Freedland: "I, for one, welcome our Corporate American Overlords"
by Kit
American lawmakers are a global force for good, one for which we should all be grateful…according to the Guardian.
Too often, according to Jonathan Freedland, the term “self-appointed global policeman”, when applied to America, is used in derogatory fashion because:
…it serves as shorthand for the arrogance of American power, invading countries and imposing regime change, charging about the world heedless of everyone’s needs but its own.
A war here or there, a fascist coup every now and then, these are just little foibles. The geo-political equivalent of putting the milk back empty, or clicking your knuckles. After all:
People are right to complain of the long history of US aggression and intervention in the lives of other sovereign nations…
“People” may be right to complain about it…but I don’t remember Jonathan Freedland, or his paper, complaining about it. Do you? In fact I thought he said the Iraq war had a “silver lining”?
Yup. He did.
And I’m pretty sure he was pro-intervention in Libya, “despite the risks”, right?
Oh yeah. He was.
And I thought America SHOULD intervene in Syria, right Jonathan?
Yup. You said that too.
So people MAY be right to complain…but actually they would be wrong. In fact all of America’s interventions in the Middle East were correct on either a practical or moral level, before or after the fact. How fortunate.
But as I said…let’s put a pin in that. This column isn’t about Jonathan Freedland’s pathetic attempt to rebrand himself as a non-interventionist, it isn’t about geo-politics (where good old America should probably intervene more), this is about corruption and respect for law and order…where good old America does all the hard work for our benefit.
Now, the cynically minded might say that America being anti-corruption is rather like a hospital being anti-medicine, and that they pick and choose legalities like courses at a buffet…but that is just reflex anti-Americanism.
America is anti-corruption.
Just because America, a country with 5% of the global population and 25% of the incarcarated adults, relies on its massive prison population to subsidise its industry, and just because these prisons are being increasingly privatised doesn’t mean they aren’t anti-corruption.
And just because America has the greatest wealth-gap of all developed nations, a wealth gap which is growing all the time and has (according to Princeton) turned the USA from a democracy into an oligarchy, doesn’t mean they aren’t anti-corruption.
And just because, in response to a financial crisis, the USA government took $700 billion dollars of tax payer money and handed it over to private banks, via a bill that was basically forced through the senate with a gun to the nation’s head doesn’t mean they aren’t anti-corruption.
Washington lobbyists spending billions. Fixed elections to get the son of a former head of the CIA into the Whitehouse. Presidential candidates breaking election laws all over the country. None of that matters. Think of all the good they do!
They stormed FIFA. They fined HSBC for laundering drug money. They are investigating the Panama Papers. These are all good things, apparently. So says Jonathan, the master apologist. We should appreciate the benign arm of American law, reaching out over the oceans, swatting aside pesky ideas of sovereignty or jurisdictional limits, and bringing us all safety. After all, the idea that America is, as Jonathan put it…
charging about the world heedless of everyone’s needs but its own
…only applies to war. Obviously. They would never extend that policy to economics or the courts, would they?
They storm the offices of FIFA, not because Sepp Blatter refused to strip Russia of the 2018 World Cup, not to wrestle control of global soccer back to the Western powers, but because they hate corruption.
They start an investigation into the Panama Papers – which were leaked thanks to funding from various American foundations – not to implicate geopolitical enemies in China and Russia, but because they love peace and freedom and stuff. International tax evasion is a problem, domestic tax evasion using Delaware and Nevada less so.
They are the friendly Empire, the better than the alternative, the big smiling face of happy hegemony, and we should all be grateful to live under their sphere of influence….because to live outside it is much, much worse.
They make sure of that.
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What an appalling point of view.
Use your prioritized access to the media to express yourself for all you’re worth, sir.
Indeed, welcome the boot that is crushing your kidneys and cracking your skull, if that’s really what you want.
But that still won’t turn wrong into right.
Sorry – one final point about the Versailles Treaty: I believe I read in one of the articles I read here at offGuardian that the terms of the Armistice Treaty of 1918 were far more lenient than the terms eventually imposed upon Germany through the Versailles Treaty.
On checking and comparing the wording and contents of the armistice agreement and the Versailles Treaty, it became apparent to me that this was true.
This is why accusations of the Versailles “betrayal” by Hitler, the Nazis and other nationalist groups in Germany gained credibility. Some of the unfortunate German politicians who were forced to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty were German Jews and this provided an excuse to blame the Jews for being Versailles “criminals” in Nazi propaganda.
Even John Maynard Keynes was motivated to warn of the consequence of the punitive Versailles Treaty.
It has often been said that the end of WW1 marked the eventual beginning of WW2. However, I believe it was the punitive nature of the Versailles Treaty that made further war inevitable, not the 1918 armistice agreement terms.
Excellent article. And the site too: I just discovered it today. I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one sick of Freedland and his pro-war, Blairite, Israel first nonsense.
Interesting article here, which refers to Freedland: https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-finkelstein/american-jewish-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda
Finkelstein remarks at one point:
“You can see this overlap between the Labour Right and pro-Israel groups personified in individuals like Jonathan Freedland, a Blairite hack who also regularly plays the antisemitism card. He’s combined these two hobbies to attack Corbyn. Incidentally, when my book, The Holocaust Industry, came out in 2000, Freedland wrote that I was ‘closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’. Although he appears to be, oh, so politically correct now, he didn’t find it inappropriate to suggest that I resembled the Nazis who gassed my family. “
Interesting article. I’m amazed the Guardian serialised a book by Finkelstein.
This (below) from a friend who has long links with the media:-
Hi John, yes with Freedland the Guardian is only going back to its roots. As you probably know, it started as a parochial newsletter for the Cheetham Hill synagogue in the heavily Jewish part of Manchester. Scott was complicit with Weissman on the Balfour “Declaration” and as Editor of the emergent Manchester Guardian was still focused on Jewish interests. When it went “national” the Jews were infuriated at the new liberal policy and have exerted pressure on it ever since. Do you remember that Rusbridger was the only Editor to accept the “This World” advert by Elie Weisel and Shmuley Boteach? Murdoch’s papers and even the Jewish Chronicle turned it down as containing inflammatory inaccuracies. It argued that Hamas uses children as human shields, even in the face of the UNESCO report from June 2013. UNESCO said after exhaustive investigation the only instances they could find was by Israel using abducted Palestinian children as human shields to protect its on-street patrols. What have the Palestinians got to “protect”? And now the avowed zionist Freedland is in charge, and the reporting is heavily sided towards Israel’s viewpoint.
Perhaps most disappointing this week is the condemnation of Labour for “anti-semitism” by Owen Jones, who originally worked for the Independent but went to the Guardian and has lost a lot of his left-leaning credentials.
At the time of the advert I told Rusbridger I would never read the Guardian again and I haven’t done so voluntarily. The extracts I have seen are better suited to the Cheetham Hill newsletter than any objective publication, and the only remaining non-zionist UK paper*, the Independent, was forced to retreat to electronic publishing by being forced to near-extinction.
*With the exception of the Morning Star.
It’s the usual tactic of buying off and infiltrating, as they have done with the Co-Op Bank and now Eurovision, which has banned the use by anyone of the display of a Palestinian flag. They don’t allow Palestine to compete, though Israel is a major entrant (and paymaster) and neither is in Europe. But neither is Australia, though it’s heavily pro-Israel so welcome. It’s a wicked world controlled by the money-men who are now ruining the Labour Party too, with a leader who’s a Patron of the Palestine Liberation Campaign. They will do anything to bring it back under (Blairite) zionist control.
They have also forced a bank in Austria to ditch all pro-Palestinian accounts.
All very depressing and exasperating.
Regards.
I don’t pay much attention to the Eurovision extravaganza but I noted this year that they reportedly ” changed the rules” to allow a political song from Ukraine. Now you say they have banned Palestinian flags. Do you have any references to details about the political stance of the governing body?
The vagaries and mysteries of Eurovision are way beyond me and – to be honest – probably so byzantine as to be not worth the effort involved in trying to understand it.
What I do notice, however, is that the zionist state has recently been cozying-up to a number of European institutions: the EU – and its many research grants (particularly for military weapons systems development); NATO – they now have a permanent office at NATO Head Quarters; Eurovision itself – even though the Tel Aviv regime is not located anywhere within Europe; UEFA – even though, again, their football teams never play in European football club contests; and the appointment of Mark Regev – former Netanyahu mouthpiece and hasbara spinmeister – to their London office, presumably in a bid to counter the growingly successful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement gaining ground across Europe.
The brutal zionist ocupation of Palestine has developed a strategy of making itself essential to countries like the UK, France, Germany and many other European countries as a military industrial complex security partner.
They also – allegedly – played a key role in the overthrow of the former legitimate regime in the Ukraine.
The zionists represent a threat to us all in terms of the importation of their pacification measures under the guise of the so-called “war against terror” which they and the US are using to undermine democratic accountability world-wide in order to control large parts of the world to their own financial and ideological advantage.
Eurovision is but one string in a many-stringed instrument of global control and domination.
Lackies or “useful idiots” like Freedland play a very useful role for the zionists too in shaping global opinion.
Let’s pretend that the Pentagon is not the lap dog of the British Crown. Let’s pretend that the United States is not a vassal of the British Crown. Let’s pretend that the enemy is “American Corporations” and not a group of Banks that control the commonwealth of British protectorates which include Israel and Saudi Arabia. Let’s pretend that fake worthless paper backed by nothing is money. Let us ignore the history of the Bank of England and the British Empire Commonwealth of Nations. Let’s blame the Americans.
Glad someone figured it out! By letting the US carry the blame post world war two the British establishment have go away with it scot free.
Britain is a much diminished former world power.
When Eisenhower threatened to withdraw support from the pound at the time of the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, Eden had to step down as British Prime Minister and was replaced by Macmillan, who withdrew UK military forces from the Suez Canal zone.
Ever since the end of World War Two, Britain’s influence has steadily diminished.
Britain has to rely on the USA for nuclear missiles for its submarine fleet.
The idea that Britain dictates US policy and activity is simply not right.
I have had to explain this to people in Occupied Palestine, who still think Britain remains as powerful today as it was when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917.
It isn’t.
It is a weak shadow of its former imperial might.
Freedland is an arch-zionist and it is the US’s role in promoting Eretz Yisrael and the Yinon Plan that Freedland and the zionism-loving Guardian approve of. The rest is just hokum and hooey. They would both soon change their tune if the US were to start holding the zionists to account for their actions in Palestine, not that there is much danger of that with AIPAC holding the congressional election purse strings so tightly.
I think it’s a tight squeeze on their testarkles along with the purse strings that keep the (s)elected ones in line. Now if the congress critters just stopped taking those mass junkets to israel where many get themselves photographed in compromising positions with hookers/children/men/etc then they might not have their testarkles in a vice & may be able to act a little like human beings. Ha – look . . . i made a joke !!
A beautifully-tailored and succinct piece that fits Mr Freedland perfectly. Apart from the fact it fails to conceal his bollocks.
The American Empire: a loving, caring, compassionate hegemon!
Interestingly enough in an essay by Orwell – Notes on Nationalism – made reference to a particular phenomenon, among others, which he referred to as ‘Transferred Nationalism’. This involved a transference and allegiance to an exterior love object, be it another, country, civilization or ideology. During the 1930s this was common enough among the educated middle class and involved adulation of Soviet Russia (even during the worse period of Stalinism). Among the adherents were the British Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and a number of high ranking establishment figures who spied for Russia. There was also a cult of Catholicism in the same period.
Needless to say in our own time there has been a mass shift by the ‘opinion formers’ and ‘progressives’ toward US style liberal-imperialism and an almost total Americanization of Europe, militarily, economically and above all culturally (soft power). People like Freedman don’t merely peddle propaganda, they actually believe in it as do the rest of their class. America is seen as the shining city on the hill, the apogee of civilization to which the world is, or at least should be, moving towards. This is almost a mirror image of the type of historical materialism as promulgated by inter alia, N.Bukharin. Of course it is not by accident that many of today’s zionist neo-cons were originally inspired by Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution.
Rather than world policeman, the US acts as world Capo. Capo = a term used in the Mafia for a high-ranking made member of a crime family who heads a “crew” of soldiers, engages in turf wars and has major social status and influence in the organization.
Agree with most of what you wrote, but read any book by Grover Furr and you’ll see that pretty much everything you think you know about Stalin was made up by one of his enemies. However even using these accounts it’s hard to argue Stalin was worse than the current US administration. How many countries did Stalin libyanise? What % of the population was in prison? Were conditions for ordinary people getting better or worse? Did Stalin allow entire cities to be poisoned by lead in their water supply?
Reblogged this on Eurasia News Online and commented:
And just because America has the greatest wealth-gap of all developed nations, a wealth gap which is growing all the time and has (according to Princeton) turned the USA from a democracy into an oligarchy, doesn’t mean they aren’t anti-corruption.
And just because, in response to a financial crisis, the USA government took $700 billion dollars of tax payer money and handed it over to private banks, via a bill that was basically forced through the senate with a gun to the nation’s head doesn’t mean they aren’t anti-corruption.
Washington lobbyists spending billions. Fixed elections to get the son of a former head of the CIA into the Whitehouse. Presidential candidates breaking election laws all over the country. None of that matters. Think of all the good they do!
This article is an antidote to Freedland’s nonsense:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/22/military-spending-is-the-capitalist-worlds-fuel/
One thing reassuring is that bad as Jon is he would not have been a worse editor than the current one who ‘defeated’ him in the ‘election’ to replace whatsisname.
Now that election would have been interesting to follow. I expect that the count was quite innovative too.
Oh, yes, “heil” to our overlords! More insight into the history of their growing power:
„Deep State USA: Dulles, Dallas and Devilish Games“: https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/deep-state-usa-dulles-dallas-and-devilish-games/
Andreas Schlüter
Sociologist
Berlin, Germany
Fair enough, but there’s evidence to suggest the Bolsheviks were funded by New York/London bankers, too.
a very interesting article, especially “The Speech That Killed The President” recording:-
https://wipokuli.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/deep-state-usa-dulles-dallas-and-devilish-games/
In view of what we now know – or think we know – it makes the references to a sinister enemy sound more like an internal one than an external one.
The speech was obviously one made to representatives of the US media, as it makes specific reference to the First Amendment.
Well, that no longer applies now that people like Murdoch have taken control of the US media.
Also, the influence of the zionist lobby now over-rides any concerns about US media independence and sovereignty.
Maybe if the UK does end up impeaching Blair, the Bush family might be next for similar treatment?
One slight reservation about the Zapruder cine film: I now believe that some of the secret service operatives were in on the act – which is why there was no secret service agent on the back of the car to block shots from behind – and that the car driver deliberately slowed down the car so an assassin hiding in a culvert below the grassy knoll would have a clear shot at President Kennedy’s head from below the level of the road, which is why his head jerked backwards – not forwards – from the fatal shot. It also explains why the exit wound at the back of his head was so massive.
I also think Johnson – the gamblin’ man – knew he was on a betting certainty when Kennedy arrived in Dallas, Texas.
Intriguingly – literally – the role of Arthur Zimmerman, Imperial German Foreign Minister at the time, of bringing the US into World War One through his infamous telegram to the Mexican Government – has tended to overshadow the fact that he also was involved in arranging for Lenin and a group of his associates to be transported from Switzerland across Germany and into Russia (St Petersburg) which can be said to have contributed directly to the overthrow of the Kerensky Government and its replacement by the Bolsheviks, who then went on to establish the Soviet Union.
Directly speaking, it was an act of the German Government in 1917 that led to the establishment of a Communist regime inside Russia. Hitler and his fellow Nazis must have been aware of this, as well as links between the Russian and German militaries in the 1920s and 1930s, designed to thwart post-WW1 controls under the Versailles Treaty.
Whether or not Zimmerman acted solely in the interests of Imperial Germany or – possibly – that he also acted in the interests of the zionist movement, which had a vested interest in the war continuing beyond 1917 in order to see Ottoman control over Palestine weakened, so that Imperial Britain would establish a jewish homeland in Palestine, is now very hard to establish.
Does anyone know of any factual and reliable sources about this possible aspect of Zimmerman’s motivations?
Nasty. And beautiful. Loved it.
Well, coming from the liberal Guardian, it shows what side such ‘liberalism’ is on: they might as well be on Hitler’s side.