"Russian Hacking", a dangerous delusion
by Kit
The author is Yale professor. Yes, seriously.
The Guardian published this short opinion piece today, its headline reads:
America lost a cyberwar to Russia in 2016. When will we have truth?
Refuting the stale claims repeated in the headline, and expanded upon in the prose, is but the work of a moment. Hitchens’ razor states that any claim made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. A Yale professor should know that. Therefore the refutation of the claim “Russia hacked the election” can be made in three simple words: No, they didn’t.
Job done. I consider the article dealt with. But now we have to deal with the undertone. Now we have deal with why this article is scary.
The scary part of this article isn’t the war-like talk about Russia.
The scary part isn’t that this seemingly delusional man is apparently a professor at one of the most auspicious institutes of learning in the Western world (although, that is cause for some concern).
The scary part isn’t an elitist “academic” sweepingly dismissing the electoral process of his own country, and ignoring the majority will of his countrymen.
No, the scary part is that he really, really means it. This isn’t propaganda, in the old sense of that word. This isn’t misinformation to spread an agenda. This is full-blown delusion. He genuinely believes the Russians are at “cyber war” with America.
To be crystal clear about this – there is literally ZERO evidence to support this. The Mueller investigation is limping along, revealing absolutely nothing (except that the FBI wanted Hillary to win). The Steele dossier is revealed to have been paid for by the DNC.
There is no evidence. And yet he believes.
Russia has become the great, Orwellian “enemy”. The unseen force behind all our ills. Russian trolls are to blame for Brexit (even though they’re not), and Catalonia (again, untrue) and Donald Trump. Russian trolls were even blamed for hacking the winter Olympics.
This is scary. Scary because it demonstrates that the liberal elite of the USA, and its vassal states, have totally lost their minds. They live in a fantasy world, an un-reality. And they will believe anything that is convenient, anything that supports their un-reality, even if it puts them on a path to real war.
That should terrify everybody.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
This Timothy Snyder is a deranged Zionist.
Emphasis on deranged.
“Hitchens’ razor states that any claim made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
I haven’t heard that one but it’s an excellent motto.
It’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked (by Russia), and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Julius Caesar warned about political leaders who can all too easily manipulate the citizenry to their bidding by manufacturing crises that purportedly threaten national security and making popular appeals to patriotism.
The big problem of accusing somebody of something without any evidence is that for the accused ,it presents a case of proving innocence ,in effect ,an impossibility .That is why in a court of law ,one is innocent until proven guilty.
We certainly do live in a world today where everything seems to be upside down.
It appears delusional to believe either narrative. Regimes such as the US and Russian administrations are hardly in the business of propagating truth unless it serves their purpose, a purpose we can only guess. Given the layers of deceit and duplicity from all who claim our interest is it any wonder such a circus exists?
It’s not a question of believing. Factually and objectively the “Russian narrative” is closer to the truth, not because Russians don’t lie but because they don’t need to in order to win the propaganda war these days.
Total farce. Mccarthyism was ridiculed for decades and now its embraced. The article spells out how its dangerous. Russian hacking propaganda narrative will be used to censor independent media aka grass roots real progressives. In fact it already is. All the social medias are seeing mass censorship.
Totally bizarre moral equivalence. The Putin Government is nowhere near as mendacious, hypocritical and hyper-belligerent as the regime in Thanatopolis DC.
Anyone know what war Timothy is referring to as a ‘win’ when he writes;
”The problem today is that the United States has not just won a war, but lost one. ”
I’m puzzled.
@jammy. You are rightly puzzled. That sentence is meaningless. Below is a picture of an illustrious Yale graduate famed for his inability to repeat a simple English proverb correctly.
I used to blame that student (or rather, pity him for mental deficiency). But your sample of Snyder’s prose suggests that coherent English is not necessarily the strong point of a Yale professor either.
There is nothing really new about delusional people – in elite institutions or anywhere else. Most people are not deliberate liars but they can convince themselves that something is true even if they have a niggling feelings of doubt. Especially if holding a certain belief benefits them personally or professionally, or not holding it harms them or their ability to make a living in their chosen field.
It is true that the claims the DoS and US/UK intelligence agencies make about Russia are false or highly exaggerated and no hard evidence supporting them has been produced. The accusers can’t even make up their minds about what Russia is supposed to have done…”hack” the DNC, conspire to swing the 2016 election in favour of Trump, influence the election via extremely powerful subversive Facebook memes…or all three. It is demonstrably true that the US has done, and continues to do, far worse things than anything they accuse Russia of doing. The many aggressive wars the US starts or supports and the Clinton administration facilitating the systemic looting of Russia’s wealth in the 1990s and engineering Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 election victory are but a few examples. Oh, and openly conspiring to rule the entire world.
But none of these facts significantly influence western public opinion because logic and reason aren’t nearly as persuasive as emotional appeals – and every propagandist knows this. And, yes, even learned men and women are susceptible.
I am surprised that some people are still shocked to learn academics at elite universities are prone to the same cognitive biases that afflict the proles or that they might be reluctant to entertain inconvenient truths that could threaten their social status or livelihood. This is psychology 101 stuff.
IMO, the most frightening aspect of all this isn’t that people are influenced by propaganda or that the US and its vassals are imperial warmongers…but that the western media, while never as objective or neutral as its acolytes claim, has completely gone over to the dark side and now plays the role of propaganda ministry for imperial global capitalism. Everything western governments, banks, corporations and NGOs do, say and support in the name of global domination, up to and including nuclear war, is Good, Right and Correct and no dissent or difference of opinion is allowed.
Thinking critically and challenging the dominant narrative in any way, shape or form is dangerous extremism and the innocent masses must be protected from these “weaponized” ideas. The media and its digital partners Google and Facebook are not censoring speech or limiting the range of acceptable thought, but enhancing our freedom and superior way of life by protecting the vulnerable public from dangerous extremist views – propagated by Russia and enemies of the west – that no right-thinking person would accept anyway. This “meme” and the ease with which it is accepted and internalized by people, or shrugged off as “oh well, what can I do about it?”, is far more frightening than professors who believe establishment bullshit.
@Eric. “While rank corruption, undermining all within, infects unseen”. UN Statement on Extreme Poverty and the Lack of Human Rights in the USA:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533
It’s not just the Graun. Below, fresh from the Mailonline (just the beginning of the article, which gets more and more wild-eyed and foaming as it goes on). As I see it, the problems are: a) a lot more people read the Heil than the Graun – though admittedly they might not get past the bashings, murders, starlet bikini pix and celebrity who’s-dunnit-with-whom stories; b) it’s nevertheless dangerous background noise which undoubtedly seeps into what passes for consciousness in Heil readers; and c) as the article says (despite the weird syntax), British MPs are being fed this slop, sorry, ‘research’.
Here it is anyway. Does Off-Graun have an official Daily Heil policy?
Russian propaganda about Brexit had more impact on Twitter than the Leave campaign, new study claims
• Research by 89up said Kremlin-backed channels pumped out pro Brexit article
• Found channels RT and Sputnik ran articles viewed up to 134m times on Twitter
• Russia ‘won the Twitter war’ and were trying to sway the vote, research says
By Kate Ferguson, Political Correspondent For Mailonline
PUBLISHED: 10:31 GMT, 12 February 2018 | UPDATED: 11:36 GMT, 12 February 2018
Russian propaganda adverts backing Brexit had four times more impact on Twitter than the official Leave campaigns claim.
Kremlin-backed channels RT and Sputnik pumped out 260 anti EU stories which were shared so widely on Twitter they were seen up to 134 million times online.
This dwarfs the number of posts from the Vote Leave and Leave.eu campaigns, which were seen up to 33 million and 11 million each respectively.
Researchers said the findings show that the Kremlin ‘won the Twitter war’ and tried to interfere in Britain’s politics.
The research, put together by 89up – a communication and social media analytics company – was submitted the report to MPs investigating the role of fake news.
It comes after Twitter bosses admitted last week that a single Russian troll factory ran 49 accounts and pumped out nearly 1,000 messages to try to sway the referendum.
We don’t have an official Daily Mail policy, but we cover all media
The Netherlands now has a Russiagate of its own, as the Dutch foreign minister Halbe Zijlstra has been caught lying about Putin and now faces increasing pressure to resign. He claimed that in 2006 he was personally present in Putin’s private dacha when he was working for Royal Dutch Shell. There he claimed to have heard Puting talk about his desire for a resurgance of a Greater Russia, which in Putin’s own words (according to Zijlstra) would include Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states and preferably Kazakhstan.
Zijlstra repeatedly used this anecdote during his political career to stir up fears of Russian military agression, but now it turns out that he has never set foot in Putin’s dacha.
The ever-revolving door between Royal Dutch Shell and the Dutch poltical elite tells you all you need to know about why Dutch foreign policy is always so eager to undermine Russian interests: western energy corporations want to block the flow of Russian oil and gas to Europe at all cost. The only way they can succeed is by manufacturing tensions between Russia and the west through the dissemination of lies.
Royal Dutch Shell — a Rothschild shell company, like British Petroleum, and the United States Federal Reserve.
It doesn’t seem to be up on the current UK Guardian opinion page anymore!
Though you can still do a web search to find it on their website.
Maybe they’ve figured what a shocking journalistic embarrassment the opinion article is?
Normally opinion articles stay around for days but slowly migrate down the page.
The new gem article is about the benign wisdom of George Soros (:-))
They’re making up this stuff thick and fast today.
Maybe trolling their readers is some cunning way of generating extra clicks to raise desperately advertising revenue?
The paper must be deeply into its final death throws to wilfully destroy is credibility and blatantly stoop so low.
I am not convinced they do believe it anymore, it is just toxic to careers to come clean, so everybody is locked into the ridiculous charade.
It happens with everything in places where you are sacked for not being omnipotent every day of your life.
Clinton is finished anyway: she lost to an anti-establishment woman groper. That takes serious talent in election losing….
The problem is all the folks in the Democratic tent who think they are not finished but are bound up in Russia hating.
The best solution is for a third candidate to emerge for 2020 who obliterates the DNC machine so badly that the brand is finished.
Then America could start again……and the world could relax. Maybe….
From what I have observed they do believe it, simply because, as human beings, it’s almost impossible to exist in a group situation wherein the lies you need to tell are acknowledged as such. The only way the group can sustain the moral authority to keep lying is if they agree to also believe the lie.
The goal, or purpose/raison d’etre of the organisation seems to also be a very powerful propellant. Zygmunt Beauman wrote about this in Holocaust where the overriding aim was for efficiency (evil really is banal). In schools all over Britain, teachers truly believe that the only option for success is to enable students to get as many GCSEs at the highest grade possible come what may. The quality of what’s being taught, the behavioural enforcement that’s needed, the cost to the mental health of students and teachers alike, the lack of a time or space to address sexual harassment/abuse, the indoctrination to support totalitarianism, etc., etc., are not ‘seen’ and woe betide anyone who does try to address these issues. The aim, the goal, the end of the race is to be frantically and hysterically obtained and the devil take the hindmost – and, of course, he does.
What? You mean a mass murder, the Butcher of Libya, the person that voted for the Authorization to Use Force in Iraq, and was in the minority of her party lost to somebody who is supposedly a woman groper?
Oh, how horrific that a MASS MURDERER didn’t win. Just horrific! How horrible.
I see you have your priorities in order.
Hey, let me guess, you were out whining and moaning when Trump placed a temporary ban on refugees on 7 nations, but sat on your hand and tongue when Obama was bombing 5 of those nations, after he won the Nobel Peace of Crap Prize..
HA, ha, ha. This just shows how internet misinterpretation runs riot.
1) For your information, I received death threats back in 2002 for being contemptuously anti Iraq war.
So my priorities about warmongering are superbly high in opposing them loudly, contemptuously, vigorously and with disregard to personal safety and prosperity.
2) My views on Obama have been clearly documented as ‘what a pity he traded on his black skin then was just like all the whiteys before him’. Do not dare say the three Republican Presidents before Trump were not warmongers…..I think you would be laughed out of court claiming they were not white.
3) Depleted uranium in Fallujah? REPUBLICAN GENOCIDE.
Never, ever, ever moralise about Democrats vs Republicans where inhuman behaviour is concerned. AMERICANS murder inhumanely, period.
Pathetic tribal ‘with me or against me’ nonsense as you have posted gets no-one anywhere.
And if we are arguing actual vs alleged then the evidence of women against Trump is as strong as the evidence of bombing. Evidence by weight of numbers.Hillary Rodham Clinton (worse than Madelaine Albright which is truly saying something) has not been convicted in a court of law.
I may think she is guilty, so may you, but until a court pronounces it so, her offences are just alleged……
I cannot vote in the US, I preferred Trump as an alleged sexual miscreant dies less damage than a nuclear holocaust.
If he becomes a warmonger in North Korea, Syria, Russia and beyond, my tolerance of him will drop to zero.
You need to look in a mirror and ask if you can make judgements prior to cross-examining a witness, buddy boy.
You are not the first. Global Warming fantasists accused this ex cancer researcher of promoting tobacco interests! Far right numpties have accused me of being a communist. Far left apparatchiks have accused me of being Boris Johnson in disguise!
Clearly I should have been a scriptwriter…..
Let’s say Trump is guilty of everything he’s been accused of.
Who cares? The Butcher of Libya was the alternative.
Both the Republican and Democratic party are against Trump, so is the corporate media, and the intelligence agencies, and the Neocons.
He couldn’t possibly have a higher endorsement than that.
At the worst, he’ll just be another Neocon fascist dirtbag – which is exactly what he ran against.
In that case the American Electorate have no choice
You do understand the ‘woman groper’ has just joined that exclusive ‘mass murderer’ club, don’t you? You cannot become US president without being a pentagon and war lobby shill. You will be removed by force if you somehow miraculous do achieve this feat. Nothing interferes with their profits.
I would speculate (easily) 50,000+ people (men, women and children) killed under ‘woman gropers’ presidency to date. They are all scum. Why people defend one pos over another pos is beyond me. Tribal. Have to back the winner. Look at me I support a ‘winner’.
Trump, Clinton, Cruz (the Reps preferred candidate, a religious lunatic), Pence (a religious lunatic) et al are pos. Line their pockets well halfwits cheer them on.
The president doesn’t control foreign policy. The deep state does.
The use of the Trump presidency is the exposure of who is pulling the strings. Wouldn’t have had that with Clinton.
In 2020? Do you seriously think we’ll still be around in 2020?
What’s the evidence for the claim that we ‘should all be terrified’?
Someone says so.
Cognitive dissonance is normal for maintaining a narrative drama in place of a true relationship.
Finding that out is disturbing and an encounter with fear. The world is not what it had seemed. people are not as I thought. Nothing is as I thought.
The desire to ‘see’ blindness and error in others operates the presumption that ‘we’ see what ‘they’ don’t. Then we all learn to see each other’s blind spots while oblivious to our own.
In some sense terror operates a sense of coercive limit on human thinking and behaviour. Some of this may be associated with events outside immediate human intent such as comets raining destruction, and others with a malign intent, or a cunning manipulative deceits that hack into our terror and shape it to operate us.
When something is ‘set off’ or launched as a political (budget) agenda, like ‘cyberwar fear’, it speaks to me of a device by which to capture and control the market or mindshare that has been induced into the digital playground with free sweeties, promises of extra power or productivity, or the fear of missing out or being left behind when the uptake becomes a social norm rather than a faction.
One already implied factor is budgets. Milking budgets (taxpayer money and the exploitable wealth of common assets), is the nature of an addictive habit. Sell the family silver – and the family into slavery and sickness rather than NOT get the ‘hit’ that has been accepted in place of true relationships.
But behind the greed or fear-driven appetite is the manipulative working of needy greedy people of influence to operate a hidden agenda than that of their own fantasy gratification in terms of power over and status within their world. The wish for control is the basis for being phished by manipulations that operate through the blindspot of their own self predications, of beliefs and definitions.
The contagion of fear’s manipulation spreads like yeast through the whole batch, to replace a true sense of self worth with a driven sense of need – and to ‘bless’ that neediness with the symbols and idols of righteousness or rationalisations based upon wishing something to be true that is not, or that something true be other than it is.
That truth is the first casualty of war is asserted by the factioning or splitting off of mind-capture to the call to war. But truth is not competing (and interlocked or entangled) narrative identities.
The mind is the great receiver, but in setting filters of bias, becomes the great deceiver, such that we run as a state of cognitive dissonance while believing our world to be real and to validate and justify our actions and reactions.
While attention is diverted, changes operate in plain sight that move the goalposts while we were not looking. Willingness to abide with what is, without recoil or contraction into reactive states, is never going to grow as an act of war, although such intent will ‘find’ all the insights by which to more subtly exchange a real relationship for a false idol that cannot and does not know you.
What is this ‘real relationship’?
Is it not that which is so terrifying that we hide it behind terror symbols of diversion and displacement so as to ‘escape’ the mind we think our own?
You can run into a wood until you are running out again – unless of course you run in circles. The thinking mind has been made a false god. It takes all the time you give it to think some more. Mind capture starts at home – and draws reflections or sets up ‘witnesses’ from ‘abroad’ to act out its experience of disconnect, power seeking and terror evasion.
It was said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But that is a self reinforcing loop.
Vigilance is needed that fears do not run in denial – as shadow governance that operates in broad daylight – yet through our blindspot.
Desire for Sanity, Wholeness,as a true healing of mind, has cause to be grateful for our brother in life for the illumination of blindspots or self-denials otherwise hidden in our own thinking. Perhaps through honesty of being and perhaps via attempt to coerce and manipulate. Either way, if the purpose is waking from entanglement in insanity, the result will serve purpose.
Freedom to know the choice by which we live, is part of the freedom to align our choice in a greater life than old thinking that attempt to manage or control in a sense of fear-framed or fear-conditioned thinking. What other quality of thinking could inform or embody our desire?
The hacker of the mind must fear the loss of the power that they think to have gained at another’s expense. No matter how successful they may seem, there is always the underlying terror of the loss of, or penalty exaction for the ‘power’ they wanted, invested in and substituted for in the mind of a believed reality experience.
But of course their experience will be of an alien will seeking to undermine and destroy them.
Jesus said it in the parable of the tenant farmers killing the messengers of the Master.
The would be possessors are possessed by their own misidentification, to war upon anything that would expose the true relation to that which is upstream to the effects.
So, insofar as you uncover fears, don’t deny them while cock crows of the dawning. But bring them to truth instead of attempting to protect or force-fit them into an framing of thought and experience that seems overwhelmingly and dramatically real.
Well I am terrified, and have been for some time. Churchill’s adage about the Americans doing the right thing but only after they had done everything else, is no longer true. They haven’t done the right thing in recent memory, and the power elite have bullied the American people into several logical inconsistencies. So lack of support for mad dog invasions means treason, failure of robotic maudlin support for their so-called heroes means sedition, (no matter those heroes have risked their life because they were unemployable and in need of wages to support their families), failure of Stepford fealty to Israeli raptors means anti-semitism, lack of acceptance of crumbling infrastructure so chemical and nuclear weapons can be maintained and expanded means cowardice, and any number of others.
This all looks unstable and unsustainable but what next?
I wonder does Churchills old adage about eugenics hold water regarding Trump. Would he have lived long enough to attain such an office under Churchill’s criteria. Probably not…………but then again Churchill did like his WASP supremacy theories. Maybe they would have had a grand old time.
The USA is the great force for Evil, destruction and genocide in history, and its psychopathic elites will happily destroy the human race if they cannot rule over all of them under ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’. And half the US elite are ‘religious’ psychotics who are slobbering for ‘The Fire Next Time’.
One also has to appreciate the extreme partisan nature of American politics, which is tribal to a frightening degree. People and families are often split along these lines to a degree that I’ve always found absurd. As a European I’ve often been staggered that anyone can take US politics seriously. To me it always seemed a grotesque farce, often a bloody one and bizarre.
American culture and history, from the very beginning, has been saturated with deep-rooted fear, hypocrisy, violence, massacre, genocide, slavery, puritanism, religious fanaticism, brutality, paranoia, manifest destiny, brazen imperialism, self-righteousness, sanctimony, visionaries and delusions of greatness and one’s place in God’s plan for the New Jerusalem, helped along by providence.
That the place was an imperialist project from the very start and has been an expanding empire from the beginning, swallowing everyone and everything in its path… cannot be denied, though it’s a kind of heresy to point this out…. is troubling. Where does it stop… the imperial expansion?
What’s really frightening today is that the ‘left’ and ‘liberals’ have lurched to the right and now accept what sounds like the core values of Republicanism virtually without question, whilst all the time pretending they are really ‘progressives’ at heart. For example, Rolling Stone magazine that recently had a glowing and uncritical review of that charlatan and fantasist Luke Harding’s absurd book about Trump colluding with the Kremlin to steal the presidential election. Well, they didn’t do a very good job did they, if Clinton received three million more votes than Trump? Yet, instead of examining the flaws in their own system, they choose to blame the Russians! Pathetic, absurd and rather scary.
Within a decade.
Look, you being a European, part of this is YOUR fault, or the fault of your nations.
We can’t control our government, but we are hardly as much of a victim to it as you are. The EU is a CIA plan, and if you don’t know this or you deny it, well, welcome to Operation Mockingbird. It is a CIA plan.
You know why you have a refugee problem in Europe? Because the United States creates the refugees. None of your leaders speak up against this. None of your news does. You realize that if the US goes to war with the Russia, Europe is going to be vaporized.
If you think this country is bad, look at your countries, which all, ever single one, has a traitor to your nation in power. Why does Europe have sanctions against Russia? Because the US wants them, and all of Europe remains silent, eager to pay higher prices for natural gas, and setting the stage for war on your continent.
I know the US is run by madmen, but Europe – it’s run by traitors who are servants to the madmen.
If you are British then one has to laugh, A US poodle lecturing Europe on subservience. HAHA. Good one.
Apparently this man Snyder has form. Here he is again, falsifying WW1, WW2 and the destabilization of the Ukraina as “‘acts of de-colonization”:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/05/snyd-j05.html
Apparently Snyder also moves in dubious company: The US council on Foreign Relations whose other memGobers include such high profile criminals and public liars as Dick “911” Cheney, Colon “Destroy their Sewage System” Powell, “Mad” Maddy Albright, Ma and Pa Clinton, Paul “WMD” Wolfoshitz and George “White Helmets” Soros. The only star missing from this Galaxy of World Class Liars is the great TB himself; but two of Tony’s employers are represented: Goldmann-Sachs and the Carlyle arms group. Yes, such people can do the world a lot of damage, have proved that in the MENA, the Balkans and the Ukraina, and are obviously planning to do even more by first defaming and then attacking Russia.
I got some good advice from the Readers Digest in the 1940s: to avoid falling for confidence men, watch your morals.
Member of the Council on Foreign Relations? Come on, he has to be a propagandist, surely. OMG! He’s won a Hannah Arendt prize, Vaclav Havel prize and a Ralph Waldo Emerson prize. How utterly shameful.
Very embarrassing for Arendt and Emerson to be in such scabrous company.
Once one knows that witches really exist and one believes in them, the next step… a belief in witchcraft, is easy; and those who question, or deny, these facts or self-evident truths, are obviously part of the conspiracy of evil too.
It actually gets worse. If one questions too much too loudly, this undermines the fight against evil and indicates one is soft on evil and the evil-doers and one becomes a target for those who know the truth, that evil is all around us and we are under daily attack from invisible forces and all our woes and ‘defeats’ come, not from ourselves, but from the interference of the evil ones and those that collude with them.
This is all extremely dangerous. The simplistic way our culture divides people into two categories, the good and the bad, those who know the truth and those in the service of lies. When lines in a cultural war are being drawn, almost on a scale that reminds one of a religious schism, one should be nervous, alert, concerned and wary… because ‘religious’ conflict and even warfare could be just around the corner.
Of course much of this is aimed at outlawing and demonizing the Russians, preparing and grooming the public for war with them. We seen and heard it all before. It’s how we sell and justify our new-style imperialist wars these days.
Once one ‘knows’ that evil exists, what it looks like and where it comes from, in this case Russia; everything falls neatly into place and follows easily and is all really, merely, details to be fitted into the bigger narrative… the narrative of warfare and being forced to defend oneself from secret attacks from the forces of evil.
Think of The Guardian’s writers as suicide bombers-ready to explode the last traces of their credibility and prospects of honest employment in the future at a moment of crisis.
For that is what Syria represents: a crisis for the Empire which depends upon victory after victory to maintain the momentum without which it will shrivel up and die.
The imperial project is to transform the global hegemony of capitalism-from which few corners of the earth are excluded, in which the great majority of mankind are involved-into the total rule of the ruling class of the United States. The object is end all resistance to the system as defined and governed by the American based plutocracy. Imagine your own dystopia-the details may be at issue but the fact of
billions being subject to a ruthless caste of exploiters, under constant surveillance, tightly policed, is a given.
And Syria stands in the way- if Washington, and its creatures in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia is held off, if Syria survives in its current form then the imperial project will be dead. Not just frustrated but dead.
It is because Syria is so important that the position of Israel is crucial during the coming weeks, because Israel has no purpose in the world but to act as Washington’s attack dog. Those who hold that it serves as a refuge for Jews are as mistaken as those who regard Jews as dominant in the United States or the
western world It is very convenient for the Empire for Israel to be seen as an angry, irrational ally prone to breaking the trammels of moderation and apt, thanks to a collective PTSD, to engage in mindless violence at the drop of a hat.
Nothing could be further from the truth-if Israel bombed the USS Liberty it did so at the behest of the US Deep State, when Israel attacks Gaza it does so because the US wants it to do so, for imperial purposes.
Israelis are the victims of imperialism and its foreign based supporters are acting, most unconsciously but many with full knowledge of their roles, to advance the interests of the Empire, as defined by the neocons who have dominated US foreign policy for decades and who have both promoted and extended the rule of the fascists who now dominate Israeli government.
For the neocons defeat in Syria which will mean the end of an advance through North Africa and the Middle East to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and Central
Asia will mean an end to their hopes of tipping Iran back into their camp. This will give Russia and China the space and time that they need to roll the Empire back in Latin America, Europe, Africa and south east Asia.
It is because Syria is so crucial as a barrier to the inexorable advance of the empire
that we can assert that nobody genuinely committed to human freedom and the liberation of the human race can be a supporter of the current assault on Syria, and the propaganda campaigns being waged by warmongers against Russia, Iran and China.
The fault line of Israel – Syria runs right through the Labour Party as well:
http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/letter-to-members-of-labours-national.html
mog. Letter from 200 Labour MPs complaining that a prominent BLiarite, one Jeremy Newman, has been caught with his hand in the till to the merry old tune of tens of thousands. More powero their elbow! Ananias was swruck dead for that sort of thing. But I didn’t see anythig about Syria; and the only mention of Israel is when Mr.Newman over there ran up a taxi fare of 3,000 GBP then refused to pay the cabby.
Good advice from a travel book: Ask the fare before you enter the vehicle.
The Guardian provides direction exactly as a compass needle re-magnetised in opposite polarity. It remains useful for navigation. Travel away from the direction indicated to enjoy safe passage.
Evidence? Damn Kit! The evidence is because they are Russian!
That is R-U-S-S-I-A-N!
We won against the Soviets and we brought the wall down so we could build it in our country. And so the EVIL EMPIRE fell at our feet!
But we are Americans and geography isn’t our strongest suit. And if it is a guy with a Russian name that is hacking the internet that constitutes ALL RUSSIANS and PUTIN himself. It is just logical because EVIL can do that sort of stuff.
And if truth be known, Tubularsock misses the little Commie under the bed. It was like losing a childhood friend.
So it is comforting for Tubularsock to have a Russian “Threat” back under the bed. Brings nostalgic feelings.
And you Kit are looking for evidence. We KNOW those Russian did IT because if they didn’t then we may have to look at or ourselves …… ain’t going to happen!
“we brought the wall down so we could build it in our country. ” eggcellent
Well the yolk’s on Tubularsock!
Well, I for one shall not be cowed by your exhortation that “we should all be scared” – why should anyone fear the decline of Western Hegemony ? These are no more than the last thrashings and writhings of the unholy beast.
are you serious? do you know how many weapons the beast has? (well nobody does) what do you think the beast is going to do with those weapons when the walls are closing in? what do you think hes doing with the secret weapons even now? whats raining on you from the sky right now? what are you breathing? what nano particles and microwaves are permeating your body? this should frighten everyone.
Being afraid is not the same as being cowed. Being afraid is a rational response to danger, and we are all in a lot of danger these days. But none of us need be cowed by it. We can face facts and do what we can to save what we can.
Uh is it because of their staggering glut of nuclear weapons? Their unstable simpleton leader? Their deep core of racial hatred? Their nonstop crimes of acquisition? Their delusional thinking? Their preferred defense mechanism being projection?
All dangerous.
A rabid dog in its death-throes is HIGHLY dangerous.
Reblogged this on Worldtruth.
The BTL comments aren’tgoing his way.
Very clear explanation & well put.
Reblogged this on leruscino.