Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

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Nefarious NED

08.09.2024 /

Is China staying Iran’s hand? Russia’s hand?

After Israel flattened the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1 April this year, killing seven people including two generals, the world held its breath, because obviously Iran had a right to retaliate fiercely. The USA and its European vassals would then have to defend Israel. There are rumours that CIA director Burns – an intelligent man, I have heard – intervened in private conversations with the Iranian leadership. War was at any rate evaded; this time.

Next, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief negotiator, and his bodyguard were assassinated on 31 July in Tehran. They were in Tehran to celebrate the inauguration of Iran’s president, Masaoud Pezeshkian, so this was not only terrorism in the highest degree; it was a de facto declaration of war against Iran. That is probably why Israel has neither denied nor admitted the assassination. Since then, the world has really been holding its breath: If Iran fails to avenge the act, Israel will be encouraged to humiliate Iran even further.

If Iran attacks, the USA will have to rush to Israel’s defence, and nobody knows where we go from there. This would be the “wider regional war” so often referred to by shuddering reporters in for instance Responsible Statecraft, But Iran is so far playing a cool hand.

As for Russia, the recent Kursk incursion, Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russia, and threatened use of long-range missiles (ATACMS and JASSMs ) against Moscow – all of which require the active foreknowledge, support and technical assistance of the USA – could easily tempt Russia to give us all a good scare. True, Russia struck the military training academy in Poltava a few days ago. The approx 300 casualties included several military instructors from NATO countries, among them – ironically – at least one Swede (cf. Battle of Poltava in 1709).

But by and large, Russia is playing a cool hand. Why?

Could it be that Russia and Iran believe that the USA is losing its grip? That Israel is its own undoing? (Europe, of course, is already a casualty of the Ukraine war.)

Or could it be that China is playing a role here? China does not want WWIII. China does not have the sort of military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in 1961. Nobody wants WWIII, I suspect, except shareholders in the arms industry as well as elderly boys and girls who have been brought up playing war games on their computers and watching bang-bang films on their giant home screens.

Personally, I don’t think the USA is loosing its grip. Not yet. Yes, more and more people are recognising what a monster it is, with its economic sanctions, its regime change operations, its support for Zionism and with its NED, but as we all know, hating a bully is not enough. It takes more to get rid of it.

The USA does not indoctrinate its own citizens, or so they – the citizens – believe, even though they have been made to recite the pledge of allegiance every single day of their school life. Until the USA starts crumbling from within, it will continue its harassment, with military and economic interference and not least with intense internal indoctrination and external psyops.

The mainstream news is full of warfare, naturally. War is spectacularly and dramatically tragic. Economic sanctions – i.e. attempts to starve populations to death – are not as newsworthy, except in the case of Russia, because they don’t look good.

But psychological and information warfare is probably the most powerful weapon of all, and not a word do we hear about it in the mainstream media. China has decided to do something about one of the USA’s most nefarious tools, NED. In August this year the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a report that reads:

It is imperative to unmask NED and alert all countries to the need to see through its true colors, guard against and fight back its disruption and sabotage attempts.

The report should particularly be recommended to those who are upset about alleged Russian interference in the eminently “free and fair” US elections.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry report continues:

[NED] has long engaged in subverting state power in other countries, meddling in other countries’ internal affairs, inciting division and confrontation, misleading public opinion, and conducting ideological infiltration, all under the pretext of promoting democracy.

NED, as we know, is anything but non-governmental, as the report explains. It spends a great deal of US taxpayers’ money to finance opposition groups in various countries, including Iran and Russia (and,not least – mind! – Georgia).

The report’s conclusion:

Under the guise of democracy, freedom, and human rights, the United States has used NED for infiltration, interference and subversion against other countries. This has grossly violated other countries’ sovereignty, security and development interests, blatantly breached international law and basic norms of international relations, and severely jeopardized world peace…

Of course, you need not trust the Chinese, or the Russians, but can you trust the USA? Are the N.Y. Times and WaPo free to write what they please?

Blindfolding

06.09.2024 /

Most of us tend to think that we are lucid. Those who have been blindfolded are the others.

I am no exception. I believe I see clearly what is happening. I see, for example, disinformation campaigns and internecine narrative warfare that is tearing the so-called West to pieces. But I don’t see what I don’t want to see.

We are told “your vote matters”, we are told that Democracy itself is at stake. Frankly, I believe that Democracy has long since been skinned to the bone in the USA and that the bones are brittle. We are fighting for the carcass of Democracy, grandiloquently cancelling each other left, right and centre.

Meanwhile, there is hardly any mention of the restless elephants in the room, the global room, that is. We are facing impending stampedes, but the press is not pressing the point. It is focusing on the upcoming US elections, when voters will be asked to choose between Scylla and Charybdis. not knowing the true nature of either Scylla or Charybdis. “Words! Words! Words!” (My Fair Lady) is all we ever get from them, oratorical tap-dancing and basically b-s.

This I clearly see, but what I just discovered is that notwithstanding my eloquent anti-cancelling posture, I too am just an ordinary “bloke”, as it were: I cancel!

There is this guy, I read, an eminent psychologist, who claims to have discovered that Google cheats. So I look up the “eminent” psychologist and Wikipedia confirms he is very eminent, indeed. This eminent psychologist has devoted much of his effort these past 8 years or so to research into Google’s methods. A documentary has been made that explains his findings.

I look up the documentary in Wikipedia and find that it “… features headshot interviews with Robert Epstein, Jaron Lanier, Jordan Peterson and Peter Schweizer.”

Two of the persons in that list are known to me: Jordan Peterson and Peter Schweizer. They are both non-people for the liberal left. So much so that I don’t want to watch the documentary. I have to fight a long battle with myself before I finally manage to press “play”.

The psychologist is Robert Epstein, founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, MA; editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine 1999–2003, no less! His research on Google methods is referred to as “Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME)” The film is: The Creepy Line. It is available in full on Youtube.

Let me make it clear at once: I found the views expressed in the film by Jordan Peterson and Peter Schweizer sound and sensible. Let me also make it clear that I am not qualified to assess the research underpinning Dr Epstein’s conclusions. But the conclusions are crystal clear and rather terrifying. He also presented them to Congress in a hearing in July 2019. (I would also recommend a speech he made in 2020, to Hillsdale college.)

What is also rather terrifying, if Dr Epstein’s conclusions are correct, is that they have not made headlines. True, even without Dr Epstein, we have seen that if keeping Trump out of the White House requires sacrificing freedom of the press, that and other civil rights and liberties will be sacrificed without so much as a hiccup, in “defence of Democracy”.

In any case, I would recommend

  • not using the Chrome web browser
  • not using Google as a search engine
  • not using Whatsapp, Messenger, Skype…
  • and last but not least, not using Gmail

rather, use

  • Firefox or Brave or Vivaldi as web browsers.
  • Duckduckgo or Brave as search engines
  • Signal as a messaging app
  • Protonmail or Tuta

And use a VPN!

Holding our breath

27.08.2024 /

It is not easy to gauge the political temperature in my country these days. Not easy at all. Corporate news outlets persist in doing what they are paid to do, which is to keep us in the dark.

We were told, yes, that Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan had been sentenced to a good many years’ imprisonment, but we were not told that this was a US-orchestrated regime change operation. We were told that the PM Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh was forced to resign due to violent demonstrations. We were not told that this was another US-orchestrated regime change operation and that India is now squeezed between two US puppet states. The USA is protecting us, defending Democracy.

Democracy? Well yes, if you consider votes cast by a blindfolded electorate watertight evidence.

While Harris et al. are gushing all over our screens and newspapers – opening a paper is akin to eating a pound of cotton candy – some of us ask ourselves whether WWIII will start in the Middle East or in Europe. Harris is “tough”, though, and will make no concessions. Bring ’em on, she seems to say. The bipartisan magazine Responsible Statecraft is not impressed. Harris appears to share the Neocon view, writes Jack Hunter, that

diplomacy could prevent war, their primary goal, so better to avoid it. A tried and true method in preventing diplomacy is to accuse anyone who wants it of siding with America’s enemies.

In contrast, the magazine Foreign Affairs reassures its readers with the article “What Was the Biden Doctrine?”:

… it is clear that the past four years have witnessed remarkable achievements in foreign policy…the active pursuit of diplomacy… demonstrating a grasp of the traditional elements of statecraft…

How many Europeans read Foreign Affairs? How many Europeans read Responsible Statecraft? I have absolutely no idea. One thing is pretty sure though: Our own mainstream media is likely to parrot the former rather than the latter.

Last night I joined a few old friends for a drink down town. I know they still follow the mainstream news outlets, the news outlets they have been taught to trust as “objective”. For some mysterious reason, “objective” is seen to be synonymous with “neutral”, at least in this country. If the reporter claims to be – and convinces the reader that he or she is – “neutral”, i.e. neither left-wing nor right-wing, most Norwegians believe she will be more likely to “objectively” discern what is good (or correct) from what is bad (or disinformation), than if she is strongly opposed to mainstream policies.

You will have noticed that I did not provide any link to Foreign Affairs. I believe that the agenda of most Foreign Affairs contributors is continued US global supremacy at all costs, an agenda I strongly object to. So you are right to assume I am anything but “neutral”.

My friends knew that I have not been neutered (pun intended). They know I am angry. But I love my friends, so I have learnt to shut up, and since they love me, they allow me to keep my peace. We do not discuss foreign affairs. Period. As for domestic affairs, the so-called “objective” and “neutral” press is mostly interested in the Norwegian Royals’ domestic problems and my friends are as indifferent to the Royals as I am. So I wonder: What do my friends really make of the “news”, all told?

Last night, I informed them that Associated Press had reassured me that the cat Sam had been reunited with his mistress (name not given by AP) after 11 years’ painful separation. My friends raised ironical eyebrows and retorted that the Norwegian press, on the other hand, was currently devoting most of its attention to the circus of the upcoming US elections. I interpreted this as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Norwegian press.

And since most of us in this country are very distressed about the vicious extermination of all fellow human beings from Gaza, I thought it might be safe to comment that from the few surviving Palestinians’ perspective, at least, it did not matter who became president, since AIPAC gives generous “donations” to both candidates and will make sure that Netanyahu gets what he wants regardless. “No US president can ever refuse whatever the Israeli government asks for,” I declared and received blank stares in return.

What did those blank stares express? I don’t know, because I did not press the point.

I assume my interlocutors still firmly believe that Putin is a new “Hitler”. After all, that is what they’ve been told day after day, just as they’ve not been told about AIPAC and FARA.

On the other hand, many people have learnt to appreciate Aljazeera over the years as an addition to N.Y. Times. Many also know Palestinian refugees living here. Finally, a growing number believe that what has been going on in Gaza has surpassed, in sadism if not in scale, Holocaust itself. Finally, the USA has made no attempt to conceal that they have sent billions and billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and other military aid to Israel over the past year. Yes, team Biden says they want Israel to stop the mass killing of defenceless human beings, but words have decisively been contradicted by facts. And weapons and military support are definitive facts.

So do my friends believe that the USA is not complicit in the ongoing genocide? And if we insist on using the Hitler-analogy, who is then the modern-day Hitler?

We are being kept in the dark. Yet even in the dark, a person might see the red-hot metal of distant burning tanks and smell the distant human flesh. Even in the dark, we can hear sirens.

AIPAC

11.08.2024 /

Frankly, I doubt the mood will change enough to stop Kamala Harris from doing Aipac’s bidding. Worse: I think that if you think Kamala Harris will change anything for the better, you’d better think again. Quite aside from my suspicion that women are not “morally” superior to men (nor, for that matter, inferior) and that non-whites are no better than whites, although I wish they were, Harris simply cannot bypass AIPAC even if she wanted to. Nobody can.

Thanks to “independent” media, we now know a great deal more about AIPAC than we did before October 7. That is because of the vocal opposition of some very brave US Americans – many of them Jews – to active US support of Israel’s depraved treatment of the population they are so determined to exterminate.

Many years ago, my family bought live lobsters in a French supermarket and were instructed to cook them… live. That’s a traumatic memory that surfaces from time to time. I felt like a monster. But Israelis! They are truly –— no, I won’t say the word. They are just truly very, very sick.

I expect you, like me, have read about the inhuman treatment to which psychotic patients were subjected in the early days of psychiatry. Those who were wealthy enough were institutionalised in stately mansions with beautiful grounds, where they were subjected to what were often counter-productive therapeutic regimes. Virginia Woolf, for instance, loathed it.

The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide. Despite her protests, [Dr.] Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for depression.

Source: Wikipedia as at 11 August 2024

The first sentence of her final suicide note to her husband reads: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times… . [ibid]

Why am I writing about madness and psychotherapy in a post about AIPAC, effectively Israel? Isn’t it obvious? Israel is a very sick society which has been treated with the wrong cure. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that insisting that Israeli Jews are God’s chosen people who are entitled to rule a large chunk of the world, was not a good idea. The patient’s delusions have grown dramatically more acute over the years.

Meanwhile the disease has been passed on to one US administration after the other, understandably, since the USA and Israel “share the same values”, not something to be proud of, let me tell you!

As early as in 2018, M.J. Rosenberg warned against the power of AIPAC, although he had himself been an AIPAC member. In his warning statement, he also explains why AIPAC is not required to register as a foreign agent (i.e. is not subject to FARA obligations).

Some of the commentators and analysts who wonder why the USA currently appears to be acting – again and again – against its own interests, find parallels in history; the decline and eventual collapse of the Roman Empire, for instance, and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These analysts see signs of end-of-empire decadence such as lack of accountability in a number of spheres, ineffective and incompetent diplomacy, non-existent long-term planning and strategy, over-spending in defence, and geographic over-extension. Not least, a growing indifference to public opinion at home and abroad – so-called “exceptionalism” – has predictably lowered USAs standing.

The recent decline of simple good manners when references are made to US presidents and their retinues, on this and other sites, is symptomatic. US soft power is starting to give, and is being replaced by incipient authoritarianism.

Warring against Iran, when the USA is already at war in Ukraine and Gaza and when it (very unwisely) wants to go to war with China, will definitely not be a good move, one that is nonetheless very likely to be made.

I think there can be no doubt that AIPAC, in lockstep with the military industrial complex, are behind many of the appalling US policy choices. And, behind AIPAC we find Bibi, who would rather start WWIII than serve a little time in jail. What a man! What a specimen of humankind!

Oh, and if you think I was exaggerating…

08.08.2024 /

A couple of days ago, I wrote about watching a horse-drawn carriage in which my children are riding. Alas, the horses have been stung by something and have gone bananas. They are careening towards a precipice. Is there nothing that can stop them, no horse whisperer who can soothe them and halt their flight?

You may think I’m too pessimistic. After all, things have looked bad in the past, too, but humankind always survived.

And it it is indeed true that WWI was not the end of the world, it only killed around 15–22 million. Even WWII was not the end of the world (“70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the estimated global population”). We didn’t have the bomb yet, except at the very end, and of course then we used it.

I’m not into wars, but it seems to me that WWI was an utterly senseless affair, pointless and basically unnecessary. WWII, however, was a different matter: The Nazis’ policies regarding what they considered the “untermensch”, and their determination to realise said policies, could simply not be allowed to prevail.

My reading is that Israel’s policies regarding non-Jews and their determination to realise said policies … I say no more.

Only the USA can stop the Israelis now. Will the USA stop the Israelis?

Listen to US Colonel Wilkerson here.He knows a thing or two, is a good talker, and he has a sense of humour too. “Fortunately …,” he said, among other things, “the mood is changing.” He meant the mood among the constituents, not the mood in Congress, yet.

Let’s hope that the “mood” will prevent WWIII.

Master

07.08.2024 /

On August 5 Glenn Greenwald asked: Who is governing this country (“this country” being, of course, the one that rules us all in the so-called West)? Obviously, it isn’t Biden or for that matter Harris. Has it ever been Biden? Or Obama, come to think of it? Or Clinton? Not to mention “nukiller” Bush junior?

Not that I really care, being spared the pain of having to live in a country where I would never be able to afford decent health care, or education for my kids, etc., etc. etc. But the question certainly merits some attention since – well, obviously, when your kids are in a carriage pulled by a runaway horse, you want to know whom to shoot when the equipage hurtles off the cliff.

US presidents – it has long been obvious – are not free agents. Not that I propose to defend their actions: They should have known better than to stand for such an ignominious office. They were possibly ignorant or even stupid, when they did so – though I doubt that Clinton and Obama were stupid or even ignorant – or they may have been psychopaths. (By definition, a psychopath is somebody whose lust for power over someone or something drives him or her to break rules, even to kill.) Kill they certainly did, if not with their own hands – God forbid; they had menials to do their dirty work.

But I am not really interested in dissecting the moral decrepitude of dangerous men and women. I would, however, honestly like to know who, in the final count, rules over the USA and its host of servile little fiefdoms in Europe. I can think of a few candidates, mainly the trillionaires who finance the unconscionably expensive presidential campaigns. They will want their money’s worth, I expect, when the race is won. I suspect they place their bets in both camps, by the way, so as to have leverage on the winner, whoever he or she might be.

So who are they? Obviously the military-industrial complex is a front runner. Christian fundamentalists are also a passionate, ruthless and frequently well-heeled lot, and they often coincide with the Zionists.

Oops! There I dropped the dirty word. “Zionists”. At the moment, yes, it would appear that Zionists are running the circus, the race to the cliff. I have been given to understand that Christian Zionists actually welcome a final solution for mankind because then they will all go to heaven. Good luck with that.

I doubt that Israelis share their pious end-of-world wishes. I gather that most Israelis are as brainwashed and deluded as most US Americans and US Europeans, including US Norwegians. Yet, I suspect they don’t want a world war, don’t want war, period, any more than the rest of us. But they don’t count. They, like us, were not asked. Democracy, my foot!

How was Israel able to indoctrinate healthy boys and girls into treating Palestinian boys and girls as vermin to be exterminated? Did they learn from Nazi Germany?

Alas, I fear they have learnt not from Germany but from the USA: The entire population of that great country was bamboozled into supporting the killing and torturing of millions and millions – in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Central America, South America, Indonesia, Haiti, Somalia…Those were all feats of brilliant indoctrination! Now watch while Master grooms his subjects to cheer the destruction of – no, not China, yet – Iran! Yes, that was not really the plan, but they are in the way.

And Master’s great Orwellian doublethink machine rumbles on, patiently repeating, again and again, and again, even as we sleep: war is peace, ignorance is strength, rule of law is Master, war is peace, ignorance is strength, rule of law is Master…

Yesterday, a Russian woman told me angrily: “You all speak so warmly of Democracy – and I agree, Democracy is beautiful – but what you have is not Democracy! It’s humbug.”

Master has committed his crimes with impunity ever since his first genocide, of the Indians, by indoctrination! As we speak, “rule of law” is allowing Israel to assassinate people here, there and everywhere. Whoever governs the USA knows full well that support for Israel now is suicidal: BRICS is growing stronger by the day as countries hastily jump out of the run-away carriage. But Master cannot stop. Master is law, Master must rule.

Master is currently Zionist (and no longer merely male). He/she is driving our children, at breakneck speed, towards the precipice. One of his/her murder victims was Ismail Haniyeh. May Ismail Haniyeh’s spectre haunt Master till the end of time.

Zionism is very ugly. It is, when all is said and done, the most insidious form of abject racism!

I recently stumbled across a couple of quotes from one of the fathers of Israel, a passionate Zionist, Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion was probably a nasty piece of work, but at least he, unlike US presidents, seems to have understood, what a nasty piece of work he was. I have copied the following quotes from this site.

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?

Source: David Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.

Source: David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.

Source: David Ben-Gurion May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population? ‘Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘ Drive them out! ‘

Source: Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

Zionism

07.08.2024 /

On August 5, Glenn Greenwald asked: “Who is governing this country” (“this country” being, of course, the one that rules us all in the so-called West)? Obviously, it isn’t Biden or for that matter Harris. Has it ever been Biden? Or Obama, come to think of it? Or Clinton? Not to mention “nukiller” Bush junior?

Not that I really care, being spared the pain of having to live in a country where I would never be able to afford decent health care, or education for my kids, etc., etc. etc. But the question certainly merits some attention since … well, obviously, when your kids are in a carriage pulled by a runaway horse, you want to know whom to shoot when the equipage hurtles off the cliff.

US presidents – it has long been obvious – are not free agents. Not that I propose to defend their actions: They should have known better than to stand for such an ignominious office. They were possibly ignorant or even stupid , when they did so – though I doubt that Clinton and Obama were stupid or even ignorant – or they may have been psychopaths. (Psychopaths have enough lust for personal power over someone or something to be willing to break all rules, or even to kill.) Kill they certainly did, if not with their own hands – God forbid. They had menials to do the dirty work.

But I am not really interested in dissecting the moral decrepitude of dangerous men and women. I would, however, honestly like to know who, in the end, governs the USA and its host of servile little fiefdoms in Europe. I can think of a few candidates, mainly the trillionaires who finance the unconscionably expensive presidential campaigns. They will want their money’s worth, I expect, when the race is won. I suspect they place their bets in both camps, by the way, so as to have leverage on the winner, whoever he or she might be.

So who are they? Obviously the military-industrial complex is a front runner. The Christian fundamentalists are also a passionate and frequently well-heeled lot, and they often coincide with the Zionists.

Oops! There I dropped the dirty word. “Zionists”. At the moment, yes, it would appear that Zionists are running the circus, the race to the cliff. I have been given to understand that Christian Zionists actually welcome a final solution for mankind. Then they will all go to heaven, I am told. Good luck with that.

I doubt that Israelis share their pious end-of-world wishes. Most Israelis are probably as brainwashed and deluded as most US Americans and US Europeans, including US Norwegians. Yet, I suspect we – most Europeans and Israelis – don’t want a world war, don’t want war, period. But we don’t count. We were not asked.

Yesterday, a Russian woman living in Norway told me angrily: “You all speak so warmly of Democracy – and I agree, Democracy is beautiful – but what you have here, now, is not Democracy! It’s all based on lies.”

Indoctrination is a fascinating field of study! How was Israel able to indoctrinate healthy boys and girls into treating Palestinian boys and girls as vermin to be exterminated? Did they learn from Nazi Germany?

Alas, I fear they learnt not from Germany but from the USA: How was the entire population of that great country bamboozled into supporting the killing and torturing of millions and millions – in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Central America, South America, Indonesia, Haiti, even Africa…. ?

By indoctrination!

The USA has committed its crimes with impunity since the initial genocide of the Indians,

By indoctrination!

And the USA is letting this happen in Gaza as we speak, is letting Israel assassinate people here, there and everywhere. The USA knows full well that its support to Israel now is suicidal. BRICS is growing stronger by the day, and US hegemony is waning because it has not been wisely administered. (“Pax Americana” has not been pax.).

Zionists, then, in the USA and in Israel – are driving our children, here and there, at breakneck speed towards the precipice. A murder victim, Ismail Haniyeh, was one of many who tried to stop them. He paid for his efforts with his life.

Zionism is a very ugly disease. It is, when all is said and done, abject racism!

I recently stumbled across a few quotes from one of the fathers of Israel, a passionate Zionist, Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion was probably a nasty piece of work, but at least he, unlike US presidents, seems to have understood, what a nasty piece of work he was. I have copied the following quotes from this site.

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
David Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.

“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.”
— David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.”

David Ben-Gurion May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, a Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

Overwhelmed and overpowered

19.07.2024 /

The “West”, meaning the USA and their coterie of client states are currently engaged in two wars, in Ukraine and in the Middle EAst.

Most of us who live in US client states in Europe were knocked out of our political lethargy when we learnt that Europe was at war again “for the first time since WWII” (forgetting that we – NATO – bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999, effectively destroying Yugoslavia).

We have also recently witnessed unimaginable horrors in the Middle East, starting on October 7, 2023. We were at first told that Israeli babies had been beheaded, after which we witnessed Israeli retaliation to a degree that nobody could deny was disproportionate. I know for a fact that many of us have often wept over the news on Aljazeera.

Now, we have gotten used to the idea that we might well be on our way into a new world war, in which “tactical” nuclear weapons will most likely be used. We have gotten used to the idea that a ferocious attempt is being made to exterminate the Palestinian people, and we see that those who rule the countries we live in are “aiding and abetting” Israel’s viscious crimes in a number of ways.

We recognise that there is absolutely nothing “we”, citizens of the client states, can do about either of these situations within the framework of “Democracy” as it has been defined for us. Voting for the “left” or the “right” makes no difference, demonstrations and protests lead nowhere but to a few arrests and business as usual. So we are for the most part silent.

Cynics may tell you that the reason we are silent is that the entertainment value of the two wars has flagged.

My view is different: Lethargy is not a sign of boredom but of impotence. I believe that “democracy” is no more than a buzzword used for propaganda purposes in “the West”, to emphasise the distance between “us” and “them”. It is not a reality. At least not in Europe or the USA.

For the umpteenth time, I urge you to read 1984 by George Orwell.

***

For me, the Eureka moment came in the wake of a very slow process. Anyone who has followed what I have written here since 2008 will see that I have come a long and disheartening way.

I have been a slow learner, alas. I was lazy in school, and had mediocre marks. I was sincerely polite to my teachers, some of whom I liked very much, and I never ever considered rebellion of any kind. As I grew older I became somewhat more academically competitive, though never to the point of wanting to break the sound barrier.

In 1986, when US bullies took it into their heads to bomb Libya – just like that – I was, however, outraged, shocked beyond words. I had somehow missed the part in our curriculum according to which the USA may bomb whoever / whatever / whenever it wants to. I was milking the cows, I remember, and I heard the news on the radio in the cow shed. There was no interrupting the routine with the cows and I had to go on milking them in spite of my rage, so I actually composed almost the only poem I ever made, and a melody too, which I hissed again and again until my chores were done.

At the time, I was a Newsweek subscriber, and I considered myself a well-informed person. But as I now know, the US press is the least recommended bulwark against ignorance. At any rate, studies, work, kids, etc. caught up with me, and then Clinton took over, “at last”.

Everybody knew, at the time, that the Republicans were the ones who wanted to ban trade unions, bomb communists to kingdom come, and kill blacks. So I knew that the Republicans were “bad”. Bear in mind that designating somebody as “bad” tends to mean there must be a “good guy”.

None of us were taught in school to fiercely distrust “bad guy / good guy” narratives. (They still don’t teach that, not in school and certainly not in the media.) Above all, we were none of us taught to be wary of media framing.

Only much, much later, not least thanks to a wonderful US documentary – Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job – did I realise that Clinton was much to blame for the terrible 2007-2008 financial crisis that rocked the world. Yes, the entire world suffered heavily. And Clinton was behind the bombing of Yugoslavia, too, in Europe, in 1999.

But Clinton played a decent trumpet! And he had a disarming smile. I am guilty as charged: I found him charming. I found Obama charming, too. Charm has been the Democratic party’s ticket to the White House. We blamed the Republican Party for all that was wrong in the USA. We? I! I was blind. I believed in good guys versus bad guys.

Mind you, already in 2014, I read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, all of It! A very polite, quietly precise firebomb of a book. I even read the sequel Capital and Ideology (2020). I should have seen the full picture then. Still, the pieces to the puzzle didn’t quite fall into place until the conjunction of the Ukraine war and the Gaza war. What then became more than obvious was:

Rule of Law is b-s.!

Meanwhile, the 12-year political imprisonment of Assange (without a trial!) while the press tirelessly peddled US propaganda and suppressed dissident views, has demonstrated that

Freedom of the press in the West is b-s.

Democracy, however, is not b-s, but truly something worth fighting for. What we have here and now, though is not Democracy; it’s a fraud. Counting pieces of paper in a ballot box every four years is a fairly expensive way of masking that citizens of Western countries have no say whatsoever about what happens to their society.

We, the defrauded citizens want to believe we are being governed for our own good, with wisdom. Had I been a psychodynamic therapist, I would have posited that we – all human adults – long for the continued guidance of a loving parent. Alas, our “parents” do not have our interests at heart but their own. The continued guidance – be it Republican or “Dem”, be it Labour or Tory – serves the single purpose of perpetuating, one way or another, status quo, the rule and continued enrichment of the oligarchy.
























































The brave 12

07.07.2024 /

In the USA, 12 brave men and women have resigned their posts as United States government officials in protest over the part the USA is playing in the war against Palestine in general and the population of Gaza in particular. On 2 July, they issued and signed a JOINT STATEMENT explaining why they did so. To publish such a statement in defiance of a president who, to quote him, “is running the world” is a beautiful and — I repeat — brave act. The document is well worth reading. I particularly recommend what follows under the sub-headings “How did it go wrong?” and “What is to be done?”

In Europe there is hardly any mention of the Joint Statement signed by the 12.

Admittedly BBC, does refer to it quite briefly, but is more than tight-lipped: “Ex-officials say Gaza policy has put US at risk” (my emphasis). However, nearly half the brief article informs us of what (the politely hypocritical) “state department spokesperson” told the BBC (my emphasis) about the blessings of US freedom of expression.

On the other side of the planet, not only does Reuters (acquired by Thomson Corporation in Canada in 2008) devote at least three articles to the matter. They have listed the 12 “US officials who have quit over Biden’s support of Israel”, and more recently they have added a link to the Joint Statement itself and a subheading: “WHY IT IS IMPORTANT”.

Huffpost, too, has a long article about the joint statement and quotes much of it.

Even CNN has at least twice provided sympathetic coverage of what the 12 have done. Is the tide seriously turning in the USA?

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