Three New Reads – July
Philip Roddis
I won’t beat about the bush. The West is inhabited by two groups: those who know that we are ruled by sociopaths, by the criminally insane[1]; and that much larger group which, taking at face value the surface forms of democracy informed by independent media, either cannot or will not accept this admittedly frightening truth.
This second group, seemingly unaware of how extreme our assiduously normalised world order is, deems the first a melting pot of extremism. Such a view has advantages for those who value a quiet life. No need to listen to, far less engage with, a word that first group says.
Not even when a dozen men own half the world while scores of millions die in directly related destitution. Not even when profits and ‘growth’ demand an unsustainable consumerism which pushes planet earth to the limits of its capacity to support advanced life. Not even when – just this January, to the backdrop of a barrage of demonisation by all mainstream Western media of China and Russia – the Doomsday Clock advanced to one hundred seconds to midnight.
Within each group we find endless internecine hostility. Those who know the world to be run by gangsters with a monopoly on both state violence and, beneath a chimera of media pluralism, the manufacture of opinion may be marxists, anarchists, or on the far right.[2] Not that my list is exhaustive, or of sufficient granularity. Each division is host to a plethora of further divisions, the bitterness of their feuds rising in inverse ratio to the ideological distance between them.
(This is what Freud meant by “the narcissism of tiny differences”. And what Life of Brian was getting at in that Judean People’s Front scene. Our pull toward schism reflects in part the ego’s drive to locate itself in difference. In part it reflects capital’s tendency – insightfully observed, I’m told, by the late psychologist, David Smail – to strip us of our collective nature and leave us atomised and alienated, individuated and impotent.)
But back to the gangsters who rule, the common thread binding my July reads. All document their cynicism: in this case a Venezuela ‘opposition’ made in America. Or the cynicism of those who do their bidding: in this case the US presence in Afghanistan, and a British Labour Party “under new management” as Keith Starmer, beneficiary of the dirtiest war ever waged on an incumbent leader, loftily informed his Punch & Judy opposite number, Boris Johnson, this week.
(Starmer’s point being that Johnson needn’t delude himself into thinking this Newest of New Labour will be “soft on Russia” – nor for that matter a sanctuary for critics of the lawless and apartheid state which is Israel.)
And this concludes my preamble to this month’s three reads. With the shortest of them close to 6,000 words, you’ll need to set aside a little more time than I usually ask.
*
Meet the Venezuelan Coup Regime’s ‘UK Ambassador’ (5,761 words)
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Richard Young/Shutterstock
This Grayzone piece by Ben Norton also featured in CounterPunch. Taking a detailed look at the ‘career’ of heiress Vanessa Neumann, it begins as it means to go on:
Since the United States initiated a coup attempt against Venezuela’s elected, internationally recognized government in January 2019, the gang of far-right opposition activists the Donald Trump administration recognized as the country’s unelected representatives have racked up a series of embarrassing scandals.
Top aides of the US-appointed “interim president,” Juan Guaidó, blew hundreds of thousands of dollars of humanitarian aid money on luxury hotels, swanky clothes, and wild parties in Colombia. Violent pro-Guaidó coup-mongers then burnt USAID trucks in a failed putsch on the Venezuelan border, while falsely blaming the fire on the actual president in Caracas, Nicolás Maduro.
Guaidó’s coup gang subsequently set the stage for North American corporations to liquidate Venezuela’s most valuable foreign asset, Citgo. And in another bizarre PR stunt, Guaidó even tried to scale the fence outside of Venezuela’s National Assembly, after refusing to pass through the main entrance.
Nearly 18 months into the failed coup attempt, the scandals keep coming.
This July, the representative that the Venezuelan coup regime appointed to the United Kingdom, Vanessa Neumann, threatened several American and British journalists who criticized her on social media.
Neumann’s corporate consulting firm claimed to have reported these journalists to the FBI, and even baselessly accused them without a scintilla of evidence of being “part of an indicted transnational criminal network with a price on your head.”
These threats came just after Neumann’s official Twitter account declared, “Death to Nicolás Maduro.” Neumann subsequently claimed her profile was hacked, while intimidating the journalists who reported on her incendiary tweet.
How a deranged right-wing fanatic ended up as the person the British Government recognizes as Venezuela’s official representative deserves some investigation.
Indeed it does and, while I stripped this excerpt of its many substantiating links, investigation is precisely what Norton delivers. Keep a sick bag close at hand.
*
“I Could Live with That” … CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade (7,165 words)
The first image of war in Afghanistan for many Americans was of CBS anchorman Dan Rather, wrapped in the voluminous drapery of a mujahedin fighter, looking like a healthy relative of Lawrence of Arabia. From his secret mountainside “somewhere in the Hindu Kush,” Rather unloaded on his audience a barrowload of nonsense. The Soviets, he confided portentously, had put a bounty on his head “of many thousands of dollars … the best compliment they could have given me. And a small price to pay for the truths we told about Afghanistan.”
Every one of these observations turned out to be false. Rather described the government of Hafizullah Amin as a “Moscow-installed puppet regime in Kabul.” But Amin had closer ties to the CIA than the KGB. Rather called the mujahedin “Afghan freedom fighters … in a patriotic fight for home and hearth.” The mujahedin were scarcely fighting for freedom, in any sense Rather would have been comfortable with, but to impose one of the most repressive brands of Islamic fundamentalism known to the world, barbarous, ignorant and notably cruel to women.
It was a “fact,” Rather announced, that the Soviets had used chemical weapons against Afghan villagers … [and] that the mujahedin were severely underequipped, doing their best with Kalashnikov rifles taken from dead Soviet soldiers. In fact the mujahedin were well-equipped recipients of CIA-furnished weapons in the most expensive covert war the Agency had ever mounted. They did carry Soviet weapons, but they came courtesy of the CIA. Rather also showed news footage he claimed was of Soviet bombers strafing defenseless Afghan villages. This was staged, with the “Soviet bomber” actually a Pakistani air force plane on a training mission over northwest Pakistan.
CBS claimed to have discovered in Soviet-bombed areas stuffed animals filled with Soviet explosives, designed to blow Afghan children to bits.[3] These booby-trapped toys had in fact been manufactured by the mujahedin for the exclusive purpose of gulling CBS News, as an entertaining article in the New York Post later made clear.
Rather made his heroically filmed way to Yunas Khalis, described as the leader of the Afghan warriors. In tones of awe he normally reserves for hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, Rather recalls in his book, The Camera Never Blinks Twice, “Belief in ‘right’ makes ‘might’ may have been fading in other parts of the world. In Afghanistan it was alive and well, and beating the Soviets.”
Khalis was a ruthless butcher, with his troops fondly boasting of their slaughter of 700 prisoners of war. He spent most of his time fighting, but the wars were not primarily with the Soviets. Instead, Khalis battled other Afghan rebel groups, the object of the conflicts being control of poppy fields and the roads and trails from them to his seven heroin labs near his headquarters in the town of Ribat al Ali. Sixty percent of Afghanistan’s opium crop was cultivated in the Helmand Valley, with an irrigation infrastructure underwritten by USAID.
This piece from CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St Clair is long, but every word more than carries its weight. With forensic eloquence it punctures the self serving myths not only of the US as a force for good in Afghanistan, but of the brazen hypocrisy of two other highly fan-fared wars: the so-called War on Terror, and the so-called War on Drugs.
*
Corbyn’s Opponents Burned the House Down … Starmer Is King of the Ashes (6,640 words)
Two news items came to my attention this week. One is that Sir Keith Starmer has authorised a £370k (Telegraph) or £500k (Daily Mail) pay-out to the party’s “antisemitism whistle-blowers”, the other that Jeremy Corbyn faces legal action after criticising those pay-outs.
With regard to the first, this piece from the Jacobin notes that:
It is objectively impossible for anyone to believe that the Labour Party merits investigation for racism, yet the Tories do not. Instead of defending the rights of ethnic minorities, the EHRC is functioning as a protective shield for racism in high places.
Disgraceful as this may be, it’s not difficult to understand why it should be the case. The EHRC does not exist in a vacuum. Most of Britain’s media outlets support the Conservative Party, and even the ones that don’t were bitterly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn.
If the EHRC announced an investigation into the Tories, it would be setting itself up for relentless flak from the Tory press. It faced no such backlash when it put Labour in the spotlight.
With regard to the second news item, the British establishment – in tandem with right wing and liberal media, an alarmingly powerful Israel lobby, and a Labour Right which again and again has shown a preference for electoral defeat over a Left Labour Government[4] – is not content with having crushed the hopes that Corbyn briefly but gloriously inspired….
(The unprecedented surge in Labour membership speaks eloquently to those hopes but I don’t suppose Team Starmer will be unduly put out by a now inevitable dwindling party membership. “You can’t make an omelette”, I hear them say, “without cracking eggs”.)
…no, that unholy alliance is bent on humiliating a man by several orders of magnitude – and I say this as one with serious criticisms of Left reformism – their moral superior. The message to anyone minded to launch any attempt at reviving “Corbynism” rings loud and clear. We will not only defeat you, but grind you into the dust beneath our feet.
Let’s not forget though that the prime agents of Corbyn’s defeat were those who sat beside him on the benches of Her Majesty’s Opposition. Which is what this Jacobin piece from Daniel Finn is about. I don’t agree with all he says. In my view he’s too soft on any number of actors – Long-Bailey, Lansman, Becket (Andy not Margaret) and Thornberry for starters. And too addicted to laboured (!) metaphors he doesn’t quite pull off. But such carps aside, this is an edge-of-seat read. However nasty you may have thought the Labour Right – and we did get glimpses through the foul mouthed slanders of John Mann and Margaret Hodge – Finn shows it to be worse.
And he has the smoking guns to prove it.
* * *
[1] I don’t mean to imply our rulers are all twenty-four carat, frothing at the mouth loony tunes. Indeed, they may be charming, passionate about improving the lot of the poor, devoted parents and all round good eggs. It’s just that the decisions they – or those who act on their behalf – make are driven by an insane and life negating imperative. I speak of the pursuit of profits which, however vehemently this class may protest to the contrary, trumps all other considerations; all those things that sane people hold dear. I don’t say our rulers don’t care about the environment, peace, the eradication of dire poverty etc etc. I say that actions speak louder than words and the choices our rulers make are overridingly driven by none of these things but by the remorseless logic of capital accumulation: a logic of which they – and the theoretically bereft economists ultimately in their pay – are and always have been in deepest denial.
[2] I’ve just finished watching for the third time the BBC drama series, Peaky Blinders. Its plotting is preposterous, its messages amoral and ultimately reactionary. But it’s also stylish, sumptuously shot, convincingly acted and houses both splendid dialogue and magnificent villains. And it locates itself in an explosive period of British history. The arch cad of Series 5 is Sir Oswald Mosley, in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929, and I was struck by how similar Mosley’s message of a global takeover by “Jews and financiers” is to that now put out by those who locate a world rocked by crises not in the logic of capital but in the shady doings of rentiers and gamblers – as if these were some disconnected aberration from ‘good’, ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ capitalism.
[3] “Stuffed animals filled with Soviet explosives, designed to blow Afghan children to bits …” As with Assad gassing kids, the week a UN inspection team is set to visit the area, no rationale is needed. As I say in a footnote to a recent post, such allegations “bypass rationality to tap into our orientalist receptivity to tales of evil-for-evil’s-sake barbarity, be the alleged perp an Assad or a Putin.” Jeffrey St Clair’s piece reminds us that such crude but – since they draw on wells of prejudice so deep we are only dimly aware of them – effective lies have a long history.
On the Labour Right’s historic preference for electoral defeat over Left led victory, two examples suffice (a third is given in the Jacobin piece). One is from the 1987 general election when Labour’s Frank Field, in Birkenhead, urged neighbouring Wallasey to vote Tory against left Labour candidate Lol Duffy. (Tory Lynda Chalker scraped back in by 279 votes.) The other is from election night 2019, when Jess Phillips was caught smirking with delight as the disastrous exit polls came in. Belatedly realising she’d been caught on camera, she adopted a suitably sorrowful look.
(NB I wrote a post on this, with a link to the damning video. It’s been taken down. Do I suspect YouTube censorship? Damn right I do – and it’s getting worse. The same thing happened with leading epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski, who’d been critical of what he saw as an overstatement of Covid-19’s threat, and the lockdown response. Whatever our views on the specifics of Wittkowski’s message, we should all be worried. As our rulers’ grip on opinion manufacture through mainstream media loosens, the battle to rein in social media is intensifying.)
For the full archive of Three New Reads, click here.
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The gloves are now well and truly off:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/29/corb-j29.html
It was obvious that the extension of the “anti-Semitism” smear would be extended from critique of Zionism to any Leftist sentiment at all.
Nice to see that His Lordship John Mann is now the Tory Party’s “Advisor On Anti Semitism.”
Great recommendations, I’ve given the Norton article a once-over and plan to re-read in more depth (some of those links look compelling). Thanks for the vomit bag warning.
Actually not only should Neumann not be recognised as a real diplomat – effectively she represents a bunch of pirates who plan to pillage their compatriots – she is barely recognisable as a real woman. Maybe she overdosed on plastic & paint from the factories of her Nazi-collaborating chosenite grandfather?
I’m sure it’s not just me, but my first impression was of Gene Simmons in drag.
“New Mann” indeed.
I know it is churlish to focus on others’ appearances but increasingly this century the political landscape has been populated by clowns and buffoons, whose very caracatures become their most defining assets as if they were puppets in some modern day Punch & Judy show.
Maybe Bojo will give her the 80 tons of gold he stole from Venezuela.
Been there, done that: “There — it sickens one to have to wade through this grimy sea of opportunism. What a spectacle of shuffling, lies, vacillation and imbecility does this Game Political offer to us? I cannot conclude without an earnest appeal to those Socialists, of whatever section, who may be drawn towards the vortex of Parliamentarism, to think better of it while there is yet time. “If we ally ourselves to any of the presen[t] parties they will only use us as a cat’s-paw; and on the other hand, if by any chance a Socialist slips through into Parliament, he will do so at the expense of leaving his principles behind him; he will certainly not be returned as a Socialist, but as something else; what else is hard to say. As I have written before in these columns, Parliament is going just the way we would have it… Read more »
I have no idea who Daniel Finn is, who’s article here, about the Crucifixation of him is really good (he doesn’t take no prisoners, just nails it to the ground with facts), but I would just like to make a few bullet points, some from a few years ago. 1. We were standing at the bus stop – we live in a pretty village…and this bloke on a bike, came zooming past us on a push bike. We were only going to the pub, about a mile away, and could easily have walked there, and then did. I said to my wife – blimey it looks like him. He does have a reputation for cycling very quickly, and it certainly was not Boris Johnson. She said, well what the hell would he be doing here? 2. So we eventually got to the pub, and he was not there. 3. However,… Read more »
What a waste of words.
All five of them…
Why don’t we ever read about the fact we’re living under full Communism and who’s behind it? The actual core issue facing humanity today? That I can read. Not more stories to keep the unaware in cloud cuckoo land.
”Why don’t we ever read about the fact we’re living under full Communism”
Things that were traditionally socialist are being eroded in the UK, we have less protection at work, there is less economic equality, less access to good free education, our state security blanket is being dismantlement, our health care privatized, we are becoming more neo-liberal in the UK, not socialist at all. That is a process that will accelerate after leaving the EU. You will have the ‘choice’ to be homeless and hungry very soon, so don’t rush it.
I highly doubt the person you’re responding to can distinguish between ‘socialism’, ‘Communism’, ‘Capitalism’, ‘neo-liberalism’ or any other ‘ism’ for that matter.
Wrong. We entered full communism not long ago. Neo liberalism is a fabrication to give you the illusion of liberalism and freedom.
😂 Well, I agree with you about the neoliberalism at least…
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babylonian talmudism
What the fuck are you on about ZP? You may as well say we are living under full Bronze Age. HALLOO! There is no communism! There was something at one time described as “communism”. That has gone. And it went a looooooong time ago! But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll stick on my Lenin or Trotsky mask and go “BOO!” and you can run away shrieking. Think of the fun we’ll have!
Not my problem if you can’t see it. It’s your problem.
I’m curious, how much more control would the party need for you to believe you are living under full Communism?
What “party”? And I’d believe I was living under full communism when no-one had to worry about maintaining a livelihood under threat of poverty and death.
The ruling class. Did you think all this is accidental? I’m almost speechless at your second sentence. Go learn some history.
Yes, there was a ruling class under the Stalinist parody of communism, but communism to Marxists means a classless society.
The ruling class isn’t a “party”. And worrying about maintaining a livelihood under threat of poverty and death is what everyone does under capitalism. The only reason we in the West have had some security was entirely the result of a long hard and communistic struggle against capitalism. But these hard won safety nets are being dismantled at an increasing speed.
Well, you wouldn’t be able to comment on OffG for a start…
I think we have copious facts (and fictions) about living under ‘full communism’, all of which has been documented. Go to any bookstore and you’ll find a profuse literature on the subject. Maybe you missed it somewhere. Or perhaps you are not aware that Russia hasn’t been communist since 1990, or did you miss that. Russia is a state capitalist state under the control of a centre-right political party – ‘United Russia’ which includes both Putin and Medvedev. There are other parties, communist, nationalists and crackpot, such as Dugin and Zhirinovsky, but then Russia is a multiparty system which holds regular elections. But please enlighten us as to who and where this ‘full communism’ is in evidence, who is in control and who calls the shots. I would be most intrigued to know. Whilst we are at it why are you so interested in the internal affairs of another States?… Read more »
Certain words and statements makes people’s brains clam up. It is better to spark their curiosity and to let them discover themselves.
We live in full communism because you no longer have any rights. Everything is controlled by the state. Freedom of association, Freedom of movement and the freedom to do what you want with your money, is almost gone. You can be locked up at will, with no means of protest or challenge. The state grants privilege to those who carry out its edicts and removes it for dissidents.
Of course there are always tiny freedoms which delude the people into thinking they are free. But we are all trapped, ultimately.
We are so far from actual democracy it is comical.
It’s troubling how few people see this.
For Marxists, the state is a tool of class oppression, which is why Engels spoke of the withering away of the state under communism. The system under Stalin was almost by definition not communist, even if it claimed to be.
Communism means, among other things, a classless society and common ownership of the means of production, which I hardly think describes the situation in the current world.
There is the ruling class, and everybody else.
Trying to defend the inept , statu quo supporting , anti-Brexit Mr Corbyn who threw away his chance at a modicum of power, and still has a lit match in his hand is a fool’s errand?
Jeremy Corbyn has a Go Fund Me page for his legal costs.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/47gyy-jeremy039s-legal-fund
Does anyone know how to block the MSM from comming up on the search results?
Mosad up to their usual tricks of destroying the left. Somebody should tell them that the Alt-right loonies they are supporting in the USA hate Jews, and will not be the jewsih peoples friends in the future, as Israel acts to break their historic bonds with the left. Very unwise political positioning.
No, they know exactly what they’re doing. They even tried (unsuccessfully) to take over the BNP as an anti Moslem front, just like the Wilders outfit in Holland. When that didn’t work out, they bankrolled Robinson and the EDL instead.
Ok people take two guesses which religion Vanessa Neumann is part of
As a result of reading this (I don’t watch TV, and had no idea who Maxine Peake is), I came across this most awesome short film, 11 minutes long, completely on topic, about Coronavirus and domestic abuse, something thank God, I have never experienced. It shook me to the core, and made me cry.
From The Bolton News “Maxine Peake stars in powerful short film, Surfaces, about escaping domestic violence during lockdown”
“Surfaces (starring Maxine Peake)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhvA2mj7og0
Tony
Tony – thank you to the link to ‘Surfaces’. An excellent piece of drama to get this serious message across.
I am surprised someone has down voted you on your comment, a comment that was passing information to the readers.
I could conceivably be wrong, but I think it’s obvious that there is a person, or a daily designee, whose duty it is to go through and down-vote every single comment on OffG.
That would be me.
To everyone who writes vacuous bourgeois crap.
Your guts are mine.
What serious message would that be? That men are abusers and women are victims? Never the other way around is it. No no. Never.
Until there is an equal focus on women’s abuse of men, we can rationally dismiss this kind of thing as more anti-male propaganda.
County Girl,
I’ve just watched “Surfaces” again. It is the most powerful piece of drama I have seen since American Beauty who my lovely wife, took me to the cinema, had a couple of pints in the pub opposite before – and said watch this.
We come from Lancashire too.
Apparently this guy is credited as the writer, but both the actors took it and made it their own. It’s sheer Genius. Even the sound and the photography is awesome
Watch Macbeth if you like…but Surfaces is much better. Far more Powerful…gets right to the depths of your guts.
I think this guy wrote it, though I might have spelt Maxine Peake’s name wrong. The other bloke playing the psycho was really good too.
https://creativepool.com/jonelsom/about
Tony
Although his language is of the rather ‘academic’ variety, professor John McMurtry (who wrote “The Cancer Stage of Capitalism”) does an excellent public service in the article linked below in very logically showing exactly “how” and “why” the MSM propaganda system delivers nothing but lies and is incapable of ever doing anything else. A worthwhile read if you are interested in the mechanics of “how” the propaganda system actually works:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8588/7451ac76cf289aa4a6796eba7e54b60b3598.pdf
Organized Crime is also doing very well from COVID. While barbershops and mainstreet are threatened with prosecution over mask wearing… casinos are forbidding staff to use hand sanitizer because it “fades the playing cards”.
Native American reservations have long been the plaything of Defense Corporations and Organized Crime – some would say these amount to the same thing. However, they are now clearly integrated into the political structure, too.
https://paulprestona21r.podbean.com/e/agenda-21-radio-july-17-2020-hour-1/
Manipulation of reservations covered in my earlier post, too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/72396917-47b0-4aac-856f-e213c3a0c3fa
The alternative medicine THEORIST killled my boyfriend.
Not the cancer no
It’s was the internet that did him in.
A documentary to reinforce that only chemotherapy is a traditional medicine not anything else or anything else ever again.
they said he would be dead in 8 months in 2015 without chemo. in 2018 he was taken into nhs. a year later he died under “paleative” care of the nhs. he was their patient and they obviously convinced him there was no hope. quite dogy to be famous as i suspect it was for roald dahl when his daughter presented with measles. ah a childrens author and a measles injection in the pipeline.
he did the chemo and survived returning to his previous lifestyle ie. they obviously didnt tell him to stop eating shit or anything at all to prevent further problems. the bit in the article where he shut off his social media is sign something happened. then his ‘friends’ were itching to make a bbc documentary when he eventually died under nhs ‘care’.
This is like an article from a previous world. Does the author really believe there is any difference between the Labour party and the Tories?Does he believe that the spectacle we witness on the political stage has any relevance to people’s day to day lives and what is being done to them? They are run by the same criminal gang. Yes that’s right. The one that is forcing us to bend the knee and wear face masks and to destroy the children of the world. It’s the children who these criminals are after first and foremost. Who gives a crp about this political charade.
there is the right to informed consent. who is attempting to “force” “us” to wear one?
“The main interest of both these classes is now identical, which is to prevent or to mitigate the rule ofuneducated members. But, to prevent it effectually, they must not quar-rel among themselves; they must not bid one against the other for the aid of their common opponent. And this is precisely the effect of a division between Lords and Commons. The two great bodies of the educatedrich go to the constituencies to decide between them, and the majority of the constituencies now consist of the uneducated poor. This cannot befor the advantage of any one.” – Walter Bagehot
Exactly. Everything else is a distraction.
History is accelerating because we are in the midst of an historical ‘calamity’, the greatest Imperial collapse, measured in wealth & power, in the history of civilization. American hegemony as we have known it for 80 years is coming to an end, the dollar is overprinted, overvalued and the ‘American way’ is rightly seen as failed. So at a time when US elites feel at their strongest, at their most nationalistic, at their most xenophobic, when they feel invincible and when they are extending their tentacles around the world with new ruthless abandon, ironically it is a time when they are most vulnerable, most exposed and most overstretched. Like the British before them, with ‘an Empire on which the sun never sets’, Washington’s vanity prevents them from seeing the impending decline overseas as well as at home, they see themselves as the exceptional rulers of the planet who earned their… Read more »
Great comment and worthy of reprint elsewhere, and I say this as someone who resides in the homeland of the fire-burning paper dragon.
Maybe the sixty odd million casualties of the revolution in China glutted their love of murder and war but I’m not that hopeful about totalitarian dictatorships.
The 1949 revolution was a revolution not a war and the Cultural Revolution was also not a war, it was a massive cultural experiment, which yes resulted in the deaths of millions, but not by intent or design. The Chinese like Russia have never initiated major wars. The USA has never stopped killing, it was born out of a genocide against it’s native peoples, and its campaign of murder and war has never stopped, and will never ever stop.
The USA if it were a person, it would be described as a Psychopathic Killer, I don’t think China could be.
Revolutions are wars. Same result,change of ownership and big slaughter. America, invaded by Europeans,set up a Masonic State. I don’t think it was coincidental that in the British isles we had the “inclosures”,the Highland clearance, the Irish famine that forced emigration to the new world. Then there’s the Russian revolution fomented and funded by non Russian interests forming a very Masonic state,just look at all their symbols. The same in China same symbols,same outside influences. Promise them utopia then start the bloody terror, in a few years you’ve got a despotic slave plantation. Next stop the whole world. It’s psychopathic all right,but America has just been used like everywhere else. It’s being destroyed from within just like Britain. Agenda 2030,destroy religion,the family,private property,the state,pure Marxism or slave bait to be exact.
That’s right, lets change the definition of every word so that your understanding of the world and you comment makes sense. Good luck with that, but I won’t be joining in with the fun.
The bum’s rush eh? fare thee well, Sally. I retire in disorder and dismay.
Maybe the 10 million butchered in the Belgian Congo glutted the Belgians’ love of murder and rapacious exploitation, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Or the genocide of 100 million Native Americans. Or the genocides in French Algeria, Italian Libya, German South West Africa, or British Tasmania. Doesn’t really seem to have glutted anything much at all, come to think of it. The slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya doesn’t seem to have glutted very much either.
America America America how many times are you going to point the finger at ‘America’. Do you realise that no further scrutiny of whom you are actually accusing makes your comment facile. This isn’t (completely) a Guardian type audience here.
Countries aren’t evil. People can be evil. There is a group of people with a twisted and supremacist ideology which makes up a large proportion of almost any company or institution’s top layer.
You have spoiled an otherwise intelligent comment by blaming ‘countries’ and not the people who have committed the atrocities. Thus your comment is normie baiting waffle.
‘’Countries aren’t evil. People can be evil’’You are very typical of a new generation of propagandists who conjure up absurd fantasies about individuals, who you can pursued people to hate and demonize, you might not actually understand what you are ‘selling’ but what you are doing is spoiling an understanding of the mechanics of real power, geopolitics and economics which is what I discuss in my comment.You do this by filling the educational void which exists today with what you think you can sell to a gullible public……..’nasty people’, which is basically the talk of idiots and Nial Ferguson. (the historian)Most of you pushing this shit don’t even understand what you are selling and why you are being asked to sell it, so it must be disorientating when people like me, tell you what you are doing, and why you are being asked to do it. Good luck with the… Read more »
Blah, blah. You, like so many, are disengenuous in the extreme. You do all the analysis in the world but then stop at ‘country’ and ‘government’.
I too was once completely naive and unaware.
Great post, Sally. So much so it’s made me peep from the shadows.
Consider the similarities with the Fall of Rome.
A ruinously and vastly expensive, bloated, sprawling, pampered, out of control, and yet totally ineffective and inefficient military establishment.
An enormous gulf between rich and poor, and an unparalleled flaunting of wealth, with the impoverishment and alienation of the bulk of the population..
The debasement of the currency.
A chaotic and dysfunctional political system serving narrow elite interests and incapable of reforming itself.
Abysmal leadership at the highest levels. Arrogant, vain, corrupt, delusional, irredeemably ignorant, deluded, criminally incompetent, and criminally insane.
Loss of control of its borders and a tidal wave of unassimilable alien invaders.
Crude excess in all aspects of public and private life. Unparalleled vulgarity and blatant degeneracy in all its forms.
Don’t think I’ve left anything out.
History is accelerating because we are in the midst of an historical ‘calamity’, the greatest Imperial collapse, measured in wealth & power, in the history of civilisation. American hegemony as we have known it for 80 years is coming to an end, the dollar is overprinted, overvalued and the ‘American way’ is rightly seen as failed. So at a time when US elites feel at their strongest, at their most nationalistic, at their most xenophobic, when they feel invincible and when they are extending their tentacles around the world with new ruthless abandon, ironically it is a time when they are most vulnerable, most exposed and most overstretched. Like the British before them, with ‘an Empire on which the sun never sets’, Washington’s vanity prevents them from seeing the impending decline overseas as well as at home, they see themselves as the exceptional rulers of the planet who earned their… Read more »
There is a mathematical error in your article. You meant to say that the internecine struggles between disparate political groups grow in direct proportion to their ideological distance. What you wrote implies that as the ideological distance grows the difference narrows, eventually to zero at an ideal distance away. Thus, the relationship of inverse proportion is being erroneously applied.
there isn’t. what he meant to say, and did, is that political sectarians frequently spend more time denouncing people and groups with similar ideas, than those that are more remote from them. hence the Monty Python reference.
The Victorian GK Chesterton was mirthfully all over this topic more than century ago in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday .
Only a year ago, former journalist and teacher Rebecca Carnes had her ‘awakening’ – a process so recent that it’s worth hearing her account.
“At first you feel evil for questioning the narrative…You have to get to the point where it doesn’t matter what people think of you. Isolated events don’t make sense unless you understand their agenda, the top of the pyramid… They are offering up American lives on a plate to fight foreign wars to build their contrived power structure.”
“In The Truman Show, how does Truman not realize what’s going on? Because that’s the reality he’s been presented with since birth.”
A campaigner on EMF and smart meters, she is also a third generation Newtown resident.
Connecticut native Rebecca Carnes describes her awakening with JIM FETZER “The Raw Deal” (1-24-20) https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=3NR7Y1B9HO1A
Interesting that this interview happened in late January, right before the COVID story broke.
They talk about the upcoming November Presidential election: Rasmussen polls suggested that 34% of Black voters were supporting Trump with jobs growing, backing for Trump’s opposition to the export of jobs and import of cheap labour; the economy was thriving, home starts setting new record, and 83% of American farmers supporting Trump.
Al Green (D-TX), said in December: “If we don’t impeach this guy he will get reelected”.
But then the impeachment failed and we all got COVID.
Sure, I appreciate this is only part of the story, but it is fascinating to see how quickly they changed the paradigm.
Starmer’s first name is: Keir.
Yes, and just to rub salt into the wound it was the early leader of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie who resigned from the leadership of the Labour Party in 1908. Maybe he wanted to be a socialist?
Second name Chegwin.
Slightly off-topic but here’s a headline from today’s Graun.
Defence policy
”Britain will respond to space threat from Russia and China …”
Words fail me!
The Guardian will be kept alive to disseminate Government propaganda. I can imagine this type of dystopian headline in the future, from someone like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot or Owen Jones:
‘We should pause before villifying those who became homeless after refusing coronavirus vaccines. They were simply victims of misinformation, which is why I support Government plans to strip those who spread disinformation of their right to travel and work.’
Who said this?
It’s made up satire. I can imagine The Guardian writing this in the future.
What an insane shitrag it is
How reassuring it is to have a knight of the realm as leader of the Labour Party. One in the eye for the Establishment!
And the fact that he’s (apparently) got the same first name as Keith Rupert Murdoch is an interesting revelation…
he’s also a member of the Trilateral Commission – look it up!
Starter’s on the cuddly old TC? Even more reassuring! I know for a fact that those altruists work tirelessly to promote the interests of ordinary people…
He isn’t a real Labour man, of course. He’s merely an entréeist.
we are not ruled by sociopaths but sociopaths elect tools to support their greed for cheap meat and pills to pop. https://youtu.be/deULuf4kyAE
Keir
Freud was a member of B’nai Brith and, as not one of his cases supported his hypothesis, the very definition of a “pseudo-scientist”.
I wouldn’t cite him as evidence in support of anything except how to mount a psy-op to smash up the family and atomise society.
The UK, and almost every country in the world right now is under colonial occupation, courtesy of the Gates/Pharma/WEF/WHO etc cabal.
The people of Spain are suffering summer heat with forced face masks because Bill Gates and Pharma shareholders want to see a return on their investments.
We are under attack and every UK politician, union, media body has surrendered without a fight.
The only opposition I’m seeing so far is far right allianced controlled opposition, which I don’t trust.
A living nightmare.
I suspect Gates, big pharma and, indeed, the virus itself are just part of the smokescreen.
It is the CIA, other western intelligence agencies, far-right politicians, tech corporations and the banks that are most likely calling the shots.
They are simply trying to distract people with talk of the vaccine etc so they don’t see the real culprits.
it is the public who have financed pharma, cellphones etc. to such amounts of power. it is they that have funded obvious junk media ignoring all warnings and revelling in their recklessness. admitting the real cause also helps find a solution. it goes back to the lack of biophotons in their diet. fresh, ripe fruits and veg raise the conciousness out of the pits of the slaughterhouse mentality.
yes, it’s too bad that people wasted all that time and money worrying about “vitamins”. once the pharma cartel patents biophotons, all our problems will be over.
dr morse says isolated nutrients are a 40 billion $ scam: https://youtu.be/9UdpLnl4MzY
You gotta be a wind up merchant quoting this Morse character for every single thing. Nutrient supplements are largely a snake oil, but not all are a scam. Tumeric for instance. Or magnesium when you lift heavy weights.
thats a lie. i quoted morse coz he has experience with people thinking supplements fix things instead of the perfectly sensible idea of eating real food to get vitamins.
What is a lie?
Dr Morse is unbiased – he’s only the “creator and founder of God’s Herbs”, lol. One would have thought G-d was the creator of the herbs. Too funny.
It takes some time and effort to learn about supplements. (I didn’t realize, for instance, that Amazon does not offer CBD oil at all but allows dozens of listings for Hemp oil showing medical benefits! The medical aspect belongs to CBD oil while Hemp oil is a source of nutritional benefits – totally different.)
Lots of reasons we need supplements although it obviously varies by individual.
i think you are demonstrating what lack of biphotons acheives.
I would dread to be Rachel when the lack of fat has meant the Vit D and K2 etc havent been getting into her body properly and she succumbs to athritis etc.
The nutter vegans want to start printing food. Plastic as it gets ffs. Devolution…..
Gates/Pharma/WEF/WHO yawn this is aimed at those who dont research properly it goes higher than that and the Gates/Pharma/WEF/WHO just the lone pasty syndrome aimed at the clueless gullible voting public also alternative funded political aligned media who think brainwashed to think salvation comes from a bielt box still even after this, it a mainly conservative (it aint government) The left right fantasy of change is aimed at simpletons. The Gates/Pharma/WEF/WHO fauchi fergy deflection took the EMPHASIS’S also of the pollltrickons in pretend charge also painted as freedom democracy holders deathtrump Boris the butcher etc I am shocked people cant see it The whole world in unison went into lockdown and the whole world giv n tak now has the mask ritual .322 ritual was when it was launched Equinox next up is the newly painted renamed friendly save humanity better to be safe than sorry we are in this… Read more »
Yes. It’s the capitalist ruling class (yawn). But I’ve been equally criticised for saying that too. Right now people around the world are being suffocated with face masks to justify needless vaccines – Pharma et al.
Please name the enemy.
The enemy HAS been named. It’s the capitalist ruling class. Sure, you could name specific people but it wouldn’t matter. The names will change. They change regularly. But the sub-managers are ruled by the managers, the managers are ruled by the investors, and the investors are ruled by the ruthless logic of profit maximization.
eyes open on a open forum if one posts something being criticised or not agreeing doesn’t exact to not liking anything that person icon has ever said done! nor them.
Name the enemy not everything can be pigeon holed to cheap words nor a sentence to explain something beyond a forums most on this site explanation understanding in less than a few 1000 or so words and is beyond words.
start with the occult dont be scared to look there is a beautiful side to this not just fear fear fear
Most unknowingly your already participating in it with voting election ritual tv media dogshit.
thanks
Why didn’t you just say ‘illuminati’. Would have saved you a lot of typing.
again this is aimed at those who dont research Studied properly it goes higher than that and this lone illuminati pasty syndrome aimed at the clueless gullible voting public also alternative failed conspiracy theorists now political aligned funded you tubers who think brainwashed to think salvation comes ….from beilet box
its the illuminati yawn
it goes before and beyond 1776 or adam who whatever
Eyes Open, I agree with your comment above (Gates/WHO etc) but I really do believe they are the front for the people behind the scenes who pull the strings. I think people with real power – the power that resets the entire world within months – are people unseen. And that’s how they want it and control it. I do believe at this point that everyone we see in the news day after day, the ones that become the enemy whether right of left paradigm, the spokesmen and women sewing mass confusion and obfuscation, demoralization and fighting, are so called patsy’s. I do believe that there has not been a US President since Nov 22, 1963 that has ever acted according to what he may or may not believe. He has acted on script or he knows the consequences. I believe every president since Nov 22, 1963 has been groomed… Read more »
ironically for the atheist scientism cult they are involved in a rerun of the churches witch huntings of old. no wonder they so readily closed their doors fearing the infection demon. https://youtu.be/gsNFQpmdCJY
“…the lone pasty syndrome…”, Ame? Cornish?
Jess Phillips shows both sides of her face on election night
I’m sure she was just happy for herself. That’s what the outrageous MP’s pension is for: to buy compliance. Still, it’s not comforting: the suspicion that simply “being an MP” is enough for some people;
that they’d prefer a compliant, comfortable life to asking what their party stands for, or whether they should be in politics at all.
When I see/read about hideous people such as Jess Philips, I can’t help but recall Billy Connolly’s line: The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.
I remember Dan Rather for the good things he did. Apparently, such things did not include his coverage of Afghanistan, yikes.
Some time back I was a regular reader of CounterPunch, but then some of the articles appearing there didn’t smell quite right, and I had already tired of St Clair’s puffed up sense of self so I made my escape. I would not now swallow his work whole without checking it out elsewhere, and frankly, is it worth the effort? (Perhaps for Dan Rather, I might – even while knowing that our ‘heroes’ are mere mortals like the rest of us.) And why would St Clair choose this difficult time in the world to do a take-down on Rather anyway?
I have a similar ambivalent history with Counterpunch, but I would hope that St Clair correctly views dismantling Rather as part of the larger aim of dismantling the decades of misinformation that is the mainstream media? One can hope, at least.
There was a purge at Counterpunch right around the time of the PropOrNot “fake news” psy-op scam, when they sacked a number of their most interesting, independent writers, including CJ Hopkins, Mike Whitney, and Gilad Atzmon, but continued giving space to pseudo-leftist shams like Louis Proyect, who seems to fulfill the role of PC thought police.
I’m sure the CIA was pleased with the results.
Very disappointing. I hardly go to the site any longer.
Even before that purge, CP banished Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer Linh Dinh. He’s published at the Unz Review now, and his outlook has changed for the worse, in my opinion. But CP disappeared him before this transformation. I drifted away when CP started aggressively denouncing the writers you mention as pernicious agents of the “red-brown alliance”. But to add insult to injury, the worst part was that St. Clair first denied that these writers had been booted. He claimed that they weren’t being published due to accidental miscommunication or unfortunate misunderstanding. But after the writers openly disputed this innocuous dodge, he cleverly justified their persona non grata status by blaming it on their ostensibly slanderous refusal to echo and endorse the “simple misunderstanding” excuse. In other words, “We didn’t purge X at all, it was just a mixup– but now that X has reacted with such ungracious hostility, X is no longer… Read more »
Dan Rather made his reputation as a corporate man in helping create “the lone gunman conspiracy theory” , around the JFK assassination, now a mantra among the scions of those that made immense fortunes maintaining said mantra.
TY. Well, that’s not good. Probably he was sort of like Chomsky and others who sometimes tell the truth but have their own reality filters for whatever reasons.
They want to keep their jobs?
The Labour party is a leader of the political trend in the capitulation of the centre-left just about everywhere. The SDP (Germany) the PS (France) Syriza (Greece) the Democrats (US) the old Communist Party of Italy, and pretty much everywhere in eastern europe including Russia with its once dominant CPSU very much subordinate to the ruling centre-right ‘United Russia’ the ruling party of Putin and Medvedev. The contest now is between centre-right and far right. The assimilation of the left to the militant centre right I would argue, is irreversible.
Where do we go from here I wonder.
Don’t forget to include the Australian ‘Labor’ Party.
But there are groups to the left of these sell-outs.
“The contest now is between centre-right and far right.”
This has been the case for decades in the US. I guess the political systems of all the foreign US vassals have been sufficiently gutted now so that they can do no more than reflect the overlords’ mephitic swamp.
The entire Corbyn episode was summed up in a quote by Tom Watson despite (or perhaps even because Watson was a total sociopath):
Corbyn was “a bit of fun” to the Blairites.
The Blairites were one of the most toxic groups I have ever seen. And one of Bliar’s chiefs of staff became much loved by the Australian labor party as Julia Gillard’s rancid chief of staff. John Tiernan even wrote her so called famous sexism speech which I thought was a huge whinge.
I know it’s a minor point but the Blairites don’t even have the tiniest particle of charm. Tom Watson and Jess Philips are such obvious creeps that you are convinced you must be watching some dodgy cheap movie whose script was written by a baboon.
Worst thing about Uncle Tom was his “war” on pedos….hmmmmm
Just had a little look at that murky affair. Very interesting. Accuse the “wrong people” of being pedos and you end up going down as a pedo yourself. So when will the MSM tell us that Jimmy Savile was innocent?
That would be amazing if it turned out he was innocent all along.
Would that be John (“tax avoidance is a basic British freedom”) McTernan, to whom the ABC Radio National breakfast programme repeatedly gave sycophantic interviews which smeared the left in the UK Labour Party?
Yep, the Blairite spiv
People like Chris Williamson are trying to put together an alternative to Starmer’s Blairite Backstabber warmonger pro austerity Friends of Israel, and however difficult that may be, he deserves the support of any decent people still in the Labour Party.
Labour is now just a Zionist shill, a dead end, a waste of time, effort and energy. Any decent people remaining in it need to get out now and throw their support behind him.