Three New Reads – December
Philip Roddis
What would you do if stuck in a lift with John Pilger? Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, in a new book reviewed here by Media Lens, quotes with approval a fellow journalist saying he’d stick pins in his eyes to avoid such a predicament.
Did the drone murders Obama signed off every Tuesday leave you incandescent? Are the spy-cam fitted drone fliers descending on our parks and beauty spots giving you the pip? You ain’t heard the half of it till you read Scott Ritter on how a quantum leap in military drone use gave Turkey’s proxy, Azerbaijan, a decisive edge over Russia-backed Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh.
What does the word, condor, conjure up? A huge raptor? A pipe tobacco? Branco Marcetic gives the low-down on US complicity, under that code name, with Latin America’s death squads and juntas in the second half of the twentieth century – and on why it still matters.
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Stuck in a lift with John Pilger (3725 words)
David Cromwell and David Edwards, who make up Media Lens[1], know former Guardian editor Rusbridger of old. Indeed, prior to his blocking them, the pair had almost collegiate relations[2] with him.
Drawing on their own pre-freeze exchanges, on Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model, on the fact the book they are reviewing makes many references to Media Lens, and on what Rusbridger does – and does not[3] – say in News And How To Use It, their calmly forensic approach nails all that is wrong with ‘our’ media; even and perhaps especially liberal media.
Here’s a (slightly abridged) taster:
The first resort of corporate journalists attacking a dissident is to focus on ‘narcissism’ [4]:
… John Pilger. With his tan, Byronic haircut, trudging priestly delivery and evident self-love, your main instinct is to flip right over to BBC1…’
Pilger … reports on the crimes of state-corporate power – including ‘liberal’ power, including corporate media power. Pilger tells the unfiltered, uncompromised truth about the foundations of power. His focus is on speaking up for the victims of power, not on serving power.
Serious analysis of Pilger’s work, then, has to include honest appraisal of his deepest criticisms of power – these are what make Pilger unusual and important. But this Rusbridger cannot do … Instead, he focuses on Pilger’s supposed character flaws.
‘even some of his greatest fans have found him an increasingly difficult, prickly figure shooting first and not always asking questions later’.
‘He is undoubtedly a prickly character … a hero until you know him.’
‘someone I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than be stuck in a lift with’.
These ad hominem attacks on Pilger are, in fact, a rejection of honest debate.
Reviewing Pilger’s 2000 documentary, ‘Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq’, on the UN’s assertion that US-UK sanctions had been responsible for the deaths of 500,000 children under five in Iraq, Joe Joseph wrote in The Times:
‘In his latest, harrowing documentary… the fearless Australian journalist reminds us that – however daunting the odds stacked against him – he is not going to shy away from his lifelong commitment to make TV programmes with extremely long titles…’
‘His angry, I-want-some-answers-please documentary style, like his haircut, is a hangover from the 1970s; and like much of the Seventies, he is enjoying a small retro revival. Pilger is the Prada of TV journalism.’
This was a review of a documentary exploring highly credible claims that Britain and the US were responsible for the deaths of half a million small children.[5]
Imagine someone with serious, verifiable evidence interrupting a town hall meeting to warn that government troops were at that moment burning hundreds of children alive in the local school. Now, we might urgently seek to challenge and check the claims, but what would we make of one who responded by mocking the haircut of the person raising the alarm? Would we not find this a morally depraved response?
Quite. And a point well made by the two Davids. As is this one:
In 2006, Pilger wrote:
‘In reclaiming the honour of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to “us”, and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us.’
This is not something Rusbridger could ever honestly discuss. Why? Because it’s exactly the role he performed as editor of the Guardian.
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Like Horse Mounted Cavalry Against Tanks (1578 words)
No informed person doubts that Turkey, though its future orientation and concomitant alliances remain shrouded in uncertainty, is a formidable military force. But should we think of her as enjoying a decisive military edge over premier league imperialisms within the EU? Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter is in no doubt on the matter.
In an analysis written for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow, argues that the extensive (and successful) use of military drones by Azerbaijan in its recent conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh holds “distinct lessons for how well Europe can defend itself.”
Gressel warns that Europe would be doing itself a disservice if it simply dismissed the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting as “a minor war between poor countries.” In this, Gressel is correct – the military defeat inflicted on Armenia by Azerbaijan was not a fluke, but rather a manifestation of the perfection of the art of drone warfare by Baku’s major ally in the fighting, Turkey. Gressel’s conclusion – that “most of the [European Union’s] armies… would do as miserably as the Armenian Army” when faced by such a threat – is spot on.
What happened to the Armenian Army in its short but brutal 44-day war with Azerbaijan goes beyond simply losing a war. It was more about the way Armenia lost and, more specifically, how it lost. What happened over the skies of Nagorno-Karabakh – where Azerbaijan employed a host of Turkish- and Israeli-made drones not only to surveil and target Armenian positions, but shape and dominate the battlefield throughout – can be likened to a revolution in military affairs. One akin to the arrival of tanks, mechanised armoured vehicles, and aircraft in the early 20th century, that eventually led to the demise of horse-mounted cavalry.
The Nagorno-Karabakh war saw largely Sunni Turkey backing largely Shia Azerbaijan against an Armenia under the protection of Russia, with which Ankara’s relations are a mixed and unclear picture. Leaving aside the complexities (explored here) of that war, Ritter has this to say of its most telling military aspect …
Turkey was facing some of the best anti-aircraft missile defenses produced by Russia. The reality is that most nations confronted by a Turkish “drone swarm,” would not fare well.
… before concluding that:
… multiple deployment of drones is only going to expand. The US Army is working on “Armed, Fully-Autonomous Drone Swarms”. AFADS will – autonomously, without human intervention – locate, identify and attack targets using a “Cluster Unmanned Airborne System Smart Munition,” which dispense a swarm of small drones that fan out over the battlefield to locate and destroy targets.
China has likewise tested a system that deploys up to 200 “suicide drones” designed to saturate a battlespace and destroy targets by flying into them. And this September, the Russian military integrated “drone-swarm” capabilities for the first time in a large-scale military exercise.
Modern warfare has been forever altered, and nations not equipped for a battlefield where drone technology is fully incorporated can expect outcomes similar to that of Armenia: severe losses of men and equipment, defeat, humiliation and likely loss of territory. This is the reality which, as Gressel notes, should make any nation not fully vested in drone technology “think – and worry.”
Which last observation sets the tone, if you’re not already depressed beyond measure, for my final read …
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The CIA’s Secret Global War Against the Left (6114 words)
Back when the man was still alive, loved and feared, I read of a comment by Mao Zedong that went like this:
America’s student protesters amaze me. They aren’t one bit afraid of their government’s tanks and bombs, yet are terrified by the sarcasms of a few reactionary professors.
Things haven’t much changed. Those likeliest to cry Revolution Now! seem those least likely to have spent time thinking it through. That’s hot-headed youth for you. Less forgivable in my view are those Left groups whose theoretical understandings of capitalism I take seriously, but which devote no space to the not insignificant problem of how a revolution can be made in a context of bourgeois states armed to the teeth and skilled in counter insurgency – and possessors of surveillance technologies beyond the wildest dreams of 20th century totalitarianisms – which makes the Russian Revolution look like a palace coup.
As one who so often sets out the problems – and insists that capitalism and decency never did co-exist in the world as a whole, and are growing less and less able to do so even in the West – I am painfully aware that I bring no solutions. As I put it in a recent BTL exchange:
I have faith in neither reformist nor revolutionary roads to what has to happen if barbarism is to be averted. Does that mean I should shut up? I think not. I never saw the logic in insisting that, if we have no solution, we have no business speaking of the problem. I can barely see a yard ahead, but continue to speak to all who’ll listen about the evils I see in that single yard.
I could have added Gramsci’s comment that when that which must happen cannot happen we are in the age of monsters. So while I do so hate to be the bearer of bleak news, in the interests of telling it like it is I feel bound to say that this third read, on the atrocities of a CIA in cahoots with fascism under the codename Operation Condor, is as relevant now as when swathes of Central and South America were subject to the vilest oppression, with Condor at its bloodiest.
This – and do feel free to tell me on the basis of detailed evidence how and where I’m wrong – is what we’re up against and this is the true nature of capitalist rule. Note the final sentence of this extract.
With South America in the grip of military dictatorships and rocked by the same kinds of social and political movements that were demanding change all over the world in the 1960s and ’70s, a handful of the continent’s governments made a pact to work together to roll back the rising tide of “subversives” and “terrorists.”
What followed was a secret, global campaign of violent repression that spanned not just countries, but continents, and featured everything from abduction and torture to murder. To say it was known about by the US government, which backed these regimes, is an understatement: though even this simple fact was denied at the time, years of investigations and document releases since then mean that we now know the CIA and top-ranking US officials supported, laid the groundwork for, and were even directly involved in Condor’s crimes.
Zooming out, Condor was hardly some uniquely shocking case of anticommunist paranoia spiraling out of control. As its connections to anticommunist terror in Europe have become clearer, it looks more like a particularly successful example of the covert war the US national security state had set into motion all over the world against democracy and the Left, a war that saw it get into bed with fascists and that, in some cases, arguably constituted genocide. It was the system working exactly as intended, in other words, and a stark reminder of the lengths the global centers of power will go to keep things the way they are.
As it happens, author Branco Marcetic finishes the piece on a note of optimism I don’t share:
Examining the legacy of Operation Condor should prompt us to think about which institutions in American life have been most hostile to democracy and, when the time calls for it, eager to align with fascists. But it’s also a reminder that, in the face of popular struggle, even this violence has a shelf life, and impunity doesn’t last forever.
State and supra-state violence in Latin America had a finite “shelf life” not because The People fought back and ultimately prevailed but because, with a few exceptions, it worked. You don’t continue to hammer a nail already driven in, and terror and violence are expensive options for a ruling class – be it a domestic comprador class or the imperialists in Washington, London and elsewhere. The trappings of democracy make better business sense.
Pessimist and gloom merchant? Moi? If you say so. But this piece makes salutary and therefore essential reading for those who value the unvarnished truth on what decent folk like you and me are up against.
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NOTES:-
[1][See my review of the Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz.
[2]‘… almost collegiate relations …‘ In a pattern Media Lens have experienced again and again, initial contact with journalists is met with friendly courtesy; a spirit which soon evaporates as ML’s unfailingly polite probes turn up the heat.
[3] Rusbridger’s silences, like the Guardian’s and like those of mainstream media at large, are often more telling than his utterances. As I keep saying on this site, while all media actively lie when the stakes are high enough, their biggest deceptions are of omission rather than commission.
[4] Not just Pilger but Assange, Chavez, Corbyn, Putin and Scargill are or were routinely called out as narcissistic. How convenient that so universally ridiculed a trait should exist in such abundance in those our rulers consider a threat! How revealing that ‘our’ media should give it, like John Pilger’s hair cut, centre stage! How dismaying that an intelligentsia priding itself on critical thinking should fall for this crap every time!
[5] The claim of half a million Iraqi under fives dying as a result of Bill Clinton’s sanctions was given infamous corroboration by his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when she said they were a price worth paying. Her words merit airing at every opportunity. While imperialism’s hot wars on the global south do impose on our rulers a threshold of justification – however low, and however intelligence-insulting the narratives aimed at crossing it – sanctions like those on Iran, Syria, Venezuela and elsewhere, though equally and indiscriminately murderous, evade scrutiny almost entirely.
Worse, aided by the silences (at best) of the Rusbridgers of this world, their lethal effects can be blamed on the target ‘regime’. Two years ago a liberal pal, a Brit in Columbia and not a stupid person, told me that Venezuelan refugees pouring across the border into her adoptive country were victims of “failed Chavism”.
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The Rusbridgers & co. are no longer journalists. They have been inducted as spokespersons for the ruling regime.
Overtly, the scheming ruling elites have become corporate lobbyists for big pharma, the vaccine manufacturers.
Useful resource on Operation Condor:
https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2015/10/operation-condor.html?spref=tw
Turkey was facing some of the best anti-aircraft missile defenses produced by Russia. The reality is that most nations confronted by a Turkish “drone swarm,” would not fare well. that is incorrect. Turkey did not face confrontation with latest Russian defense systems at all. And Russian anti drone integrated AA/AM system are the best in the world, China and India even Turkey bought them already. Russian air base in Syria was attacked by ISIS with US, ISRAELI made Drones hundreds of times, unsuccessfully because Russia deployed multi layered defense and because waged symmetric war. Russian simply traced flight path of attacking drones and then immediately hit hard drone launch and assembly locations with their supersonic missiles and attack aircraft. nothing like that could have happen from poor military Armenian side spending seven times less on defense than rich Azerbaijan. In fact Russia was not on side of Armenia fight in that conflict… Read more »
Agree, but S300/400 are anti-missile, not anti-drone. Please confirm.
Specifically for small drones Russians have Panzir II and III system but all of that is integrated with S300/400 System near and far defense perimeter grid response tailored to type of threat to handle deceptive attacks including swarms. moreover there is electronic warfare theater grid tasked in hacking/ hijacking navigation systems GPS spoofing etc., in fact It also uses 5G based Temporarily deployed military grade grid at near 100Ghz carrier frequency.
“Operación Condor” was a military operation against irregular enemies. Cuba´s castro sponsored armed group in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile among others. They did not have any popular support. They were chased and neutralized as Chechenians rebels in Russia. Sorry for them but they lost. They are not heros, not remebered, not welcomed then and now. Yu have to avoid believing your own propaganda.There is nothing romantic on Che like guerrilas in south america. There is a lot of problems in our countries and they were no solution at all, they were another huge problem.
I can barely see a yard ahead, but continue to speak to all who’ll listen about the evils I see in that single yard.
Look harder Philip, as I don’t see any mention on your blog of ‘the evils a single yard ahead’.
Ain’t this true –
The Right doesn’t trust the government on covid because their instincts are telling them the authorities want them dead. The Left trusts the government on covid because their instincts are telling them the authorities want the Right dead.
?
[some right wing person]
Now pigs have PCR +ve Covid, so they will kill all the pigs. And they won’t stop there.
Famines through political control of the food chain…now where have I read about that before ?
Let me guess you’re going to mention the Nazi sob story about of hololodmor?
Even While It Was Happening, It Wasn’t Happening
I haven’t been looking at Phil’s site much recently. I think he thought he might act as some kind of moderator between the Left (seemingly devoted to the COVID narrative) and the sceptics. Although I reject this, in my view utterly manufactured, attribution of Right Wing to COVID scepticism. In any case I think that Phil was shocked at the “rudeness” of the sceptics. He seemed oblivious to the supercilious arrogance of the Left COVID believers. He has since completely withdrawn from the matter and affects that (pseudo) modest “I can’t see what’s going on and nobody can” attitude. I wouldn’t say your “right wing person” is correct at all – and how typical of the Right to think it’s all about them. The govt only work to secure power for the rulers who only care about who lives and dies according to their power interests. The Left/Right divide serves… Read more »
The govt only work to secure power for the rulers who only care about who lives and dies according to their power interests. The Left/Right divide serves their interests as a divide-and-rule device. Nothing that I or Dr.Stack says contradicts what you say. The ‘Left’ (as in the rank and file) are currently just a battering ram for the elites. They are hoodwinked and shackled to an absurd philosophy which only serves to assist the plutocrats’ designs. The authoritarianism of the state says, “you cannot question Covid”, but is also says, “You cannot question immigration levels, at all. You cannot question how George Floyd actually died. You cannot question the educating of children in gender dysphoria. You cannot question the near total remodelling of our identities in a myriad of other ways. You cannot question why Jonathan Pollard gets a flight home in Adelson’s jet and a hero’s welcome on… Read more »
As my last comment went into the machine for processing, I note that people online are being both thankful for the brave and principled postitions that have made some sense of 2020, but also critical of those who have stopped making sense. I have held throughout that unless and until certain subjects, certain taboo subjects are aired and allowed to be debated, then the absence of ‘Leftwing’ voices criticising the great reset will remain a mystery to most. One cannot ascribe the failures of Hedges, Camp, Johnstone, Edwards and Cromwell, as well as publications from the Canary to The Communist Review to some vast conspiratorial shill operation. There clearly is something fundamentally wrong with the thinking and narratives which pervade all these minds. I thank OffG for their work this year past. A beacon, if ever there was one. This will all go precisely nowhere though if we are not… Read more »
Azerbaijan comes from “Land of Eternal Fire” because of the fires from the gas erupting from the ground. The Baku oil-fields were a stamping ground of the Rothschilds from the late Nineteenth Century. Stalin made his name as a bandit in the area. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s otherwise utterly tedious ‘Young Stalin’ has the eyebrow raising line of Stalin declaring during a robbery, “we’re working for the Rothschilds”.
Always remember Sebag himself was described by his fellow “historians” as very high in titilacious gossip and very low in hard facts. You can literally invent any claim about Stalin and so called critical thinkers accept it blindly
I didn’t find it tedious. While not depicting Stalin as a nice guy, it was free of the Trotskyist-influenced portrayal of him as a “grey blur” and “bureaucratic non-entity” which has been quite widespread in mainstream history.
The biggest Damascene moment for me – the event that was fundamentally pivotal in opening my eyes far more than anything they ever wrote ever could – was when I got blocked by media lens on Facebook for asking them why, when their raison d’etre is to challenge the corporate narrative, why have they so spectacularly failed to challenge the covid one. This was back in May. No response – just a deletion of the comment and a blocking within 10 mins of posting it. Same the happened on Twitter.
The only thing I can conclude is that they are part of the problem.
Media Lens was always pushing the Greenwash narrative. Covid is then the necessary an noble (sic) lie to effecting its agenda of global monopolism.
Roddis apparently modified his position here – for I recall him pushing carbon guilt trips here to a consistent and critical challenge.
But the the fundamental arguments of the Greenwash are only a means to and end – as is covid.
I appreciate that last article by Branko Marcetic since that’s the world I grew up in: the Brazil of the late 1960s. He should come out and state more brazenly what we know: Operation Condor was implemented in 1975 and thus was a successor to the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) going back to 1955. Far from locally inspired, these were coordinated on the ground by fascists, first and foremost Klaus Barbie who was spirited from the collapsing Third Reich to Latin America with hundreds if not thousands of Nazis. Barbie was posted to Bolivia, as Adolf Eichmann to Argentina before his kidnap by the Israelis. The real big fish, Martin Bormann, was widely believed to be in Brazil. The process of Nazification persisted as late as the Kennedy administration, which set up the The Office of Public Safety (OPS) financed through USAID, and the OPS in turn ran the International… Read more »
Time’s Fun When You’re Having Flies (but the edit clock runs out).
If you asked me to toss a coin and call U.S. policy in Latin America in those years I would say it was to use the spectre of communism as an excuse to militarize/repress those countries to soften them up for U.S corporations.
Just as R2P is used serves as a convenient opportunity to grab resources.
In the same way the War on Drugs is used in Mexico as a pretext to send in the military as a vanguard for mining companies to depopulate and clear the land for mineral extraction (see Oswaldo Zavala).
Next up: the green agenda and climate change/Agenda 21 will be used in the same way to herd people into cities, clearing land for… you know who.
Just ask the Bundys.
uza named it the monroe doctrine. control of the hemisphere.
still not satisfied as we can see
The USA was tired of Batista and was trying to game his departure. Castro was hostile to the PSP, the Cuban Communist Party, which was initially suspicious of him. The Americans knew Guevara was a Communist but he was only one of several significant deputies of Castro and even Guevara disliked the PSP, considering it to be overly timid. American intelligence assessments of the Cuban situation paid too much attention to the PSP, in hindsight.
In both World Wars, most Latin American countries declared war on Germany. Sometimes there were real grievances, like their ships being torpedoed by U-Boats, but for the most part it was US pressure.
Most obediently lined up with the USA during the Cold War as well, with military coups or similar organised in countries less cooperative.
Rusbridger is not a journalist, he is a whore.
Isn’t he the one that sold out Snowden and Greenwald?
He is but Greenwald is no friend of ours he’s a very good friend of eBay founder and CIA asset Pierre omidiyar
Yeah, I never liked The Intercept at all. Glad that Greenwald finally left them.
Armenia is not “Russian supported.” Russia has recently had better relations with Azerbaijan than Armenia. Armenia has been playing dirty anti Russian games to curry favour with Washington. By rights, Russia should have left Armenia to stew in its own juice.
Russia was playing both sides. Much was made of the Armenian leader’s Soros connections, but the big guns (including Israel) were firing for the Azerbaijani side, the USA paid little attention, obsessed with its own problems, and if Soros has the demonic power often credited to him I did not see it at work in Karabakh. At most Russia prevented a total Armenian defeat.
To comprehend where this is going, we have to consider how they think. We have to give up a little of ourselves in 2021. We cannot use only our own way of thinking. Satanic Transhumanism: The Future of Reason? by Peter Clarke https://petermclarke.medium.com/satanic-transhumanism-the-future-of-reason-79b673ce57d0 In modern times, several prominent transhumanists have explicitly linked occult practices to their transhumanist goals. For example, Jack Parson, founder of America’s rocket program, was deeply involved in the occult religion Thelema. Parsons had a distinct vision for bringing about the next step in evolution for humanity. He described his vision in occultish terms, but his goals directly aligned with transhumanism. And Jack Parsons links through his partners L Ron Hubbard and Frank Malina to the wife of Malina’s son, Roger, who is Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine, daughters of once the biggest scientific publisher, Robert Maxwell, and thus to the funder and blackmailer of scientists, Jeffrey… Read more »
It all ties back to Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alevydre and Synarchy. Which you could trace back to the Knights Templar, at least Saint-Yves would. All voodoo of course, but the lunatics running this show believe it is true, somewhat like Aglie in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The new religion will be global, synarchic and based on perfecting the human race via genetic engineering. Hence the CIA and the rest now propagating the notion of aliens being real. In the next year we enter the true Aeon of Horus.
Interesting about Pilger. He was at an event in London last year and watching him walk away after his presentation I detected a lack of warmth. Not sure I can put my finger on – perhaps an arrogance or something brought about by a general tiredness with fighting. I think he’s around 80. Who knows, but that’s I felt.
And we should care why? HOnestly, he has the largest most important body of honest documentaries in the world exposing every corporate and government crime around the world for nearly 50 yrs. What a pathetic toerag you are.
And? More than likely Pilger is controlled opposition because he believes covid hook like and sinker! Oops I’ve annoyed the Pilger equivalent of a Chomsky fanboy
Really?
Sorry, but I say as I see. And I took the trouble to go. Lots of them made good speeches. But I wont be told what I felt watching each presenter. I might be right or wrong but say what I saw and felt.
There’s too many people who think they are far above others, alternative media at times similar. If we are to improve our message we need to remove the snobbery. Pilger has achieved much, but he is not god.
Quite a lot of icons have had significant negative sides – Gandhi, Tolstoy, Mandela, Mother Teresa etc. I actually consider the last to have been a thoroughly evil woman masquerading and being presented as a saint. But “a lack of warmth”, “arrogance” – you’re going to have to do a lot better than that.
Private Eye in the 1980s sometimes referred to Pilger as “Pilgov”, implying he had Communist sympathies, but that magazine is not always the anti-establishment beacon it presents itself as and I doubt whether Pilger was ever wealthy enough to sue them – a significant check on Private Eye’s journalism being the possibility of being sued.
I’m not going to have to do better than anything. Likewise I won’t ask you to do better on your Mother Teresa comments. That is what I felt. End of story. Take it, or leave it.
John Pilger has remained silent about what is in effect WW3 without bombs. Perhaps lockdowns and restrictions don’t affect him personally. Perhaps police brutality only matters when it happens in foreign countries but not his own
Quite agree, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and many other celeb ‘rebels’ have nothing to say about the WW3 Plandemic genocide and the actual “new rulers of the world.” I watched his last limp interview on RT Going Underground, it was useless. Followed him for years, no more.
I’m a billionaire living in singapore, smoking weed in front of all their cameras and i can tell you, there are no rules for us elite. I fly commercial just to see how many drugs I can sneak through. The answer is=a lot.
I hope I might share with the good readers and admins of Off Guardian another read, er, I mean, listen, my most recent podcast episode on how the lockdowns are like a religion. I come from a very extremist religious community and the comparisons between the ways in which both operate as mechanisms of oppression are staggering.
https://anchor.fm/frieda-vizel/episodes/Lockdowns-as-Religion-eo8doj
Thanks so much for sharing your link to your podcasts, Frida. I listened to “Those Masked Hasidim” and it really opened my eyes a different world, but it also made me realise that my childhood growing up in a small country in Africa had many similarities. I find people’s obsession with ‘safety’ in most first world countries quite nauseating at times.
The worldwide destruction of the economy continues apace.
Why?
Love the shirt. On the subject of moustaches, my old mum disapproves. Our window cleaner’s apprentice turned up a few months ago sporting one similar to the above. My mum told him not to come back again until he had shaved. Next time, he came back cleanly shaven.
Interesting story about my window cleaners for another day. But the moral of the story is always listen and learn from your window cleaners. They almost certainly know more than you.
I would have found another customer.
Dan and Brett love demonising people, they are fed tripe by Bill Bowtell who has an unthink tank funded by Gates, the horrific Norman Swan whose last doctor job was counting fat on the Biggest loser,, and that god awful duo Raina Macintyre and Mary-Louise McClaws from WHO, they are destructive and depraved and out sourced the fake tests to Twiggy Forrest and Sutton did the old trawl back 2 months for people who had a positive PCR and call their deaths covid even if they are over 100 and die from endstage alzheimers, my new neighbour came over from Victoria to SA, she had to submit 3 applications to cross and imaginary line but is so glad to be out of the place.
Vis-a-vis the hammer and nail analogy, it may be time to turn the Hydra myth on its head. It’s true the ruling elites need a steady supply of nails to keep society and people locked down. That’s where the Hydra comes in. We always regard the Hydra as a symbol of evil, which good must keep lopping off heads to try and slow the growth of new heads. But isn’t the Hydra more symbolic of the people than the rulers, in that those who traffic in evil must keep lopping off the people’s heads as new heads appear to replace the ones lopped off? Evil by its very nature is a fixed quantity; those in its service use it to remain in its service for years, decades, generations. Good is constantly renewed as one instance of good after another is cut down by those determined to keep evil alive and… Read more »
If one thinks that is bad, just take a look at the example below of the Langley-Land hack attack propaganda at Brown Shirt Press (aka Counter Puff). The Fabian Fascist Eugenicists are on overdrive to divert the blame for the crimes against humanity of their War Racketeer Corporate Fascist bosses to Orange Hair Bozo, as if Orange Hair started it all. He didn’t.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/31/repairing-trumps-carnage-fixing-our-democracy/
What a gang of crocodile teared hypocritical fakes, frauds and phonies.
Alexander Cockburn must be turning in his grave.
An enlightening collection that identifies three related fronts in the war against the elites and their supporters: words, technology and physical force.
The opposition is divided. That binary left/right distinction suits the powerful. Right, instead of attacking ‘woke’, concentrate your fire on the neo-liberal elites. Left, stop lashing out at the conservative religious minded people and start laying into the neo-liberal elites.
I can hear the nail being hammered in in the distance. Another three or four strokes and it will be over, at least until the next one needs to be put in place.
Both the “left”, including woke children, and “right” are equally deluded and more alike than different. Common denominators: virtue signalling, righteousness, tribalism and other biblical unpleasantries. And being part of either tribe consists of simply repeating the right slogans and defending them against any critical view, and mistrusting the others, always.
Both sides are more or less equally unworthy of continuing as they were, and so is anyone who does not think for themselves. Convid is a bit like an intelligence / intuition / dignity test.
There was a time I believed that, but while they are not necessarily as polarised as they say, I have had enough contact with people from both camps to say that the differences in outlook and behaviour are real.
I have a Polish name (“Waldorf” is an Internet pseudonym). An ex-Leftie railed at my “stupid” name in the course of an argument about a current event. However, he had vocally abandoned any claims to left-wing politics by then. Perhaps he had always disliked Poles and other foreigners, but when he was professing socialist beliefs he never expressed it. Slipping to the right was when he let his inner xenophobe out.
There is a left and right! And a centre! Pretend all you want! What you literally mean is “left and right is a fake paradigm, it’s obvious that every one does or should think like me”!