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https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-tale-of-three-cities-u-s-hypocrisy-and-joe-bidens-rules-based-international-order-philip-giraldi/5807567

A Tale of Three Cities. U.S. Hypocrisy and Joe Biden’s “Rules Based International Order”.

Washington’s Hypocrisy on its “Rules Based International Order”

One might actually be willing to consider that there might be some value in the “rules based international order” being promoted by the Joe Biden Administration if such a thing actually existed and was applied equally to all transgressors. Of course, in reality, the “rules” being referred to are neither agreed upon nor driven by any broad international consensus and are merely a trick that is exploited to further the interests of the United States and its closest allies. In fact, the “rules”, such as they are, are most frequently ignored to give a pass to the bad behavior being exhibited by the US and its friends.

If the “rules” were actually intended to place limits on violent interactions among nations, consider for a moment the actual record of the United States in that regard. Recent opinion polls demonstrate that the US by a large margin is considered by other nations to be the most dangerous country in the world. That judgement is based not only on historic memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the Vietnam War and the overthrowing of alleged “leftist” regimes in places like Iran, Chile and Guatemala. Armed interventions on a greater or lesser scale have been a regular features of US initiatives throughout the Caribbean and Latin America ever since the Spanish-American War.

More recently there has been the global war on terror, unleashed on the entire world based on US condemnation of countries that were not perceived to be toeing Washington’s red line on what constitutes terrorism. This has led to pointless and ultimately failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia in which, by some estimates millions of civilians have died directly or indirectly, and the US itself has sustained the war-making through the printing of trillions of dollars in essentially fiat currency and running up enormous debts, a chicken that will come home to roost before too long. In Afghanistan, and also in Yemen and Iraq, the US has engaged in targeted assassinations as well as profile killings of civilians using drones.

The most troublesome aspect of all the violence that the US has initiated is that there are no actual rules in sight, apart from the Blinken-Biden-Austin clowns in Washington citing unsubstantiated threats coming from countries incapable of actually doing any harm like Iran or countries like Russia and China that had previously no intention of confronting the American military colossus.

So Washington is the beating heart of policies that have created turmoil worldwide while also moving the Doomsday clock closer to the finality that might well come with a nuclear war. And all the posturing is literally for nothing, for a bad cause supporting a corrupt, autocratic regime in a country that is no democracy with no visible off ramp. The hypocrisy of those in the White House and in Congress, as well as in the media, who are so reckless with the lives and fortunes of their fellow citizens literally defies belief.

If Washington is the first of the three cities that I am considering, Moscow must certainly be number two as it is on the receiving end of the US hypocrisy, being accused of having deviated from the “rules based” international order by invading Ukraine one year ago. Russia, however, sees things differently. The Kremlin has argued that it has repeatedly sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on two fundamental issues that it plausibly claims threaten its own national security and identity. First is the failure of Ukraine to comply with the Minsk Accords of 2014-5 which conceded a large measure of autonomy to the Donbas region, an area indisputably inhabited by ethnic Russians, as is Crimea.

Recently former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has let slip that there was never any intention to comply with the Minsk Agreement, implying that it was all a charade to enable strengthening Ukraine to join NATO and, if necessary, fight Russia. In fact, the Accords were ignored right from the beginning, with Ukrainian militias and other armed elements using artillery to shell the Donbas, killing an estimated 15,000 mostly ethnic Russian residents, a number which appears to be confirmed by independent sources.

The second vital national security issue for Moscow was over plans to offer NATO membership to Ukraine, which would place a possibly superior hostile military alliance at its doorstep. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly observed that the issues were both negotiable and that Zelensky only had to agree to maintain his country as “neutral,” i.e. not linked to any military alliance, and to honor some reasonable autonomy for Donbas. Reportedly it was the United States and Britain that pushed Ukraine into rejecting any and all of the Russian demands in a bid to initiate a war of attrition using Ukrainian lives to destabilize Putin’s government and reduce its ability to oppose US and Western dominance.

America the Feckless. How Low Can We Go? Philip Giraldi

And there is of course the back story, that the United States had long been meddling in Eastern Europe in spite of a pledge not to take advantage of the break-up of the Soviet Union to expand NATO eastwards. The US had brought about “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014 to remove a government friendly to Moscow. But in this case, the increasing involvement of the US and NATO in the fighting has been an extremely dangerous development because it has escalated the conflict and turned it into what might become a devastating nuclear exchange. One would like to see an immediate truce initiated to stop the fighting followed by serious negotiations to come to a settlement of the territorial dispute. But, of course, the United States, which has provided Zelensky with more than $100 billion in aid, has made it clear that it is not interested in a negotiated settlement unless Putin is willing as a confidence building first step to withdraw from all occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. In other words, he must surrender.

So whether Moscow has broken with the “rules based international order” depends very much on how one defines threats. Certainly, at a minimum, Washington has behaved far worse than Russia over the past twenty years, which rather confirms that the “rules” are essentially a convenient fiction. And finally, my third city to consider is Jerusalem, the claimed capital of the state of Israel. As the Jewish state is arguably either Washington’s closest ally or, as many believe, the tail that actually wags the White House dog, it is instructive to look at its behavior to examine whether the US applies a uniform standard to friend and foe alike when it doles out punishment to accused rule breakers.

If the United States is considered by the world community to be the most dangerous “superpower” country, Israel has to be considered the leading pariah among smaller, more regionally focused nations. And its control over the White House, the Congress and the national media in the US is such that it is never held to account for anything. Most recently, there was an attack by Israeli soldiers on a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin on the West Bank in which ten Arabs were killed. In retaliation, a Palestinian gunman subsequently shot dead seven Israelis in Jerusalem before being killed himself. Speaking from the Oval Office, President Biden only saw fit to mention the Palestinian counter-attack, saying merely that “This was an attack against the civilized world.” The initial Israeli attack which killed ten was not even cited, suggesting that Israeli atrocities killing Palestinians do not bother the civilized world that the Bidens live in.

In another White House demonstration of where its priorities lie, last year’s shooting dead by an Israeli soldier of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh led eventually to a milk-toast call for an inquiry by the White House, even though Biden and company openly bought into the Israeli government lie that it was an accident, likely triggered by a lot of Palestinian terrorist shooting in the area, which was not true. And don’t expect any real pushback against Israel’s policy of shoot-first from Congress, which only last week removed Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee because she was “antisemitic” due to her criticism of Israel’s behavior.

The Israeli Defense ministry indicated that it would not cooperate with any inquiry into its behavior and the Abu Akleh story has since disappeared. Israel has also killed other American citizens without any consequences, including Rachel Corrie and 34 sailors on board the USS Liberty naval vessel in 1967. Never before has a government killed Americans only to be rewarded with a $3.8 billion gift from the US taxpayers every year. The Jewish state’s government has also recently indicated that its free-fire policy against Palestinian civilians and their foreign supporters will not be modified. Israeli soldiers and policemen who kill Palestinians, who are routinely described as “terrorists,” are almost never investigated or prosecuted and have been, in some cases, praised in the media and promoted.

And Israeli control over major parts of the US federal government appears to be tightening. In a press conference last week, the United States State Department refused to confirm that Israel is in illegal occupation of large parts of Palestine, nor will it acknowledge that Israel has a nuclear arsenal.

Israel’s track record vis-à-vis its neighbors is somewhat similar to the American pattern of rules enforcement, though it rarely even bothers to excuse its behavior. It even started a major war, having attacked all its neighbors, after complaining falsely that they were “threatening,” in 1967, after which it illegally seized and occupied their territory. It is currently bombing Syria on a regular basis and has also attacked Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinians in Gaza. It has assassinated Iranian scientists and technicians.

Israel has invaded and occupied southern Lebanon and facilitated a massacre of Palestinians settled in camps there. Neither Syria nor Iran has ever attacked Israel or even threatened to do so, but Israel persists in claiming that it is threatened and is trying to convince Biden to join it in attacking the Iranians. The new, extreme racist right-wing government of Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu is in particular stepping up the pressure on Palestinians through actions that are illegal under international law without a squeak coming out of the White House. Home demolitions, property seizures, checkpoints and other round the clock harassment of Palestinians also are increasing in frequency as the Israelis expand their occupation of the West Bank. And Israel even sponsors actual terrorists in the form of the weaponized settlers who beat and destroy Palestinians at will with no consequences even when they kill an unarmed Arab or a child.

And some Israelis are also thinking of something grander, in the form of genocide, when it comes to their Palestinian neighbors. A prominent right wing Israeli member of parliament has perhaps suggested what he and many of his colleagues would like to see done to the remaining Palestinians. Zvika Fogel, a member of the governing coalition has called for a “final war” against the Palestinians to “subdue them once and for all”, following international condemnation of security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s incursion into Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, an additional illegal move intended to assert total control over access to Muslim holy sites. Fogel responded to the criticism, saying in an interview that Israel’s policy of going to war with Palestinians “every two or three years” was no longer good enough and that there should be one last war to “subdue them once and for all. It would be worth it because this will be the final war…”

So, it is a tale of three cities. Moscow is engaged in a war that at least has a rationale, even as one should and must oppose armed interventions between two neighboring countries. The Russian operation has been opposed by the United States, which has heedlessly escalated the war and produced a situation that can be devastating for all life on the planet. Washington is also the grand hypocrite in the game in that it has behaved far worse than Moscow over the past twenty years. And then there is Jerusalem, or if one prefers, Tel Aviv. A monstrous Israel is preeminent in how it wins the prize for being the absolute worst in its inhumanity and war crimes, without a rebuke from Washington or Joe Biden ever about “rules based international order” violations.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-balloon-opportunism-and-hypocrisy/5807328

China Balloon Opportunism and Hypocrisy

Day Two of Commie Balloon Madness. The primary feature here is an inflow of “public servant” careerists clogging the interwebs with condemnation of something they hardly understand.

In Neocon slash Neolib Bizarro World, a helium bag the length of three school buses with an unknown payload and solar panels attached has become a declaration of war for the uniparty political class. Consider the former vice president under Orange Man:

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Mike Pence @Mike_Pence

Shoot down the Chinese spy balloon. Go ahead and send the Secretary of State to China next week. Have @SecBlinken Look them in the eye and tell em- it better never happen again. That’s Peace Through Strength

7:04 PM ∙ Feb 3, 2023

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23,622Likes2,131Retweets

I posted yesterday on the infeasibility of this.

Reality, however, is not a strong suit for “representatives” jockeying for attention, as power-hungry narcissists are wont to do.

Here we have a former CIA boss and a former ambassador to the United Nations venting spleen over them damn Chicoms. Note the stern visage.

New York Post @nypost

Pence, Pompeo and Haley demand Biden ‘shoot down’ Chinese spy balloon trib.al/OMAsSSc

8:06 PM ∙ Feb 3, 2023

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Pompeo’s Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School is of little help in understanding balloons, missiles, and the Stratosphere.

Politicians and blue-checkers on Twitter are not inclined to compare and contrast. The “threat” posed by what is either an errant weather balloon or a clumsy surveillance device doesn’t hold a candle to the threat of the USG surveillance state.

The National Security Act, signed into law by a nuclear terrorist in 1947, resulted in mass surveillance of the American people. The FBI was established as a political police force, while the CIA concentrated on overthrowing foreign governments (it also violated its supposed charter to spy on domestic antiwar activists).

The Church Committee of the mid-1970s revealed how presidents used the CIA, FBI, and NSA to destroy political enemies (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—all employed the FBI to neutralize the opposition). No balloons were required.

The list of subversive, liberty-destroying programs and operations is long and sordid—ECHELON, COINTELPRO, Operation CHAOS, Project Mockingbird, Projects RESISTANCE, MERRIMAC, HT/LINGUAL, and the Cactus program, which tied it all together. This is a short list of known USG anti-liberty programs. No doubt many others remain classified and secret.

Following 9/11, the USG used “terrorism” as an excuse to violate the civil liberties of Americans. The so-called PATRIOT Act was rushed through Congress, resulting in illegal and “warrantless” surveillance of “tens of millions” of Americans.

In 2014, it was revealed the NSA had built a system designed to infect target computers with malware. The USG surveillance state went so far as to masquerade as a Facebook server in an effort to exfiltrate data. The overall objective was to “own the Net.”

The obsessive-compulsive effort by the state to disrupt the constitutionally protected political activity of its subjects—including the destruction of careers, frame-ups, and assassinations—is a topic far too lengthy for this Substack post.

Hypocrisy abounds, even though none of us know for certain what the ominous balloon is meant to do. Regardless, it was exploited to condemn China, resulting in Antony Blinken canceling a trip to the authoritarian crony capitalist “communist” nation.

It should come as no surprise Pence, Pompeo, Haley, and the majority of Congress critters and bureaucrats of the state, not only approve of tyrannical surveillance and “neutralization” of folks not on narrative but also enthusiastically support implanting military bases in foreign lands, thus creating endless tension as it develops and fields ever-evolving mechanics of death and mass murder.

For instance, consider the following:

Imagine the response of the USG if China moved troops near the Canadian and Mexican borders.

The Doomsday Clock would be a nanosecond before midnight.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2023/02/05/the-worst-of-times/

The Worst of Times

What kind of monsters infest the US and its vassal regimes— ones targeting unwanted segments of their societies for elimination, using Pharma as their weapon of choice.

The same ones threaten humanity’s survival by nuclear war against Russia and China, nations threatening no others.

Nothing in world history approaches the peril facing humanity today.

It’s a time when US-dominated NATO is at war against Russia, what poses the ominous risk of going nuclear.

It’s when Nazism is reemergent because of support from the same regimes that defeated its scourge over 75 years ago.

Last Wednesday, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed the following reality:

US-dominated NATO’s military-industrial complex is hostile to invented enemy Russia.

“We see how NATO’s entire military infrastructure is working against Russia, and we see how NATO’s entire intelligence infrastructure, including reconnaissance aviation, and satellite groupings are working in the interests of (Nazi-infested) Ukraine in a 24/7 mode.”

Their hostility toward Russia “will not change the course of events.”

“The SMO will continue” until Vladimir Putin’s publicly stated aims are achieved.

On Tuesday according to two unnamed Biden regime officials, the empire of lies is preparing to send another $2.2 billion in arms and equipment to Ukrainian Nazis — including longer-range rockets to targets in Russian territory. 

As it’s doing effectively each day, Russia will target and destroy them.

Along with slaying the made-in-the-USA Nazi-infested Ukraine monster, Moscow is proving its military superiority over US-dominated NATO at the same time.

It also proved that the empire of lies and forever wars is belligerently hostile to nations free from the scourge of its control.

Most people don’t understand the threat of today’s most perilous time in world history.

In cahoots with US/Western regimes and their wars of aggression, MSM stick exclusively to the fabricated official narrative while suppressing what’s crucial for everyone to know.

They support what’s important to expose and condemn — notably the scourge of Nazism infesting Ukraine, tyrannical rule where the rule of law was effectively abolished.

According to the so-called Center for Strategic and International Studies, hegemon USA intends war on China by 2025 over Taiwan.

Beijing considers the island a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland.

In stark contrast to how the empire of lies operates — coercing other nations belligerently to bow to its will, China, Russia and other nations free from its control seek cooperative relations worldwide according to the rule of law.

Russia is decisively defeating the scourge of US aggression against its sovereign independence.

The empire of lies and forever wars against invented enemies by hot and/or other means will fare no better against China or militarily potent Iran.

As noted military analyst, Andrei Martyanov explained, hegemon USA has no defense against Sino/Russian hypersonic munitions.

The Pentagon “is nowhere near to fielding anything comparable to (Russia’s) 3M22 Zircon and is not going to be there for a very long time.”

And when it attains this level of expertise, Russian technology for defense will greatly exceed its current capabilities — developed at a tiny fraction of what the US spends for weapons of war for aggression against nations free from its control.

Russia’s defeat Nazi-infested Ukraine was certain from day-one of its liberating SMO.

And there’s nothing that the empire of lies can do to prevent what’s largely achieved already.

A Final Comment

Both wings of the US war party are making much ado over the nonexistent threat of a Chinese balloon in US airspace.

Whether for reconnaissance of weather conditions or spying is a virtual nonissue.

Both countries — and Russia — operate numerous satellites to obtain military-related intelligence at about 70 miles above the earth’s surface, slightly above what’s considered the dividing line between its atmosphere and space — with no public hyperventilating threats to down them.

So why now?

Hegemon USA is at war against Russia with intent to eventually attack China over its Taiwan breakaway province in similar fashion to its preemptive war on Russia using Ukraine for this purpose.

Downing China’s balloon achieved nothing strategic.

Along with likely more provocative actions to follow, dominant empire of lies hardliners pushed things closer to preemptive US war on the country.

If things go nuclear against Russia and/or China by the empire of lies and forever wars, humanity may not survive the onslaught.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/patrick-lawrence-the-pentagons-balloon-floats-on/

The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On  

It is just as well that Antony “Guardrails” Blinken has called off his long-scheduled visit to Beijing, which was due to begin Tuesday. It would have been his first since taking over at State and the first by a secretary of state in four years. But Blinken would not have got any guardrails in place or built any exit ramps, which he seems to consider his highest calling. Let us wonder, parenthetically, if our Tony wasn’t meant to be a transportation engineer.

No, given the events of the past few weeks, the time for guardrails, exit ramps, and even “easing tensions”–was psychotherapy Blinken’s missed vocation?–would appear to be past for the Biden regime and its relations with Beijing. In my read, Blinken just spared himself another in a considerable line of embarrassments since he made a dog’s dinner of his first encounter with his Chinese counterparts during that infamous debacle in an Anchorage hotel two years ago next month. 

The stated reason for Blinken’s cancellation—and as he has not proposed a future date, it is a cancellation, not the advertised “postponement”—was the Chinese balloon that floated across Montana’s skies last week. I will have a few remarks about this very odd incident, a hall of mirrors in its own right, in due course. For now just two points to note immediately.

One, the appearance of the Chinese balloon in American airspace was a godsend for Blinken. Setting aside his exceptional mediocrity, no American diplomat can hope to get anything done with China while representing an imperium that grows ever more belligerent in the Pacific theater. Easing tensions, guardrails, and all the rest are notions intended to secure the quiescence of the American public—to keep the imperium hidden from view. The Chinese do not take such talk the slightest seriously. They keep the door open to serious negotiation with the U.S. as a matter of principle, but they entertain no illusions whatsoever that a high American official of so provocative an administration as Biden’s will walk through it. 

Two, let us note it was the Pentagon that announced the balloon incident and managed the day-to-day presentation to the public. State and the White House were left to react to the news, at least publicly. Behind this small detail lies a large, decisive victory for the generals—and a defeat for the diplomats, though they have not for decades fought their corner in these matters with any discernible vigor or conviction.

Remember all the grand talk of “diplomacy first,” and “the military will be our last resort” during Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 and his early months in office? That was just more of this jumped-up provincial pol’s patented snake oil, as the wiser among us understood from the first. This guy was never serious about a shift to responsible statecraft. He has a general solidly in with the arms merchants running the Defense Department and the most pitiable nerd since John Kerry—and this goes back, wow, three secretaries—running State.  

If the balloon incident merits consideration on its own, what happened 60,000 feet above Montana last week cannot be understood without careful reference to other, more consequential developments over the course of the past few weeks—or, depending on how you count, years. 

A few weeks ago Biden welcomed Fumio Kishida to the White House. There in the Oval Office he enlisted the willing Japanese premier in Washington’s increasingly aggressive campaign to threaten China and, finally, draw it into a military confrontation. When Kishida departed for Tokyo, Japan was certified as what Yasuhiro Nakasone, the nationalist premier during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, long wanted to make it: As Nakasone said, “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” stationed in the western Pacific.

I counted the Kishida–Biden summit big news. News as big or bigger came last week, just before the balloon business, when Defense Secretary Llyod Austin met in Manila with Ferdinand Marcos—yes, scion of the dictator—and the Filipino president opened the islands to nine, count them, locations where U.S. troops, ships, and aircraft will be permitted to rotate in and out. The rotation arrangement is a way around the post–Marcos constitution, which bars all foreign troops from being stationed on Filipino soil. So they are not stationed there: They come and go and may as well be. 

“This is a big deal,” Austin said while in Manila. “This is a very big deal.” I am with the secretary on this point. Look at a map. The Philippines’ northernmost islands are but 90–odd miles from Taiwan. Rotating, schmotating, American troops and matériel of all sorts will now be positioned to deploy effectively and rapidly in a ground, air, and sea operation against China in direct defense of the island territory—which has become, since Mike Pompeo’s day as Blinken’s predecessor, the epicenter of a majorly reinvigorated U.S. military presence at the far end of the Pacific. What Austin got done in Manila last week has been in the works at least since early 2019, when the Pentagon sold Capitol Hill on what it called its “Regain the Advantage” plan — as if the U.S. had ever lost it. Congress renamed the operation the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and promptly threw scores of billions of dollars at it. These billions continue to flow.  

Look at the map again. Between the Kishida agreement and the Marcos agreement, Washington has secured the military cooperation of two of America’s alliance partners in the Pacific to make a north-south arc far closer to China’s shoreline than Hawaii is to California. A third treaty ally, Australia, has for years cultivated a confrontational stance toward China and welcomed an increased U.S. military presence–a tilt diametrically opposed to the interests of Australian citizens and businesses, if not the nation’s defense cliques. 

John Lander, a veteran Australian diplomat, gave an encyclopedic account of this increasingly militarized relationship in a lecture to the Committee for the Republic a couple of weeks ago. I urge readers to view it here. When it appeared on our computer screen, we were riveted. The household came to a stop until Lander had finished.

Amid these “facts on the ground,” the voices of hawks in Washington grow shriller and more worrisome. 

In a memo dated February 1 but leaked several days earlier, a four-star Air Force general instructed units under his command to begin concrete preparations for war with China he predicted will come by 2025. Gen. Mike Minihan heads the U.S. Air Mobility Command—he is in essence a logistics man—and to go by his photograph and what he has to say for himself he is straight out of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Minihan’s memo—leaked, but I am not sure how confidential it was actually meant to be—laid out a nine-point plan as “preparation for the next fight.” “I hope I am wrong,” he commented after the memo was made public. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”

O.K., the American military is replete with kooks such as Milihan whose off-the-wall utterances are never heard beyond the barracks. We’re seeing something different now. Michael McCaul, the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee responded to the Milihan memo this way on Fox News Sunday after it was made public: “I hope he’s wrong as well. I think he’s right, though, unfortunately.”

Think about this, the view of the most powerful figure in the House on the foreign policy side. Now think about Blinken’s just-canceled visit and what the Chinese thought about it. 

The line in Washington before the balloon incident disrupted Blinken’s plans was that his trip to Beijing was especially well timed. Guardrails had to be put in place, tensions had to be eased. What tales the policy cliques tell themselves. A report published Saturday in The Diplomat tells us Beijing saw little point in Blinken’s encounter with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi.  “Sections of China’s officialdom and academia are adamant that the U.S. secretary of state should not be welcome in Beijing,” the magazine reported. And that is just the subhead atop the piece. The whole is worth reading for its careful reporting. 

In effect and according to what official statements have been made, Blinken intended to try once again what has failed since the Anchorage disaster in March 2021: He proposes to persuade Beijing to accept that the U.S. wants to cooperate in some areas—climate, health, and so on, the easy stuff—compete on the economic side, and confront in matters of security. This is naïve in the extreme, the thinking of people who have spent too much time in Washington offices and not enough among other people and in other nations. 

The Chinese read newspapers and can read maps. Shall we leave it at that, and conclude Blinken is fortunate to be off the hook with the Chinese for a good long while? 

I made some initial comments on the balloon incident as the news broke Friday morning, taking care not to draw conclusions. They are here for those interested. 

Here I shall take some care to draw a few conclusions.  

By all available indications, no, the Chinese did not send a high-altitude balloon the size, I read, of several school buses, to gather intelligence on fields of intercontinental missile silos spread across Montana while remaining undetected. Not a persuasive proposition. 

The Pentagon asserted without equivocation that the balloon was “certainly from the People’s Republic of China.” It did not identify the balloon as a surveillance craft in any way Pentagon officials, or any others in Washington, had their names on such a statement. It “assessed” that the balloon was on an espionage mission. Always be wary of this word “assess.” It is a weasel word that does not commit anyone using it to anything. It means, at best, “We don’t know and cannot say.” Or it means, “We know this is not true and will not stand by it but want the public to think it is true.”

No thanks. This is precisely the trick played when “the intelligence community”—that preposterous phrase—put out its “assessment,” in January 2017, of Russian culpability in the theft of Democratic Party email six months earlier. That “assessment” turned out to be nonsense, of course. But no spook had to answer for all the fallacies. 

Why is the Biden regime not making serious, vigorous representations in Beijing—threatening a break in relations, diplomatic expulsions, or other such retaliation for a breach of American sovereignty? Why did the Air Force follow the progress of the balloon all the way across the United States, presumably as it gathered intel all the while, as if it were some kind of harmless curiosity? On Saturday the U.S. shot the balloon down as it drifted across the Atlantic, so there will be no balloon to examine. Interesting. We never saw evidence of Russia’s hand in the pilfered email, either. 

All the evidence to date, which is not to say there is very much, indicates the craft was an off-course weather balloon on a civilian mission, just as the Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was after an apparently careful investigation of the matter Friday. Assume this is so and the above queries have answers. 

The media’s reporting of this incident is down there with the worst of the rubbish they served up during the Russiagate years. In the same stories, numerous of them, The New York Times reported the Pentagon’s “assessment,” then the Chinese explanation, and then went on to refer to the balloon as a spying craft in all subsequent mentions. It continues to do so as we speak. 

The government-supervised Times outdid its own silliness on Saturday morning, by which time it was obvious the status of the balloon as an espionage craft was open to serious doubt. China claims the balloon was used for meteorological purposes, The Times reported. However, the Pentagon says it was a collection device, although it was not sophisticated enough to gather intelligence on the ground below. 

This is a close paraphrase, as Times editors have since deleted this passage from the paper’s website, and I do not blame them. Consider carefully what is being said. 

One, weather balloons are collection devices. Collecting data is what they do. The contradiction The Times pretends to present is sheer chicanery. Two, it was a surveillance balloon but was not capable of surveilling.  

I know The Times well, from the inside as well as out. This is how its editors and reporters slide out the side door when they are at risk of exposure for having misled readers. They sometimes present us with riddles. In this case: It was not a weather balloon because it was a collection device, and let us ignore the fact that weather balloons are by definition collection devices. It was an espionage craft even though it was incapable of espionage.

Answer to the riddle: It was a weather balloon.

The tomfoolery surrounding the balloon incident will soon be forgotten. But do not miss, readers: We have just witnessed an unusually messy and visible round in the decades-long contention between Pentagon generals, whose power waxes without interruption, and a purposefully weakened State Department, whose power has steadily waned with the rise of the national security state.

In this connection, were Blinken in the slightest serious about his easing tensions project, he would have ordered a plane from Andrews Air Force Base and flown to Beijing as soon as he had word of the balloon incident. I see two reasons he didn’t. One, his scheduled talks with Wang Yi, as I have suggested, were a fool’s errand from the first. Two, the Biden regime quickly understood the Pentagon had trumped State once again and, as a matter of political expedience, they had to cave to the Capitol Hill hawks. 

The contention I describe has long been especially intense in trans–Pacific affairs. During my years as a correspondent in Tokyo and elsewhere in East Asia, I drew the conclusion that Washington does not have a foreign policy in the Pacific: It has a security policy run by the military. No honest American diplomat ever contradicted me.

A balloon of little consequence just popped over the Atlantic. The Pentagon’s floats on.  

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https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-and-the-three-tests-of-compliance/

Covid and the Three Tests of Compliance 

Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials. 

So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues. 

Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances. 

The final movement of the 6th “Tragic” Symphony by Gustav Mahler features three hammer blows, the third of which was later removed by the composer for superstitious reasons: the fear that the third signifies death. To this day, audiences wait in anticipation to see if the conductor will motion the percussionist to deploy the third or not. When he does not, the blow is even more conspicuous in its absence. 

And here we are in year three of the times after the pandemic response sent our lives and those of billions into extraordinary upheaval. To most of us, it seems like a crazy blur of edicts, propaganda, revelations, fear, confusion, division, and shock, so much so that it is hard to keep the history straight. Indeed, many people just want everything forgotten or at least completely mis-remembered. 

Daily, we are bombarded by fake history that we know is wrong. We lived through it. Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing. 

One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms? The policies seem to be constructed for just that purpose. 

As if to fit the model, they came in three great waves: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Let’s examine all three stages and reflect on their demands and terms. It begins to make sense, at least from the point of view of those in control. 

Lockdowns 

“Thank goodness for the lockdowns; this will end the pandemic.”

The lockdowns hit us hard from mid-March 2020 and onward, imposed as if they were a conventional response to a circulating new pathogen, though they literally had no precedent in history. They were sweeping, closing churches, schools, small and medium-sized businesses, civic clubs like AA, bars and restaurants plus gyms, and even venues that host weddings and funerals. Many states imposed stay-at-home orders. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, while medical services were reserved for only Covid cases and other extreme emergencies while everything else was shut. 

All of this was based on the astonishing announcement by the Trump administration: “Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission” and “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

At the March 16, 2020, press conference, not one reporter asked a critical question. Even if this was only for two weeks, as was promised, how is any of this compatible with law and the Bill of Rights? How is it that bureaucracies, without any vote of any legislature, can simply “shut down” an entire country? It was completely bizarre, so much so that most people figured that there had to be some legitimate underlying rationale. 

Not everyone went along. Some hair salons, bars, and churches remained open but found themselves pilloried by the media. Then the cops arrived, even SWAT teams, closing them by force. The kids had to stay home too, and moms and dads were forced to leave the workforce to care for them at home, splitting their days pretending to work on Zoom calls while their children pretended to be in school on Zoom too. It was a massive crush of technology and everyone had to adapt. 

There was nowhere to go and most American towns suddenly looked like ghost towns. President Trump announced that it would surely all be over by Easter but this itself was something of a shock: Easter was more than two weeks away, so his announcement amounted to extension of lockdowns. His advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx seized the moment and successfully talked Trump into another full 30 days of lockdowns. 

These weeks were excruciating. Many if not most people knew that there was something very wrong but it was unclear what. We could no longer meet with friends and neighbors to discuss. Plus many people in our online communities seemed to be all in on the lockdowns, fully believing that this was the way to control and eventually stop a pandemic. 

And yet there we were, all of us living in this surreal scene, asked to believe the implausible and give up what we loved the most by deference to a handful of people who said that they knew more than we knew. Those who did not do the right thing were considered horrid and unscientific, insufficiently credulous toward our betters. 

Masks 

“Thank goodness for masks; this will end the lockdowns.”

In these early days, there was no thought put into universal masking. It was never part of our history. There was a moment during the 1918 pandemic that one city tried masks but not only did it not work; it produced a massive political revolt. Not since then had masks for the general population ever been tried. Plenty of countries in the Far East had used masks to filter out smog on bad days but that problem had never been something that affected the US enough to make them a norm. 

Plus, in those days, the experts told everyone not to bother with them. The masks should be saved for medical personnel. In any case, they don’t really work to control the spread of viruses like this. They are not the equivalent of using condoms to avoid infection from AIDS. A respiratory virus is something else entirely, and we are a people informed by evidence and science. The evidence was nowhere in sight that masks achieve any real purpose. 

Practically overnight, that advice changed. Part of the deal was that masks were the key to getting out of lockdown. We could leave our home again if only we would wear a mask. For those who don’t like lockdown, now is your chance to leave it behind. You only needed to comply with this second round of edicts. The first round, true, was pretty rough, but who can object to putting a cloth on your face? Surely no one. As Bill Gates said, we wear pants so why not cover our faces too? It only makes sense. 

People went along, and we went through a whole season or two in which we did not see smiles. Even the children had their faces covered. If you desire to breathe freely, you could fully expect to be denounced by strangers for daring to reject the demands of authorities. You could get thrown off a plane, and put on a list never to travel again. The hate was apparent everywhere, even in outdoor markets where gatekeepers would sternly instruct you slap that cloth on your face. 

Those who resisted the masking demands were – like those who refused the lockdowns – regarded as miscreants and political rebels. I personally found the whole demand of masking to be so preposterous (masking has long been a sign of subservience) that I spoke out against them, only to find myself attacked viciously in many public forums as a grandma killer and a disease spreader. And this came from from venues that previously had celebrated civil liberties. 

This demand for masking was later nationalized once the Biden administration took over. It was to be 100 days of masking to defeat the virus. But by now no one believed anything coming from Washington. We knew for sure that the claim that it was only for 100 days – why 100? – was propaganda.  

It eventually took a major court case to end the mask mandate for all travel: buses, trains, and planes. Even that is still being litigated to this day, as the Biden administration claims it has the power to impose such an order by virtue of the quarantine power of the federal government, first granted in 1944. 

Looking back, the deal was pretty obvious: you can get out of lockdowns by masking. If you don’t like complying with the first round of tests, here is another test for you: comply with this and all your kvetching about lockdowns can come to an end. Just go along! What kind of pathology do you have to keep from continuing to indulge this pointlessly rebellious habit? You are probably a conspiracy theorist or QAnon or hanging around people from the radical right. 

Just do what you are told and then everything will be fine. Things are not fine because you irrationally cling to your “freedumb.”

Of course, the government broke the deal. Masking didn’t really end the restrictions. They continued on anyway. And many are still with us, even the track-and-trace surveillance and restrictions on movement. The signs that demand we socially distance still festoon airports and malls even if everyone ignores them. 

Vaccines 

“Thank goodness for the vaccines; they will end the lockdowns and the masks.”

Eventually, there came a third test of compliance. This time it was more explicit: if you don’t like lockdowns and masking, the way out is pretty simple: get the shot. If you get the shot, you can travel around freely and you can even take off your mask. This is the way we end this pandemic but there must be broad compliance. Everyone authorized to get the vaccine under the “emergency use authorization” should do it. 

New York City shut down to everyone but the vaccinated. Refuseniks could not go to restaurants, bars, theaters, libraries, or any other public house. Boston and New Orleans followed suit. The mayors said that they were keeping the city safe and reviving the economy because the only way to avoid getting Covid was to be around only vaccinated people. We were further told that the unvaccinated were prolonging the pandemic. Their patience was running thin: get the jab or lose your job. 

Many had to get it, and thousands were fired for refusing. Millions were displaced because of all this. And this only intensified the campaign, which was then extended to children. Then came the booster and the bivalent. All the while, the news concerning their effectiveness got grimmer. It did not stop transmission, thus removing all “public health” rationale behind the mandates. Moreover, it did not stop infection. You would get Covid anyway. In fact, by virtue of immunity imprinting, you could be even more vulnerable. 

The thinking behind the third hammer blow turned out to be a lie too. Your decision to surrender your bodily autonomy to the vaccine that did work did not gain back your freedom any more than the mask or the lockdowns did. All three compliance demands, each predicated on the idea that it would make the virus go away and gain back rights and liberties, turned out to be ruses of one sort or another. 

Crucially, the new demand came with the promise that if you just believe in and comply with the newest thing, the older thing that you hated will go away. So what’s the problem? Just give in to this new thing and all will be well. 

And yet the vaccine mandate was the most egregious by some measures. If lockdowns were the war, the vaccine mandate was conscription. It took hold of your own body and demanded you allow – via a needle in your skin – in a government-funded and indemnified potion about which you knew nothing. It was the equivalent of drafting young people out of their prime to kill and be killed in a foreign land, and we know how that has ended for states that have tried it: not only riots but revolutions. 

So the third test for many was the very act that flipped the switch in many people’s minds. It was a bridge too far and the act that caused millions to rethink everything about the pandemic response and their compliance all along. Even for those who went along with it, the bitterness remains and grows. 

From legend and literature, this is how things usually are presented, not with one inviting temptation to go along but rather with three chances to comply, each with assurance that all will be well if we just give up our recalcitrant desire to think and act for ourselves. At each stage, every one of us faces enormous pressure, and not just from government but also from family, friends, and coworkers. 

• “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread” ~ material comfort 
• “If You are the Son of God, throw yourself down” ~ fame and social approval
• “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me” ~ power 

The three tests in this case turned out to be more like the hammer blows in Mahler’s symphony, signifiers of disaster and death, in this case pertaining to our rights and liberties. 

Sure enough, even now, the remnants of all three are still with us. There are still capacity restrictions in place as remnants of the original lockdowns. Masks are still required in many cities and venues. And the vaccine mandates are still being enforced. And the pandemic emergency is still in place and will be for several more months. 

Just as one is ending, you can be sure that another is beginning. The New York Times just sounded the alarm about H5N1 bird flu, which they say could kill half of humanity if it crosses over from birds to humans. And we can be certain that the three trials will be visited upon us again. 

Have we learned? What will be our response in the next round of trials?

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/05/chris-hedges-woke-imperialism/

Woke Imperialism

Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state.  

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties.  African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control. 

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about  incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them. 

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feign that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ. 

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Meme, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks: 

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/propaganda-perpetuates-pandemic-censorship/5803995

Propaganda Perpetuates the Pandemic and Censorship

Video at article

In the video above,^1,2 initially published in August 2021, professor Piers Robinson, Ph.D. — co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, whose research specialty is organized persuasive communication and contemporary propaganda — speaks to Asia Pacific Today about propaganda in the age of COVID.

As noted by Robinson, COVID-19 is unquestionably the largest, most sophisticated propaganda operation in history. Psychological techniques were extensively used during 2020 to incite fear and panic in the population, while other persuasion strategies were used to get people to support and defend COVID measures such as masking, isolation, social distancing, lockdowns and jab mandates.

The Propaganda War

Indeed, propaganda is what allowed for draconian and unscientific COVID measures to be implemented in the first place. Without propaganda and simultaneous censorship of opposing views, little of what we’ve been through would have been possible.

As noted by Robinson, while the use of state propaganda could initially be justified as a necessary means to achieve a public health objective — protecting people from COVID-related illness and death — it quickly became apparent that this was not the case, and likely never was.

Today, three years in, it’s quite evident that COVID is a psychological operation. For example, since 2022 at the latest, COVID has been nothing more than another endemic respiratory infection, much like the common cold, yet the pandemic has not been declared “over.”

We now also have clear evidence that the COVID jabs don’t prevent infection or spread of the virus, which negates the entire premise for vaccine passports, yet they’re being pushed anyway. In short, COVID-19 was (and still is) a means to an end; to suspend and strip us of Constitutional rights and civil liberties, and to further social, political and financial restructuring objectives outside democratic processes.

A Propaganda Masterpiece

Another propaganda expert who has spoken about the overt use of propaganda to create and maintain the pandemic is professor Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., whom I interviewed in June 2021 about the academic censorship he experienced at New York University.

Ironically, it was his teaching students how to question and resist propaganda that brought on the curtailment of his academic freedom, after teaching this important subject for over 20 years. Like Robinson, Miller believes that what we’ve experienced over the past three years is a propaganda “masterpiece” of unequaled scale and sophistication.

It began with the outbreak of an unknown pathogen in China. Media showed images of people allegedly dropping dead in the streets. This has never happened anywhere else since then, which strongly suggests those images were misappropriated for one purpose — to spread fear.

According to Miller, the type of fearmongering used to propagate the belief that COVID-19 was a lethal threat was the most devastating ever used in propaganda history. What made the COVID propaganda so much more effective than any previous propaganda operation was the fact that a virus is the perfect enemy.

It’s invisible, could be carried by anyone, including those you love the most, and could “get” you anywhere. As explained by Miller, in previous propaganda operations, the enemy was typically portrayed as having the ability to “infect” the people and the nation with its evil.

This was the case both with anti-communist propaganda and the “war on terror.” Communism was likened to an infectious disease set to ravage the nation, and terrorists were likened to a pandemic that had to be controlled and combated. With COVID, the propaganda shifted to the thing of fear itself — an actual virus.

Despite a long-held understanding that asymptomatic infection doesn’t exist, the propagandists even managed to convince the public that perfectly healthy people could spread the virus. It was a complete fiction, a scientific falsehood, which is how we know that the pandemic narrative was a psychological operation, yet people were so fearful, they didn’t question it.

What Is Propaganda?

As noted by blogger and propaganda analyst Klark Barnes,³ if we want to be free, we must know what propaganda is and how it works. Classical rhetoric is about persuasion through argument. It appeals to logic. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a kind of subrational manipulation that appeal to our most basic instincts.

An informal definition of propaganda is “an organized attempt to get people to think or do something — or not think or do something.” Propaganda can be true or false, or somewhere in between, and can be used for both good and ill. Public service ads encouraging you not to smoke, for example, are a form of benevolent propaganda.

The problem with propaganda is that it’s inherently biased and one-sided, which can become outright dangerous if the other side is censored.

This is particularly true when it comes to medicine and health, and the censoring of COVID-19 treatment information and the potential hazards of the COVID shots is a perfect example of this. State propaganda and war propaganda also rely heavily on the incitement of fear and anger, which makes people behave in ways they normally wouldn’t.

They Must Constantly Stir the Pot to Keep Fear Simmering

As noted by Barnes, media forecasts of other “imminent ordeals” are also a way “to keep widespread fear and anger simmering:”⁴

“The possible next acts include a cyber-attack (‘by Russia’); a breakdown of the world supply chain, and consequent food shortages, or famine (likely to be blamed on Russia); a heightened ‘climate crisis,’ necessitating further lockdowns …

‘[T]terrorist’ attacks, by ‘white supremacists’ and angry blacks (portending war between the races); an ‘alien attack’ on Planet Earth, as in The War of the Worlds or Independence Day; and — of course — another plague or two, or three, caused by some further COVID ‘variant,’ smallpox … the Marburg virus, and/or whatever other pathogen, real or imaginary, might serve the same old purpose …

Such looming sequels to the COVID propaganda … would also each inflict a vast amount of further suffering on humanity — and so those of us who study propaganda critically, as public intellectuals, must speak out loud and clear, to set things right.”

According to Barnes, setting things right involves, first and foremost, sharing the truth. Propaganda narratives that must be countered with careful and thorough analysis include but are not limited to:

Over the past three years, I’ve written many articles detailing all of these. But setting the record straight on individual propaganda topics is not enough. If we are to retain our freedoms, Barnes believes the public also needs to get much savvier about propaganda overall.

The Free Press Has Became a Propaganda Juggernaut

For decades, we had a free press that helped keep pro-industry advertising lies in check. Professional investigative journalists working for magazines, newspapers and broadcast outlets would write in-depth exposés, outing the truth behind deceptive advertising and countering industry propaganda with science, statistics and other documented facts.

As a result of the free press doing its job, ineffective or toxic products were often driven off the market. The answer that industry came up with for this problem was to control the press with advertising dollars. By becoming a major revenue stream, advertisers more or less automatically ended up controlling the content.

Even though media management and editors will deny it, if advertisers don’t want you to speak about certain issues that might adversely impact their business, all they have to do is threaten to pull their ads.

At that point, you have to make a decision: Ditch the truth or ditch your income. Most news organizations will ditch the truth for payment, and simply will not run reports that might harm the bottom line of its advertisers. As explained by Barnes:⁵

“That real-life Ministry of Truth was not set up ex nihilo by some iron faction of totalitarian oligarchs but gradually took shape out of a corporate media cartel with interlocking boards, heavily dependent on the advertising revenues of Amazon, Big Pharma … and the media’s own parent companies … with its assets closely managed by BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS …

[As] that vast commercial system has become more unified, it also has maintained, or even tightened, its covert relations with the military and ‘intelligence community’ …

And while the commercial media system has been thus corrupted top to bottom … the ‘public’ media and ‘alternative’ press — from NPR, PBS, the BBC and CBC … to nearly every single outlet on ‘the left’ — have also been absorbed into the juggernaut primarily by their funding through such sturdy CIA pass-throughs as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Open Society Institute …

[The] ‘free press’ … has been turned into a bio-fascist fear machine, its propaganda services assured by Bill Gates’ ‘strategic media partnerships,’ and the concomitant ‘fact-checking’ operation that he also largely funds.

The propaganda gushing daily, hourly, from that system also has depended on the wisdom of such global PR firms as Weber Shandwick, Edelman and Hill+Knowlton Strategies … and, within the Fourth Estate, the rise … of ‘journalists’ prepared, in university, to be far less concerned with honest journalism than with … serving ‘social justice.'”

The Web of Players Silencing Truth

Indeed, as Barnes notes, advertising companies have likely played an important organizational role in the COVID propaganda. Another major one, which I suspect may have had a central role, is the Publicis Groupe. I detailed some of its many connections in “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.”

In summary, Publicis represents a long list of major companies within the technology, pharmaceutical and banking industries in more than 100 countries.⁶ These companies, in turn, have various partnerships with the U.S. government and global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Publicis has ties to NewsGuard/HealthGuard, educational institutions, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Bing, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, global technocratic institutions like the World Health Organization, national and global NGOs like the Center for Countering Digital Hate. And, it dominates health websites like WebMD and Medscape.

Taken together, this explains how certain views can be so effectively erased. Publicis itself is also a partner of the World Economic Forum, which is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and our way of life. As such, Publicis appears to be coordinating the suppression of information that runs counter to the technocratic narrative.

The Art of the Great Lie

Marshall McLuhan once said,⁷ “Little lies don’t need to be protected. But the great lies are protected by public incredulity.” Basically, people will deny really big lies by saying “Come on, you’re crazy, they wouldn’t do that.” It’s far easier to call people “conspiracy theorists” than it is to face the possibility that what they’re saying is true.

Little lies don’t need to be protected. The big lies are protected by public incredulity. ~ Marshall McLuhan

In a November 4, 2022, article,⁸ clinical and public health physician Dr. David Bell noted that the more divorced a lie is from reality, the more likely it is to succeed, thanks to the quirks of human nature and normal psychology:

“In a former role I had a boss who lied a lot. The lies were pure fantasy, but massive in scope and delivered with sincerity. They were very successful.

This success was based on the reluctance of most people to consider that someone in a position of authority in a humanitarian organization would completely ignore all semblance of reality. People assumed the claims must be true as fabricating information to that extent in those circumstances seemed to defy logic.

The principle of Really Big Lies is based on the lies being so divorced from reality that the listener will assume their own perception must be flawed, rather than doubt the claims of the person telling the lies. Only an insane or ridiculous person would make such outlandish claims, and a credible institution would not employ such a person.

Therefore, given that the institution is apparently credible, the statements must also be credible, and the listener’s prior perception of reality was therefore flawed. Lesser lies, by contrast, are likely to be perceived as sufficiently close to known reality to be demonstrably wrong. Inventing truth can be more effective than bending it.”

I believe this is precisely the strategy employed by Big Pharma, health agencies, government officials and the deep state propaganda arm over the past three years. Their claims have been so far from any semblance of reality, anyone aware of the facts has been left feeling more than a little crazy.

Unfortunately, while most humans have a moral and ethical compass, few end up following it when confronted by psychopaths in authority and the peer pressure to conform. As noted by Bell, good team players almost always end up supporting false narratives, and those who refuse to go along with what are clearly lies tend to be but a tiny minority.

Refusing False Narratives Has Real Consequences

As Bell correctly points out, over the past three years, health care workers, patients, researchers, academics and public health employees have been forced to embrace a long list of fantasy-based dogmas that are contradicted by prior public health orthodoxy.

But it’s the sharp break from factual reality that makes it impossible to question them because, if you do, you’re now questioning “the entire current hierarchy of public health,” Bell says. To quote Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re not attacking him when you question his irrational flip-flopping, you’re questioning science itself.

If you question these fantasy-based beliefs, you’re a science-denier, and you’re putting your employment and reputation at risk. And, unfortunately, those risks are not imaginary. Many doctors and scientists whose reputations and contributions to public health have been beyond reproach for decades have been stripped of their medical licenses and lost their jobs for speaking out against the reigning COVID narratives.

Transparency and Truth Are the Remedy

So, where do we go from here? How do we end the madness and return to reality-based public health? Bell believes that public health professionals who have misled the public will inevitably pay a heavy price for their betrayal. He writes:⁹

“Whilst growing their industry’s finances, public health professionals are degrading themselves and betraying society. The betrayal, based on incessant lying, is something for which they will inevitably face consequences …

Eventually, even the most dedicated followers will begin to question the sense of putting on a mask at a restaurant door only to remove it 10 steps later, or vaccinating vast populations against a disease to which they are already immune whilst they die of other readily preventable diseases.

The way out of this is simply to refuse to lie, or cover for the lies of others … [The] truth will catch up, one day, with those who don’t … It is far better to leave early and live with dignity.”

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-tyranny-overran-the-united-states-while-you-were-watching-youtube/5806516

How Tyranny Overran the United States While You Were Watching YouTube

Slowly, against their will, and against their natural inclination to watch football and eat pizza, Americans are awaking to the reality of a totalitarian system with its tentacles wrapped around every aspect of their existence. Sadly, the true nature of this tyranny still eludes the understanding of most citizens, in part because the process by which America was transformed utterly has been slow, in part because the commercial media points us away from the true causes of this slippage and pins all blame on easily identifiable bad guys.

Those seeped in the progressive political tradition sensed a radical loss of justice and transparency under the George W. Bush administration, a trend that only accelerated under the Trump administration—with a perceived reprieve under Obama and the possibility of a positive turn under Biden.

Those marinated in the juices of conservative politics observed an end of freedom and the spread of socialist, or “leftist,” ideology that oppresses the citizen under Clinton and Obama.

Both interpretive communities refer to the same social and political trends, to the war on freedom that renders us up as sacrificial lambs to the cruel gods of global capital. The rhetoric employed by the two groups is so radically different, however, and the histories of the United States that they embrace are so divergent, that they are lost in intense ideological conflicts even as they describe the same creeping totalitarianism.

That conflict is no accident. That ideological battle over the insignificant is just what the doctor ordered for the interests of high finance. Or as J. P. Morgan put it,

“By dividing the people, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.”

The super-rich already had their consultants come up with detailed studies on how to divide up citizens by religion, by ethnic identity, by cultural signifiers, and by class so that they are incapable of unity even in the face of the complete takeover of the economy, the media, education and the political process.

Progressives refer to the supporters of Trump in rural areas as “stupid” and fundamentalist Christians refer to the followers of the Democratic Party as “evil.”

This profound misunderstanding is probably reinforced by numerous classified operations in which individuals promoting divisive left-wing, or right-wing, positions are encouraged, and paid, to do so as render those who should have common cause as foes.

There is another reason why we have such a difficult time understanding the transformation of our society. The nature of this totalitarianism runs against the assumptions we were taught by movies, novels, and news reports. Our minds are cluttered with archetypes for dictatorship and evil that are at odds with the reality.

The greatest crime of Hollywood was convincing us that evil takes the form of a monster with fangs and claws, of an evil leader with a sinister smile. Corrupt journalists extend this fiction to the public sphere, explaining how evil is embodied in foreign leaders like Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or in domestic ill-doers like Hillary Clinton (for the right) or Donald Trump (for the left).

As a result, we are unable to detect, or to understand, the takeover of our society that has taken place.

That is to say that we are confronted by “inverted totalitarianism,” to borrow the term of the philosopher Sheldon Wolin, a cultural and political state in which all aspects of our daily lives are controlled by multinational corporations without our knowing and we lose all freedom.

As a result, our actions are profoundly limited; we are constantly beaten down by an iron fist covered in the soft glove of interest charges, student loans, and constant surveillance.

The totalitarianism that we face is “inverted” in the sense that we expect some dictator standing on top and playing the bad buy, oppressing us out of personal greed, vanity or cruelty. But the true source of our misery is rather the manner in which multinational corporations use supercomputers to calculate profits and then extract as much money as possible from us by making it impossible for us to grow our own food, to heal our own illnesses, to teach ourselves, or to entertain ourselves. Instead, we must buy products, online, or in supermarkets, in transactions from which multinational corporations and banks will invariably take a major cut. The only learning that is recognized and accredited is expensive and is controlled by corporations.

We are offered only false choices between Pepsi or Coke, between Taco Bell or Wendy’s, between action films or romantic comedies, and between the Democratic or Republican Parties.

The process by which citizens lost their self-reliance, their self-sufficiency in food production and in energy production, and the basic skills of sewing, knitting and carpentry, growing dependent on products supplied by corporations, began 100 years ago. We can trace the current crisis back to the campaigns of John D. Rockefeller to force citizens to be dependent on petroleum through the promotion of automobiles and trade, the slashing of budgets for public transportation and the massive funding for highways, the push for the mechanization of farming and the popularization of plastics.

Rockefeller also paid off experts so as to marginalize homeopathic medicine and traditional treatments and create dependency on overpriced hospitals that are tied to corporations, while rendering universities and research institutes dependent on the benevolence of the rich, thus making systematic critiques of the sources of wealth a taboo topic.

To be more specific, the invisible inverted totalitarianism that has taken control of our daily experiences can be traced back to the launch of Windows as an operating system in 1985. Microsoft Word, under the rule of Bill Gates (an ardent student of John D. Rockefeller), set out to control the means by which citizens utilize their computers and later, to control how they interacted with each other over the internet.

Sure, presidential elections were held every four years, and the public was given a chance to express itself. Secret police did not cart off those who criticized the government—in fact criticism of government was encouraged as way to distract from the impact of bank deregulation.

Most citizens were hardly aware that having one corporation control the system software for all computers that they supposedly “owned” meant that they had lost their freedom.

Yet the shift was profound. Whereas the individual previously could decide for himself where to place files in his office, how to organize documents and layout his papers around his typewriter, the manner in which information is organized within Windows is extremely limited, determined in advance by unaccountable forces and the format and layout cannot be modified by the user.

Needless to say, this first step down the road to tyranny, this fatal loss of basic autonomy, was carefully covered up in the rhetoric of convenience and efficiency, exciting innovation and technological advancement, so that few recognized the loss.

Myths about the importance of convenience, of connectivity and of globalization were swallowed by the entire population. Critical topics like the scientific method, the control of the means of production and the decision-making process in government, and in other institutions, were forgotten.

The next step in this hidden tyranny over our daily lives came in the form of search engines like Google, social networks like Facebook, and other massive, interconnected, corporations that mediated the interactions of the individual with the community, often taking over critical functions that previously belonged to the community or to non-profit institutions like schools or research centers.

Under the guise of greater convenience for the individual, businessmen with unlimited funding from investment banks were able to buy up rivals, block out alternatives that offered search engines as cooperatives, and thereby created search engines that pose as transparent institutions but derive money through the sophisticated manipulation of human interactions using algorithms.

Because Google and Facebook had such resources that they could lose money for years, the manner in which they whittled away at the autonomy of the citizen was almost undetectable. Equally important was the strategy of using short-term stimulation of the brain by postings, instant messages and gaudy news reports, to remap the connections between synapses so as to render most incapable of complex, three-dimensional, thinking. That service, the creation of a dumbed down, passive, population, was true product that internet giants offer to their real clients.

Google controls what information we access to, in what order we have access to it, and it lays out a hierarchy of significance in search results that has some basis in fact, but is primarily a political act for sale to the highest bidder.

Results of Google searches are altered, on a case-by-case basis, in response to the needs of corporations to promote their views to extremely specific audiences.

Although we are trained to think of Google as a public service, its falsehoods, increasingly given authority by the parallel Wikipedia entries created by public relations firms, are not subject to external review. Google users are never permitted to participate in the process of the formulation of policy, or in the review of content. That is to say, the United States calls itself a democracy, but the primary tool that citizens rely on for information is run as a dictatorship.

Another popular cloak for the slip into tyranny is the framing of “opinion” as content in the news. Scientific fact ceased to be central in reporting from 1990s. In its stead, opinion polls of groups selected by polling companies are held up as a confirmation of what is true.

Public opinion polls are the propaganda equivalent of stock buybacks. The billionaires, having radically deregulated the economy and dumbed down the population, merely force-feed their opinions to the public through the media that they control and then claim that the policies they want are demanded by the public.

Facebook gives the appearance that the citizen can express himself freely, and can make friends with anyone. Yet, since Facebook Inc. controls whom a citizen can easily find through its network, and who sees what, and it does not permit users to use their own software, or design their own page, or own the networks they create on Facebook, or to have any say in how Facebook is administered, the freedom is fiction.

Legal concepts like the contract have been twisted beyond recognition in the totalitarian cyberspace that surrounds us.

A contract is a negotiated agreement between two parties. On-line, however, whether it is the decision to accept cookies, or to comply with the rules for a commercial application, the user has no right to make demands of the corporation. He or she is given the false choice of either agreeing with all conditions offered, or not having access to the service. The contract is an empty ritual.

We are accustomed to permitting Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat or Instagram to determine what becomes of information that we share, and we are unaware of the billions in profits those corporations make by selling off the information, the content, and the creative ideas that we supply without giving us any compensation. In a sense, these social networks are a form of virtual slavery.

Click here to watch the video

COVID-19 Totalitarianism

Because the thinking of citizens has been degraded for decades, and citizens rely on corporate-sponsored sources for basic information, it became possible, for the first time, to create a virtual pandemic, planned by the super-rich, promoted by the news sources that they own, authorized by experts at the institutes and universities that they fund, and legitimated by government agencies (and international institutions like the World Health Organization) that have been radically privatized.

Previously, a significant number of citizens were capable of assessing the accuracy of information on their own. Research institutes like Harvard University still had an ethical commitment to the scientific method and to academic integrity.

All that is over now. The façades of the NIH and Harvard remain the same, maybe they are even better maintained, but the intellectual innards have rotted away. Distinguished professors are easily assembled to give testimony to ridiculous theories about COVID19.

The dangers of the COVID19 vaccines are not the primary threat. The danger lies rather in the shift of the decision-making process for policy away from science, and away from a transparent policy debate. COVID19 serves a successful precedent for invisible forces at private equity funds to decide medical policy in secret and then feed it to us through authority figures.

Those invisible forces now feel they are free to require of us, without any accountability to science, that we have any substance that they offer injected into our bodies as a condition for the right to attend school, to find employment or to receive medical treatment.

The process was made possible by the interaction of social networks, search engines, commercial media, and other critical components of daily experience that determine opinions concerning reliable and authoritative voices. That process is run as an invisible dictatorship that controls a distracted, confused and unfocused population, drowning in connectivity.

Nothing will get better until citizens recognize the cause of this nightmare was not the legacy of the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas or the Trumps, although they all played their role, but rather the end of the self-reliant and informed citizen with access to the writings of experts with a deep commitment to the scientific method and to ethical principles.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/04/us-surrounds-china-with-war-machinery-while-freaking-out-about-balloons/

US Surrounds China With War Machinery While Freaking Out About Balloons

In what Austin journalist Christopher Hooks has called “one of the stupidest news cycles in living memory,” the entire American political/media class is having an existential meltdown over what the Pentagon claims is a Chinese spy balloon detected in US airspace on Thursday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled his scheduled diplomatic visit to China after the detection of the balloon. The mass media have been covering the story with breathless excitement. China hawk pundits have been pounding the war drums all day on any platform they can get to and accusing the Biden administration of not responding aggressively enough to the incident.

“The important thing that the American people need to understand, and what we are going to try to expose in a bipartisan fashion on this committee, is that the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party is not just a distant threat in East Asia, or a threat to Taiwan,” House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher told Fox News on Friday. “It is a threat right here at home. It is a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest — in places like those that I live in.”

“A big Chinese balloon in the sky and millions of Chinese TikTok balloons on our phones,” tweeted Senator Mitt Romney. “Let’s shut them all down.”

China’s foreign ministry says the balloon is indeed from China but is “civilian in nature, used for meteorological and other scientific research,” and was simply blown far off course. This could of course be untrue — all major governments spy on each other constantly and China is no exception — but the Pentagon’s own assessment is that the balloon “does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

So everyone’s losing their minds over a balloon that in all probability would be mostly worthless for spying, even while everyone knows the US spies on China at every possible opportunity. US officials have complained to the press that American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them, and in 2001 a US spy plane caused a major international incident when it collided with a Chinese military jet on China’s coastline, killing the pilot.

The US considers it its sovereign right to spy on any nation it chooses, and the average American tends more or less to see it the same way. This is highlighted in controversies around domestic versus foreign surveillance, for example; Americans were outraged over the Edward Snowden revelations not because spy agencies were conducting surveillance, but because they were conducting surveillance on American citizens. It’s just taken as a given that spying on foreigners is fine, so it’s a bit silly to react melodramatically when foreigners return the favor.

As Jake Werner explains for Responsible Statecraft:

Foreign surveillance of sensitive U.S. sites is not a new phenomenon. “It’s been a fact of life since the dawn of the nuclear age, and with the advent of satellite surveillance systems, it long ago became an everyday occurrence,” as my colleague and former CIA analyst George Beebe puts it.

U.S. surveillance of foreign countries is likewise quite common. Indeed, great powers gathering intelligence on each other is one of the more banal and universal facts of international relations. Major countries even spy on their own allies, as when U.S. intelligence bugged the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Typically, even when such surveillance is directed against the United States by a rival power, it does not threaten the safety of Americans and it poses manageable risks to sites where secrecy is of the utmost importance. However — in the context of rapidly increasing U.S.–China tensions — foreseeable incidents like these can quickly balloon into dangerous confrontations.

Now let’s contrast all this with another news story that’s getting a lot less attention.

In an article titled “US secures deal on Philippines bases to complete arc around China,” the BBC reports that the empire will be adding even more installations to the already impressive military noose it has been constructing around the PRC.

“The US has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines – a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan,” writes the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes. “With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints – Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

“The US hasn’t said where the new bases are but three of them could be on Luzon, an island on the northern edge of the Philippines, the only large piece of land close to Taiwan – if you don’t count China,” writes Wingfield-Hayes.

The BBC provides a helpful illustration to show how the US is completing its military encirclement, courtesy of the Armed Forces of the Philippines:

The US empire has been surrounding China with military bases and war machinery for many years, in ways Washington would never tolerate China doing in the nations and waters surrounding the United States. There is no question that the US is the aggressor in this increasingly hostile standoff between major powers. Yet we’re all meant to be freaking out about a balloon.

Ask me to show you how the US has been aggressing against China I can show you all the well-documented ways in which the US is encircling China with weapons of war. Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US and they’ll start babbling about TikTok and balloons.

These things are not equal. Maybe Americans should stop watching out for hostile foreign threats and start looking a little closer to home.