On U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism
by David William Pear
Keeping markets open and free.
If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.
For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. It subjugates small countries, corrupts them by backing right-wing dictators, and enables death squads to commit mass murder of all suspected dissidents. During the First Cold War leftists, anti-colonialists, nationalists and intellectuals were called “communists” and imprisoned, tortured and executed. Now they are called “terrorists”.
The foreign policy interests of the U.S. are to promote the neocolonial interests of U.S. corporations, and to project the financial and military power of the U.S. internationally. If the U.S. cannot bully a head of state into collaborating then it backs a military coup d’etat, stirs up internal violence with divide and conquer strategies, and covertly uses mercenaries to start civil wars. If all else fails it will find a pretext or a false flag to invade and overthrow an unfriendly government.
Because of past disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq the U.S. is hesitant to commit large numbers of U.S. boots on the ground. Instead it prefers the safety of “boots in the sky” with its domination of air power to bomb helpless countries into submission. If it cannot get a country to submit then it destroys it mercilessly as an example of the price that other countries will pay if they do not go along to get along with the U.S.A. The U.S. never gives up on its quest for control of worldwide capitalism. Any doubters of U.S. persistence need only to look to North Korea, Cuba and Iran.
U.S. foreign policy is the domain of the elites. The public busies itself with domestic issues, just trying to make a living and raise a family. Sometimes the elites of foreign policy let their masks slip to reveal their true nature. When Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 2009 that “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people” he was not just intellectualizing, as if teaching a Harvard course on political science. Brzezinski was admitting to his personal responsibility for policies that have killed millions of people.
Photo: Brzezinski with President Jimmy Carter. Photo source: Daily Mail.
It was Brzezinski that advised President Jimmy Carter to destabilize Afghanistan in the 1980’s. At the time Afghanistan’s communist government was modernizing the country, developing its economy, educating its people, and improving the standard of living for millions of Afghans. It was also advancing the rights and opportunities for women, which the U.S. is constantly touting as one of its cherished human rights concerns. It was Brzezinski’s destabilization project that set women’s rights back hundreds of years in Afghanistan. When human rights get in the way of U.S. foreign policy objectives, then human rights lose.
In 1979 Brzezinski advised Carter to secretly authorize the CIA to give financial and military aid to further inflame Islamic fanatic mujahideen that were violently opposed to modernization. When the Soviet Union intervened militarily in support of the threatened Afghan government it was not an invasion. It was the legal response of Russia to a neighboring country that was asking for military aid against foreign backed insurgents. Today we see a similar Russian military assistance program in Syria for similar reasons against very similar villains.
Carter feigned indignation and outrage towards Russia and he put the freeze back into the Cold War. He decried the “invasion as a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people”, and Carter claimed it was a Russian plot to control Afghanistan’s oil.
Carter declared a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics to punish Russia, and by doing so he dashed the dreams of U.S. athletes that had been training for 4 years in preparation for the Olympic Games. A good time was had by all in Moscow without the U.S. participation. U.S. athletes were sacrificed as pawns in Brzezinski’s game of the Grand Chessboard. It is a blood soaked chessboard where the masters see flesh and blood people as objects to be toyed with.
What Brzezinski and Carter did was to set a trap that the Soviets fell into when they sent their military into Afghanistan. The trap had been laid before the Russian “invasion”, and not afterwards as Brzezinski would brag years later in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur:
Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
Carter and Brzezinski were overjoyed that the U.S. would then have the sweet revenge of giving Russia a bloody Vietnam experience. Carter and Brzezinski gave Afghanistan a Vietnam experience too, in which millions of people were destroyed.
Once events in Afghanistan were set into motion, then Carter and Brzezinski added gasoline to the inflamed Islamic fanatics with billions of dollars in U.S. military support funneled through Pakistan. Thousands of mercenaries from Arab countries poured into Afghanistan to join the fight and get paid too. They were called “Afghan-Arabs”. The Brzezinski-Carter scheme would be continued under President Reagan and led to the destruction of Afghanistan, the re-subjugation of Afghan women, and millions of Afghan civilian victims of war. Afghanistan never recovered but from its ashes rose up the Taliban and al Qaeda. The mysteries surrounding the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th 2001 are unresolved. Regardless of whodunit the attacks of 9/11 would be used as justification by President W. Bush to launch another invasion of Afghanistan.
Brzezinski’s egotism to show how smart he thought he was is the smoking gun of George Orwell’s famous quote:
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
For decades the U.S. pretended that the false narrative of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was reality. The U.S. glorified the mujahideen as freedom fighters, when actually they were Islamic fanatics and mercenary proxies used by the U.S. and its coconspirators. The U.S. and the Saudis funded a heavily armed brand of Islamic terrorism that the U.S. though that it could control, ignore or kill off once it was no longer needed.
As Brzezinski also said in that Le Nouvel Observateur interview:
What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
The U.S. thought that it had found the “silver bullet” to destroy all of its enemies and control West Asia with “stirred-up Muslims”. With the illusion of such power the U.S. fed its addiction to regime change projects using Islamic mercenaries. As Brzezinski said, controlling people is difficult. The result of regime change projects has been chaos. For the U.S. chaos is an opportunity. It is of no concern for the elites that chaos costs millions of people in the world to suffer.
Today the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria can be laid posthumously at the feet of Brzezinski. Carter has escaped public blame and he still teaches Sunday School as the Nobel Peace Prize president. Brzezinski was so good at killing millions of people that he went on to advising another Peace Prize president how to do it. President Obama called Brzezinski “one of our most outstanding thinkers”. Obama picked up the killing where W. Bush left off.
Killing millions of people instead of trying to control them is the model for asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is when the U.S. destroys a small country that has a limited ability to defend itself and cannot strike back. The tools of the trade are the CIA, air power, missiles, drones and mercenaries.
The U.S. public has become immune to its government killing millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Arabs, as long as it does not interrupt with the public’s busy daily lives. The opportunity costs to the American people is costing them universal healthcare, affordable higher education, modern mass transportation, modern infrastructure and economic security in old age; but the public does not seem to notice, and cannot connect the dots. They still think that the U.S. has the highest standard of living in the world. The reality is that the U.S. comes in at about 19th on everything from the infant mortality rate to high speed internet; except military spending and political prisoners at which the U.S. is number one.
Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Image source: Wikipedia.
How did the U.S. fall so low when it started with such high hopes on July 4th 1776 with the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Those words never really meant what most Americans think they mean. American capitalism is a hierarchical based class society. Property bestows more rights and privileges on the top of the pyramid of wealth. The Founding Documents of the U.S.A. were written by the elites, for the elites and for future elites in the lottery of capitalism American-style. By “Life” is meant for those that can afford the necessities and luxuries of life.
“Liberty” is the liberty to close off the commons from the natives and those that do not own property. “Happiness” is the happiness that comes with owning slaves, and finding foreign sources of cheap labor.
As the greed for more and more land, more slaves and more wealth grew, the elites declared that it was Manifest Destiny for them to spread capitalism and the American way of life across all of North America. It was then that Asia’s destiny became America’s destiny. When the U.S. boundary met the Pacific Ocean the U.S. did not stop its Westward expansion. It kept on going to Hawaii, Japan, China and Korea. The U.S. joined the European scramble for overseas colonies and empire.
Capitalism must expand to survive. Adam Smith’s quaint form of capitalism was based on bartering. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker traded their products with each other providing all with meat, bread and light. Modern capitalism American-style is based on money, and money is based on debt. Debt requires that interest be paid by the borrower to the lender, thus syphoning off capital from the capitalist to the financier. The capitalist must expand production and find sources of cheap labor to pay the interest and to skim a profit too. Expanding production means that more and more natural resources are needed. To produce more requires even cheaper labor and automation. To sell an ever increasing amount of finished products of capitalism requires advertising and expanding to foreign markets. If any link in the chain is broken then the Ponzi scheme of capitalism collapses into an economic depression.
Economic depressions cause social unrest, civil disturbances and class conflict. When the social hierarchy of capitalism is shaken by economic depression, then capitalism must restore order either with violent repression or appeasement by redistributing some of the wealth to reduce tension. The first instinct of the capitalists is to resort to violence and repression to preserve their wealth. That is why capitalism and true democracy cannot coexist. One or the other has to give or the system is in danger of breaking down entirely.
Photo: Pinochet – Moneda. (Image by fpealvarez)
The natural political order for capitalism is right-wing dictatorship, martial law and fascism. Only by continuous expansion, imperialism and the exploitation of others can there be a compromise between capitalism and democracy domestically. When U.S. presidents say that the “American Way of Life” is being threatened by enemies what they mean is that small countries resist being subjugated and exploited by the U.S. Empire.
When the U.S. first began to expand beyond the shores of the Pacific Ocean they were met with rejection. Ancient societies such as in Japan, Korea and China had civilizations with thousands of years of history. They had their own social order, their way of life and they were self-sufficient. They told the U.S. capitalists to go away. Such behavior by Asians was intolerable to the U.S. capitalist and merchant classes who wanted to sell their excess production and make trading profits. The U.S. was outraged that Asians, whom the white supremacists Euro-Americans saw as being non-Christian barbarians and inferior humans, would act so superior as to refuse to buy and sell with U.S. traders.
How was the U.S. to expand trade when it was met with such ‘insolence’? The answer that came naturally was to send in the navy with gunboats and the marines with bayonets to subjugate the ‘insolent barbarians’ to either open up to trade or have their cities bombarded with cannon balls and burnt to the ground.
The “West was won” with genocide of the Native Americans, and if genocide was needed to subjugate Asia, then the U.S. would use it, and it did. The U.S. continued its killing spree in the Philippians, Korea, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. The U.S. considers the Pacific Ocean a U.S. lake.
The U.S. is still trying to control the world with cannon balls. The cannon balls keep getting bigger, more technologically complex and more genocidal. The U.S. cannot accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries to, the more destruction, death and chaos it causes. Instead of creating world order the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth is drained off by military expenditures and maintaining a foreign empire.
Vladimir Lenin explained how today’s U.S. foreign policy works in his 1917 thesis on the causes of World War One: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Capitalism leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to imperialism and imperialism leads to war. Capitalism also leads to inequality. Inequality and democracy cannot coexist forever because there are limits to expansion and growth. To preserve inequality requires fascism and a police state. Democracy can only thrive if there is more equality. Eventually, choices will be made between fascism or democracy, and between capitalism or something else?
This article originally appeared on OpEdNews.com
David William Pear is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement.
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With the discharge of Sergei Skripal from hospital, there was brief mention of the case in the MSM. Only the “Independent” allowed comment on two articles, both of which were heavily censored overnight.
But before the censors deleted most of the cogent criticisms, it was clear that an overwhelming majority of commenters totally rejected the government story and the government troll-postings were heavily down-voted.
Interestingly, as well as the critics being deleted, most of the government trolls had their heavy down-votes converted into modest up-votes.
The new Josef Goebbels running the British media is certainly more subtle than his German original.
Goebbels was a genius in comparison to the scum who control, run and infest the Western fakestream media sewer.
David William Pear, and those who say similar things, are absolutely right. I just finished the two volume work, “The Political Economy Of Human Right” by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. And before that, I read Edward S. Herman’s blunt “The Real Terror Network.” Volume one of TPEOHR is titled “The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism.” Guess what that’s about? The second installment looks at Washington’s destruction of Indochina and the corporate medias’ role in aiding and abetting it.
Just for fun, the new issue of SyrPer has just come out; with this headline bang on-topic:
THE NEW ORDER IN THE NEAR EAST; TRUMP LOSES BIG TIME IN LEBANON, IRAQ, IRAN, NORTH KOREA AND TURKEY
[No comments yet]
Reblogged this on circusbuoy.
I wonder whether certain posts are being eliminated even on alternative sites.
For example, I’ve tried posting this on Russia Today, which would normally be only too happy to publish it, but it is immediately deleted, without even time for moderation:
“For those aficionados of Sherlock Holmes among you, here is the latest reckoning in the Skripal case of likeliest suspect(s) according to Holmes’s classic “motive, means and opportunity”:
The Clinton Mob wanted some dirt on Trump to ‘swing’ the American election.
Via the CIA, they approached MI6 who referred them to Christopher Steele (ex-MI6 Russia desk) and now running a ‘black ops’ private “security” firm.
Steele asked an old MI6 contact, Paul Miller, for assistance.
Miller was Sergei Skripal’s MI6 ‘minder’. He instructed Skripal to compile a “suitable” dossier for the purpose.
Steele sold the dossier to Glenn Simpson of the Clinton Mob for a large, undisclosed sum.
Upon hearing of Steele’s profits, Skripal demanded a slice of the action . . .”
RT’s commenting feature, put into the hands of a company called Spot.IM, is awful. Spot is run by a couple of Israelis who appear to be utterly censorious. And regular visitors to the site are all given the same abusive welcome when they comment, with comments being disappeared willy nilly, all the time. And RT doesn’t give a crap. I noted a few instances on my blog, but sort of gave up tracking them when it became apparent that I could spend all of my time just on RT’s censorship of my comments.
I soon stopped reading RT BTL.
Nothing to see there anyhow – just a swarm of Butthurt Clinton-Wailers, Beavis & Butthead clones, starry-eyed Americans who believe Russia is an ethnically pure Aryan domain of god-bothering Happy Families, and loonies like our dear friend Free Dumb Fighter.
What is this “BTL” I keep hearing about?
‘Below The Line’ i.e. in the Comments section, below the main article.
Hi , I have enjoyed starting to read your blog. Arrby, I posted a comment and re-blogged your, about Arrby Post.
This on Regurgitating Conventional Pieties, is I think a common experience we seem to share.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/09/social-conditioning-and-conventional.html
Who ate all the pieties or ´Now is not a time for soundbites´.
”Say I get up on Nightline, I´m given whatever it is, 2 Minutes and I say Gaddafi is a terrorist Khomeini is a murderer. Whatever it is etc.etc. The Russians, you know invaded Afghanistan all this sort of stuff, everyone just nods, you simply don’t need any evidence. But suppose you say something that’s not just regurgitating ”conventional pieties”, say you say something the least bit unexpected or controversial. Suppose you say ………….
( insert Green Party Policies on Basic Income, reform of debt based money or not renewing Trident here )”
(Equally, insert Jeremy Corbyn´s heterodox politics to Blu Labour and Neoliberal austerity )
Quote from Noam Chomsky starts at 1min 48 s
or click link Regurgitating conventional pieties
Thanks. My ‘about’ is ridiculously long. I’ve seen abouts that don’t even say anything about the blog. So I guess there’s a range. Mine would be at one extreme, being longer than the average post. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing – as long as there’s useful info there and not about me personally, lol.
I enjoyed it and still look forward to working through all the links.
I see you have taken Chomsky’s point regarding concision and censorship on board, I agree with that as well.
I guess so, lol.
@ Arrby
Is there anything the Hasbera haven’t got their hands on?
It will soon be too late for any normal citizen to be heard…
I agree and it’s not just Israel. It’s the global deep state, led by the US. The Silicon Valley titans are part of the deep state and have the ability to all but silence us online. I do a series on my blog – even though I don’t have time for it – dealing with three main areas: 1. Lawlessness / Ruined 2. Professional Scam Artists 3. The Avalanche Snapshots. The snapshots are examples, news reports (mainly but not exclusively, from alt media) revealing instances where the global deep state and its allies and tools out and out kill communication. It will get worse before this system of things is simply ended.
@roger. So there are patriots in Sweden? Only not in the government. Like everywhere else in the West.
As a native South African I object to your assertion that our government shot your prime minister. More likely the culprits are hiding in plain sight — in the traitorous regime which besmirched Sweden’s reputation by framing Assange and cozying up to NATZO.
The Assassination of Olof Palme was in 1986
On Friday, 28 February 1986, at 23:21 CET (22:21 UTC), Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, was fatally wounded by a single gunshot while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet Palm
The Assasin Eugene De Kock were caught on CTV at Arlanda Airport.
see @ 2.51
I have heard that Bush snr. had Palme killed because he would not allow illegal arms to be shipped through
Sweden. Bush has been a major arms dealer and is a billionaire because of it.
He has never taken no as an answer.
This is the direction we are moving in:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19467976/black-mirror-social-credit-china/
Universal Basic Income for everyone that gets turned off if your “social credit score” isn’t up to scratch.
What does this mean for political activism and anti-establishment figures???
The US is an outlaw state and the notion that the American electorate are unaware of this defies credulity. The evidence of US crimes is overwhelming. The history of those crimes stretches back to the very creation of the US. Such crimes are committed daily and many of them are boasted of by the political media elite (eg, the recent air strikes on Syria).
All the more reason to undermine and water-down the education system….. which I have seen in Canada first hand, and which has been obvious to anyone looking at the US for these many years. Democracy needs citizens to be educated in order for it to work.
What passes for education today is
obedience training.It requires no more education than basic literacy, such as is easily provided by primary education. This fact was demonstrated beyond doubt by the history of the English working class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who with minimal education created a labour movement that was able to challenge the ruling class and make substantial political, economic and social advances.
Exactly the same in Austfailure, sally. The Right here, led by the Murdoch cancer, HATE teachers with a sickening venom, HATE public education as they do public housing, transport, health and all collective goods, and endlessly subvert public education and promote private, most particularly elite, education. The results after forty years of deliberate dumbing down and stupidefication, are revolting, but the Right relies on dumb, ignorant, greedy and hateful proles for the bulk of their electoral support.
“atheistic government” God is more approving of someone, or some group, that disbelieves but acts decently than a group like the American State that purports to be Christian but is anti-christian.
“U.S. athletes were sacrificed as pawns in Brzezinski’s game of the Grand Chessboard” Indeed. They play and we pay. So very, very true.
I learned something from this article that I didn’t know, namely the timing for the funding of the Islamic crazies by the American schemers.
Good luck though, getting people to read books!
I’ve got bad news for everyone who has not realised it already: capitalism won. It is, and will remain the dominant cultural hegemon. The prize? The full or partial destruction of the biosphere, and the concomitant full or partial collapse of civilisation …not least because we have no Plan B, no Planet B, and not a clue about what to do next. We cannot even guarantee there will be a ‘next’.
The reason for the collapse? Systemic fragility, financial overreach, over-production, over-indebtedness, the loss of potential, momentum and reproducibility of culture, space time compression …but primary to all the inherent contradictions: carbon capitalism is about to run out of fuel. More sophisticated analysis would show that fuel and resources do not need to run out for them them to become an economic drag, allowing the GFC debt hangover to catch up with us. This is already occurring.
The debt momentum of centuries is an ineluctable and irreversible vector driving one way, and the biophysical restraint of Nature is a greater force pushing the other …there is only one winner. We need to prepare for what comes next, optimistically presuming there will be a next. We will need to heal Nature, human and environmental, with what is left. That may not be very much at all.
“, and will remain the dominant cultural hegemon.”
Which puts your persistent pessimism/defeatism regarding the efforts of the left in the Labour Party to build a movement which will transform capitalist society into perspective. You have given up.
Happily, the reality is that capitalism, in all its aspect is a very fragile, brittle construct. Its ideology, as your post suggests, is discredited among anyone with critical faculties, it is exposed every day by the failures and the ‘triumphs’ of neo-liberalism.
It just needs a push and it will collapse. That push is what Corbynism represents, get behind it and add your weight and it will disappear very quickly. And that push will be all the more powerful if those involved are, as you are, ruthless in your criticism of those tendencies and people whose ‘moderation’ and willingness to compromise are undermining the movement.
Have you noticed how Ms Thornberry seems to be growing up: Gaza yesterday, Syria today. Good work Seumas,
Bevin: we seem to have a fundamentally different appreciation as to what capitalism is and entails. Primarily, you see Corbynism as a resilient distinct entity that will survive capitalisms collapse unscathed? How is this even possible within a globally networked economy? I see Corbynism as a redistributive mechanism wholly WITHIN capitalism: thus subject to all of it’s contradictions, violence, exploitation and alienation. The UK is a tertiary service economy WHOLLY dependent on someone elses labour and material resource exploitation. Essentially, we export our violence, in the modern idiom through financial terrorism, and gather the re-appropriated wealth for domestic bourgeois consumption and re-distribution. Thus, Corbynism is a re-distribution of re-distributed wealth that, by rights, should be repatriated to where it belongs for the various globally exploited countries to escape the IMF Structural Adjustment Policy debt and death trap. You might want to consider the ethics and collective moral culpability of such a situation. Or do you deny that such a situation exists? If so, please explain how the UK creates wealth without sub-imperial wealth exploitation and over-extended household indebtedness?
So if we can agree that the wealth to be re-distributed is not ours to begin with, and therefore immorally gained …how do we build a moral society on immoral foundations? Because these are the sort of questions I seek answers to, even if only for personal comfort. Is it pessimistic to seek to imagine a moral and equitable society?
Personally, I think that you put too much faith in one man. Fundamentally, I know we have a base common denominator …there is only one global superpower, our common humanity. Can human emancipation be achieved through the collapsing statist project? So long as humanity is the subject of heirarchical domination: we will always remain alienated from what Marx called our “species essence”. It is possible to have a responsible state, at least in theory. One that maintains the reciprocity of the Social Contract and the General Will, or common good. It’s just that in 4,000 years of ‘advanced’ civilisation we have never managed it, Why: that is another very good question to posit and try to answer?
Your critiques fail to realise fully, what the Critical Theorists observed, that the dominant culture is totalising and inculcated into the majority of its subjects. Thus capitalist materialism reproduces itself through the wants, needs, and desires of its dominated subjects by reproducing “false consciousness”. Thus, the people want to maintain the material consumption that capitalism offers. And when they get moral pangs: they seek “mirror-capitalist” materialism …or socialism as you might call it? But do we even need a global networked economy that extracts, overproduces, exploits, alienates and destroys the planet so we can have more stuff? Another pertinent question to ask? If not, what could replace it? A gifte economy of “symbolic exchange” perhaps?
The planet is dying; the global economy is dying, if not already dead; what persists is financial terrorism and financial engineering that amounts to the biggest criminal act in history …the theft of the future. In among that, do you propose that we redistribute a tiny fraction of our stolen childrens future to assuage our guilt and feather our present with fake purloined prosperity? Because I do not think that is justifiable? If not, what would a globally equitable society look like?
What is true prosperity? What does it truly mean to be free? How much is sufficient to sustain true psycho-spiritual happiness? How much is a sunset worth? What utility does love have? How do I monopolise and benefit from empathy? Are these questions even worth asking?
How long do we continue to legitimate a dead state economic paradigm and throw our consent and self-actualising potential into a statism that seeks to work for itself and for the few? And if you think one man can wrest the entrenched power from the state and return it to the people (where the sovereignty has constitutionally always lain), you are more naive than I thought you were. If we, the people want a future (and if capitalism leaves anything for the future …it has just about cleaned up already) we are going to have to do it our selves. Legitimating and re-legitimating a de-legitimated state is disempowering in the extreme. How quickly you forget that Corbyn was complicit with the completely synthesised Skripalgate? How quickly we move ‘on’?
“I see Corbynism as a redistributive mechanism wholly WITHIN capitalism: thus subject to all of it’s contradictions, violence, exploitation and alienation. …”
Capitalists cannot and will not tolerate any such reforms. For Christ’s sake they thought Wilson was so dangerous that the military would have to take over! Look at the extraordinary things the Tories did in the Miners Strike.
Look at what neo-liberalism has demanded be done to the Unions.
Capitalism simply isn’t run by laid back sophisticated operatives ready to buy up unions and go along with mild reformists- its ruling class is run by highly competitive, greedy and callous thieves (the people who did India and America) who want everything and will elbow aside anyone who stands in their way. Their aim is to enslave workers, and cut living standards to less than subsistence. The next step for them is not giving in to Corbyn and the left but fascism with death squads and concentration camps.
Frankly, comrade, I’ve read your critiques before,. They used to re-assure me. I believed that they wanted the NHS because fit and healthy workers were better for them, I believed that they wanted free education for similar reasons and decent wages too. And maybe some capitalists did but they were pushed aside by the more ruthless who smashed the unions, ended free education and will soon have demolished the NHS.
Capitalism is an evil system. Corbyn may not be to your taste but what else is there that can possibly put basic reforms, most of them to do with living standards, back on the agenda?
Will they be allowed? I very much doubt it. The capitalists will fight tooth and nail to preserve their loot-part of which is the power to humiliate the poor-.It is then that the real struggle will begin. Tell those Critical Theorists that that is how revolutions begin-when the powerful break the contracts they have made and attack the organisations built by the poor for self defence.
As to the IMF, as with the ideology I go back to Cobbett: the Debt must be audited, most of it is odious and should be repudiated. And ideology is a simple matter, socialists need to start answering back, refuting the cheap and shopworn ideas of the ruling class and repeating the eternal verities of solidarity and love. The things all societies have always believed in and which it takes an immense and constantly modernised ideological industry to defy.
It takes the Ivy League and Oxbridge, generations of philosophising and millions of people working in the media to contradict the knowledge that we are all born with: that we are equal, all must be fed and sheltered, the sick must be comforted, the weak assisted. The ideas that underpin the existence of the species, without which we are doomed.
Almost everyone can see through capitalism and its ideology. Only the ‘educated’ have doubts.
Bevin: as I said: fundamentally we share the same vision …the empowerment of the people. All of the people. Where we differ is in the praxis of empowerment. Your reading of history is astute and informative: surely enough to contribute to the conclusion that the history of the state is the history of repression and alienation? The simple reductionist solution would be that the removal of the state would remove repression? No, we carry the seeds of our own repression within us. Fundamentally, at the level of our perception of the world (apperception actually: how we semiotically contextualise and categorise experience).
Will you find this insight in any political theory or social philosophy? Not that I know of. Then what practical value does it have, other than as a personal philosophy? (Actually, it is an anti-philosophy). I believe it can contribute insight to the reason why the people willingly accept their own disempowerment and alienation.
We do not have a way to understand our own emancipation and empowerment beyond the tyranny of received and externally codified signs and symbols (semiotic narrative construction, philosophy, ideology, religion, race, culture, gender, and ultimately identity itself …which are socially constructed). [Barthes; Derrida; Baudrillard et al]. Not only do we see ourselves mirrored in (manipulated or ‘synthesised’) ideologies [Lacan]; we see ourselves mirrored in consumer materialism …the acquisition of ‘things’ that confer and display wealth and status [‘status value’ – Baudrillard]. So we continue to legitimate the process of consumer production (and therefore consent to endorse the continuance of the hierarchical ‘relations of production’ – class relations) …whether it be capitalist materialism or socialist materialism matters little: the industrialised process of consumption for the sake of consumption and the maintenance of false consciousness of conferred wealth and status is on the verge of irrevocably damaging the biosphere. And self-actuated implosion. We may have already crossed the event horizon: I suspect we have, but I do not know – no one does …but if we do not break our habitual addiction to ‘stuff’ and the materialised conception of transferred (reified) wellbeing and faux prosperity – we will not survive.
[NB: faux prosperity based on the burning of hydrocarbons that we have no way of perpetually valorising – so we will be forced to alter our habitual misperception of society and humanity whether we want to or not.]
Does this give you an insight as to why I cannot endorse Corbynism? Well, there is a moral aspect as well. To support a party or support a state: you must endorse and participate in the ‘collective consensual constituency’ …a shared foundational ideology between the elector and elected. Quite simply: I do not …for reasons I have already shared. The major red flag would be Corbyn fund raising for the White Helmets four months before the Rashidin Massacre of Innocents. I cannot support anyone linked directly or indirectly to that atrocity. Honestly, I would question the morality of anyone who does. Most recently, it was a Labour MP, Mathew Pennycock, who urged Treason May to fulfill the funding gap for the WH after the fake suspension of US funding. Quite frankly, anyone who supports Labour indirectly supports child murderers and terrorism …and shares in a collective moral culpability with their actions. I cannot see it any other way.
When people ignore or endorse positions of support for the WH, then we have a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ [Habermas]. This is the cost of legitimating the consensus reality …alienation from ones own morality. No one could support the murder of children, so it “did not happen” [Baudrillard]. Can you see how quickly the consensus reality (‘Lifeworld’) would break down if people were not alienating themselves from their humanity? Poof, it’s gone! Legitimating the illegitimate is the very nature of our disempowerment.
[A most recent example is that support for Labour is support for the transparently synthesised events in Salisbury …which Labour and Corbyn used to manufacture their own political capital: to further their Magnitsky agenda. Support for Labour entails support for the Cold War and a sanctions agenda based on conspicuously fabricated ‘facts’ to support a synthesised billionaire ideology. This is a case of policy (ideology) manufacturing it’s own consensus by synthesising corrobarable ‘anti-facts’ and ‘anti-meaning’. If that does not pose a jeopardy crisis for the legitimacy of the lifeworld: I do not know what will.]
So we enter an alternative factual, synthetic, and parallel unreality (‘hyperreality’: Baudrillard) that is more real than the real …because it contains and mirrors back our identity. How do we break out of this? What is the alternative? Adulterated Western consumer culture cannot even conceive of its own transcendence. We have no “transcendent signifier” so we exist in a hyperloop repeating our same inadequate responses, endorsing a debased and impotent lifeworld …or opting out into addiction, hedonism, avoidance strategies and escapism …or simply being ‘externalised’ as redundant by the dominant hegemonic cultural system (fully 85% of humanity). Wouldn’t you like to find an inclusive alternative that works for 100% of humanity? (Yes, even the oppressors: they are those that are the most alienated from their humanity). I know I would. For the totality, not just the Few?
That means we have to develop our own uncompromised ‘reality based community’ to the point where a new transcendent praxis of empowerment and humanity emerges from the synthetic fog. First, we have to stop synthesisng the ‘fog’: and this must necessarily occur at the individual perceptive level …community and society are as much artifacts of self as the other way round. I am lucky enough that the new world is staring me in the face, and is not something to be undervalued. Few people in this fucked up world are afforded the ability to envisage the future: I hope not to squander mine. You once said that I wanted to rearrange the world to suit my priviliged POV (not the way you expressed it) …if that means the extension of peace from my vantage point to the rest of humanity …then yes, yes I do. And I know you do too.
“Will you find this insight in any political theory or social philosophy? Not that I know of”.
Have you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
https://www.academia.edu/1738898/Paulo_Freire_Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed_1.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sdNtwSMMGo
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2016/09/bourgeois-resolution-poem-in-three.html
@BigB. Thanks for identifying the field of battle: Selfishness and Stupidity vs Cooperation and Intelligence. A much bigger field than politics, although it impinges on politics. Prince Kropotkin was an evolutionary biologist as well as a political activist; he pointed out that the Universe is a very big and rather hostile place for Life to have evolved in; and that much of animal survival depends on cooperation and wisdom rather than “competition red in tooth and claw”.
“For we wrestle not with flesh and blood but against Principles and Powers in the Heavens.” — St.Paul, Corinthians 12
Two major epistomologies arise from the study of Buddhist hermeneutics: the degenerative and dividing …or the regenerative and unifying. It is a matter of perception. It’s not hard to deduce which the pan-historic elite have chosen to acculturate us with, as they have come to monopolise cultural creation? Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Bookchin tried to envisage what a society of equals living cooperatively might entail: and how it might organise post-production. We do not need resource hungry heirarchical tiers of supra-sovereignty to enjoy an experience economy and follow the goals of life, love and the pursuit of happiness. Nor can we ecologically afford them. We could be a lot happier with a lot less …if only we could collectively see it …the real is perhaps hiding in plain sight?
Thanks, that’s what I was trying to say withChristian terminology. Of course Buddhist monks introduced these ideas into the ME 3-4 centuries BC.
All the major world religions (including Judaism) are indistinct in the views of adepts. At the highest levels of understanding they are unifying. Then there is the fundamental base level that is violent and divisive. You couldn’t have a better illustration of the two epistimologies of perception. Place Thomas Merton, MLK and Thich Nhat Hanh together (they never actually met thanks to MLK’s state execution) and inwardly you would not be able to discern difference or divisiveness. Unfortunately, they are the exception, not the norm. But so long as there are those who can rise above the adversity into which they are born, there is hope. Where there is hope, there is a way…
[In Buddhist terms, the Way …Marga – the path for the adepts of all denominations and all creeds. In humanity there is no distinction.]
I think it was Jack Cornfield who said, “Buddha’s greatest concern as a teacher is not that the truth is too difficult for people to understand, but that the truth is so simple people won’t accept it.”
You’re right, but I myself believe in God and his plan of salvation for imperfect humankind. This system of things is doomed in all the ways you outline, but mainly because of its opposition to the Creator. That’s just my view. I don’t knock others for having a different one. I just disagree with them on that one point.
The Bradbury pound would solve the debt crisis at the stroke of a pen.
As Soddy pointed out in 1926, money is not wealth.
Corbyn is the only politician with the vision and courage to carry this reform out.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/0eWXoipxpX74/
I’ve taken to using BitChute as well. I still use YouTube, but I don’t trust YouTube to not disappear my vids. This is redundancy. I also signed up for, and was accepted by, Steemit. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to log onto the site. I also don’t like all the focus on money, crypto or otherwise. The simple idea of supporting a site monetarily isn’t the problem. James Corbett probably summed up, best, how I feel in one of his ongoing discussions on alternative social networking options when he said his only goal was to learn and pass on info.
Hi Arrby, I think Steemit is very good, I also have High hopes for AKASHA.
I have been playing with IPFS for a couple of years and The Distributed Web is coming on very nicely.
WE-Tube is a good distributed net video streaming platform as well the networks are as yet below critical mass and the general state of WEB 3.0 is in BETA I think that in another 6 months things will be much more user-friendly and the network more developed.
Web 3 is uncensorable and the Powers That be clearly are not going to leave it alone to have an easy ride.
James Corbet did some very interesting videos when he closed his Twitter account. I am interested in establishing a cooperative mutual syndicate on web 3 which will leverage audience in the Corporate web and distribute revenues via smart contracts to “Content Providers”
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/the-internet-is-big-big-boys-still.html
This very Basic analysis shows how concentrated the Dominance is of the Huge Web Monopolies, this coupled with analogue/Digital Dinosaur Media and Corporate concentration of power does give an indication of how closely controlled access to revenue streams are for those of us outside of the Corporate Mainstream. The Answer is to Network and Combine into Media Flotillas that can increase Media Portal focus points through which Internet users can be directed to Internet gardens and landscapes they may never discover with the Google Satellite Navigation.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/03/on-tulip-manias-and-fragility-in-our.html
The distributed web is above all about Democracy. There are many watered down versions of democracy and also models of governance calling themselves democratic which are nothing of the sort. Your Platform, IPFS and Swarm and others I have not heard of, I am sure.,are at the Elite end of Computing. Within the proprietary software model even distributed systems would leave existing Elite hierarchies in control manipulating and rationing information and access to the fruits of what we call Society or civilisation.
Richard Stallman the founder of GNU describes what free software is.
´´Free software means the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/05/nsa-sha-256-sha-2-mrkel-trees-and-magic.html
SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA).[3] They are built using the Merkle–Damgård structure, from a One-way compression function itself, built using the Davies-Meyer structure from a (classified) specialized block cipher.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/04/akasha-smasha-decentralized-social_53.html
The Decentralized Social Network, Akasha, Launches Web3 Site
So what is all the fuss about? Well, put simply there will not be and has not been much fuss,
there’s an old adage; ” when you see a bandwagon it’s always to late to get on”. Well on this one, the Bandwagon has actually just gone on
Beta testing it’s around the point that Ethereum was in late 2015 early 2016
It is exciting as it shows how the web 3 will work on top of the distributed Block Chain.
Free at last Free at last free at last!
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/10/getting-blockchain-central-banks.html
Aristotle said money is created by Law not nature, this is true of FIAT money. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are presently created by convention or custom within a defined network lets call it the Blockchain space. Crypto is voluntary and very powerful but a very small fish in an ocean of FIAT money.
When Bitcoin or ETHER or Dash or any of the hundreds of COins are generally accepted and held in preference to other Money´s with STate/central bank sanction then the Bankers will have lost. Things are a far way from that point as most of the Greater Fool investment in the present bubble is not an investment but speculation where The speculator takes profits in FIAT currency, ultimately this ties Bitcoin to FIAT value which in itself is also illusory.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/09/the-king-is-dead-long-live-king-bitcoin.html
I Made these interactive Quizzes based upon the Positive Money Quiz By David Faraday https://www.quiz-maker.com/QYMG3AR and the money creation Survey of MP´s https://www.quiz-maker.com/Q4FBT85
In fact, the choice of Žižek as our theoretical foundation may be understood as a concession to the undecidability of money as an inherent feature of the phenomenon itself. Paraphrasing Lacan’s infamous slogan that ‘The woman does not exist’, our analytical approach to Bitcoin is underpinned by the following assumption: ‘Money does not exist’.This obviously does not mean that there is no actual money in the world but rather that money has no transhistorical essence, which would lend it to a general theoretical definition. Such approach to the study of money also puts us in line with Dodd’s recent invitation to ‘[embrace] all of the various empirical forms of money without lapsing into an arbitrary nominalism’
http://research.cbs.dk/…/ole_bjerg_how_is_bitcoin_money…
Bitcoin is in a huge Bubble, that should not be confused with Ponzi Schemes they are quite different things.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/…/on-tulip…
The essay quoted is quite old Ethereum had not come on the scene by then also the Rash Of Initial Coin Offerings is the sign of a Greater Fool Bandwagon. The Real Estate Bubblöes all over the world and other asset bubbles are no different.
Here is a psot I put up on Steemit.
https://steemit.com/maga/@tonefreqhz/donald-trump-el-presidente-owwned-by-wall-street-maga-macrons-arse-gets-trump-action
Its the debts and liabilities on the Trump Empire Balance sheet that we really need to bear in mind when examining Trumps biggest claim to Authenticity. According to Trumps own boastful claims in debate, He Buys Politicians and as such can not himself be bought? To Examine that claim properly there are two questions we need to Ask. Does Trump control his liabilities or do they control him? Notwithstanding the old saying If you owe the bank a 100 dollars and can´t pay it back you have a problem if you owe the bank a million dollars and can´t pay it back the Bank has a problem. In real Estate remember the penalty for default is forfeiture. ´´He also has between $5 million and $25 million in his Capital One checking and savings account, and another $1 million to $5 million in J.P. Morgan Chase accounts.
´the WSJ tallies Trumps Cash position to call it 41 million dollars. Without rental income or cash generation figures from properties operated as opposed to leased out a true figure for Trumps cover of cash income and rents over Principal and interest liabilities is beyond the scope of this Blog. Certainly beyond its writer’s inclination to fathom, at any rate. As with Polling, probability based upon a statistically significant sample is sufficient for our purposes to decide this question. The preceding sketchy figures derived from Trump’s own solemn disclosure of qualified information to run for the Presidency of the US, not a trivial matter by any measure, will do. So what does this tell us.?
¨
To do that let’s consider Leverage….
http://www.wetube.io/author/Tonefreqhz/
I have a problem with Wetuibe presently I have been unable to resolve a server timeout message I use D Tune and Bitchute as well but all of the services are glitchy right now that will change and functionality will improve. Burst Coin and SIA coin are very interesting crypto networks it is on top of the Blockchains that distributed web functionality can sit effectively it will allow for massive functionality and a cryptocurrency complementary currency ecosystem Mutualism is a very real threat to Capitalism in the WEB 3 space.
Effectively the political economy of the future will I believe concentrate in Mutual decentralised autonomous shared Use models over centralised hierarchical Ownership models.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/03/energy-returned-on-energy-invested.html
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/11/apple-and-harware-euthenasia-planned.html
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/08/renewableseroi-why-money-doesnt-cut-it.html
Assumptions of Artifical scarcity and indeed actual reductions in energy outputs of energy resources leads to the destruction of human life, similarly waste generated by a need to provide artifical scarcity to support monopoly profit levels of price also lead to environmental destruction.
I have already started compiling notes on this question in these 3 previous blogs.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/08/conquestofdough-squaring-energy-food.html
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/08/feeding-world-malthus-wasnt-such.html
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/08/technocracy-energy-based-economics.html
http://www.themoneysyndrome.org/index.php/publisher/
That Old Chestnut, It’s all Lies but not the Climate Change Thing? Go Figure. http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-old-chestnut-its-all-lies-but-not.html …
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
https://twitter.com/RogerGLewis/status/997289684635193345
A new low in stupidity, and unwarranted arrogance. To compare climate scientists and ALL the Academies of Science of the planet to ‘mediums’ is simply imbecilic, but you seem to think it clever-the very embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger type.
The ruling elite know this is true, which is why their ecological catastrophe denial industry efforts are so deeply sinister. Unless they are engaged in some collective omnicide pact, or are galactic reptiles after all, they must be planning, I believe, to ‘solve’ the ecological Holocaust by Malthusian means, ie by a culling of 90% or so, give or take, of the ‘useless eaters’, their eternal enemy, ‘other people’, who they hate and fear. The steady drum-beat of agit-prop against the ‘over-population’ of the poor countries grows by the day. Once it was just obvious Rightwing racists, but now it is pretty widespread, even in ‘entertainment’ like the latest ‘Avengers’ slaughter-fest. If you counter with the argument that it is really over-consumption, by the rich countries, the rich citizens of those countries and the economic elite in particular, the rejection of that simple fact is often quite venomous. The Right in the rich world would GLADLY exterminate 90% of Indians, Chinese or Nigerians etc in order to protect their consumption, and they are seeking, through the usual brainwashing means, to normalise such genocidal opinions in Western societies. And with the Pentagon spending tens of billions on bio-warfare research, with an archipelago of research centres worldwide, with teams collecting samples of DNA, blood and tissue, including neoplasms, from all human populations and recombinant DNA research figuring strongly, I fully expect biological warfare will be the preferred means to realise their grand eugenicist program. One they have envisaged for decades, even centuries.
Thanks for the posting: great stuff!
“I have a long held belief that human rights and democracy are socialist/communist ideals and therefore will always be the antithesis of imperial capitalist thinking.” I essentially agree but with this reservation; What do you mean by Socialism/communism?
As some have pointed out, Stalinism is not particularly attractive but Cuba, I suggest, presents a more benign alternative. The Allende experiment in Chile worked, that’s why it was overthrown. The Scandinavian model of socialism works, although it is being undermined.
To assume that the only form of communism/socialism available is Stalinism is just plain wrong.
In the mid eighties I was working night shift just outside Brisbane Australia and during the mid shift break reading some left wing article with the headline “The Future of Socialism?”
In an accusatory tone the bloke opposite me yelled “Hey pommie are you a f*cking commie?”
So I gave him my standard reply, “You tell me what you think a communist is, and I’ll tell you if I am one.”
He had no idea! But, you’ll be pleased to hear, he eventually came up with a definition which satisfied the whole shift, this is absolutely true, according to Jim, one of the most vile men I have ever met, a communist is; anyone who has given or received oral sex! And, nodding sagely the whole shift returned to work.
Are you part of the revolution?
What do you mean by Stalinism?
I ask because it strikes me that Cuba is in many ways a demonstration of the possibilities of ‘stalinism’.
This Diana Johnstone essay is worth looking at:
https://www.unz.com/article/trotskyist-delusions/
It used to be said that trotskyists have not had a new idea since Lev Davidovitch was assassinated. That is certainly true where the matter in question is Stalin and the CPSU after Trotsky. I come from the Trotskyist tradition and I am increasingly conscious of the grain of truth in the old Stalinist charge that Trotskyism was trending towards support of imperialism. We see it not just in the long list of renegades from Burnham to Kristol, to Lovejoy to Hitchens but, more importantly, in the support that Imperialism has got, in Syria, Libya and elsewhere from self identified Trotskyists backing jihadis and NATO bombers on the grounds that they represent revolution.
It is high time that ‘Stalinism’ was re-evaluated. One way to begin would be by considering the fact that it Was the Trotsky policies of Collectivisation which, opportunistically implemented by Stalin, led to the great purges…
If there is one thing that my years immersed in alt media has taught me, it’s that much of what I ‘know’, is fake knowledge. So I would agree with the idea of re-evaluation. It may or may not lead to new ideas. I know that I accepted for the longest time all of the propaganda about North Korea, until recent years when alt media began reporting real news about it’s leaders and the country, as one example. And in the last 2 days, I have been given some info that makes me see climate crisis in a different light. Yes, I believe that there’s a climate crisis, if only because How can there not be? (You can’t throw a wrench into complex, operating machinery and get a good outcome.) But Barbara McKenzie sure gave me some food for thought in regard to that subject. I’m now a little less disappointed with the folks (or is it just Patrick Henningsen?) at 21st Century Wire for their pooh poohing of preachers of climate crisis.
https://barbaramckenzie.wordpress.com/2018/04/27/climate-change-a-hypothesis/
Sorry, Arrby, but Mckenzie’s thesis is cobblers. A regurgitation of long disproved denialist tropes, the quoting of outright denialist charlatans, very hoary denialist smears (‘Gore made money’!)all cobbled together with a stupid thesis that war somehow (no science, of course, just ideological belief and hope) ‘warms’ the planet, but NOT by its massive use of fossil fuels, which would only strengthen the anthropogenic climate destabilisation caused by emissions of greenhouse gases through fossil fuel combustion hypothesis.
https://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2016/11/re-framing-war-on-carbon-carbon-surplus.html
There is a pedagogical deficit in public education on Climate evidenced by ignorance of the Carbon Cycle, this is hampering debate on solutions such as those proposed by Tony Lovell in the soil carbon video (At the end of this post). Partial solutions are often attacked vigorously as a climate (no pun intended) of ad hominem dominates responses to anything not fitting the bag of nails demanded of the War on Carbon, ´´CO2 as pollution´´, hammer.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/was-inconvienient-truth-always.html
Al Gores Movie, An Inconvenient Truth has been comprehensively De-Bunked, Particularly Michael Manns Hockey Stick. It has been discredited so much in fact that one British High Court Judge recommended it should not be shown in schools without an appropriate erratum message.
“The judge ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained nine scientific errors and thus must be accompanied by an explanation of those errors before being shown to school children. The judge said that showing the film without the explanations of error would be a violation of education laws.”
“BBC News. October 11, 2007. Retrieved March 21, 2015.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2016/11/our-only-debt-is-to-nature-and-what-is.html
How You Can Be Absolutely Certain That Mainstream Media Lies About Everything
Caitlin Johnstone
28355
One thing that puzzles me is why when draws the conclusion that the MSM is a lie machine, Which I agree with. Then why is it the Anthropogenic Global Warming due to the CO2 Hypothesis is somehow a Truth that the MSM is Consistently Telling? I can not reconcile that contradiction, I am curious how you do yourself?
Addicted to Distracted By Bruce Charlton Makes for compelling if Uncomfortable reading.
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.se/
It will offend most readers but he has a very good point, I do not share his pessimism but the rest is hard to argue with.
“People and events presented by the media as Good are always, in reality, bad; and people or events presented by the media as bad are usually (but not always) Good — and when bad people or events are not presented as Good, then they are condemned as bad for the wrong reasons.
Also, if genuinely Good things happen to be presented as Good by the Mass Media; then it will invariably be the case that they also are said to be Good for the wrong reasons.
Thus, the major output of the modern International Mass Media consists of only four categories:
1. Good presented as bad
2. Bad presented as Good
(That is to say simple inversion)
3. Good presented as Good for a bad reason
4. Bad presented as bad for a bad reason
(That is to say explanatory inversion)
These four categories, which can be summarized as either simple or explanatory inversion, account for all sustained and high-impact modern major Mass Media stories without any exceptions.
Therefore those who want to free their minds from the Mass Media must first avoid as much Mass Media output as possible, and secondly develop automatic negativistic behaviour towards the Mass Media output which they cannot avoid”.
https://off-guardian.org/2017/06/17/the-revolution-is-being-televised-but-why/
Your repeated disinformation efforts are quite fanatical-I wonder what drives you. You speak of soil carbon as a ‘solution’ (true, and one that must be undertaken) but a ‘solution’ to what? You have vociferously denied that there is an anthropogenic climate destabilisation problem, so why search for solutions to a problem that does not exist? The ‘hockey-stick’ distribution in regard to global average temperatures is settled science, reproduced by scores of other climate scientists. Moreover, the pattern, of a long steady-state in the Holocene, punctuated by excursions explained by science, but accelerating sharply upwards, at increasing pace, from 200 years ago, has been demonstrated now in innumerable other natural systems. It’s like denying the Laws of Physics, but you’re down to that task I am sure.
One ‘judge’ ELEVEN years ago is the best you can do-who can deny that denialists fanatics are nothing if not nostalgics? Got anything more recent, and do you go to ‘judges’ for health matters, or consult them on other matters of science?
Where I live, at least half the fakestream media, the Murdoch cancer, talk-back radio, and the business Fairfax press, are still denialists, like you, of varying toxicity, and the non-deranged media more or less ignores it, as if it will go away. I see plenty of fakestream media swill, which you no doubt deeply imbibe, in the UK and USA, that is also ferociously denialist. Your thesis becomes even more shabby when one applies the ‘follow the money’ trail. Where is the money in regard to the question of anthropogenic climate destabiliation caused by greenhouse gas emissions? Why, with the fossil fuel industry, the greatest concentration of wealth and power in all end-stage capitalism, whose assets are valued in the tens of trillions. That’s why creatures like you can suck on the teat of a vast industry of disinformation, doing your little bit to hasten your own (I suppose) species’ end.
Arguments are rebutted by Evidence not Ad Hominem.
On Fanaticism take a look at this thread, I present all the science and the Faithful Fanatics of the AGW Cult do what you do Mulga.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/07/fanatical-climate-evangelist-pot.html
This You Tube debate sets out the state of Things still, Hows the Grand Solar Minimum working out Mulga?
In case you missed it Here is The Rocket Science Journal, The Blog of Dr Jeffrey Glassman the celebrated Rocket Scientist.
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/11/gavin_schmidt_on_the_acquittal.html
Gavin Schmidt who is in the IQ2 Debate is engaged and rebutted by Dr Glassman , comprehensively , That Mann the Author of the Hockey Stick and the other conspirators in the Climate Gate scandal,
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/03/climate-gate-getting-deeper-into-detail.html
Are still taken seriously by the faithful such as your self show just how powerful the belief system is.
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_%E2%80%98Cult%E2%80%99_of_Climate_Change_(n%C3%A9e_Global_Warming)
Once again you attempt, with that pure essence of Dunning-Krugerite stupidity mistaking itself for genius, to refute settled science in regard to anthropogenic climate destabilisation caused by the emissions of greenhouse gases, science concurred with by >99% of recently peer reviewed climate scientists and ALL, EVERY, without exception, Academies of Science and scientific societies on the planet. Then you LIE about a ‘conspiracy’ in the entirely invented ‘Climate Gate’, when no such thing existed, at least EIGHT inquiries completely exonerated the institutions involved, and the whole, REAL, conspiracy to discredit science was almost certainly the work of the fossil fuel industry. Surely you MUST work for them-to debase yourself intellectually and morally, as you do, without material reward for your services seems bizarre, to say the least.
Arrby Try this rogerglewis
May 18, 2018 at 1:51 am
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/
For every sell out ISO supporting regime change in Libya & Syria, there is a Socialist Action defending the rights of ALL sovereign countries (esp small ones with lots of oil) to self-determination.
Am I dreaming here….. Stalinism is communism, socialism…… big question mark…….
That was a monster, madman regeime.
I’m not an expert, but I’ve come across tidbits here and there in my reading (books) that reveal that Stalin isn’t ‘exactly’ what ‘our’ history teachers have said he was. Although I am a long way from viewing Stalin as a good person and am sure that I could never be persuaded he was. He had a lot of influence, for the worse, on Chinese Communism. Aren’t just about all great power (and smaller power) leaders mass murders?
Communism and socialism are alternatives to the dog eat dog system that has trumphed, via force, on earth. ‘Triumph’ does not equate to superior, especially when the winner wins via breaking rules.
As Noam Chomsky points out, revealed in declassified US documents is the fact that the US never feared Soviet military power or truly believed it’s socio-economic system was a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy. US elites feared the Soviet’s ‘political’ power. In other words, If you offer people the clear choice between a dog eat dog system and one in which no one loses because neighbors truly look after each other and governments show solidarity with the people rather than powerful, capitalist special interests, the people will go for the safe and sane system. The Warren Buffett’s can’t have that.
““There’s class warfare, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” – Warren Buffett
Yet another crack in the facade of Full Spectrum Dominance; the UK shadow foreign secretary has broken ranks.
TonedEmperor618 comments BTL Indie 5 hours ago:
A crack, a small crack to be sure, but a crack in the shamefull facade of anti-Syrian propaganda. It’s a start.
She’ll be crucified for it, but the crack can only get wider because it’s the truth. They’ve lost, and the first to come clean stand the best chance for political survival.
Well done Emily.
Through USAID spectacles:
US imperialism also seeks to destroy any alternative system that could compete with its capitalism. The Soviet Union was attacked by the west from the start of the revolution and remained under attack until US undermining eventually caused it to collapse. Cuba has been under relentless threat. Socialist Yugoslavia was bombed into submission, including bombing all production sites etc. Chile was destroyed, Venezuela is relentlessly undermined.
The Scandinavian countries have had their social democratic welfare models undermined by EU membership, itself a US straightjacket. Even today, when the populations of Sweden and Finland oppose Nato membership, the politicians have ignored this and entered into military partnership with the US.
No country has been allowed to go its own way, if that way did not involve being crushed by US imperialism, whether financially or culturally or in terms of cuisine, where populations are increasingly becoming obese through following the pizza, coca-cola, burger, intensively farmed food way of the US.
The US has military bases all round the world. Any vassal country that resists will be crushed immediately as politicians take their rewards and wealth for acquiessing.
Do you have any evidence that Finns oppose NATO membership?
I’d wager they are certainly more appreciate of NATO considering the Russian situation at the moment.
Just looked it up and you are right but the % supporting is growing (unsurprisingly).
Do you really think Russia threatens Finland?
Because I don’t see anything in the Russian media to support this view. Rather, it is being constantly repeated to the Russian people that the fears of the baltic states and especially the scandinavian states of “Russian invasion” are baseless.
If what you say is based on the Ukrainian case, one has to take into account that the situation in Ukraine is quite different, since there is currently a very aggressive attitude of the ukrainian nationalists towards the Russian speaking population, and the government change was the result of US backed coup (which occurred after the west gave Russia false assurances, as far as I recall). One also must not forget the Odessa pogrom in May 2014.
“Do you really think Russia threatens Finland?” I think there is a threat in terms of cyber-warfare and disinfo certainly. Whether there is a military threat is another thing altogether but as we saw with the huge Zayad (“West”) military parade in 2017 there is certainly a show of power from Russia against Baltic and Eastern European states that would scare any country with a history of being invaded by Russia.
Russia is already making threats against Finland as the Finnish leadership is moving closer to NATO: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2017/10/13/russia-promises-countermeasures-if-finland-joins-nato/
Finland is working with Baltic States and others on developing defense mechanisms against “hybrid war” from Russia: https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-10-03/finland-opens-new-center-fight-hybrid-threats-russia-and-beyond
There certainly seems to be some kind of push to get more serious in Finland by the political class. Whether the average Finn is on the same page is debatable.
Also you can’t take what Russian media says as your only source on there being no threat against Finland or the Baltics. That’s totally absurd to just take it all from one set of sources with a similar bias.
Blah, blah, NATO cut-paste message-point blah.
[[ Also you can’t take what Russian media says as your only source on there being no threat against Finland or the Baltics. ]]
And what should we take instead? The gutless fascist trash churned out by your pal Mr Stoltenberg??
Remember how your NATO scum bombed civilian targets in Serbia?? 7000+ civilians murdered in their own homes by your Aryan blonde homo-erotic gay Tom Of Finland heroes.
You should take multiple sources into account and weigh up the evidence while taking into account each individual sources biases.
That’s how real analysis is made.
You should butt our and stop trolling this message-board, Buddy-Boy.
The reality is that Russia is threatened by NATO’s intention of using Finland as a base in its strategy of surrounding Russia with armed forces and missile bases.
Finland was part of the Russian empire until the Bolshevik revolution freed it. For many years Finland was a model of peaceful co-existence, hence the expression Finlandisation.
The Bolshevik revolution didn’t “free” Finland except by accident as the Finns beat the Soviets in a war and then the anti-communist side won the civil war. If any of those victories hadn’t happened then Finland would have been in the Soviet Union.
Also just because a nation was part of an empire for a time, in the age of Empires no less, doesn’t mean that it should be now.
Otherwise you could claim it would be fine for Austria to invade Serbia…
You have been warned now three times to stop hijacking this discussion about US policy in Asia with offtopic neocon talking points about Finland.
But in addition to having the manners of a pig, you don’t want your country’s (the USA’s – your not British) abusive history in Asia discussed. So you resort to the classic troll technique of starting an off-topic flame-war about something else.
Your history is incorrect. There are books on these subjects.
”For many years Finland was a model of peaceful co-existence, hence the expression Finlandisation.”
As was Sweden of course. During the whole period of the first cold war Scandinavia was neutral, apart from Norway, There was no Russian threat or even the possibility of one. Now, however, everything has suddenly changed – the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! In fact it was the Americans who were coming and for some bizarre reason the Scandinavians wanted to join the Anglo-Zionist empire in the American campaign of encirclement. I would contend that the Scandinavian Quislings (an appropriate figure) buckled under the pressure from the Americans to join in the coming war against Russia.
Yes, sir, no sir, whatever you say sir. What a band of opportunist scum Europe has for a political elite.
Multiple sources show the widespread fascist, anti-communist, anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltic States. Are you going to make me search for all of that? Or can you take my word?
Why would anti-communist sentiment in the Baltics be surprising at all? Their nations suffered greatly under that oppressive system! It’s absolutely sensible and justified!
Anti-Russian sentiment is certainly unfortunate but again not surprising considering it was Russia that was the seat of power in the Soviet system even though most Russians were oppressed by and opposed to that system.
I would like to get information on “widespread fascist” sentiment as that seems not plausible.
Is it a case of confusing genuine nationalism with “fascism”?
As with the Western Ukraine the Baltics welcomed their Nazi liberators in 1941, and even had their own little holocaust.
[[ I would like to get information on “widespread fascist” sentiment as that seems not plausible.]]
Here are Latvian Nazis marching ‘in memory of the fallen Nazi Wehrmacht troops of WW2’.
Among the crowds you can also see a presence of your fellow Estonian Nazis who have come to cheer for their Latvian allies. This march is an annual event. It is the only march in a European country in memory of Hitler and his wartime Divisions. Such a march would be (and is) forbidden in any decent EU country.
This song of Latvian SS Stormtroopers was recorded recently by Latvian fascist enthusiasts who revel in recreating their Nazi past:
And there are hundreds more examples on the internet. The rules of this messageboard only permit me to give two weblinks per posting – or else I could post hundreds more examples of your drooling jackbooted scum friends in Latvia and their merry little Hitler marches.
I Live in Sweden, I visited Finland earlier this year Naturally I have Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish Friends.
Sweden and Finland have a Joint Treaty whereby each would only enter NATO is the Other also does, that decision would require a referendum in both countries,
The Position is explained very well in this Video.
Olof Palme was assassinated in all Likelihood by the South African Security Services with CIA assistance and probably under a CIA Contract.
Going Back even before Palme there was also this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Ndola_United_Nations_DC-6_crash
In Which Dag Hammarskjöld died.
There is no doubt in my mind that Sweden has been targeted for discipline to Liberalise its social policies and punished for the 2014 election of a left coalition. There is much exageration and of course there was the Famous Trumpism, Last Night in Sweden.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/03/last-night-in-sweden-to-louse-on-seeing.html
The Julian Assange case and Swedish political meddling under the Reinfeld Neo Liberal Government Initially but seen through By Lövens Governent is
another example of the Swedish elite OR THE dIS–LOYAL WITHIN IT Pursuing policies at odds with National Interests but not their own.
The first Palme film recounts the Episode of Submarines in the Stockholm Archipeligo, it is now thought they were NATO and Not Russian Vessels. Sent to embarrass Palme.
The Monroe Doctrine and American Exceptionalism are part of the same mind set of the US Mythos.
“Sweden and Finland have a Joint Treaty whereby each would only enter NATO is the Other also does, that decision would require a referendum in both countries,”
That’s a very rational and reasonable policy from those countries. My worry on that is potentially it would mean they’d only attempt to join NATO before its too late.
However a highly commendable democratic way of solving the issue.
It would add to your rapidly diminishing credibility is you were to adduce a scrap of evidence that Russia threatens any European country. Or has done so since 1918.
The threats, including flagrant bad faith on the part of the US, all go the other way. NATO’s days are numbered, the organisation clearly serves no purpose except that of the imperialists, and US arms dealers.
You seriously can’t be claiming that Russia hasn’t threatened a single European country since 1918???
That’s absurd. They’ve invaded and controlled multiple since then!
I oppose Oppose Sweden Joining NATO I consider it to be the Terrorist Wing of the Neo Liberal Washington Consensus, otherwise Known as the “Rules Based International Order, Or the We Make the Rules up to suit ourselves as we go along New World Order.
Sweden reintroduced National Service last Year, I was very distressed I grew up in an Expatriate UK Army ( Civilian Admin) Family during the Cold War in West Germany, most people who have lived and served get to the same point as Major General Smedley Butler eventually and that is that War is a Raquet.
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier by Smedley D. Butler
2,556 ratings, 4.29 average rating, 272 reviews
War is a Racket Quotes (showing 1-12 of 12)
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
I also oppose Sweden Getting rid of the Kroner and joining the Euro Currency group. Finland did join the Euro Currency and it has been very bad for the Finnish economy.
An important part of US history is the financing of the Wars the Guns or Butter questions as AJP Taylor used to call them.
A great deal of US Geo Political Power projection is to protect the Exorbitant Privileged of Petro Dollar hegemony.
3. Areas
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/05/on-u.html
domestic Policy and Foriegn policy presentation at Home
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/05/the-end-of-national-debt-and-larger.html
Paying for the War and the history of Standing Armies.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/05/nsa-sha-256-sha-2-mrkel-trees-and-magic.html
Paying for war, Black budgets War on Drugs a CIA drug running front etc, Pentagon Missing Trillions, Iran Contra,
Ollie North new President of NRA.
this is an excellent piece from William engdel posted by Tony Carlucci
Excellent article by F. William Engdahl on long-term nature of US foreign policy: https://journal-neo.org/2018/05/14/brzezinski-s-ghost-shapes-washington-eurasia-geopolitics/ …
Cut through the smoke & mirrors & look at the big picture. #Iran #Syria #Russia #China.
1:13 PM – 16 May 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
@roger. So there are patriots in Sweden? Only not in the government. Like everywhere else in the West.
As a native South African I object to your assertion that opr government shot your prime minister. More likely the culprits are hiding in plain sight — in the traitorous regime that besmirched Sweden’s reputation by framing Assange and cozying up to NATZO.
The Assassination of Olof Palme was in 1986
On Friday, 28 February 1986, at 23:21 CET (22:21 UTC), Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, was fatally wounded by a single gunshot while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet Palm
The Assasin Eugene De Kock were caught on CTV at Arlanda Airport.
see @ 2.51
“No clear evidence for Palme’s killing was ever found that could conclusively point the finger at the apartheid government. However, ten years after Palme’s assassination, Colonel Eugene de Kock, a former South African police officer and covert assassin alleged that Palme had indeed been killed by the apartheid government.”
https://secretsouthafrica.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/eugene-de-kock-and-the-assassination-of-olof-palme/
I would not trust the word of a professional “covert assassin” even if he swore it on the Bible, let alone trust a mere allegation 10 years after the event without producing evidence — and without even going to trial! Were de Kock or Williamson or White even brought to a Swedish court? Did the Swedish regime pursue these alleged assassins with International Arrest Warrant as vigorously as they pursued Assange on a trumped up charge of rape by burst condom? Such a political murder case would have been in all the newspapers for months even years, but I never saw anything like the never ending Swedish furore over Assange.
Sweden is not as snow white as IKEA DIY furniture is painted.
So, as a ‘native South African’ you support the Afrikaaner regime in power in 1986 and its murderous BOSS assassins? Am I getting that right?
Finland joins a Nazi pact aimed at destroying Russia, in complete refutation of the USA’s lies that NATO would not move ‘one inch’ to the East after German reunification, and this Ukronazi blames Russia!
@ vexarb
1986 was another Time and Country here in Sweden. Sweden has fought a rearguard action against EU Neo-Liberalism but the Neo-Liberals have had power for periods of time notably the Reinfeld administration under who Assange was Falsely charged.
Sweden is very different to Other Southern COuntries in Europe even the Northern Ones, Our History from 1809 Onwards is quite different and since the late 19th Century Markedly so the Social Contract was done differently here.
The Post 1992 Swedish Financial Crisis was also handled very differently If the 2008 Crisis had followed a Swedish Model Capitalism would be in Better shape.
Sweden has often been demonised as Socialist it is more Correctly Democratic Socialist and there is a considerable difference
Here is something of what Swedish Democratic Socialism meant in the mind of the Great Olof Palme.
Palme did attend the Bilderberg Meeting held in Sweden in 1972, The Wallenbergs are very much plugged into the Rules-Based International Order Globalist thing.
the answer is in Debate in the 1982 Election.
https://publicintelligence.net/bilderberg-conference-1973/
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/04/mc-namara-tillerson-woods-world-bank.html
Vexarb, how interlocked all of this is and who exactly wears the Black or White Hats is very blurred indeed.
If you have read the Brandt report you will see what was happening Prior to the Collapse of the Soviet Union ahead of the PEANAC turn in the late 90’s.
A very good programme is the Age of Uncertainty made by Adrian Malone , a some time BBC filmmaker ( and Confidant of Sppoks and Henry Kissinger, believe it or not) and Father of my Good friend David Malone the Two episodes a weekend in Vermont repay close watching Sergy Abitov also appears in the Palme Film.
Heres an Interview of David Adrian’s son and equally storied Film Maker.
According to a poll undertaken by leading Finnish newspaper “Helsingin Sanomat” (no friend of Russia) in November 2017, 59% of Finns opposed NATO membership.
https://euobserver.com/tickers/139754
The percentage supporting NATO membership for Finland in that poll was 22%. This percentage is actually down from 25% support in a poll undertaken in 2016, which percentage itself is down from 27% support in a 2015 poll.
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/poll_finnish_support_for_nato_membership_still_low/9329652
However the percentage of Finns who perceive Russia to be a negative influence rose from 2015 to 2016. This may suggest that Finns view the issue of NATO membership separately from the issue of whether Russia is a positive or negative influence on Finland. It may be that the Finns most fear those consequences of NATO membership not directly relevant to their concerns about Russia; for example, they may fear that if Finland were to join NATO, and another member of NATO were to provoke Russia unnecessarily, Finland might end up having the bear the brunt of Russian anger if NATO required the Finns to support that NATO member that was responsible for causing trouble in the first place.
Good post Jen thanks.
You are right that the relationship between supporting NATO membership and being worried about Russia is not necessarily a 1:1 correlation.
You are the one though saying that Russia is a threat because Moscow is considering counter-measures against Finland if – and ONLY IF – Finland joins NATO (and thus consents, under the terms of its membership, to allow NATO troops into its territory right up to and along the Finnish-Russian border). In other words, if Finland stays out of NATO, Russia will leave Finland alone – because Finland will then not be hosting NATO soldiers and military bases.
Your freedom or someone else’s? Violent/non violent ‘freedom foghting’?
Sorry?
Cognitive dissonance, huh? Try learning English.
It wasn’t very good English to be frank.
The prime Ukronazi ‘Freedom’-the freedom to kill, Jews, Moskali ‘cockroaches’, Poles etc.
Back again, are you? You were told to take a hike, TROLL
Do you control this website or something?
If you can’t handle an opposing viewpoint you don’t really have much business being here.
I told you to LEAVE.
You are TROLLING this message-board with your stinking NATO off-topic TRASH. So it’s YOU, yankee trash, who has ‘no busines being here’.
Do you control me?
I’m not going to leave just because you say so. I believe in freedom not do-as-you-are-told.
I’m also British not American.
What’s your nationality?
LEAVE this forum, TROLL
You really struggle at this debate thing don’t you?
It’s obvious to everyone that it is you that is the troll.
Hijacking debates with offtopic neocon shit about Finland is TROLLING
END OF STORY, END OF DISUSSION. LEAVE.
In your former identity you hijacked an entire topic and made discussion impossible.
Now you are doing it again with your bullshit about ‘Finland’ on a topic about American policy in ASIA.
Do you think Finland is in Asia???
GET OFF THIS FORUM, TROLL
I didn’t bring up Finland first – someone above did and I joined the discussion and had a reasoned back and forth with a sensible poster.
It’s you that is filling the discussion with your unhinged ad hominem attacks and fact free posting.
What is your nationality if you don’t mind me asking?
You seem to think it matters as you bring it up for others so just curious as to where you are from?
@all involved in this exchange. NO MORE abuse, accusations of trolling or other ad hom exchanges please. Any more such content-free comments will be deleted.
Understood!
Of course, but if you read the discussion one person added to the discussion and one attacked it. Readers responded via thumbs. I hope moderators delete negative people, not attackers and attacked, if so then the attacker people win. Thank you for your work!
You are an American, you are lying. I don’t care who the HELL you are, and my nationality is something I share with my FRIENDS. You are NOT my friend. You are piece of shit.
Replty to ‘Freedom Fighter’ about evidence of opposition to NATO membership.
Regular opinion polls indicate a majority against membership. However, as for your allegation that support is rising, that is no real surprise as the Nordic media are just as bought and paid for presstitutes forever squeeling about Russian aggression blah blah. Interestingly statistics about foreign aircraft encroaching Swedish airspace show NATO air forces are far the worst offenders, Russian hardly at all! And dont forget, Russia is a Baltic country unlike most NATO members!
Finland is not a country of Scandinavia.
Fact.
To Reinertorheit,
yes I know Finland is a Nordic country not Scandinavian, I myself am a Scandinavian speaker who understands but 1 or 2 words of Finnish, including Sauna, but to the outside world, this distinction is blurred. Finland is also a republic with not cycling monarchs etc. But you are splitting hairs, really.
Finns have had to live for centuries with Russia (and Sweden on the other side who has also been imperialistic & land grabbing). Finns doesn’t want war, they’ll be crushed—we need to support our sis & bros there to retain their independence in the LONG run.
There is a huge risk of relentlessly and unjustifiably attacking the United States as the United States is our only option for overthrowing global tyranny.
True patriots in the US military should be our greatest friends and need to be informed about what they need to do to root the traitors out of their government and the FBI must criminally prosecute the criminal networks with such power in the US.
Looking to communist mass murderers such as Lenin for guidance is absurd. Leninist ideology is a huge part of the problem and has informed all the tactics of control. See Lenin on controlled opposition, subversion and disinformation.
Lenin’s ideology was never about helping working people but an amoral one only concerned with seizing power and with jewish supremacism.
Please wake up – ‘overthrowing mass tyrany’ is actually a sales pitch to rationalise trillions spent on sophisticated military hardware.
The so called axis of evil, Iran, Iraq and N Korea have never troubled a single western state, ever (self defence doesn’t count) – the US on the other hand
https://www.thenation.com/article/americas-secret-war-134-countries/
“Please wake up – ‘overthrowing mass tyrany’ is actually a sales pitch to rationalise trillions spent on sophisticated military hardware.”
No, it’s not. It’s my call for removing traitors, taking on corruption and re-introducing democracy and civil rights.
Ah, democracy from the barrel of a gun the ol’ Amerika way. And how many countries have been destroyed and have been killed or had their lives ruined because of this maverick way of thinking?
Not the John Bolton’s or Oliver North’s of this world they have profited. That’s why they salivate for war. There is a whole history of imperial death and destruction wrought by capitalist psychopaths some of who like Bolton and Cheney are draft dogging cowards.
Cheney who managed to get 5 draft deferments went on to be the CEO of Halliburton, was involved in the 9/11 aftermath and promoting the Global War on Terror. Such enrichment from war [arms sales in Cheney’s case] by cowards is often a hallmark of imperial capitalism.
This has very little with what I was advocating.
At no point have I supported the criminals Bolton or Cheney or supported the wars in Iraq and other ME countries.
What I am saying is that the American people and especially patriots in the military are those who will be extremely valuable in making sure criminals like Bolton or Cheney are brought to justice.
That’s it’s important to call on Americans to return to the constitution and sane state-craft.
I’m not talking about “exporting democracy” that comes from Trotskyite neo-conservatism.
I’m talking about getting back true democracy in the West and in the US – firstly by dealing with the huge sums of political donations allowed to corrupt the political process.
Cheney involved in 9/11 aftermath? He was right up to his neck in it from the getgo.
” jewish supremacism..”
well, as far as I know what moved the jews to join the opposition movements in tsarist Russia, was nothing of the sort.
Pobably there were opporunists, but most of these people were idealists; what this had turned into later, is another thing.
Lenin himself openly expressed the opinion that Jews were superior to non-jews such as Russians:
“An intelligent Russian is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins?”
I’m not saying all jews involved in anti-Tsarist movements were supremacists.
Ignore the question mark in the quote
What is it about LEAVE that you can’t get, YANKEE?
“Lenin’s ideology was never about helping working people but an amoral one only concerned with seizing power and with jewish supremacism.”
In fact you are not just a NATO troll but a neo-Nazi. Fighting for freedom just the way that Goebbels did. Get back to Mein Kampf.
You obviously know nothing of the ‘mass murderer’ Lenin except propaganda from the real mass murderers by whom you are inspired.
I’m not a neo-nazi – that’s a huge stretch of an allegation.
It’s obvious to anyone who has studied history that Lenin and his government were responsible for the death of a large number of people. They weren’t the only criminal state in history however.
Lenin preached the use of controlled opposition which is now copied by governments worldwide in a project of deception waged against ordinary people. A highly dangerous legacy among many of Lenin.
“Because of past disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq the U.S. is hesitant to commit large numbers of U.S. boots on the ground”.
Even if one accepts this, it is heading for the dustbin of history as a restraint:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-u-s-military-will-have-more-robots-than-humans-by-2025/237725/
What Brezinski had to say about the forthcoming technocratic state (mostly in ‘Between Two Ages’) is worth researching for anyone unfamiliar with it.
Unfortunately, what must be talked about is the nature of the acquisition of decision-making power?
Do you get to execute policy based on violence, blackmail, extortion and thuggery? Or through convincing the majority to grant such powers? I think we all know which is quicker…
Do you have hierarchical power structures concentrating ever more more power at the top, or more diffuse and localised ones? I think we all know which is simple to manage and control and which is easiest to abuse…
Communism Soviet Style can be very hierarchical and power can be obtained through violence, elections can be dispensed with etc. Communism per se does not guarantee flexible, delegated decision making.
Gandhi’s one million villages is a nice slogan, but how do those 1 million villages interact with each other? The danger is some fanatic is not satisfied with running one village….
When you have a world with many paid mercenaries armies etc, how do you stop putsch if armies are told to stand down? Those military know nothing but a military life, what will thry do to retain it?
If you look at nature, one plant does not seek to conquer the earth. Local soil health is restored after damage.
Local people restoring local health should be the norm.
The question is how to dispense with dictators who prevent that happening….
Great article but if I was being picky I would have emphasised why so many in the west have remained indifferent for so long to America’s long running, and self-evident campaign of international terror and illegal war.
The short answer is of course the film industry and the media; both in their own way heavily responsible for maintaining a variety of myths or outright lies that make mass murder palatable to an army of consumers who have become desensitised to the never ending diet of shit served up to them.
Good looking Americans taking out bad guys in the name of entertainment, or stooges in the MSM disseminating security briefings (dressed up as news) are two cultural traditions that should be attacked relentlessly via social media or other avenues.
The corporations and the military may have ‘the might’ but it is only self interested Quislings like Monbiot, Tisdall, Freedland, Cohen and Nougayrède who fail to make clear they don’t have ‘the right’.
Brzezinski did not add that it was also more ENJOYABLE to kill one million, if you are a Death-worshipping psychopath, and that is the true nature of the US ruling elite, and those of the West, to lesser extents.
Meanwhile in the real world Russia completes its bridge to Crimea, within budget and on schedule.
http://tass.com/world/958661
US occupied Ukraina responds with a quote from US TV series Law & Order: “I’m an American, I’ll sue”.
I have a long held belief that human rights and democracy are socialist/communist ideals and therefore will always be the antithesis of imperial capitalist thinking. However they are used effectively as a false flag to delude the populations into believing that capitalist imperialism is at heart benevolent.
This article goes a way to explaining this and includes Lenin’s analysis of the causes of WWI . As global capitalism goes further into crisis we are seeing this with freedoms being rolled back and the reason give, as always, is an enemy. Not capitalism but a fictitious enemy that is robbing us of our freedoms and human rights…
“human rights and democracy are socialist/communist ideals..”
in the vry important sense that socialism/communism aimed to feed the hungry and to take away from the aristocracy its feudal “rights” on the poor, yes.
Then one must not ignore reality and forget what it had become under Stalin. And also after Stalin people in the Soviet Union did not have the right to express publicly criticism of the government established “truth”.
This must not be forgotten.
The ‘liberal’ West believes in ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’, but only for the ruling elite. The rabble are to be kept in line, until an efficient, property-preserving, method is found to best be rid of them.
“I have a long held belief that human rights and democracy are socialist/communist ideals and therefore will always be the antithesis of imperial capitalist thinking.”
How can anyone believe this nonsense!
You talk of “freedoms being rolled back” but under communism (and especially the vampire Lenin) those freedoms were destroyed immediately!
Reblogged this on MUSO MUSINGS ON FATHERHOOD THEORY AND STUFF and commented:
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/real-politik-and-brexit-negotiations.html
This was posted on Quora the other day, I can’t help but think it goes very well with this article.
steve Keen
https://twitter.com/ProfSteveKeen/status/996607714699587584
@ProfSteveKeen
22h22 hours ago
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My friend from Germany says America is not the greatest country in the world. How can I convince him otherwise? by Kevin Dolgin
The Tension between Domestic and Foreign Policy and the separation of the two is actaully a theme in Dr Henry Kissinger’s Doctoral Thesis.
Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822 (1957)
´´There are at least two forces at work against which the tragic hero of the statesman struggles. The first is “the problem of legitimizing a policy within a governmental apparatus;” an issue Kissinger calls a “problem of bureaucratic rationality” (Kissinger 2013, 326). While the making of policy is defined by contingency and flexibility, bureaucracies of government measure success in terms of calculability and safety, characteristics uncommonly associated with the messy process of policymaking (Kissinger 2013, 326 – 327).´´
It´s always nice to be able to quote a bit of Shelly,
Castlereagh appears with other members of Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet in Shelley’s poem The Masque of Anarchy, which was inspired by, and heavily critical of, the Peterloo massacre:
I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.[17]
Carol Quigley is very good on the public opinion point in Tragedy and hope he says this.
Quigley’s words.p.232 tragedy and Hope.
´´but criticism should have been directed rather at the hypocrisy and lack
of realism in the ideals of the wartime propaganda and at the lack of honesty of the chief negotiators in carrying on the pretence that these ideals were still in effect while they violated them daily, and necessarily violated them. The settlements were clearly made by secret negotiations, by the Great Powers exclusively, and by power politics. They had to be. No settlements could ever have been made on any other bases. The failure of the chief negotiators (at least the Anglo-Americans) to admit this is regrettable, but behind their
reluctance to admit it is the even more regrettable fact that the lack of political experience and political education of the American and English electorates made it dangerous for the negotiators to admit the facts of life in international political relationships.”
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2017/06/real-politik-and-brexit-negotiations.html
propaganda meant for export is not generally aired in Governments home markets, a frustration for domestic government propagandists. Have you ever had a digital rights management notice saying ´´Content Blocked in your territory´´, licensing of content and censorship of propaganda are part of the same apparatus of mass surveillance and Mass manipulation, Beware! For a practical discourse on this in real life see the Smith Mundt Act.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act )
Section 501(a) of the Act (care of the Voice of America Web site) provides that
“information produced by VOA for audiences outside the United States shall not be disseminated within the United States … but, on request, shall be available in the English language at VOA, at all reasonable times following its release as information abroad, for examination only by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and by research students and scholars, and, on request, shall be made available for examination only to Members of Congress.”
“This means that VOA is forbidden to broadcast within the United States.” In reality, of course, any American with a shortwave receiver or an Internet connection can listen to VOA. This is incidental, however. VOA cannot direct or intend its programs to be “for” Americans. This distinction is often lost on experts who see the letter of the law, but with no real understanding of the media. George W. Bush-era State Department official James K. Glassman has called for directing VOA at American audiences.