew on while the amnesia of the daily news cycle sets in.

They want everyone to pin all the blame for the Gaza genocide on Netanyahu, but this is not all the fault of Netanyahu. It’s the fault of the entire Israeli state. It’s the fault of Joe Biden. It’s the fault of the Democrats. It’s the fault of all the Israel supporters on Capitol Hill. It’s the fault of the western press. It’s the fault of the Israel lobby. It’s the fault of the unelected empire managers in US government agencies. It’s the fault of the entire US empire and all its imperial member states like Australia, the UK, the EU, and Canada.

Gaza is proof that the US empire cannot be permitted to exist any longer, and they’re trying to get everyone to ignore this fact and blame the whole thing on one guy. Don’t let them do this. Don’t let them deceive you into losing sight of what they’ve done.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/can-bibi-netanyahu-stopped/5853475

Can Bibi Netanyahu be Stopped?

Recent developments suggest that Israel’s full-scale ground offensive in Rafah could take place at any time. What we have been told by Israeli officials, is that the operation will require the evacuation of the city, presumably so the IDF can inflict the same level of destruction on Rafah as was inflicted on Khan Yunis and Gaza City. Once the ground forces are deployed, the Palestinians will be forced to flee to the Egyptian border where they will seek refuge from the Israeli onslaught. What happens next is uncertain but –given the numerous meetings between Israeli and Egyptian officials and their respective Intel chiefs– we think there may be an agreement to allow over a million Palestinian refugees to cross the border into Egypt. Here are a few recent articles suggesting that Egypt may be getting paid to participate in Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation.

1– Egypt signs expanded $8 billion loan deal with IMF, Reuters

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday it would increase its current loan programme with Egypt by $5 billion…. The new agreement is an expansion of the $3 billion, 46-month Extended Fund Facility that the IMF struck with Egypt in December 2022….

Egypt is also seeking a separate loan from the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facility which promotes climate transition financing. Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said that loan would be $1.2 billion

2– EU announces €7.4 billion aid package for Egypt as concerns mount over migration, Le Monde

The European Union on Sunday, March 17 announced a €7.4 billion aid package for cash-strapped Egypt as concerns mount that economic pressure and conflicts in neighboring countries could drive more migrants to European shores….

The aid package includes both grants and loans over the next three years for the Arab world’s most populous country, according to the EU’s mission in Cairo….

The deal comes amid growing concerns that Israel’s looming ground offensive on Gaza’s southernmost town of Rafah could force hundreds of thousands of people to break into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Israel-Hamas war, now in its sixth month, has pushed more than 1 million people to Rafah.

3– World Bank Aid Pushes Egypt’s Global Bailout to Over $50 Billion, Yahoo finance

The World Bank on Monday said it would provide Egypt with over $6 billion, boosting the global bailout for the North African nation’s struggling economy to more than $50 billion in the past few weeks….

The announcement comes a day after the European Union pledged around $8 billion in aid, loans and grants. Those funds followed a newly-expanded $8 billion International Monetary Fund program that was unveiled hours after authorities enacted the nation’s biggest rate hike ever and devalued the currency for the fourth time since early 2022.

Obviously, heaping billions of dollars of loans on a debt-ridden nation whose moribund economy shows no sign of a rebound, is not normal procedure. One can only conclude that the money is being offered for some alternate purpose, that is, to deal with the surge of refugees that will soon be pouring over the border. But, if these articles have not yet convinced readers that the Egyptian government is in cahoots with Israel, then perhaps this March 23 column will:

EU sidelines parliament to rapidly send €1bn to Egypt, euobserver

The European Commission is officially sidelining the European Parliament’s scrutiny role when it comes to €1bn of loans being sent to Egypt. The announcement came ahead of a €7.4bn cash-for-migration-control agreement with Cairo, posing tricky questions for an increasingly frustrated European Parliament.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says, in a letter dated 15 March and seen by EUobserver, that the urgency of wiring the money to Cairo requires her to bypass the assembly. She has since decided to trigger article 213 in the EU treaty, allowing the European Commission to go at it alone.

“For reasons of utmost urgency and highly exceptionally, the recourse to of Article 213 TFEU is considered as appropriate legal basis for the first operation of EUR 1 billion,” she writes, in a letter sent to European Parliament president, Roberta Metsola..

Bibi’s Endgame: A Ghastly Humanitarian Crisis Followed by Forced Expulsion

Why would the president of the European Commission feel such an unbearable sense of urgency over the dodgy finances of a failed state in east Africa? And why did Ms. von der Leyen chose to ignore the limits of her legal authority by wiring the funds to Cairo without first acquiring the approval of the assembly?

If all of this seems rather unusual, it’s because it is. Political powerbrokers across the West are doing whatever they can to assist Israel in its plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Ms. von der Leyen is just one of the contributors to this malign project but there are others as well. The point we are trying to make is that Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the herding of its population towards the southern border is part of a broader plan that has many moving parts and many powerful players. Israeli leaders know what it takes to carry off an operation like this because they have conducted similar operations in the past as this excerpt from an article at Counterpunch helps to illustrate:

Ethnic cleansing was and remains integral to the Zionist project…

In order to create a Jewish state in Palestine the Zionists had to create an overwhelming Jewish majority…. Nazi Germany helped by driving out Jews from Europe… but there still existed no realistic prospect anytime soon of creating an overwhelming Jewish majority by attracting Jewish settlers….

Israel’s first round of ethnic cleansing began in 1947, intensified in 1948, and continued into 1949. Altogether, 720,000 Palestinians, some eighty percent of the Palestinians in the territories occupied by Jewish/Israeli forces, were expelled during this period; this amounted to half the Arab population of mandatory Palestine.

Israel engaged in a second round of ethnic cleansing during and after the capture in June 1967 of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem… Palestinians who were present in the Occupied Territories but were not counted in an Israeli census after the June War were denied the right of residence in Israel…. by these and other means, Israel had ethnically cleansed one-fifth of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

In the decades following the June 1967 War, Israel made life increasingly difficult for the Palestinians in the occupied territories…. Between 1970 and 2000 the population of the West Bank and Gaza tripled, increasing from one million to three million. Inside its de factor borders, Israel now contained 4.1 million Palestinians and 5 million Jews. This was ringing alarm bells. Something had to be done about this…. Postscripts on Israel: October 7 Surprise?, M. Shahid Alam, Counterpunch

What we can infer from this excerpt is that the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza is not aimed at quashing terrorism but at changing the demographic make-up of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The fact is that one cannot preserve a Jewish-majority state without a clear Jewish majority. By annexing the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel will dramatically increase the number of Arabs within its borders putting that core principle at risk. Here’s more from the same article:

Israel’s Jewish population grew tenfold between 1948 and 2023, increasing from 717,000 to 7,181,000. Nearly half the world’s Jewish population now lives in Israel.

Yet Israel has not been winning the demographic race. In 2023, the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews in historic Palestine—7.4 million Palestinians versus 7.1 million Jews….
Postscripts on Israel: October 7 Surprise?, M. Shahid Alam, Counterpunch

Israel’s military operation in Gaza is merely a response to a demographic problem that has bedeviled Israeli leaders since the inception of the Jewish state. In light of that fact, we can see that Hamas is just the pretext that’s being used to conceal the motive driving the hostilities. In truth, it wouldn’t matter if the Palestinians were Hispanic, Asian or Scots-Irish. If their numbers threatened to exceed those of the Jewish majority, their fate would be the same.

Naturally, the de facto annexation of additional Arab territory poses a numerical challenge for which there is ultimately only one solution; ethnic cleansing. And while the formulation has been repeatedly repackaged to sound less oppressive, (transfer, evacuation, resettlement, voluntary migration) the practice remains the same. (Ethnic Cleansing def– The mass expulsion or killing of members of one ethnic or religious group in an area by those of another. Oxford) Here are a few recent iterations on the same theme:

In a document from October 17, 2023, Israels’ Intelligence Ministry, examined the option of ‘evacuating’ the Gazans to the Sinai, and claimed that this would “yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel.”….

An Israeli think tank, the Misgav Institute, also made a similar pitch. It argued that the conditions in Gaza offered “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip and its coordination with the Egyptian government.”….

Jonathan Adler, a Hurford Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on December 31, 2023, asserts that “today there is a growing momentum [in Israel] to carry out mass transfer—with American support.” Some Israeli politicians and officials—including a former Brigadier General and a former Israeli ambassador to the United States—“suggest that Palestinians should flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsula…

On October 20, the White House asked Congress for funds to “address potential needs of Gazans fleeing to neighboring countries.” If the White House was preparing to finance the ethnic cleansing of Gazans, it is unlikely that this happened without prior discussions with Israel and Egypt. Did these discussions happen before October 7?… Counterpunch

Clearly, what Israel wants a Palestine without the Palestinians, and in the last six months they have done everything in their power to achieve just that. Now that the goal is within their grasp, they will do anything –even jeopardize relations with their most important ally– to reach their objective. That is why on Wednesday “Netanyahu said that Israel “had no choice” but to move into Rafah as the country’s “very existence is on the line.” In truth, Israel is in no danger at all, Netanyahu is merely trying to conceal the real aim of Israel’s ground offensive which is to exile over a million Palestinians into Egypt. According to a report in CNN:

Netanyahu had earlier told the delegation that displaced Palestinians in Gaza could “just move” out of Rafah and “move with their tents.”

“Move with their tents”?

So, now, Netanyahu is admitting what his critics have been saying from the very beginning, that Israel’s military onslaught is actually an ethnic cleansing operation aimed at pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza and into tent cities in the Sinai Desert?

It appears so, and it also looks like Egypt is going along with the plan. According to the Guardian:

Egypt has begun building an enclosed area ringed with high concrete walls along its border with Gaza that appears intended to house Palestinians fleeing a threatened Israeli assault on the southern city of Rafah.

Photos and videos released by the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights (SFHR), a monitoring group, show workers using heavy machinery erecting concrete barriers and security towers around a strip of land on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing….

SFHR said on social media that the videos showed efforts to “establish an isolated area surrounded by walls on the border with the Gaza Strip, with the aim of receiving refugees in the event of a mass exodus”. Egypt building walled enclosure in Sinai for Rafah refugees, photos suggest,Guardian

Everything from the clearing of land in the Sinai desert to the issuance of humongous loans to Egypt, to the secret meetings of Intel chiefs in Doha (CIA, Mossad, Egypt’s General Intelligence) to the blustery pronouncements of Israeli officials, to the frenetic leapfrogging of Anthony Blinken from Jedda to Jerusalem to Doha to Cairo and back again, suggests that we are about to begin the final phase of Israel’s malignant ethnic cleansing operation. Here’s how Johnathan Adler at the Carnegie Endowment summed it up:

….. it is becoming increasingly clear that the war is in pursuit of a second goal: the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Israeli politicians and officials from the Israeli defense establishment have called for a second Nakba and urged the military to flatten Gaza. Some suggest that Palestinians should flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsula, including former Brigadier General Amir Avivi and the former Israeli ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon.

Avivi and Ayalon insist that evacuating Palestinians out of Gaza is simply a humanitarian measure, protecting civilians while Israel conducts its military operations. But other reports suggest that Palestinians would be permanently resettled outside of Gaza, in an act of ethnic cleansing….

Today’s plans for mass transfer thus bear a closer historical resemblance to the 1948 Nakba and its aftermath. After 200,000 Palestinian refugees had fled from historic Palestine to Gaza by March 1949, the United States pushed for a UN proposal to resettle tens of thousands in the Sinai desert….

Over the past few weeks, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has resisted Israeli and American pressure to allow Palestinians to evacuate through Rafah into the Sinai… But in exchange for accepting Palestinians from Gaza, the US has reportedly offered Cairo economic incentives at a time when Egypt faces an extreme debt crisis…. South into the Sinai: Will Israel Force Palestinians Out of Gaza?, Carnegie Endowment

In all probability, there’s nothing that can be done to prevent Israel’s flattening of Rafah or the inevitable eviction of the Palestinians from their last refuge. The only hope is that the international community will condemn Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza by imposing painful economic, political and military sanctions that will last until the land is returned to its rightful owners. That is not sufficient restitution for the death and suffering the Palestinians have endured over the last half century, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/29/patrick-lawrence-imperium-decline-on-the-way-to-fall/

Imperium: Decline on the Way to Fall

 

I just read a most remarkable piece in The Seattle Times—remarkable for its bluntly nihilistic candor. The headline atop Ron Judd’s August 2021 essay for The Times’s Pacific NW Magazine gives a good idea of the writer’s point: “The decline of American civilization.” And the subhead: “There’s more bad TV than ever; it’s available everywhere; and it’s making us fat, lazy, selfish and stupid.” 

News sometimes seems to travel slowly in these parts, but never mind that. If Judd’s observations were pithy three years ago, they have the gravitational pull of Jupiter as we read them today. Here is Judd bringing home his thesis:

Based on our current state of national dysfunction, cultural warfare and garden-variety public psychosis—more on this after a few commercial messages urging you to ask your doctor about a new wonder drug, Byxfliptaz—it’s undeniable that the mainstream American today possesses all the crisp, mental faculties of a Jell–O salad left too long out in the sun at an August picnic at Marymoor Park.

Now does not seem the time for bad TV or brains gone to Jell–O. In consequence of a rapid succession of events, none appearing related to any other, the collapse of America’s seven and some decades of hegemony is dramatically accelerating. Some astute observers now think the “international rules-based order,” as the policy cliques call the projection of American power, is already done for. I suppose the choice lies between accepting this reality and watching bad TV, and O.K., the latter proves tempting to a surprising many. 

Awake, O sleepers, and arise from the dead! 

On the eastern flank of the Atlantic world the imperium’s managers have lost a war they were confident they would win when they started it with the coup they arranged in Kiev a decade ago. The West’s wild miscalculation in Ukraine leaves Russia the victor, and it would be hard to overstate the consequences of this blow for American power and prestige. 

Added to this, the policy cliques’ years-long effort to isolate Russia, cripple its economy and destroy the value of its currency has manifestly failed. As measured by the growth rate of gross domestic product, the Russian economy is handily outperforming America’s and Europe’s. With ruble-denominated trade increasing at a startling pace, the currency is stable. Moscow is now a leading force as the non–West, a.k.a. the Global South, coalesces behind a multipolar order based on legally binding principles of sovereignty, the U.N. Charter and other multilateral documents and declarations. 

Some readers may have taken little notice, but the new leaders in Niger, who came to power in a coup against the nation’s pro–Western president last July, have just 86’ed the U.S. military, which has long maintained a $250 million outpost in northeastern Niger that the Pentagon considers essential to Washington’s effort to project power across West Africa and the Sahel. So much for the “full-spectrum dominance” of the neoconservatives’ turn-of-the-century dreams.

Saving the worst for last, the United Nations Human Rights Council just received a 25–page report and a 12–minute video summary from its special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” You can read all the blurry New York Times apologias you want about the Gaza crisis. It remains that in the eyes of the world’s majority, the U.S. is sponsoring a mad-dogs regime as it exterminates an entire people. The price the imperium will pay for this in years to come will be steep.

Turn off the tube and think about these developments. To take them together, as we should, they tell us two things. One, a new world order composed of multiple poles of power, however strenuously Washington seeks to undermine it, is breaking out all over and gains momentum as we speak. Two, Washington’s policy cliques, stupidly unwilling to accept 21^st century realities, are likely to act with increasing desperation as U.S. primacy finally gives way to a global order worthy of the term. If you thought the past couple of decades have been violent, chaotic and destructive, brace yourself: There is almost certainly worse to come.   

However long the Biden regime goes on saying the war in Ukraine is “at a stalemate,” and however faithfully our corporate media repeat this nonsense like ventriloquists’ dummies, if the Kyiv regime is losing ground daily and there is no realistic hope of regaining it, the word we are looking for is “lost.” The question it is time to ask: What will the U.S. and its European vassals do when the make-believe wears out and defeat, while never admitted on paper, is too obvious to deny? 

Nothing good. As a negotiated peace on any terms acceptable to Moscow is out of the question, and as subverting “Putin’s Russia” remains the objective, the U.S. is likely to intensify the sorts of covert ops and “hybrid warfare” that have been on Washington’s menu for decades. This stands to get very dangerous very fast. Did we have a preview of messes to come with the shocking attack on the concert auditorium and shopping arcade near Moscow on Mar. 22? This is my read. 

The U.S. “intelligence community” was quick to make public an “assessment”—a flimsy term that commits no one to anything—that the attack was the work of a group of militant Islamists and there was no evidence Ukraine had anything to do with it. Soon enough an offshoot of the Islamic State, ISIS–Khorasan, claimed responsibility. President Putin, who had been cautious from the start about assigning blame, eventually declared that Islamic terrorists were indeed culpable for the deaths of 137 innocent Russians and for setting the Crocus City Hall ablaze.

Identifying ISIS–K as responsible is a complicated business, we must bear in mind. After the collapse of Washington’s client regime in Kabul three years ago, many members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, finding themselves suddenly homeless, joined ISIS–K as shelter from the storm. These were CIA–trained intelligence and counterinsurgency operatives, and they reportedly went over in considerable numbers. There were subsequent reports, never verified,  suggesting that the CIA was using unmarked helicopters to supply ISIS–K with weapons and matériel. A year ago last week, Foreign Policy described it as “arguably the most brutal terrorist group in Afghanistan.”

Moscow, perfectly aware of these connections, now concludes that the CIA, along with Britain’s MI6, were behind the Crocus Town Hall attack, with the Kyiv intelligence agency, the SBU, playing a supporting role on the ground. The chief of Russian intelligence unpacked all this last week as he outlined Moscow’s findings. “We think the act was prepared by the radical Islamists, but, of course, the Western special services have aided,” Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s chief,  asserted. “And the special services of Ukraine have a direct hand in this.” 

There is too much circumstantial evidence supporting this case to dismiss it. The CIA’s “assessment” assigning responsibility to ISIS can be taken as perfectly true but only half the story. The same day Bortnikov spoke, Russia sent a hypersonic missile—the kind that eludes standard air defense systems—to destroy the SBU’s headquarters building in Kyiv. This is what I mean by things getting very dangerous very fast.

It is hard to say what Washington will do now that Niger has declared that the 1,000 U.S. troops stationed there are “illegal” and ordered them removed. It is easier to say what the U.S. will not do, unfortunately. It has given no indication whatsoever that it has any intention of withdrawing its troops and shutting their base. 

A spokesman for the new government in Niamey, elaborating on the official statement on Mar. 17, asserted the U.S. presence “violates all the constitutional and democratic rules, which would require the sovereign people—notably through its elected officials—to be consulted on the installation of a foreign army on its territory.” 

That may sound like boilerplate, but it is exceedingly important Niamey cast its expulsion order in such terms. Addressing the Nigerien statement at a press conference, the State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, brushed it off as if it were dandruff on his lapels. Let us watch as the master of the international rules-based order now demonstrates—just as it did in the Iraq case a few years ago—that the rules and the order have nothing to do with respect for the sovereignty of other nations or the democratic principles the U.S. wears gaudily on its sleeve. 

It is unlikely Niamey will be able to force the U.S. out, just as Baghdad couldn’t when it ordered all remaining U.S. troops out a few years ago. Do you think the rest of the world is watching bad TV and will take no notice as American soldiers stay on in the Nigerien desert? The extent the U.S. succeeds in defying another host nation’s order will be the extent of another loss of credibility, prestige, and respect. 

You’re seeing a few commentators these days who are looking at these various developments—the lost war in Ukraine, the West’s failure to isolate Russia, mounting hostilities to the U.S. in West Africa, the ineluctable rise of a new world order—and taking them together as a measure of the imperium’s accelerating collapse. 

The American Conservative published a piece last week headlined, “The ‘Rules–Based Order’ Is Already Over.” If Dominick Sansone overstates his case, which focuses on the West’s confrontation with Russia, it is not by much. “Moscow has insulated itself from Western ostracization, thus changing the entire balance of power in not only Europe, but the world,” he writes. “The ‘rules-based’ economic and political order has been irreversibly altered.”

In another piece that appeared last week, Moon of Alabama, the widely read German website, argued that the defeat in Ukraine announces the end of “military hard power superiority” as the West’s most effective “instrument of deterrence.” It must now find “a new tool that allows it to press its interest against the will of other powers.” 

And then, turning to the Gaza crisis, this disturbing conclusion:

It found that tool in demonstrating utter savagery.

The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide. That it will do everything to prevent international organizations to intervene against this.

That it is willing to eliminate everyone and everything that resists it.

To me the Moon of Alabama piece is chilling precisely to the extent what it has to say is plausible. We are now invited to consider whether the West supports the Israelis’ barbarities in Gaza because barbarity is now policy. I cannot dismiss this argument. 

“Those nations who commit themselves to multipolarity,” the piece concludes, “should steel themselves for what might be visited on them.” The comfort to be taken here, cold as it may be, is that the non–West knows all about bracing itself against the imperium and the former colonial powers. And the Russians have shown them these past few years that it can be done.

....

https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/27/spending-unlimited-2/

Spending Unlimited

The Pentagon's Budget Follies Come at a High Price. 

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.

Defending “the Free World”?

President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.

Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.

As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.

Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.

As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.

Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.

Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.

Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex

One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.

Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.

The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.

The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/where-we-are-now/

Where We Are Now

No one wants to find oneself in an information war. But when it happens, over the long term, history shows that there is an undisputed champion: the truth. Four years ago, a major war began as nearly all  governments in the world built a bonfire for science, wisdom born of experience, limits on power, human rationality, free speech, rights, and liberties generally. 

Most of life since those days has been about the coverup. That has involved strange denials, redactions, data burns, communication deletes, limited hangouts, sock puppets, switchboarding between cutouts, favor call-ins, and every clever trick in the art of war to confound, confuse, and conspire – all in the interest of keeping the public in the dark. 

The good guys in this struggle only have one source of power: the ability to speak truth. It so happens that this method, while it certainly invites the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is the most powerful one of all. That’s because truth is infinitely reproducible. It needs only to find ears to hear to contribute mightily toward ending the corruption and restoring what we’ve lost. 

It so happens that we are in an upswing period in terms of victories for the causes that are at the core of who Brownstone is as an institution. Because too often the fullness of our activities is not known – many people think Brownstone is just a website with great articles – we thought we would explain. 

In mid-March, on the four-year anniversary of the lockdowns, many of us were at the Supreme Court, both inside the courtroom and also on the sidewalk outside at the rally. At issue were our fundamental rights to free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment. To our great alarm, we found evidence in the oral arguments that a third of the court doesn’t seem to understand much less believe in what is called free speech. Another third of them seem confused. The final third is with the cause completely and ready to upload the injunction against government agencies to stop them from working with universities and other third parties to further ruin the Internet as we know it. 

That was not good news but what happened after was wonderful. Having the Supreme Court just hear the case, merely being on the court docket and having the arguments made public, unleashed a huge torrent of news stories. Many top writers and commentators who had previously ignored the case became interested. Brownstone voices flooded the media with more articles and evidence concerning the problem. It became a massive topic of public debate. 

This is absolutely not what the censors wanted. They built their machinery in secret over many years, deploying it fully from 2020 onwards. They never wanted to be noticed and certainly did not want this debated. And yet there it was for the world to see. It became so extreme that the program called 60 Minutes slapped together a propaganda piece valorizing one of the topic censors working at the University of Washington, without pointing out that she also works for the government’s censorship offices as part of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Representative Jim Jordan jumped in to defend the right and true but of course the interview was chopped up to make him look a bit lost, exactly as we would expect. 

But that too backfired, as social media blew up with digital rotten eggs being tossed at 60 Minutes and the censor in question. No longer can they get away with these kinds of smears and propaganda. Much of the reason is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X which now provides a means of countering the nonsense, broadcasting many podcasters who took apart 60 Minutes and many other corporate outlets that defend the censors. 

In other words, we have them on the run at least in terms of public messaging. This is precisely what we hoped. In this way, regardless of how the court case turns out – and it truly could go either way – we seemed to have gained some momentum in the right direction concerning public opinion. And that is essential regardless of what the law and courts say. 

Here is a case in which we have a brief window in time to weigh against the real goal. What is it? Based on all the evidence, the goal is the complete control of all information streams via digital technology. It’s strange how close they came to that until many people figured it out and started pushing the other direction, among them Brownstone.org and our 20 Internet properties. Despite all the throttling and attacks, we managed millions of readers in many different venues. So long as we have that, and so long as the censors do not finally succeed, we will stay at it. 

Much of the deeper research and writing here is being done by our Censorship Working Group, which meets regularly to share information and work on strategy, resources, and messaging. We’ve found that these smaller working groups have been extremely effective in inspiring productivity and quality in various subject areas. 

Another working group we have concerns pandemic planning and the World Health Organization in particular. In these efforts, we have partnered with Leeds University in the UK in order to take advantage of large databases and other resources. This team, known as REPPARE, has produced huge reports on the factual claims of the WHO and others and found them to be non-factual. These reports have gained the attention of many officials the world over and been reported in the Wall Street Journal. 

Working with only a handful of other experts, this team has served as one of the world’s only counterweights to the push for global government power to lock down whole populations. This is an incredibly serious threat, as we should know from very recent experience. It must be stopped if anything resembling freedom is going to stand a chance. 

A third working group concerns money and finance and the global drive for central bank digital currencies. The timeline on this plan keeps moving closer and yet there are ways in which our own work is pushing it further away. It has only recently become a major point of political controversy, such that Ron DeSantis, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump have all sounded the alarm. Here again is another massively important topic about which hardly anyone knew anything a year ago but which has become a point of public controversy. 

In each of these cases, the goal and strategy is the same: shine the light of truth on the nefarious plans and actions. That light has more cleansing power than all the elections and court judgments, as much as those help. And this is precisely what we attempt daily with our editorial program, which pushes out three articles each weekday and three more on the weekends for a total of 70-plus pieces per month, or a book every thirty days. 

Truly that’s some powerful publishing. In addition, we inspire reprints the world over in all major languages, to which our site translates in real time, in addition to offering audio of everything in English. Many of these articles appear in huge venues like Zerohedge and Epoch Times, along with well-produced interviews and podcasts with the authors. 

In addition, we have indeed published ten books in a mere two and a half years, groundbreaking books that would otherwise not see the light of day because they would be buried in academic libraries or otherwise lost in the commercial thicket that grinds serious literature into consumable pleasantries to feed prevailing biases.

All of the above doesn’t address what is easily our main activity, which is granting fellowships to scholars, journalists, attorneys, and others who face professional disruption due to their writing. As you know, there is an ongoing purge of journalism and academics as part of the censorship campaign. The goal is to cleanse all information sources of dissident voices. Even from the very outset Brownstone dedicated itself to this mission. We’ve so far supported some 20 massive voices, each with a story of tragedy and triumph. We don’t tell the details of these cases publicly simply as a matter of discretion and respect for privacy but they are all remarkable. 

One such case occurred this past week. Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill of the Toronto area had come to our first annual conference and gala in 2021 and became inspired to oppose the lockdowns and then forced masking and jabs of the government. That landed her in huge trouble with the media, the medical association, and the government. She has been fighting to gain back her reputation and pediatric practice ever since. Last week it emerged that courts imposed on her a seemingly unpayable fine of $300K due in 7 days. 

She gave a call with a desperate sense of what could come next. Her home was threatened with repossession and she faced total bankruptcy. Following that contact, our network became seriously activated with interviews and articles plus a fundraising campaign that ended up raising $200K in a matter of days, if you can imagine it. Then Elon Musk got involved, promising to make up the difference and fund her court appeal no matter what, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. 

The whole experience unfolded like a modern-day miracle of faith, hope, and generosity. 

We are currently hoping to raise the funds to put her on fellowship. In addition to Kulvinder, several other outstanding cases are awaiting funding that we cannot yet provide due to the limits of resources. We hope that can change. 

As part of the fellowship program, we also run private retreats for scholars, Fellows, and others. They are three-day sessions of information-sharing among experts to create a university-style environment that no longer exists but is absolutely essential for research and social support. Reflecting on the productivity and value of these, many agree that this might be the most significant program that Brownstone backs. 

Indeed, we are holding our first retreat for writers, creators, and scholars in Europe next month, with most every European country sending a representative. It is being held on the coast outside of Barcelona. These programs are expensive but not as much as one might think, given the output. We are also excited to introduce Brownstone-style thinking to a group of European intellectuals who have a proven record of standing up for principle when it matters most. 

Finally, we have our monthly supper club, which is now on its 34th monthly, and consistently selling all tickets for each meeting with a waiting list to get in. There is always an exuberant feel of coming home when it begins at 5:30pm and people stay so long as the restaurant stays open. We pack in 100 people for talks on medicine, health, media, tech, and a variety of other issues. People drive very long distances to get there! 

It’s all part of the driving ethos: sincerity of purpose, rigor of argument and research, broadness of spirit, and the desire to put the revelation of truth ahead of ideological bromides and browbeating. That might seem obvious but oddly, it is rare in research journalism today, especially in the current partisan environment. 

The influence of this work has been extremely broad and deep throughout the world. And keep in mind, we were only founded in May 2021 and still only have the tiniest of staff, with a budget that is a miniscule fraction of what major think tanks in Washington and elsewhere spend every year, to say nothing of the Gates Foundation and government agencies. The experience absolutely proves that one dedicated group of people can do so much with just a little. 

Thank you for being part of this amazing moment in history and for your own faith in our work and your generosity. We hope you have appreciated this “inside look” at the depth of our work, and we would be honored with your continued support. Please know of our gratitude for all you have done thus far.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/we-failed-the-freedom-test/

We Failed the Freedom Test

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Francis Bacon

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

If the Covid-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

Four years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.

The danger of martial law persists.

Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Covid-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s Covid-19 response to the Covid-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self, and private property.

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used Covid-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale.Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the Covid-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for Covid-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

Those tactics were already being used abroad.

In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero Covid” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract Covid-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women, and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable, or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to Covid quarantine centers?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.

Covid-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.

What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-meltdown-of-commercial-real-estate/

The Meltdown of Commercial Real Estate

 

In case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.

Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.

The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.

To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.

So what happened? 

The Fed’s yo-yo interest rates first flooded real estate with low rates and cheap money. Which were overbuilt. 

Then came the lockdowns, which forced millions to figure out new workday patterns. People liked foregoing the long commute (not to mention the free money). Despite every effort, downtown businesses have not been able to get all workers back. 

These days, everyone talks about hybrid models of working, some in-person and some remote. But judging from observation, remote is winning. In any case, even a 30 percent reduction in the footprint of office space once the leases are renewed could topple the entire sector. 

The restaurant and retail sectors of downtown feel the pinch, with more closures all the time. Adding to the pressure are absurd levels of inflation and ever-riskier streets on matters of personal security. Put it all together and there is ever less reason to slog to the office. 

When the Fed panic-hiked interest rates in the 2021 inflation, that put trillions of commercial real estate underwater even without other factors. Add to that crime, inflation, plus remote work, and you have a dangerous mix that could toppled cities as we know them. 

This could mimic and elaborate upon last year’s bank crisis, where falling bond prices panicked depositors. That crisis only stopped when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell effectively bailed out every bank in America with sweetheart loans written on fictitious asset values along with unlimited taxpayer guarantees through the comically underfunded FDIC.

By the way, the FDIC is essentially guaranteeing over $20 trillion in deposits on just over $100 billion. So they’ve got a half-penny on the dollar.

Without those government pre-bailouts, one paper last year by researchers at Stanford and Columbia estimated that 1,619 US banks – about a third of them – could be at risk of failure.

The problem is that nothing was actually fixed. In fact, it’s getting worse. For the simple reason that as the months roll by there’s more and more debt coming due.

And that brings us to Crombie, who notes that there’s $929 billion of commercial real estate debt coming due in the next 9 and a half months.

That’s up 28% from last year, and it’s getting bigger every day as banks pretend loans are still healthy by effectively adding missed payments.

We’re starting to see glitches in the matrix; New York Community Bank just went through a near-death experience over its garbage portfolio of commercial real estate loans, dropping almost 80% before it was bailed out by vulture investors while the megabanks hover like megavultures.

More will come. Potentially a lot more: a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that up to 385 American banks could fail over commercial real estate loans alone.

These would overwhelmingly be small regional banks, who typically hold a third of their assets in commercial real estate loans.

They hold so much because they know their local markets best, but the Fed poisoned that chalice by flooding easy money to developers.

For now we’re only seeing the sickest banks dropping out of the herd. That could dramatically accelerate as that $1 trillion plus in loans come due.

Commercial real estate delinquency rates have already jumped to 6 and a half percent – up 30% in a matter of months. Rates of distress in office loans just hit 11%.

When the smoke clears, we could lose dozens, even hundreds, of regional banks. Going by the last time with savings and loans, taxpayers ate 80% of the losses.

Meaning you could be on the hook for trillions, while the megabanks gorge on the carcass.

Slashing interest rates could staunch the bleeding. But with inflation marching up every month – currently at 5 and a half percent annualized – that’s not going to happen.

....

https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/03/28/its-hard-to-run-an-empire-these-days/14/

It’s hard to run an empire these days  

As I was saying to Diocletian over Prosecco just last week, it is hard to run an empire these days. You have to lie to people more or less incessantly to keep the troops minding the perimeter in supplies. No falsehood is too preposterous to gain the public’s acquiescence. At times you have to deceive even the Senate. 

“Ah, yes, the solons,” the old persecutor replied. “It is mere ceremony with them. You can keep the senators in the dark if protecting the arcana imperii requires it. They usually prefer this, indeed. As for the vox populi, one must occasionally feign to hear it, but there is no need to pay any attention.”

“Son of a bitch,” I exclaimed, quoting the current guardian of America’s imperial secrets. “You’ve got the Biden regime to a ‘T.’” 

Did he ever, the crafty autocrat.  

There is nothing new about lying to Americans to get the empire’s business done. It was 76 years ago last week that President Truman won public acceptance for Washington’s endless postwar interventions in his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress. It was 60 years ago this August that President Johnson faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify sending ground troops to Vietnam. As for cutting the dolts on Capitol Hill out of the loop, we have been talking about the imperial presidency since Arthur Schlesinger coined the term in the latter days of the Nixon administration. 

Three-quarters of a century later, Joe “New Ideas” Biden has altered course not one minute on the policy cliques’ compass.  

It has been objectionable enough in many quarters that the Biden White House has sent two on-the-record shipments of weapons to Israel for use in its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza since the Israel Occupation Forces—we’re renaming these barbarians—began their siege last autumn. These were for $106 million and $147.5 million; in each case the administration invoked emergency authority to bypass the mandated congressional approval. 

At this point, a decisive majority of Americans want President Biden to force Israel to declare a ceasefire—which, as everyone knows, he could do in a trice. In a poll conducted Feb, 27 to Mar. 1 for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than half of those surveyed thought the U.S. should stop all arms shipments to Israel—“no more U.S. money for the Netanyahu war machine,” as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, put it.  

But never mind the populus and never mind Congress. The former are to be ignored and there are various ways to circumvent the latter. The Washington Post reported in its Mar. 6 editions that, as arms sales to the apartheid state grew more politically perilous, Biden’s policy people have covertly authorized more than 100 separate, under-the-radar shipments. We do not know the value of these, but each has been small enough to require no legislative authorization. 

No debate, no disclosure. We know about these transfers now only because regime officials told Congress about them in “a recent classified briefing.” Before that, Congress didn’t know anything about the shipments, either—although this seems highly unlikely. I do not see how Capitol Hill could be unaware of an op of this magnitude. My surmise is that legislators were perfectly happy once again to surrender their responsibilities to the imperial presidency. That recent classified briefing made page one of The Post because this is the national security state’s way of easing the public into the picture.    

These shipments are obviously counter to the spirit of the law, if not its letter. But no one in the administration has felt compelled to offer an explanation since The Post’s piece appeared, to say nothing of an apology for deceiving a public increasingly critical of the regime’s Israel policy. Congress has raised not the slightest objection—Congress, as in the 435 representatives and 50 senators elected and paid to represent your interests and mine. 

Cut to historical flashback. 

Diocletian’s reign, from 284 to 305 C.E., was noted for a few things. He executed thousands of Christians and burned a lot of churches while also seeing to numerous constitutional and administrative reforms intended to make the imperial throne more imperial. The Roman Senate continued to convene in a building Diocletian fashioned for the purpose. But there were no more fictions or illusions attaching to its powers. One of his reforms was to make sure it had none in matters of state. The body once responsible for Roman law was down to housekeeping chores and sheer ritual. 

We do not yet have official permission to conclude publicly that Ukraine has lost America’s proxy war with Russia—that remains among our Great Unsayables. But we are allowed—encouraged, indeed—to talk about how desperately the Kyiv regime needs more American guns if it is to stop Russian advances and—I love this part—reverse them and win the war. 

In the Mar. 8 edition of Foreign Affairs, this headline: “Time is Running Out in Ukraine.” And this subhead, well-crafted to preserve the necessary degree of delusion: “Kyiv Cannot Capitalize on Russian Military Weakness Without U.S. Aid.” You can read the rest of Dara Massicot’s essay here if you insist, but the display language as just quoted is what Foreign Affairs wants you to know, or think you know: The $60.1 billion in additional support the Biden regime proposes will save the day and Congress must stop blocking it. 

This has become something like the running theme on Ukraine since the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, announced it a couple of weeks back. It is now O.K. to suggest the conflict that has literally destroyed yet another nation and another people in the U.S. imperium’s cause has reached “a stalemate,” but only if it quickly follows that more weaponry is necessary to keep the thieves and neo–Nazis in Kyiv going. Stalemates can be overcome, you see. You only get to lose once, at which point you don’t need more guns. 

On Mar. 14 The New York Times published “America Pulls Back from Ukraine” in its daily feature called The Morning. “What the war may look like if Ukraine does not receive more U.S. support,” is the subhead this time. Same story: All will be lost if the U.S. does not send Ukraine more war matériel tout de suite. All can be gained if it does. 

You know, it is one thing for a Dara Massicot to go on about the desperate need for the U.S. to ship Kyiv more weapons. That is her job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and we can leave Ms. Massicot to her war-is-peace paradox. It is entirely another for a New York desk reporter at The Times to do the same. As you read German Lopez’s “report,” keep in mind: You are not reading journalism. You are reading a clerk for the policy cliques normalizing the latter’s desire to resupply Ukraine as our incontrovertible reality. 

Sound journalism must have multiple sources, as any first-year J–school student can tell you. Lopez’s is a one-source story allowing of no other perspective on the war other than the official perspective as the Biden regime tries to shake loose the dough from Congress. What is vastly worse, the one source Lopez quotes is not even the usual administration official who cannot be named because of the “sensitivity” of something or other. No, the source is “my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers the war.”

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. First, Julian Barnes does not cover the war. From The Times’s Washington bureau he covers what the regime wants the public to think about the war, full stop. Second, where do The Times’s editors get off having one reporter quote another reporter as the authority in a story when the quoted reporter is lock-and-stock repeating—uncritically, without qualification, in roughly the same  language—what the administration declares at every press conference concerning the Ukraine war and in every public statement?   

“With an aid package, the Ukrainians will have a much better chance of solidifying their defenses, holding the line. And in some places, they may be able to retake territory,” Barnes tells Lopez. “So it falls on the U.S. to supply Ukraine.”

He’s an original thinker, our Julian. You have to give him this. 

I have long speculated that the many Massicots, Barneses, and Lopezes among us may get dressed every morning in the same locker room, so similar are the things they say. I wondered this again when, a day after The Times piece appeared, The Washington Post published “U.S. anticipates grim course for Ukraine if aid bill dies in Congress.” I tell you, if you switched the bylines on The Times and Post pieces not even the reporters would notice.

These people are doing not more, not less than getting the imperium’s lying done for it. Three cases in point:

One, if U.S. weaponry is so critical to the war as is proclaimed, this is no longer Ukraine’s war, if ever it was. It is America’s, yours and mine. 

Two, Ukraine has not stalemated the Russians. If Kyiv has not already lost Washington’s proxy war—my assessment—it is losing it in slow motion with no prospect of reversing this outcome. 

Three, we have a lie of omission. The Biden regime has already allocated an all-in total of roughly $75 billion for the Kyiv regime’s war effort, according to figures Foreign Affairs published recently. This equals Russia’s 2022 defense budget and compares with the $84 billion in Moscow’s 2023 budget—this before the $60.1 billion Biden now wants. 

Given that the reported record indicates more than half of what the U.S. has already sent appears to have been either stolen or black-marketed, I have questions for Messrs. Barnes and Lopez and the squad of reporters the Washington Post bylined. Where is the analysis here, if crooked pols and military officers are stealing aid Kyiv says it needs to fight Russian forces? Where is even a mention of this obvious factor in the course of the war? Where are the editors in New York and Washington who should insist their reporters address this question? And if they can report that theft is not such a factor, where is your story telling us why all the thievery has not mattered?

There is one assertion in these pieces—finally, something—that distinguishes one from the others. The Post story, taking things further than The Times or Foreign Affairs, reports that “absent more American military support, ‘countless lives’ will be lost this year as Kyiv struggles to stave off collapse.” This comes from the usual unnamed “senior official,” who tells The Post, “Here’s the bottom line: Even if Ukraine holds on, what we really are saying is that we are going to leverage countless lives in order to do that.”

Do we all understand? Ending support for a war that is already lost or is ineluctably headed that way will not save lives: It will cost lives. The interior logic here is that it is out of the question for Kyiv to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Moscow, as the Kremlin has proposed on numerous occasions. This has long been advanced as another “normalized” reality. It is, once again, one thing for an administration official to make this repellent case and entirely another for reporters to repeat it uncritically. 

The Biden regime is stuck this time having to deal with lawmakers tired of sending money to crooks. And the media clerks who are supposed to cover it are stuck lying to the public in the service of the regime’s case. Are we surprised to read, here and there, that the policy cliques are already considering ways to circumvent Congress once again?