Sunday, March 17, 2024

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/03/16/european-powers-stab-each-other-in-the-back-over-ukraine-proxy-war-defeat/13/

European Powers Stab Each Other in the Back Over Ukraine Proxy War Defeat

The failure of being vassals for the American empire and the impending disaster of defeat for the NATO proxy war in Ukraine is weighing heavily.  

Europe is rife with treachery in the age-old fashion of imperial rivalry. It’s pathetic to watch, but highly instructive about who the real villains of the piece are.

The failure of being abject vassals for the American empire and the impending disaster of defeat for the NATO proxy war in Ukraine is weighing heavily.

Each European power is pushing the other over the abyss to save its own political skin.

France’s Emmanuel Macron has emerged to be a little king rat. He has taken to talking up deploying NATO troops to Ukraine to salvage the proxy war against Russia. Macron struts around like a rat in jackboots too big for his feet calling on other European leaders not to be cowards.

The former Rothschild banker Macron then turns around and cancels yet another trip to the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Maybe the French leader got scared by the Russian air strike on Odessa last week when the Greek premier was touring the city along with Ukraine’s puppet president Zelensky.

Macron sent his Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné to Lithuania last Friday to discuss with the rabid Russophobic Baltic states the idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine. Given the history of the Baltic states aiding and abetting the Third Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, we can safely posit the same states are an open door for such French-inspired madness.

However, with classic elite cowardice, Macron obviously doesn’t want to be anywhere near the front line when the action gets hot. Better to hunker down on a comfy armchair in Elysée Palace and bark out your angry poodle orders from there.

Meanwhile, that other bastion of European civility (meaning treacherous deception) the good old British are cajoling Germany to send long-range missiles to Ukraine to strike deep into Russia.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is balking at supplying the Taurus cruise missiles to the Ukrainian regime. The German-made weapon has a range of 500 kilometers. Given the unhinged NeoNazis in Kiev (headed up by a Jewish puppet Zelensky) it is a certainty that the Taurus missiles would be fired at Moscow to kill “Untermenschen Russians”.

That’s why Scholz is worried. His top Luftwaffe commanders have already been caught red-handed planning how the Taurus “super tools” would be used to hit deep Russian targets.

Enter the ever-so-polite British with a helping hand to the Germans. Britain’s Foreign Secretary “Lord” David Cameron visited Berlin last week urging the Germans to supply the Taurus missile to Ukraine.

Cameron said London was ready to help Germany “solve the problem” of its reluctance to provide the long-range weapon.

The British top diplomat offered a swap arrangement whereby London would buy Taurus missiles from Germany while supplying more of its Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine. In that way, Berlin would not be implicated in attacking Russia, according to Cameron.

Laughably, the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said she considered the British offer to be viable.

Her nominal boss, Chancellor Scholz, has officially remained reluctant to the idea of sending Taurus missiles.

Germany would do well to treat any British proposal with deep suspicion. After all, it was the British that inveigled Germany into two world wars. The first one was with the objective of destroying an imperial rival, while the second one was engineered to unleash Hitler’s war machine on the Soviet Union.

The cold facts are that the United States and its European NATO vassals embarked on a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine as the battleground. That war was at least 10 years in the making from the CIA-sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power the present NeoNazi regime.

The two-year proxy war has turned out to be a colossal failure for the American empire and its European satellites. The Kyiv regime is collapsing from overwhelmingly superior Russian firepower. The wasting of the Ukrainian military – as many as 500,000 men – as well as up to $200 billion in financial and military aid paid for ultimately by Western taxpayers will rebound with massive political repercussions for the warmongering Western elites.

Each one of these imperialist criminal powers wants to save their own necks as the noose of public anger inevitably tightens.

The French cock-turned-rat Macron would no doubt like to muddy the battlefield with NATO troops – while avoiding any muck splashing on his dainty little boots of course.

The Americans are beginning to realize they can’t win and are finally cutting off the money, leaving the Europeans high and dry to deal with a continental-sized mess. Joe Biden can’t even remember if it was Ukraine or Iraq that he made a fatal mistake in.

Britain, ever the arch Machiavellian maggot, would like to throw Germany into the frontline against Russia. No doubt the City of London could pick up some much-needed capitalist business from war reconstruction contracts.

The proxy war in Ukraine is over and the Western rats are scurrying off the ship.

The Western public needs to hold each one of them to account and not let them blow up a bigger war with Russia as a way to distract from their culpability.

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https://edwardcurtin.com/the-world-as-it-was-a-masterly-documentary-film/

“The World As It Was”: A Masterly Documentary Film

 

Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism.  In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today.  Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare.  Chapter One of the documentary series, Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, appropriately subtitled: “To see where we are, look where we’ve been,” does that brilliantly.

The series opened four months ago with “The Prologue” (see review) wherein the lives, importance, and assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy are explored; how the government and media buried the truth of who assassinated them and why; and why it matters today.  Season One will unfold over the next year with chapters covering their lives and assassinations in greater detail.  Season Two will be devoted to the government and media coverups, citizen investigations, and the intelligence agencies and their media mouthpieces’ mind control operations aimed at the American people that continue today.

Chapter One – “The World As It Was” – is about the 1950s, the rise of the Cold War with its propaganda, McCarthyism, the development of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, betrayals, blacklists, the abrogation of civil rights, censorship, and the ever present fear of nuclear war and the promotion of fallout shelters that set the stage for the killing fields of the 1960s and the CIA’s ruthless machinations.

One could say that the 1950s were the Foundation of Fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and that now we are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

The film opens with President Eisenhower delivering his famous Farewell Address, warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.  It is a short and powerful speech, concealing not a smidgen of hypocrisy since it must not have been Eisenhower who presided for eight years from 1953-19661 as this complex grew and grew and he poured 2 billion dollars in weapons and aid and a thousand military advisers to the ruthless and corrupt Vietnamese dictator Ngô Dinh Diêm, while saying he was “an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom.”  His speech, while still good, reminds me of all those who spend their careers quiet as church mice as the wars and assassinations rage on only to find their voices in opposition once they retire and collect their pensions.

In response to Eisenhower’s speech, some of which we hear, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – one of a hundred interviews done for this series over six years –  says that Eisenhower’s speech “is probably today in retrospect the most important speech in American history.”  While that is debatable (I would pick JFK’s American University speech), he rightly emphasizes the importance of Ike’s speech and the fact that his uncle, President Kennedy, fought against the military-industrial complex handed him by Eisenhower.  This is important, for although JFK did get elected emphasizing the Cold War rhetoric of a non-existent missile gap between the U.S. A. and the Soviet Union, he very quickly changed, having been betrayed by Allen Dulles and the CIA regarding the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam, Laos, etc.  The military brass quickly came to hate Kennedy, a naval war hero from World War II.  His three year transformation into a great peacemaker – and therefore his assassination by the CIA and its friends – is a story many still would like to squelch.  This documentary series will prevent that.

Those who control our present and wish to control our future are hard at work today trying to control our past and they will therefore hate this truthful film that is a powerful antidote to their attempted amnesia.  In thirty-nine sobering and entertaining minutes (with emphasis on both words), “The World As It Was” illuminates a period in U.S. history that is often dismissed as the staid and boring 1950s but was in fact when the infrastructure for today’s censorship, chaos, and fear were laid.  It was not the era, as a baseball movie about Jimmy Piersall and his depression from 1957 put it, when “Fear Strikes Out,” but the time when fear burrowed very deep into the American psyche and anxiety became a weapon of state.  Is it any wonder that today could be called “the age of depression, fear, anxiety, and pill popping”?

It is interesting to note that Eisenhower’s warning also contained an admonition to beware the growth of unchecked science, technology, and a future when computers would replace blackboards.  If he were still alive, he would no doubt not recognize the country controlled by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).  This vast computer-networked monster makes all the warnings about the 1950s snooping, informing, and controlling activities of government agencies seem like child’s play.  They can’t open snail mail now when few send any, but reading computer messages barely necessitates a finger’s movement, or, as Edward Snowden continues to warn, the entire electronic phone system is open sesame for government controllers. Cell phones acting as cells. Blackboards are gone but so is privacy.  The 1950s’ government snooping is pure nostalgia now.  We are through the looking glass.

As then, so today.  Oliver Stone talks about how in those days the constant refrain was “the Russians are coming” and how his father, a Republican stockbroker, told him that “the Russians are inside the country.”  Fear was everywhere, all induced by anti-communist propaganda aimed at controlling the American people.  Stone is still fighting against the Russia bogeyman stories, while today we are told again and again that the Russians are still coming.  We can only assume they are very slow.

Aside from RFK, Jr. and Oliver Stone, in this episode we hear from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the screenwriter Zachary Sklar, et al.  Because the film is so ingeniously crafted, many of the most powerful voices – for and against the government repression and fear mongering – are those from newsreels and television shows that are artfully spliced between the commentaries of the aforementioned people. For example, to see and hear FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rant about communists under every bed and to juxtapose that with the calm words of the filmmaker Dalton Trumbo, blackballed as one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, is an exercise in distinguishing sanity from insanity.

To this is added music, advertisements, movie clips, and jingles from the 1950s culture that place the viewer back in time to feel and absorb the “vibes,” as it were, of those days.  Like any era, it was complicated, but the overriding message from the fifties was not about mom making tuna noodle casserole but was that there were commie traitors everywhere throughout society and that every citizen’s obligation was to turn them in, even if that meant turning yourself or your parents in.  Children were taught to get under their desks when the sirens sounded, for they were safe places when the Commie Nukes start coming in.  Civil Defense drills screeched this fear into your every fiber.  In April 1957 the Army Air Defense Command announced that new Nike Hercules missiles with atomic warheads would shortly be installed around New York City, Boston, Providence, etc. to replace conventional warheads.  A spokesman added that these nuclear warheads posed no danger and that if the missiles were used, fallout would be “negligible.”  Of course.

Let me use an anecdote from pop culture that I think sums this up this sick game of fear and distrust – paranoia.  My parents were on a game show in the fall of 1957 called “Do You Trust Your Wife?” hosted by Johnny Carson. By the summer of 1958 the show’s title was changed to “Who Do you Trust?”  I used to joke that Hoover or Senator Joseph McCarthy was behind the change and their English grammar was atrocious, but I realize it was probably some fearful lackeys in the television industry.

Professor Miller, an expert in propaganda, narrates quite a bit of “The World As It Was” and does so admirably.  He correctly points out that to describe the 1950s as the era of McCarthyism is a misnomer, for doing so “let’s the whole system off the hook.”  It was the entire government apparatus that promoted a vast repression based on fear whose aim was to create meek, deferential, and obedient people afraid of their own shadows.

He points out that the basis for all this was established by President Truman in 1947 with his Executive Order 9835 that required loyalty oaths to root out communists in the federal government.  Six months later the CIA was founded and the country was off to the Cold War races with its anti-communist hysteria and the institutionalization of a militarized society.

The Red Menace, nuclear extinction, and the need to root out those traitors who were conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force were pounded into people’s minds.  Not only were these traitors in the government, but in the schools and colleges, the labor and racial equality movements – more or less everywhere.  Whom could you trust?  No one, not even yourself.  While McCarthy was eventually censored for going too far when Joseph Welch accused him of having no decency during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, he accomplished the goal of injecting his paranoic poison into the social bloodstream where it remains today, part of the political structure shared by both major parties.

But hope arose, as the film concludes, when JFK was elected in 1960 and in his first week in office went to the theater to see the blackballed screenwriter’s Dalton Trumble’s adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Spartacus, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome.  Fast was also blacklisted and wrote the novel secretly.  As RFK, Jr. says, this was a symbolic turning point when this was reported on the front page of The New York Times.

“It [the film Spartacus] is a parable of resistance and heroism that speaks unreservedly to our own times,” wrote the great journalist John Pilger in We Are Spartacus shortly before his death. “There is one ‘precise’ provocateur now; it is clear to see for those who want to see it and foretell its actions. It is a gang of states led by the United States whose stated objective is ‘full spectrum dominance’. Russia is still the hated one, Red China the feared one.”

Yes, today we are told that the Russians are still coming.  The bad old days are back.  But so also is the slaves’ rebellion.

Four Died Trying is a documentary series that is part of this rebellion.  Chapter One, “The World As It Was” shines a very bright light on disturbing U.S. history.  It shows where we have been in order to help us see where we are.  Don’t miss it.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/when-panic-became-normalized/

When Panic Became Normalized

In honor of the fourth anniversary of the tyrannical overreaction to a largely imagined threat that elsewhere I’ve described in terms of Israel’s worship of golden calf, I thought it useful to relive my own experience of how easily normal was abandoned in favor of dystopia in less than a week.

Thursday, March 12

Following the cowardly lead of the NBA and NHL, MLB announces that after the conclusion of that day’s Spring Training games, they would also be refusing to play. This throws my planned travel with two friends in just three days into chaos, as we had arranged a trip specifically so that they could experience Spring Training for the first time. After discussion, we agree to travel to Florida anyway, even if the primary purpose of our travel had been ruined.

I rant online about this. Aside from a couple of women deeply afflicted by too much living in the suburbs, most of my friends seem to be in agreement.

As I join a married couple for dinner that evening, a certain dark foreboding is projected by the TVs above the bar, as what should have been live sports programming was replaced by talking heads blathering on about the fact that everything is canceled. And yet, life is normal at the restaurant. After bidding the couple adieu, I then join other friends at a local microbrewery, where once again things are normal.

Friday, March 13

That night I attended a birthday party for a parishioner at a nearby restaurant and bar named the Darlington Hotel. He was now running the place in hopes of purchasing the establishment for himself. Corona bottle openers were given away as free gifts, in mockery of the panic. 

I post the following image to Facebook with the caption “We don’t live in fear in NW Beaver County!”

(The Darlington Hotel would never reopen again after this weekend. I still have that bottle opener as a visible sign to never stop being morally outraged over what happened.)

Saturday, March 14

On what should have been the day of Pittsburgh’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, festivities continue as normal at my favorite local dive. The manager panics at one point by covering his beard in beer foam and saying that he isn’t feeling too well into the microphone. I, however, have an unexplainable sense that something very bad is coming.

Sunday, March 15

I offer Sunday Mass at one of our churches. While attendance is a little down due to the obligation being dispensed, everyone is normal and full of good cheer.

I leave for the airport to fly to Tampa with my friends. While we are waiting, the news is released: Governor Tom Wolf has revoked human rights and appointed himself and a man pretending to be a woman as unaccountable tyrants. Finding out that my diocese is going along with this madness fills me with such rage that my friends see me noticeably red and sweating.

We board our plane (which was completely normal), drive our rental car to the condo where we were staying, and then go for a drink at the nearby Captain Curt’s, as Florida is still completely normal.

Monday, March 16 

This would be the last normal day of our lives, as Ron DeSantis would cave to the temptations to be a tyrant (at the direction of President Trump) and announced that the next day there would be bizarre and useless occupancy restrictions at restaurants. After a day at the beach, we spent the evening out listening to live music for the last time and enjoying fine dining for the final time. For a nightcap, we thought we would be funny and take advantage of a special on Corona, but we ended up hurrying out of there because the bartender had obviously just had a psychological breakdown; she was telling us how she kicked a smoker out of the bar for coughing, wiped everything repeatedly, and then threw away the ashtray the patron was using.

Tuesday, March 17

The effects of the contagion of panic having caught up with us in Florida meant that there wasn’t much reason to plan to do anything. We went to a local liquor store to buy bottles of liquor to take home (as buying liquor was now illegal in Pennsylvania as the state-owned liquor stores were forbidden from opening). We ironically watched Stephen King’s The Stand. A pizza shop that night basically refused to serve seated tables, so broken was the psyche of the employees. We ended up back at Captain Curt’s where we had relaxed the first night, except that there was nothing relaxing there with the altered seating.

Wednesday, March 18

In the process of journeying back, I took my friends on a tour of sadness of the things we were supposed to do. After stopping at Mixon Farms, I showed them the completely abandoned Pirates City complex. We then drove to LECOM Park where we were to attend 2 games; a sole ticket window was open to issue refunds to those who had purchased their tickets in person.

Locked out of LECOM Park

At the Tampa airport, we sat at the bar at the Hard Rock Restaurant for our last taste of freedom. Once on the plane, it was clear that we were now living in a dystopia, as the Southwest flight attendants now refused to perform regular drink service (as they were terrified to touch anyone) and only handed out cans of water. (My one friend has retained that can of water as a memory of the trauma.)

Then we had the dark drive home, wondering if we would ever know freedom again…

Life Was Normal Until Our Leaders Panicked

As I went through my memory of those days, the realization that jumped out at me was that the vast majority of those who succumbed to hysteria only did so after our leaders failed in their grave duty to keep everyone calm regardless of the danger.

As I recently argued, we as a culture used to be in wide agreement that panic is to be avoided no matter what and that good leadership must therefore be completely immune to hysteria.

Yes, hysteria was spreading through the populace, particularly among those predisposed to social contagion through the consumption of mainstream media. But it is undisputably true that people were continuing to live their lives normally even as professional athletes (our modern-day gladiators) proved themselves to be sniveling cowards who refused to earn their massive paychecks out of fear. 

The only tangible sign of widespread panic was the hoarding of toilet paper, which displays more of a fear of what OTHERS will do rather than a fear of catching a respiratory illness. When I arrived in Florida people were calmer than those I left behind in Pennsylvania, even though Covid was being detected at far higher rates there, for the simple reason that their government hadn’t done anything crazy to indicate a reason to panic.

The minute the government started acting crazy, the people started acting crazy.

What leaders in government did, whether it be President Trump on the national level or your health department head on the local level, was an abject failure in what is one of the first duties of good leadership. To encourage panic and the psychological devastation that accompanies panic is wicked and depraved. The lack of accountability for nearly any of those guilty portends a future even more devoid of the necessary virtues required for good leadership.

In an alternate reality, it was possible for a message akin to FDR’s 1933 inaugural speech to delivered in March of 2020: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance…” 

Had that happened, the panic which was spreading would have eventually subsided, as it always does. We lost our freedoms and our lives are permanently damaged as a result of those whom we have chosen as leaders proving to be abject failures or worse.

Four years later, the two major parties are planning to nominate candidates for president who are in agreement that spreading panic and hysteria was the right thing to do in 2020; they disagree only about how much panic should have occurred. Only an independent candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., seems to think that any level of accountability is needed for what happened.

Will we ever have leadership again that wants to avoid causing the people they serve to be broken psychologically enough to throw ashtrays away in fear of catching a cold?

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