Probably the most famous actor and theater man in Germany, Dieter #Hallervorden, has unexpectedly clearly, albeit in subtle lyrics, sided with the people bombed in the #Gaza Strip. The video shows harsh images with a sensitive song, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for a peaceful future for Israel.
This is an archive of links to interesting websites I have been collecting since 2017. Many of these links go to what I consider to be significant articles found in weblogs that I follow.
What you see below this first article that you are reading now, is a long list of articles, each of which has a title that is a link to the original website. Click to go to that website.
The article text was originally intended to be a short description or excerpt of whatever the link refers to. However, the more recent articles generally display most or all of the significant textual content. This is because links can disappear from the internet over time, and this is a way to preserve the content.
Unfortunately, I have not been consistent in marking articles text that is only an excerpt, although many excerpts include an ellipsis (...) indicator. Most articles dated before 2019 (the date is given in the bar at the bottom of the article) are excerpts.
Generally I have presented the articles without comment, so you can make your own assessment, but most political articles are "alternative" to "mainstream" views. Some do have a qualifying comment at the front, or are labelled ("tagged") with "Bullshit" when I feel there is egregious false or misleading content.
There are more than 1300 links here, so there are a few ways to select what you want to read. In the green bar at the top, you can visit the "Tag cloud", which shows "tags", words that describe significant aspects of each article. The larger the tag appears, the more articles exist that have that tag. For many articles, one of the tags will be an author name. Click on a tag to bring up a list of only those articles tagged with that word. You can also view the tags sorted alphabetically, or by number of uses.
You can also search using the "Search text" and "Filter by tag" boxes at the top of the articles list. Another way to browse, is to visit the "Picture Wall" and hover your mouse pointer over an interesting picture to see the title, and click.
If your search produces a lot of results, and the articles are long, you can hide the article text to see just the titles by clicking on the caret ( ^ ) at the top right "Links per page" area. Unfortunately, you will have to do this again when proceeding to the next page of links. I hope to fix this someday.
I hope there is something that you will find worthwhile to see here!
RIP Refaat in Gaza
Sad news:
Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 - 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023
Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza's most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza's voice to the outside world.
He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister's home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids...
Refaat's pinned tweet:
Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 13:01 UTC · Nov 1, 2023
If I must die, let it be a tale.
Refaat's last tweet:
Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 5:00 UTC · Dec 4, 2023
The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.
Quote
Vice President Kamala Harris ...
Embedded video
His writing:
My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ - NY Times - May 13, 2021
By Refaat Alareer
Mr. Alareer lives in Gaza and is the editor of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories.
...
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”
Lectures:
English Poetry Lecture 1/28: An Introduction to Poetry (video) - Refaat Alareer / eLearning Centre - IUG
On air:
_Palestine voices on Israel's war against Gaza - Usefull Idiots - Oct 13, 2023
This week’s interview with Refaat Alareer, Yumna Patel, and Muhammad Shehada
video_
How Refaat was murdered:
شهداء غزّة Gaza martyrs @Gaza_Shaheed - 12:54 UTC · Dec 8, 2023
Important information on Refaat’s assassination:
The day before yesterday, Refaat received a phone call from the Israeli intelligence about locating him in the school where he took refuge. They informed him that they were going to kill him. He left the school not wanting to endanger the others, and at 6 p.m. his sister's apartment was bombed, where he was killed, his sister and her four children
Obits:
In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer - The Electronic Intifada - 7 December 2023
‘If I must die, let it be a tale’: a tribute to Refaat Alareer - Max Blumenthal - December 7, 2023
Related:
The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza - Adam Johnson / The Nation - Dec 7 2023
The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister.
> America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. ... <
A dear friend of Moon of Alabama tweets:
annie fofani🇵🇸 @anniefofani - 22:08 UTC · Dec 7, 2023
I miss you so much Refaat. i assume you sent me this so i could pass it on after your death. so, here it for the world. click, the date is at the base.
Rest in peace.
Posted by b on December 8, 2023 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink
On all fronts, the Israeli internal paradigm is fracturing; and externally, the West is itself fissuring, and becoming a pariah on the global stage. The western leaderships’ explicit facilitation of a bloody cleansing of Palestinians has incised the old spectre of ‘Orientalism’ and colonialism onto the skyline. And is gyring the West towards being ‘the world’s untouchable’ (along with Israel).
Overall, Israel’s government objective looks to be to converge and then channel – multiple tensions into a wide military escalation disgorgement (a big war) – that somehow would bring a restoration of deterrence. Such a course concomitantly implies that Israel would thus turn its back to western pleas that it somehow act ‘reasonably’. The West mostly defines this ‘reasonableness’ as Israel accepting the chimaera of a passage to ‘normality’ arriving through the Saudi Crown Prince bestowing it, in return for a contrite Israel undoing seven decades of Jewish supremacism (i.e. accepting a Palestinian State).
The core tension within the Western-Israeli calculus is that the U.S. and the EU are moving in one direction – back to the failed Oslo approach – whilst polling underscores Jewish electors firmly marching in the other direction.
A recent survey conducted by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs shows that since 7 October, 79% of all Jewish respondents oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State on 1967 lines (68% were opposed prior to 7 Oct); 74% are opposed even in exchange for normalisation with Saudi Arabia. And reflective of the internal Israeli divide, “only 24% of left-wing voters support a [Palestinian] State without conditions”.
In short, as the western institutional leadership clings to the shrinking Israeli secular liberal Left, Israelis as whole (including the young) are moving hard Right. A recent Pew poll shows that 73% of the Israeli public support the military response in Gaza – albeit a third of Israelis complained it had not gone far enough. A plurality of Israelis think Israel should govern the Gaza Strip. And Netanyahu, in the aftermath of the ICC arrest threat, is overtaking Gantz (leader of the National Union) in approval ratings.
It seems that the ‘western consensus’ prefers not to notice these uncomfortable dynamics.
Additionally, a separate Israeli divide concerns the purpose of the war: Is it about restoring to Jewish citizens the sense of personal, physical security, which was lost in the wake of 7 Oct?
That is to say: Is it the sense of Israel as a redoubt, safe space in a hostile world that is being restored? Or alternatively, is the present struggle one of establishing a fully Judaicised Israel on the ‘Land of Israel’ (i.e. all the land between the river and the sea) the prime objective?
This constitutes a key divide. Those who see Israel primarily as the safe redoubt to which Jews could flee in the wake of European holocaust, naturally are more circumspect at the risking of a wider war (i.e. with Hizbullah) – a war that could see the civilian ‘rear’ directly attacked by Hizbullah’s vast missile arsenal. For this constituency, safety is a premium.
On the other hand, a majority of Israelis sees the risk of wider war as inevitable – indeed to be welcomed by many, if the Zionist project is to be fully established on the Land of Israel.
This reality may be difficult for secular westerners to grasp, but the 7 October has re-energised the Biblical vision in Israel, rather than excite a surfeit of caution about war, or a desire for rapprochement with Arab States.
The point here is that a ‘New War of Independence’ can be held aloft before the Israeli public as the metaphysical ‘vision’ of the way ahead, whilst the Israeli government attempts to pursue the more mundane path of playing the long game, leading to the full military matrix control over the land between the river and the sea, and the removal of populations that will not submit to the Smotrich dispensation of ‘acquiesce or leave’.
The schism between Israel as a secular, post-holocaust ‘safe-space’ and the contrasting Biblical, Zionist vision sets a border between the two zeitgeists that is both porous, and at times overlaps. Nonetheless, this Israeli divide has bled across into U.S. politics and, in a more scattered way, has entered into European polity.
For the Jewish diaspora living in the West, keeping Israel as a safe-space is vitally important as, insofar as Israel becomes insecure, Jews feel their own personal insecurity worsens, pari passu. In one sense, the Israeli projection of strong deterrence in the Middle East is an ‘umbrella’ that extends to cover the diaspora, as well. They want quiet in the region. The Biblical ‘vision’ has an edge to it which is frankly too polarising.
Yet, those very power structures straining to sustain the Israeli strongman paradigm in the western consciousness now find their efforts are tending to shred those western political structures, on which they depend, thus alienating key constituencies, particularly the young. A recent poll amongst 18-24 year-olds in Britain found that a majority (54%) agreed that “that the State of Israel should not exist”. Just 21% disagreed with this statement.
The wielding of Lobby power to compel Western united support for Israel and its deterrent objectives – coupled with a lack of human empathy for Palestinians – is inflicting heavy losses on institutional leadership structures as underlying mainstream parties fracture in different directions.
The damage is exacerbated by the western peace camp’s ‘reality blindspot’. We hear it all the time: the only solution is that of two-states living peacefully side by side on the lines of 1967 (as enshrined in UNSC resolutions 242 and 338). Apart from in the West, the same mantra is also rehearsed (as the peace camp reminds us) by the Arab League.
It seems so simple.
It is indeed ‘simple’ – but only through ignoring the reality that such a Palestinian state can only come into sovereign ‘being’ through force – through military force.
The reality is that there are 750,000 settlers occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and a further 25,000 settlers living in Syria’s Golan Heights). Who will remove them? Israel won’t. They will fight to the last settler; many of whom are zealots. They were invited and placed there in the years since the 1973 war (largely by successive Labour governments), precisely to obstruct any possible Palestinian state coming into existence.
The question that those who say ‘the solution is simple’ – two states living side by side in peace – do not answer: Has the West the will or the political resolve to instantiate a Palestinian State by force of arms, against the current will of a plurality of Israelis?
The answer, inevitably, is ‘no’. The West does not have the ‘will’ – and the suspicion then arises that in their hearts they know this. (There is perhaps a yearning for a solution, and disquiet that absent ‘calm in Gaza’, tensions will spike in the diaspora, too).
The hard truth is that the Resistance has understood the reality of the situation better than their western counterparts: A putative Palestinian State has only receded in prospect since the 1993 Oslo process, rather than having advanced a jot. Why did the West not take corrective action over three decades, and only then recall the dilemma when it became a crisis?
The Resistance has better appreciated the inherent untenable contradiction of one people appropriating to themselves special rights and privileges over another, sharing the same land, and that such a scenario could not long persist, without breaking the region apart (witness the wars and devastation to which maintaining the existing paradigm already has led).
The region stands at the edge; and ‘Events’ at any moment can push it over that edge, despite the efforts of regional actors to control incremental movement up the escalatory ladder. This is likely to be a long war. And a solution likely will only emerge through Israel, by one means or another, facing up to the inner paradigm contradiction within Zionism – and to begin seeing the future differently.
And of that, there is, as yet, no sign.
Editor Note: Actually 6 types can be seen.
INTRODUCTION
Reading perhaps Russia’s greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, during the horrors of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war, I thought it might be of some interest to examine Berdyaev’s views on war, Russia, and Ukraine. Berdyaev was born near Kiev, in Obukhov, Kiev Oblast’, lived in Kiev and its environs, and attended a series of educational institutions in Kiev, including Kiev University. However, like many born in Ukraine over the centuries, he identified exclusively as a Russian, having no Ukrainian but rather noble Russian, noble French, as well as Polish and Tatar ancestry.
Living in the Russian Empire, he was caught up in many of its intellectual trends and political events. Drawn to Marxism in his university days and exiled to Vologda in 1897 for anti-Tsarist activity, Berdyaev soon abandoned such thought in favor of a moderate conservatism and revival of his Orthodox faith. He was very much opposed to the atheistic communist Bolshevik regime, and was arrested and interrogated by Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinskii and deported from Soviet Russia along with hundreds of other philosophers and conservative intelligents in 1922. Berdyaev remained loyal but critical both of the Tsarist regime and Orthodox Church. As a thinker, he produced a free religious, historical, and political philosophy, with his greatest contributions being made to philosophy of history, so popular among the Russian intelligentsia both in his and our time. His thought reflected many of the elements extant in Russian culture and thought during the late 19th century, as I have analysed in my Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History and Politics (Europe Books, 2022) and my working paper “Russian Historical Tselostnost’” (https://gordonhahn.com/2023/04/13/working-paper-russian-historical-tselostnost-parts-1-3-conclusion/, 13 April 2023), including: monism, universalism, communalism, solidarism, messianism, historicism, transcendentalism and anti-bourgeoisism.
Berdyaev’s monism, like that of most of Russian religious and philosophical thought, held that God was present in the world and the Heavenly Kingdom and Divine were interconnected with the material world, humankind, and individual persons’ lives. Humankind’s purpose should be to prepare for the full unity of the universe and the Heavenly Kingdom, between spirit and matter, God and humankind. Berdyaev’s very Russian belief in or aspiration to unity or wholeness or tselostnost’ enveloped other types of tselostnost’: universalism, communalism, solidarism, and historical unity (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 138-42, 380-2, 567-8, 725-6, and “Russian Historical Tselostnost’”). As an Orthodox Christian, Berdyaev believed in the ultimate unity of all humankind in Christ—putting his Russian univeralist and monist tselostnost’ in brief (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 138-42, 380-2).
Similarly, Berdyaev shared the Russian aspiration to and belief in the propriety of communalism—the priority of the group’s interest over individual interests and the benefits of this to individuals and humankind (Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’, pp. 567-8). Although he was critical of Slavophiles, he saw their belief and that the Russian agrarian socialists in the advantages and moral superiority of the village commune as a reflection fo Russians’ preference for a communalist rather than individualist culture. He also endorsed Slavophile Aleksei Khomyakov’s views of spiritual communalism or sobornost’ – ‘communitarianism’ or ‘conciliarism’ – under the protective divine wing of Christian love in the community of Orthodox believers and the Church (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Nikolai Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016, pp. pp. 161-70, at p 162. )].
The Russian preference for political, social, cultural, and ontological (identitarian) unity or solidarism is also present in Berdyaev’s work as an aspiration, since he was well aware of the great schisms that plagued Russia historically and in his own time. As I discuss below, these foundational elements of Russian tselostnost’ in Berdyaev’s thinking accompany his equally Russian messianism, historical tselostnost’, his vision of Ukraine, and his views on war.
Berdyaev, Russia, and its Fate
Berdyaev was neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. He was, rather, a Russian patriot, Orthodox believer, a moderately conservative for his time and place, but he was critical of the Russian elite, intelligentsia, people, and orthodox Church. Presaging Soviet culturologist Yurii Lotman’s work on Russian duality, he was particularly struck by and quite penetrating and eloquent in describing the stark contradictions in the Russian character—its abundant antinomies: “In other countries one can find all these contradictions, but only in Russia does the thesis turn into its antithesis, the bureaucratic state is born from anarchism, slavery is born from freedom, and extreme nationalism from supra-nationalism” (universalism) [Nikolai Berdyaev, “Sud”ba Rossii,” republished in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii), pp. 11-44, at p. 29]. He points to other antinomies. Russian nationalism also coexists, it not produces Russian universalism: “Supra-nationalism, universalism” is “an essential trait of the Russian national spirit… The national in Russia is precisely supra-nationalism and its freedom from nationalism; in this Russia distinctive and unlike any other country in the world. Russia is called upon to be the liberator of nations” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 20). In this last phase we see one way in which one particular trait generates Russian messianism, a belief in a special global mission for Russia in shaping world history. In another antinomy, “(t)he other side of Russian humility is an unusual Russian self-opinion. The humblest Russian is the greatest, most powerful, and uniquely called” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 21). Here again, another essential trait leads, in Berdyaev’s thinking, to Russian messianism. In order to attain its proper status in the world and have its say in History’s course and outcome, it needed to overcome the negative sides of these antinomies.
Being a Russian patriot and imbued by Russian monist Christian, teleological historicism, Berdyaev, much like Fyodor Dostoevskii, developed a faith that Orthodox Russia would overcome its shortcomings and play an important role in leading humankind to Christian unification at the end of History. He certainly saw Russia as properly a “great Empire” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 276) and was supportive of Russia’s colonial advancement of less developed peoples and of Russia’s “heroic” army in World War I (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 100). At times, he wrote as if Russia was destined to overcome its insufficiencies and play a pivotal or leading role in history, but at other times he was urging changes to achieve this, thus implying an element of uncertainty in his own mind. For example, in his article “Spirit and Machine,” Berdyaev wrote: “If Russia wants to be a great Empire and play a role in history, then this lays on it the obligation to start on the path of material-techonological development. Without this decision, Russia will fall into a situation without exit. The soul of Russia will be freed and its depths disclosed only on this path (of material development)” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Dukh and mashina,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 266-76, at p. 276).
Berdyaev’s own nationalism and messianism were reflected in his belief in a special historical role of the Slavs—his “Slavic idea.” He was no enemy of the West but was highly critical of its bourgeois materialism, which he blamed for the outbreak of World War (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 207, 217-18). “Russia is the most non-bourgeois country in the world,” lacking the “despotism” of the bourgeois family life and concerns Berdyaev averred. He conterposed to this Western ‘bourgeoisism’ the transcendence of the world exemplified by Russians: “The Russian person with ease of the sul overcomes any bourgeoisness and departs from any custom and from any normed life. The wanderer (strannik) type is so characteristic of Russia and so wonderful. The wanderer is the freest person on earth. …The greatness of the Russian people and the calling of it to a higher life are concentrated in the strannik type. … Russia is a fantastic country of spiritual drunkenness. … The Russian spirit cannot sit in place, it is not )of) the shopkeepers’ soul, not a local soul. In Russia, in the soul of (its) people there is a kind of endless searching, a searching for the invisible city of Kitezh, and unseen home. … Before the Russian soul open great exapanses, and there is no marked horizon before its spiritual eyes. The Russian spirit borns in a fiery pursuit of the truth, absolute, divine truth and salvation for the whole world and the universal resurrection to a new life” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 24-6). Here, in Berdyaev’s perspective, is a classic Russian vision of the Russian soul, replete with its monist, universalist, transcendental, and messianic expanse. Berdyaev was himself typically Russian in his tendency towards transcendentalism and wholeness, preferred over the everyday mundanity of Western bourgeois life and understanding. Berdyaev’s very Russian transcendentalism, symbolized by and reflected in the strannik, is evidenced by his own belief in and aspiration to wholeness in its various forms as well as by his messianic hopes for Russia (see Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History and Politics).
Oddly enough Berdyaev did not view Russia’s main opponent in World War I, Germany, as having been soiled by its very bourgeois life and even denied it had a fundamentally materialist culture. German culture and messianism derived from a far deeper cause, its own peculiar idealism. German bourgeoisism, industrial-techological advancement were the consequence of the German spirit. “The German is a metaphysician” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Religiya Germanizma,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 195-204, especially p. 197). In contrast to Russian idealism’s humility, however, German culture, in Berdyaev’s view, is imbued with an egocentric nationalism and aspiration to instill rationality, organization, and order in the world. While Russian messianism and universalism accepted chaos as the nature of human history before salvation, German messianism and universalism pursued humankind’s salvation through the willful elimination of chaos, and only Germany, Germans thought, can accomplish this task (Berdyaev, “Religiya Germanizma,” pp. 195-204, especially p. 200). In this way, like Russian nationalism, German nationalism contained and indeed nurtured the germ of universalism, however different a species of universalism it might be, not to mention imperialism.
Despite its own sprituality, Germany had chosen the path of “prideful” nationalism and the machine in excess and thus was in conflict with Russia and potentially could be better opposed by the Slavic idea, Slavic unity, and Slavic messianism. In his earlier writings, which have been the focus herein so far, Berdyaev adhered to some pan-Slavist tendencies and even proposed Slavic unity and messianism as an antidote and counterforce against German militaristic messianism. For example, in his article, “The Slavic Idea” (“Slavyanskaya ideya”), he emphasized that two of the 19th century Slavophiles’ and pan-Slavists’ shortcomings was to ignore or underestimate as well as a failure to address divisions between the various Slavic peoples and to harbor an inappropriate disdain for Poland because of its Catholicism, leaving the “Slavic idea” in a “sad condition” (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 161-70, at pp. 162 and 163-5). Instead, Russia ought endeavor to unify the Slavs under the “Slavic idea” against the threatening danger of Germanism”, should emphasize ethnicity over religion in order to unify Slavdom, particularly its two greatest states, against Berlin (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 161 and 168). Indeed, Russia must, according to Berdyaev, “redeem its historical guilt” before the Polish people (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 165). “The idea of Slavic unification, first of all Russian-Polish unification, should not be external-political, utilitarian-statist” but rather “spiritual and focuses on internal life” in the Slavic world, which presumably means a concentration on overcoming religious schism, cultural differences, and historical grievances (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 170).
One cannot help but be struck by the analogous configuration of the contradiction and conflict between Berdyaev’s view of world affairs, World War I, the idealistic orgins of German militarism in the aspiration to organize and order humankind, and the Slavic idea he counterposed to German imperialism, on the one hand, and Russia’s perception of American hegemony, Washington’s rules-based new world order, and Russian neo-Eurasiainism and Sino-Russian-led, Greater Eurasian-centered alternative multi-civilizational model for the international system, on the other hand, reflected by BRICS+, the One Belt One Road Initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Indeed, Berdyaev perhaps presaged Eurasianism in writing that “Russia should be demonstrate types of eastern-western cultures and overcome the one-sidedness of Western European culture with its positivism and materialism and the self-satisfaction of limited horizons. … We should move out into the worldly expanse. And in this expanse the ancient wellsprings of culture should be visible. The East should become of equal value to the West again” (Berdyaev, “Slavyanskaya ideya,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 159).
Berdyaev’s endearment to the “Slavic idea” centered on a Russo-Polish rapprochement and alliance and his disdain for Germany’s imperialism and war machine suggest that similarly he would have rejected American positivism, materialism, and hegemony, NATO expansion, and its splintering of Slavic peoples away from Russia and if alive today would accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to block NATO expansion even at the cost of war in Ukraine. It is reasonable to conclude, in fact, that Berdyaev’s views of Ukraine, if held in comparably relative form today, might have facilitated not just his acceptance, nut perhaps even support for Russia’s ‘special military operation’ against Kiev.
Berdyaev, Ukraine, and Russia
As noted above, Berdyaev was born and lived his youth and young adult years in Ukraine, indeed even attending university in Kiev. So he could have succumbed to ideas of Ukrainian nationalism which intensified at the time or rejected them based on his essentially Russian ethnicity and identity as well as his later adult life’s deep imbeddedness in the life and culture of Russia in its imperial centers, St. Petersburg and Moscow. Initially, he dabbled in Marxism as much of his generation did but then turned to a religious idealism rooted in Russian Orthodoxy. The issue of Ukrainian nationalism and separatism was already a burning issue in the Russian Empire by World War I and was intentionally aggravated before and during by Vienna, and Berdyaev did not shy away from blaming St. Petersburg’s policy for damaging Russia’s prestige and strengthening separatism in Galicia (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Natsionalizm i Imperializm,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 132-40, at p. 139).
Berdyaev’s preference for and perhaps belief in Slavic unity would naturally have been predisposed him to oppose Ukrainian separatism. At the same time, in discussing the divisions in the Slavic world, he noted the tendency of ethnically close or related peoples to be less able to understand each other and so to more easily reject each other than peoples culturally and linguistically more distant from each other. (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Rossiya i polskaya dusha,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 187-95, at p. 188). This dynamic can be seen in stark relief nowhere better than in Russo-Ukrainian relations, though, to be sure, much of the antagonism has been seeded by Russia’s foes, seeking to sow separatism for centuries there—not to mention Poland’s and Austro-Hungaria’s own colonial relations with Ukraine. Therefore, Berdyaev was and would be today keenly attuned to the complexities of the Russian-Ukrainian relationship – compounded after his writing on the subject by the Soviet experience in a myriad of ways – and its role in fomenting the crisis that led to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war.
Consistent with his pan-Slavist idea, Berdyaev fully rejected in his time the idea of a separation of Russia and ‘Malorossiya’ (Little Russia) or Ukraine. In his 1918 article “Russia and Great Russia” Berdyaev denied both the Great Russians and “Little Russians” any status as separate nations or peoples. Just as there is no separate Ukrainian nationality, he aasserted, so too there is no separate Great Russian nationality; there is only a single, united Russian nation, with “tribal differences” between Russians and Ukrainians (N. A. Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” Nakanune, No. 3, April 1918 republished in A. Yu. Minakov, ed., Ukrainskii Vopros: V russkoi patritiocheskoi mysli (Moscow: Knizhnyi mir, 2016), pp. 413-19, at pp. 413-14.). In other words, he perceived solidarist tselostnost’ and supported solidarism of the Russian nation as a united ethno-cultural entity, noting its centuries’ long continuity until 1917. He did so in the unique way of denying the Great Russians any national status separate from its union with Ukraine and other traditional territories and even Russia’s colonized peoples. Berdyaev was prepared to sacrifice even the well-being of each of the eastern Slavic nations for the sake of a unified Russia. “A suffering, sick, misfit Russia would be better than well-off and self-satisfied states of Great Russia, Little Russia, Belorussia, and other regions, thinking themselves independent wholes” ( Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” p. 418). For him, “(i)t is not possible to think of Great Russia without the south and without its riches. And it is impossible not to see a terrible betrayal and terrible crime in the destruction of the entire cause of Russian history which carried out the idea of Russia” (Berdyaev, “Rossiya i Velikorossiya,” p. 419). Assuming Berdyaev would not have acquiesced to constructivist arguments regarding nations, his pan-Slavism would have inclined him to refuse to recognize the formation of a separate Ukrainian identity and the idea of a separate Ukrainian nation and state. Moreover, Berdyaev asserted that annexations can be historically useful and condemned Europe for failing to help the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and wrote of Russia’s historical “calling” in his discussion (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Dvizhenie i nepodvizhnost’ v zhizni narodov,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 227-33, at pp. 229-32). Given his pan-Slavism, one can suspect that he had in mind any future Russian attempt during the war to help Turkey’s Slavic Christian peoples breakaway from Constantinople. Although whether Berdyaev, if he was alive today, would have or would not have backed Russia’s ‘special military operation’ into Ukraine is a considerably different matter, by all appearances he could very well have accepted it and the annexations of Ukrainian territory both in 2014 and 2022.
Berdyaev on War
In numerous articles written during World War I and before the fall of the Romanov dynasty and Imperial regime, Berdyaev discussed nationalism, imperialism, universalism, messianism, the role of words in politics and society, war, and Russia’s relations to all these elements (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii). The theme of war was directly related to the time in which he was writing, during World War I, when Russia was in the midst of a mammoth struggle of competing imperialisms of which Russia’s was but one and hardly focused on Europe proper. Berdyaev’s monist tselostnost’ was reflected in his belief that war was a reflection not just of humankind’s inner, spiritual world but of the divine world (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-18). War is material reflection of spiritual world, a symptom of internal disease in humankind, a reflection not cause of evil. In this way, all were to blame and responsible for and participates one way or another in the ‘Great War’ (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-7, 210-11). But most of all, it seems, materialism in its most concentrated social form – bourgeois life and values – was responsible for the outbreak of WW I. Here, Berdyaev’s very typical Russian transcendentalism emerges to indict non-spiritual, bourgeoisie life, which, he argued, kills human spirituality (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 207).
But on the grander scale of things, war is inevitable, an integral part of tragic nature of human history, which Berdyaev emphasized in his monist philosophy of history and historicism (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 217). His religiosity availed him to parse differing attitudes towards war he perceived in Russians and perhaps others between materialists and positivists. Berdyaev asserted that materialists’ greater fear of death more contributed to their greater fear of war and therefore their pacifism. Consistent with his monism, Christians (such as he himself), he argued, see war more deeply as a symptomatic expression of “spiritual violence”, which all inflict on others (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 208). There is a “dark irrational source” in the depths of humankind from which comes “the deepest tragic contradictions.” Evil in humankind was gaining full reign in the absence or insufficient ubiquity of the Divine. Yet war is a mix of good and evil. In terms of the latter, it involved violence and death inflicted by man against man. A truly Christian war (and state) were impossible for Berdyaev. In terms of the good, war moved the tragedy of history forward towards its apocalyptic apotheosis of all humankind and the advent of the ultimate triumph of “Christ’s sword”, the Second Coming, and Heavenly Kingdom (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 209). Thus, Berdyaev’s views on war are based on his Christian philosophy of history and historicism intermixed with his Orthodox monism and universalism.
Later, Berdyaev would develop a sophisticated religious philosophy of history in which he elaborated on the connection between the worldly and spiritual worlds’ struggle between good and evil and its relationship to world history and its ultimate apocalyptic, yet Christian outcome with the second coming of Christ and the advent of the Heavenly Kingdom to the material world. Here was a mix of beliefs in monism and historical unity. A hint of his subsequently more deeply developed Christian eschatology and teleology of History’s ultimate outcome and the following salvation can be seen in a religiously and metaphysically philosophical passage on war:
The responsibilityof man (for the war) should be broadened and deepened. Truly, man is violent and a murderer more often than he suspects and than (others) suspect about him. It is impossible to see violence and murder only in war. All our earthly life rests on violence and murder. Even before the beginning of today’s world war we were violent and murdered in the very depths of life more than during the war. The war manifested on the material plane our old violence and murder, our hatred and antagonism. In the depths of life there is a dark, irrational wellspring. The most profound tragic contradictions are born from it. And humankind, not enlightened within itself divine light because of this dark ancient element, inevitably is passing through the baptismal horror and death of war. There is an inherent redemption of ancient guilt in war. There is something foolish in the abstract wishes of pacifism to avoid war, leaving humankind in its previous condition. This is the wish to remove responsibility from oneself. War is intrinsic punishment and intrinsic redemption. In war, hatred is remolded into love, and love into hatred. In war the furthest extremes touch, and the devilish dark intersects with divine light. War is the material manifestation of the ancient contradictions of being and the revelation of the life’s irrationality. Pacifism is the rationalistic negation of the irrational dark in life. And it is impossible to believe in an eternally rational world. It is not for nothing that Apocalypse prophecies about wars. And Christianity does not foresee a peaceful and painless end of world history. Below is reflected that which is above, and on earth it is at it is in Heaven. And above, in Heaven, God’s angels fight with Satan’s angels. In all spheres of the cosmos there is fiery and furious elements, and war is conducted. And on earth Christ brings not peace but the sword. The deep antinomy of Christianity is in this: Christianity cannot answer evil with evil, resist evil with violence, and Christianity is war, the division of the world and its outgrowth until the end of the redemption of the cross in dark and evil (Nikolai Berdyaev, “Mysli o prirode voiny,” in Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 205-13, at pp. 208-9).
The above exegesis is not only Berdyaev’s metaphysical analysis of the meaning of World War I and war in general. It is Berdyaev’s recommendation to Russians on how they should interpret the apocryphal events they were witnessing.
Indeed, Berdyaev argued that Russians’ failure to adopt such a religious-metaphysical attitude towards the war that recognizes the “(c)reative historical tasks” related to the war led to a need for self-justification for Russia’s involvement. Self-justification was achieved by placing themselves above the Germans, who were portrayed as morally inferior. Russia’s “hasty justifications for the war or, more precisely, our self-justifications came to one conclusion: we are better than the Germans, moral right is on our side, we are defending ourselves and others” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 220). He continued: “For some (Russians) the German people were acknowledged as the bearer of militarism and reaction, and that is why it is necessary to fight with them—it is a progressive cause. Even anarchists such as Kropotkin stood for this point of view. For many the German people seemed the bearer of the anti-Christian principles and a false spiritual culture, and that is why war with them is a holy war” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 221). Berdyaev would likely see this less the less than humble and sufficiently arrogant and self-righteous today in both the Western and much of Russia’s perceptions, proclamations, and propaganda surrounding the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war.
There was no shying away from criticism of Russians’ behavior at the outbreak of the war, on Berdyaev’s part. He castigated the bloodthirsty nationalism that swept through Russia at the time as it did throughout Europe: “The orgy of chemical instincts and the ugly profiting and speculation in the days of the great war and the great trials for Russia are ourgreat shame and a black stain on national life” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 99). He saw this as a consequence of Russia’s weak moral education, lack of a civil society and civic honesty and honor, and one alternative side of Russian smirenie: susceptibility to the “temptation of easy gains,” which he saw elevated by in Russia’s bourgeois-philistine layer” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, pp. 99-100). Thus, he today would be dismayed by similar war mongering and the like coming from the ultra-patriotic wing of Russia’s political spectrum as well as from more ‘bourgeios-philistine’ elements such as Russian Security Council Secretary, Chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission, and former Russian president Dmitrii Medvedev.
Finally, Berdyaev placed the war in another larger context of the struggle between peoples for a “dignified national existence” that was part of the development of the world’s historical tragedy in which no nation had a monopoly on morality in war. “Тhe historical struggle is a struggle for being and not for forthright justice, and it is implemented by the comprehensive spiritual forces of nations. (The historical struggle) is a struggle for national being and not a utilitarian struggle, and it is always a struggle for values, for creative strength and not for the elementary fact of life and not for simple interests. One can say that the struggle among nations for historical being has deep moral and religious meaing, and it is necessary for the higher goals of world process. But it is impossible to say that in this struggle one people wholly represents the good, and another people wholly represents evil. One people only can be more right than another relatively speaking. The struggle for historical existence of each people has an internal justification” (Berdyaev, Sud”ba Rossii, p. 223).
CONCLUSION
Berdyaev’s thought on Russia, Ukraine, and war are a clear function of his Russianness and Orthodoxy filtered through his own personal struggle to understand the visible and invisible world and cosmos around him. In Berdyaev’s Christian eschatology, teleology, and soteriology dictated an even-handed treatment of the relative good and evil of the world’s peoples in the making of humankind’s tragic history, which was to end in apocalypse ushering in Christ’s second coming and the Heavenly Kingdom. This even-handedness is reflected in Berdyaev’s harsh criticisms of Russia alongside his attribution of a special mission. It is also evident in Berdyaev’s refusal to support Russian chauvinist positions in relation to Ukraine as well as Poland and even Germany. Great and Little Russians are co-equals in the Russian nation, in Berdyaev’s view. Finally, all are responsible and participate in the human evils of hate, violence, and war through which humankind must suffer to attain a divinely determined, not any man-made worldly and metaphysically historical outcome on earth as in Heaven.
On May 15, 2024, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was evacuated by his bodyguards after suffering serious injuries.
As the European Union prepares to transform itself into a single state, its political evolution is taking an authoritarian step.
The election of MEPs and the President of the Commission is already a done deal
The election of MEPs promises to be deliberately confused. There are still no political parties at European level, despite the fact that they have been talked about for fifty years and enshrined in the treaties, but only European coalitions of national parties, which is not at all the same thing. These coalitions each present a Spitzenkandidat, literally a "head of list", who is not, however, a candidate for Parliament, nor does he or she appear on any of their national lists. Five of them will be debating their plans to preside over the European Commission in Eurovision. They are :
– Walter Baier, European Left ;
– Sandro Gozi, Renewing Europe Now;
– Ursula von der Leyen, European People’s Party;
– Terry Reintke, European Greens;
– Nicolas Schmit, Party of European Socialists.
The "Identity and Democracy" group was not invited to this show. This is because the five previous groups have a particular conception of democracy. They consider that Identity and Democracy doesn’t play the game they do, and therefore refuse to debate with it.
This debate will not take place in the studio, but in the hemicycle of the Parliament; a setting that imposes itself. The President of Parliament, Roberta Metsola, took advantage of the fact that the elected representatives were in the middle of an election campaign to grant the producers this set, without informing the parliamentarians. Many would have had their say.
It will take place in English. This is another of the Union’s subtleties: each member state has the right to request that all official documents be translated into a language of its choice. The Union therefore has 23 official languages for 27 member states, i.e. 552 possible language combinations. However, no state has requested that English be one of the languages of the Union. Malta, for example, which has made English one of its two official languages, has preferred Maltese to be used in Brussels. Yet, de facto, English has become the 24th language of the Union, and the only one common to all. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that the EU is not a European project, but an Anglo-Saxon one.
Incidentally, this strange debate is of little importance, since everyone knows that the Commission President will probably be chosen from outside this cenacle: it is likely to be banker Mario Draghi [1]. This is not impossible, since in 2019, Ursula von der Leyen did not take part in this debate and yet became President of the Commission.
Don’t get me wrong: Mario Draghi may be 76 years old, but he’s the former governor of the European Central Bank. In this role, he did everything to make the euro irreversible. He managed, "Whatever it takes", to save it from the sovereign debt crisis of the 2010s. It hasn’t solved any problems, and has exacerbated the gulf separating the economies of the member states. From the point of view of the member states, he’s an incompetent, but not from that of the investment bankers, a caste that has always been his (he was Goldman Sachs’ number 2 for Europe).
Confirmation of the Belgian (Brussels), German (Mönchengladbach) and European corruption investigations into Ursula von der Leyen leaves no room for doubt [2]. The institutions urgently need to get rid of her. Similarly, parliamentarians caught red-handed have been discreetly sidelined, including Vice-President Eva Kaili. The impression must be given that the Union’s administration is honest and at the service of its "citizens" (sic); an impression, because in reality, there are neither European people nor citizens, as evidenced by the absence of European parties.
The EU’s choices are already made
The Union, which is a political structure that goes far beyond the original "common market", faces a number of external challenges:
It has signed several free-trade agreements with states or blocs that do not respect its internal rules. The balance of competition, which was established via a complex system of subsidies, is therefore no longer assured, given that there is no comparable financial system on a global scale [3].
Instead of linking the fact of trading with a third party to its compliance with the Union’s internal rules, it has linked it to its respect for human rights. Yet two of the EU’s trading partners are posing very serious problems, without the EU reacting.
– For 76 years, Israel has not complied with any of the United Nations resolutions concerning it. Moreover, it has just begun an ethnic cleansing of Palestine, massacring some 50,000 civilians and wounding around 100,000 others.
– Ukraine, whose constitution is explicitly racist, has carried out two successive coups d’état (2004 and 2014). It has since elected a president, but his term of office ends today, May 21, 2024. No elections have been called and eleven opposition political parties have been banned.
In recent weeks, the EU has not moved one iota in the face of the free trade agreements it has signed in violation of its internal rules. In its view, all we have to do is wait for the problem to disappear: within a few years, the affected agricultural sectors will have disappeared.
On the other hand, the EU has announced its support for a solution for Palestine, while continuing its aid to Volodymyr Zelensky’s undemocratic regime.
– On the first point, the EU seems eager to recognize Palestine as a full member of the United Nations. It points out that it does not support the plan of the UN’s special envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte (assassinated in 1949), but refers to the plan of the Colonial Commission chaired by William Peel: there should be two separate states, and certainly not a bi-national state where Jews and Arabs would have equal rights.
– With regard to Ukraine, the EU persists in ignoring the Minsk agreements, endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2202, and the responsibility to protect that derives from them. Not only does it fail to congratulate Russia on ending the massacre of Russian speakers in the Donbass region, but it persists in accusing it of invading its neighbour.
When it comes to defense and foreign policy, the EU’s positions are exactly those of the G7, in which it participates. There is not a single case in which it differs from them, or even simply expresses a nuance. The EU is therefore building up an arms manufacturing industry and coordinating each country so that it continuously supplies the Kiev government. Until 2022 (the Russian army’s special operation in Ukraine), the EU had no involvement in defense issues. Indeed, the European Treaties stipulate that this is not its responsibility. The defense of the Union’s territory does not depend on its member states, but on NATO, whether or not they are members.
However, on a permanent basis, the Atlantic Alliance defined interoperability standards between its members, which it passed on to the European Commission, which in turn had them adopted by the European Parliament. These were then transcribed into national law by each of the 27 member states. These standards ranged from the composition of chocolate (there’s a chocolate bar in the rations of Alliance soldiers) to the width of main roads (so that US tanks could use them).
The Commission had no difficulty in taking up arms issues. It had already done so for drugs during the Covid epidemic. It’s worth noting that the generalization of these drugs has not proved its usefulness in the face of Covid-19. But that’s not the point. This was not a devastating epidemic, but a pretext for a mobilization exercise in which each power showed what it could achieve. From this point of view, the Commission proved that it could take on an issue that was not within its remit, and that it could even conclude gigantic contracts on behalf of its members without revealing the secrets of its negotiations.
When the EU becomes a single state, the Commission should demonstrate the same dexterity and more, since its action will no longer be hampered by the 27 member states. They will have disappeared. After the merger, banker Mario Draghi is expected to achieve "economies of scale". For example, there’s no need to waste money on embassies for each member state, as a single network will suffice for the single state. While we’re at it, the privileges of some will be put at the service of all. For example, the French permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council will revert to the Union. Or the French atomic bomb will be handed over to the Union’s Defense Department. Neutral states, such as Austria, will have disappeared anyway.
What’s true in politics is also true in economics. Mario Draghi has long been advocating a reorganization of the EU economy along Soviet lines: each region with its own specificity. In fact, it was with this in mind that the EU concluded the free trade agreements to which I referred at the beginning of this article. While livestock farming will remain a particularity of Poland, the Netherlands has taken the lead by authoritatively putting its farmers out of work, and it won’t be long before France devotes its talents to other tasks.
Eliminating obstacles
The real obstacle to the creation of a single state can only come from those member states that refuse to disappear. It lies in the Council of Heads of State and Government.
Two diametrically opposed and irreconcilable points of view face each other. The two extremes are in the former Czechoslovakia: for just over a year now, the Czech Republic has been governed by General Petr Pavel, former Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee. His agenda is that of the G7 (affirmation of a world governed by rules [4], containment of Russia, support for Ukrainian fundamentalist nationalists, preparation for confrontation with China). Robert Fico, on the other hand, has governed Slovakia, for six months. The alliance on which he relies certainly includes a few nostalgic supporters of Father Jozef Tiso, who established a national Catholic regime under Nazi protection during the Second World War. More seriously, it is founded on supporters of independence from the USSR, who did not recognize themselves in the figure of Václav Havel, the CIA agent who took power during a colourful revolution, the "Velvet Revolution". A former Communist, Robert Fico distinguishes Russia from the USSR. He defends a world organized around International Law (and not G7 "rules"). He supported Security Council Resolution 2202 and consequently approved Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. He is the one and only EU leader to have held this position (Viktor Orbán’s Hungary avoids broaching the subject).
A few days ago, the problem was solved: on May 15, 2024, an individual fired five shots at him at point-blank range. Robert Fico was immediately evacuated (photo). He has already undergone two operations and his life is no longer in danger. The debate he was leading in the Council was interrupted. It is not expected to resume.
The history of the EU is already written. The wonderful thing about this project is that, as it unfolds, we discover why Brussels has imposed rules and facts that made no sense when they were first decided, but now make sense.
The grotesque Spitzenkandidaten debate, in English and in a grandiose setting, but with nothing at stake, will have played its role: occupying the crowds while the people who count decide their future in the shadows.
Footnotes
1) “Paris 2024 and Berlin 1936 in the service of an impossible imperial dream”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 30 April 2024.
2) “The Von Der Leyen case”, Voltaire Network, 5 April 2024.
3) “The European Union against farmers”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 27 February 2024.
4) “What international order?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 7 November 2023.
The conflict between Israel and Iran is distinct from that between the Arab population of Palestine and Jewish immigrants. Contrary to popular belief, the Persians have never been the enemy of the Jews. In fact, in ancient times, it was Cyrus the Great who enabled the Jews to escape from Babylon, where they had been held in slavery.
After the Second World War, when the United States seized the remnants of the British Empire, US President Dwight Eisenhower reorganized the Middle East. To dominate it, he appointed two regional powers to represent him: Iran and Israel. The two countries were both friends and rivals.
Eisenhower sent his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (brother of CIA Director Alan Dulles), to Syria to organize an Iranian-Syrian alliance to contain Israeli ambitions. A mutual defense treaty was signed between Damascus and Teheran on May 24, 1953. At the time, the Syrian president, General Adil Chicakli, was pro-British and anti-French. This treaty still exists today [1].
At the same time, the UK came into conflict with Shah Reza Pahlevi’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize oil production. With the help of the United States, London organized a coloured revolution ("Operation Ajax" [2]). MI6 and the CIA paid thousands of people to demonstrate and overthrow Mossadegh. Responding to the "call" of his people, the sovereign changed his Prime Minister to Nazi general Fazlollah Zahedi [3].
Cooperation between the Shah’s autocratic regime and Israel began in 1956 with the construction of the Elian-Ashkelon pipeline. Above all, in 1957, Mossad sent a team of "revisionist Zionists" [4], led by Yitzak Shamir, to set up the dreaded SAVAK political police [5].
In 1956, to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt wanted to nationalize, the declining colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France, enlisted the help of the colonial state of Israel. After this operation, the France of socialist Guy Mollet thanked Israel by secretly sharing its atomic research with it. This research continued unbeknownst to the United States.
However, when the U.S. became convinced that Tel Aviv was heading for the bomb, it made sure to give it to Iran too. In 1974, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing brought Iran into the Eurodif consortium. It undertook to supply it with enriched uranium and to train its scientists. Two years later, US President Gerald Ford authorized Iran to pursue its own bomb.
While the Western media had always portrayed the Shah of Iran as a sovereign who respected human rights, they began to prepare public opinion for the revolution when Imam Khomeini took refuge in Paris. On December 19, 1978, TF1 suddenly discovered the practice of torture by the SAVAK.
In 1978, the United States took a dim view of Shah Reza Pahlevi’s military ambitions, which threatened Israeli power, and decided to impose a new Prime Minister with a new policy. Zbigniew Brzeziński, President Jimmy Carter’s security advisor, decided to rely on the Shiite clergy, some of whose assets had just been nationalized by the Shah (the "White Revolution"). In his view, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, whose preaching was circulated on audiocassettes throughout the country, had the authority to become the monarch’s Prime Minister. Despite the opposition of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, he organized his exile to the Paris region, where he stayed for four months before being flown to Tehran by Air France on a special plane. The United States had persuaded the Shah that they were in control of the situation, and only intended to fight his opposition. They had even asked the Savak to assassinate the philosopher Ali Shariati (a personal friend of Frantz Fannon and Jean-Paul Sartre) in London, so that his ant colonialist ideas would not interfere with their scenario. The Shah had agreed to take a leave of absence while Washington sorted out the problem at home.
However, on the day of his return, February 1, 1979, a crowd of one million people acclaimed the Ayatollah. From the airport, he made his way to the cemetery where 800 Iranian victims of political repression had just been buried. To the astonishment of Westerners, he delivered a violently anti-imperialist speech. There was no longer any question of a revolution within the Persian Empire, but of the establishment of an Islamic Republic.
At the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, Ayatollah Khomeini apostrophized the army, calling on them to liberate the country from the Anglo-Saxons. The man the CIA took for a doddering preacher was in reality a tribune who inflamed the crowds and convinced everyone that they each could change the world.
Israel immediately seized the Iranian half of the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. A long dispute ensued, which was only secretly settled much later.
Khomeini questioned the recognition of Israel as a colonial state, had the premises of its embassy seized and handed them over to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 1985, Robert McFarlane, Security Advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, planned to deliver arms to Nicaragua’s counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, without the knowledge of Congress. To this end, he first approached Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The two men agreed that it was not possible to involve a revolutionary Arab state like Libya, but perhaps Iran. Through the intermediary of MP Hassan Rohani (future President of Iran), they contacted the President of the Iranian Assembly, the hodjatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani agreed to buy weapons to fight the Iraqi aggression, and to transfer some of them to the Contras. Thanks to this deal, Rafsanjani, already a large landowner, became the richest man in his country [6].
In 1988, Iraq used chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranian army and population. The result was a huge number of cripples. Even today, the threshold of tolerance to air pollution is very low in Iran. Often, the state issues an alert and the city of Teheran has to be evacuated for several days. I remember my friend, the great journalist Nader Talebzadeh, who, interviewing me on television, suddenly left the set, coughed up his lungs and was hospitalized. Responding to the suffering of his people, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini declared weapons of mass destruction in general to be contrary to his vision of Islam. Since then, Iran has ceased its nuclear, biological and chemical military research. This ethical decision made the war last a little longer.
In 1992, Hashemi Rafsanjani, now a professional arms dealer and President of Iran, organized secret exchanges with President Carlos Menem’s Argentina. Now publicly collaborating with the United States, he sent troops to fight under NATO orders in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also supplied Argentine arms to the Bosnians. Officially, he did not question Khomeini’s anti-colonialist vision of the world, but supported the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović. Israeli military personnel also took part in the operations.
The Iran-Argentina arms trade was interrupted by Israel, which organized the attack on its own embassy in Buenos-Aires (1992), followed by the attack on AMIA (1994) [7] and finally the assassination of Argentine President Carlos Menem’s son, Carlitos (1995) . [8].
In 2001, Washington abandoned its policy of balance in the Middle East. Gone were the ties between Israel and Iran (1953-79), Israel and Iraq (1979-91) and Israel and Saudi Arabia (1991-2001). The Pentagon intended to sow chaos throughout the "wider Middle East" (excluding Israel), i.e. from Afghanistan to Morocco [9]. Those who had chosen this new strategy had pulled out all the stops to impose it: the September 11th attacks.
In 2003, a former Guardian of the Revolution, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, became President of Iran. He reversed the policies of his predecessors and returned to the ideals of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini. He never ceased to clash with the religious authorities, and even with the Supreme Leader. He industrialized his country, built social housing and tried to help the Shiite populations of the Middle East to find their own independence. Questioning the unspoken alliance with Israel
in 2005, he explained that the State of Israel would disappear like Apartheid South Africa. Reuters falsified his words, crediting him with announcing the destruction of the Israeli people [10].
In 2006, he organized a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran. His aim was not to deny the truth, but on the contrary to show that the State of Israel was not reparation for Nazi crimes, but a British colonial project. Israel then asserted that it is anti-Semitic, which it absolutely is not.
At the same time, Israel launched a worldwide press campaign claiming that Iran had resumed its military nuclear program. This was based on the fact that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had launched a vast civilian nuclear program. Indeed, he intended to discover another way of producing energy, through nuclear fusion rather than fission as in atomic bombs. At the time, Iran was planning to help the Third World develop by escaping Western control of hydrocarbons. A very long battle in international institutions began for Iran [11].. In addition to Iran’s pseudo-military nuclear program, Israel began to denounce Iran’s pseudo-imperialism in Iraq.
The agreement concluded in secret on March 2, 2008 in Baghdad between Admiral William Fallon, Commander of U.S. Forces for the Middle East (CentCom), and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was broken by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The US military intended to pacify Iraq with Iran, not against it [12]. But Dick Cheney, who had been involved in the September 11th attacks, would not budge from the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine. That’s why he launched a colour revolution during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second election [13].
On September 23, 2010, at the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for an international inquiry into the attacks of September 11, 2001, causing panic in the White House.
The situation changed again in 2013. U.S. President Barack Obama wanted to put an end to the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, which would require decades and millions of deaths before there would be any hope of a return on investment. He therefore planned to renew ties with the Iranian personalities who took part in the Iran-Contra affair, in other words, with Hashemi Rafsanjani’s team.
He began secret contacts in Oman [14]. In the end, his interlocutors [15] promised to prevent Ahmaninedjad’s team from fielding a candidate in the next presidential election, so that Hassan Rohani could win. Simultaneously, in August, Barack Obama withdrew from Syria, where he claimed to have drawn a red line, leaving his French partner, François Hollande, alone with his warmongering.
As soon as he was elected, Hassan Rohani once again abandoned the ideals of Imam Rouhollah Khomeiny and began negotiating the sale of Iranian oil to the Europeans. Bribes were paid by Austria. On the other hand, the Islamic judiciary arrested and sentenced, one after the other, all the collaborators of former president Ahmadinejad. His vice-president, Hamid Beghaie, was arrested on a secret charge, tried behind closed doors and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment [16].
President Rohani’s cabinet then proposed the creation of a Shiite federation with the various Shiite communities in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in short, the restoration of the Persian Empire. At the same time, the 5+1 negotiations began in Geneva. Within a few days, an agreement was reached. A first document was presented on November 24, 2013. The Chinese and Russian ministers, Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov, declared that the agreement was easy to draft because all parties knew that Iran does not have, nor seek to have, an atomic bomb. A long year of silence followed, with the initial text not signed until July 14, 2015.
A little later, in 2016, Hassan Rohani concluded a discreet agreement with Israel to settle the Eifat-Ashkelon pipeline dispute. In 2018, the Knesset discreetly passed a law punishing any publication about the pipeline’s owners with 15 years’ imprisonment.
General Qassem Soleimani, symbol of Iran’s anti-imperialist revolution.
The new American president, Donald Trump, realized that he could not be cordial with his counterpart, Hassan Rohani. In the eyes of everyone, and especially the Iranians, their country is the unwavering enemy of the United States. So, on May 8, 2018, he tore up the nuclear agreement without warning. Washington and Tehran played this comedy as they did with Reagan and Rafsanjani: officially, they hate each other, in private, they do business. The Iranians, who continue to tighten their belts, discovered with amazement on social networks the incredible standard of living of their leaders and their families.
The two groups that have been at loggerheads for half a century in Iran - international businessmen and anti-imperialist fighters - are now crystallizing around President Hassan Rohani and General Qassem Soleimani. The latter promoted an alternative: the "Axis of Resistance". In the name of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, he armed and trained foreign Shiite groups, not to federate them, but to give them the means to achieve independence. From Ansar Allah (Yemen) to Hezbollah (Lebanon), each group would be responsible for itself, coordinating with others but refusing orders from Tehran. The men trained by Soleimani won victories against Daesh, against some of their own governments and against the West. He himself became the most popular man in the Middle East. Officially, he is not involved in politics, but his speeches inflame the Arab and Persian populations. If he stood for election, he would surely be elected president. The veterans of the Iran-Contra affair then decided to eliminate him. On January 3, 2020, he was assassinated at Baghdad airport by a US guided missile strike. President Donald Trump claimed responsibility for the operation, but the local consensus was that it had been conceived in Tel Aviv. The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raissi, could be elected without difficulty.
The Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus should not be interpreted as directed against President Ebrahim Raissi’s team, but against the Revolutionary Guards.
Although the massacres in Sudan and Congo are far more deadly than those in Palestine, it’s the latter that I’m going to talk about today. Indeed, this is the first time we’ve witnessed ethnic cleansing live on our cell phones. I’d like to come back to some information that I’ve already covered in various articles, but which some media obviously don’t want to include in their analyses. I would like to tell you that there is no community fatality: this conflict was not provoked by the people of Palestine, be they Jews, Christians or Muslims, but by outside powers who, for a century, have wanted them never to know peace.
Behind the screens, the Prince of Wales (protector of the Muslim Brotherhood) sees God and becomes King Charles III.
The British creation of Israel
To make myself clear, I’ll start by telling you about the United Kingdom. You attended the coronation of King Charles III. You’ll remember that, in the middle of the ceremony, he took off his rich clothes and dressed in linen. His pages set up screens to prevent the audience from being dazzled. When the screens were removed, he had become king. He was then presented with the symbols of his power, the sceptre and globe. What had happened in those few moments out of public view? The Prince of Wales had seen God, like Moses before the burning bush [1]. This explanation probably sounds far-fetched to you, and you wonder how his subjects could believe such a tall tale. In fact, since James VI in the 16th century, British sovereigns have declared themselves kings of Israel [2]. It was against his conception of divine right that Oliver Cromwell overthrew his son Charles and proclaimed the Commonwealth. However, the Lord Protector was equally enlightened, professing that all Jews should be regrouped in Palestine and Solomon’s Temple rebuilt there [3]. In the end, successive dynasties kept this myth alive. They adopted various rites and imposed others on their subjects, such as Jewish circumcision, which was performed in maternity wards on all newborn males in the Kingdom at birth, during the XIX century.
Two years before the Balfour Declaration (1917), which announced the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, a Jewish diplomat and future Foreign Minister, Lord Herbert Samuel, wrote a memorandum on the Future of Palestine (1915). In it, he argued for a Jewish state that would place the entire Diaspora at the service of the Empire. A little later, he specified that this new state should never be able to ensure its own security, so as to be eternally dependent on the English Crown. This is exactly what we are witnessing today. This is the fate that has cursed the people of Palestine.
Lord Arthur Balfour’s declaration was followed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points. In them, he describes the objectives achieved by his country during the First World War. Point 12 is strangely worded, but at the Paris Conference that drafted the Treaty of Versailles, he specified in writing what was to be understood: the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine (and Kurdistan in Turkey). The World War had brought about a rebalancing of forces, so that Washington was now working alongside London in the defense of common interests.
During the interwar period, Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine went smoothly. Arab landowners readily sold some of their land to Jews. However, as early as 1920, Arab terrorists began murdering Jews. Among the murderers was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who was sentenced by the British to 10 years in prison, but never executed. On the contrary, Lord Herbert Samuel (the man who had written that there should never be security in Palestine), who had become the British High Commissioner in Palestine, pardoned him and appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, ostensibly to maintain a balance between the two great local families.
Then came a Salafist (i.e. a Muslim wishing to live like the Prophet’s companions in the 7th century), Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had already organized a revolt against the French in Syria and became imam in Haifa. He decided to wage jihad, not against the British occupiers, but against Jewish immigrants. Various attacks and pogroms against Jews followed. To maintain civil peace, the British killed al-Qassam, after whom the current Hamas al-Qassam Brigades are named.
The death of al-Qassam had solved nothing. The British, true to their colonial technique of "divide and rule", have always developed with one hand what they fought with the other. In 1936, Lord Willam Peel, at the head of an official commission, assured us that peace could only be restored by separating the Arab and Jewish populations into two distinct states. This is what is known today as the "two-state solution".
During the Second World War, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem became an ally of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. In particular, he rallied the Muslims of the Balkans to join the SS and supported the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". For their part, the Jewish fascists (the "revisionist Zionists") of Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky fought alongside the Axis against the British. The Zionists, for their part, fought on the side of the Allies, while challenging the limits that the British theoretically imposed on Jewish immigration - only theoretically.
Fascist historian Benzion Netanyahu and his son, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Source: Prime Minister’s Office
They met in May 1942 at the Baltimore Hotel in New York, under the chairmanship of David Ben Gurion. They laid down the principles of the future State of Israel. Until now, we have been assured that Ben Gourion was a man of good will. However, he had been Jabotinsky’s companion during the inter-war years, and had spoken out in favor of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A book, released in Hebrew in Israel two weeks ago and published by a major publishing house, assures that he was kept abreast of the Hungarian Rezső Kasztner’s negotiations with Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann that lasted until the fall of the Reich. Kasztner claimed to buy the escape of a million Hungarian Jews. In reality, he saved only his family and friends. Above all, he extorted 8.5 million Swiss francs in gold (a colossal sum at the time) from wealthy Jewish families in Hungary, making them believe in a possible escape [4]. If the documents quoted in this book are accurate, David Ben Gurion would also be a swindler, having deceived his own people.
The United Nations proposed
• not to divide Palestine (not the "Peel two-state solution") ;
• to establish a republican, democratic and representative regime;
• to guarantee the cultures of the various minorities;
• guarantee religious freedom for Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Conferences and negotiations followed in vain. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly (which then comprised only 56 member states) approved the partition plan drawn up by a special commission [5]. It was immediately rejected by all Arab countries.
On May 14, 1948 (two and a half months before the end of the British mandate), David Ben Gurion cut short the discussions and unilaterally proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel. The day after the coup, as the 100,000 British troops began to withdraw, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Yemen sent their troops to defend the Arabs of Palestine. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also sent a group of fighters, under the command of Saïd Ramadan (son-in-law of founder Hassan el-Banna and father of Tariq Ramadan), to join them. At the time, however, none of these countries had an army worthy of the name. They were quickly defeated. The myth of the invincibility of Tsahal was born.
However, as my Lebanese friend Hassan Hamade told me, this narrative is a lie. In reality, the Arab heads of state were already committed to Israel, and the Jews were no more valiant than the Arabs.
In this way, Emir Majid Arslan, the Lebanese Minister of Defense, led his troops without encountering much resistance to Bethlehem, which he liberated. The Lebanese President, Bechara el-Khoury, immediately ordered him to abandon the battlefield, which he refused to do. He dismissed him, but he continued the war as a mere officer. In the end, his troops were not defeated by the Jews of Palestine, but by the "Jordanian" army commanded by a British general, John Bagot Glubb (known as "Glubb Pasha") and a hundred or so British officers. In reality, Jordan had no soldiers, but the Arab Legion, formed by the British during the Second World War, had changed its name to the "Jordanian Army" on the first day of the war, while retaining its British officers. It was the British and Jordanians who saved Israel from the start, just as they saved it again when Iran attacked last month. This war was not an attempt to crush Israel, but the first manifestation of Arab Zionism.
The United Nations, worried by these developments, dispatched a special envoy, the Swede Folke Bernadotte, to recuperate the situation after the Israeli coup and the Arab-Israeli war. As soon as he arrived, he realized that the Special Commission that had drawn up the partition plan was ignoring demographic realities: the Israelis were claiming a territory disproportionate to their numbers, and enjoying the support of Arab Zionist governments that had first pretended to play the role of good offices and then to wage war.
On September 17, 1948, "revisionist Zionists" (i.e. Jewish fascists) assassinated Folke Bernadotte and the head of the UN observers, French colonel André Serot. My maternal grandfather, Pierre Gaïsset, was in the next car. He was unharmed and replaced Colonel Serot in his duties. The assassin, Yehoshua Cohen, was never arrested. Two years later, he became the official bodyguard of Prime Minister David Ben Gourion. The leader of the "revisionist Zionists", Yitzhak Shamir, was immediately appointed head of a Mossad department. He carried out secret actions on behalf of the United Kingdom and the United States throughout the Cold War, from Guatemala to the Congo, and later became Prime Minister (1983-84 and 1986-92).
On November 29, 1948, the Ben-Gurion government, which claimed to be searching for the assassins of Folke Bernadotte and André Serot, submitted an application for membership of the United Nations, accompanied by a letter declaring "that the State of Israel hereby accepts, without any reservation whatsoever, the obligations arising from the Charter of the United Nations, and undertakes to observe them from the day it becomes a Member of the United Nations". Convinced, on May 11 1949, the United Nations General Assembly accepted [6]. Today, in view of Israel’s systematic failure to respect its commitments, several states are calling for its membership to be "suspended".
Operation "al-Aqsa Flood”
Let’s move on to the present day. On October 7, 2022, the Palestinian Resistance, on the initiative of Hamas, launched a vast operation against an Israeli military base and also against civilians. Under international law, the Arabs of Palestine are an "occupied population" within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions. However, they can only attack military targets, not Kibbutz or raves. The aim of the operation was to take military prisoners, and possibly civilian hostages too, in order to negotiate the release of Palestinian hostages in Israel, i.e. administrative prisoners. It is not known how many prisoners and hostages they have taken, let alone how many are civilians and how many are military personnel. According to Hamas, more than 30 officers are being held.
This operation, " al-Aqsa Flood”, has been prepared over the last three years in full view of everyone [7]. Hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were dug using tunnel-boring machines, which could only enter Gaza with the approval of Israeli customs. At least 1 million cubic meters of earth and rubble had to be evacuated under the eyes of the Israeli security services. Several training camps were built and hang-glider training was carried out. Not only did the Israeli intelligence services observe all this, but so did other powers such as Egypt and the USA. Numerous reports were sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet he did not react. Worse still, he dismissed his Defense Minister, General Yoav Galland, in August 2023, because Galland complained about this lack of reaction in the cabinet. However, given the public reaction to this dismissal, he preferred to reinstate him rather than have to explain the reason.
Israel accused the journalist who published the photographs of October 7, long before the security services intervened, of being a member of Hamas.
The various Palestinian factions (Islamic Jihad, PFLP and National Initiative) were awakened by Hamas at 4.30 a.m. to take part in an operation starting at 6.30 a.m. (i.e. before sunrise). It began with the destruction of all the robots monitoring the Separation Wall. So, from 6.30 am, the alarm was sounded. By 8:00, news agencies around the world were broadcasting images of the attack [8]. However, the Israeli security forces did not intervene until 9.45 am.
From the outset of their intervention, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) applied the "Hannibal directive"; an instruction that orders one to kill one’s own soldiers rather than see them taken prisoner by the adversary. The Israeli government’s casualty figures do not distinguish between attackers and defenders. Similarly, the Israeli government has reported exactions that fighters do not normally have time to perpetrate during a surprise attack. The Mauritian Pramila Patten, UN Special Rapporteur on sexual violence, interviewed victims and witnesses of Operation Flood of al-Aqsa. She concluded that some sexual exactions may have been committed, but that the most serious accusations (notably the castration of soldiers) were not credible [9]. Reports of the beheading of babies were withdrawn after an investigation by Al-Jazeera.
For the moment, the Israeli opposition refuses to address the question of the Prime Minister’s possible role in the organization of this operation. But it must be asked: Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of the fascist Benzion Netanyahu, private secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky (Benito Mussolini’s ally, who died at the start of the Second World War). He has always expressed his admiration for both men.
Benjamin Netanyahu has always supported Hamas as a tactical ally in the fight against Yasser Arafat’s Fateh. However, until 2017, Hamas referred to itself as the "Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood". This organization was restructured in 1949 by the British secret services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [10]. In 1950, it became part of the Anglo-Saxon Cold War apparatus. That’s when Sayyed Qutob, the jihad theorist, became its star. Admittedly, in 2017, Gazans who wanted to defend their country joined it, but they demanded that Hamas break with the Muslim Brotherhood and the British. In the end, the two currents coexisted [11]. On October 19, 2022, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received Khalil Hayya, leader of Hamas’s revolutionary current. But he refused to receive Ismaël Haniyeh and Khaled Mechaal, leaders of the Hamas Brotherhood [12]. From an Arab point of view, then, there is not one Hamas, but two. Indeed, throughout the Syrian war, Hamas fought alongside al-Nosra (the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), the IDF and Nato Special Forces, against the Syrian Arab Republic. On December 9, 2012, Hamas elements came to the Damascus suburb of Yarmouk to assassinate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Front (PFLP), including a friend of mine [13].
Not only is it wrong to attribute the October 7 attack to Hamas alone, but it is also wrong to ignore the fact that there are two Hamas. These lies make it possible to present the "Deluge of al-Aqsa" operation as a vast anti-Semitic pogrom, in the words of President Emmanuel Macron, when in fact it was an act of Resistance, as pointed out by Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The massacre of Gazans with the Anglo-Saxons
We have witnessed the massacre of 35,000 people, the disappearance under the rubble of 13,000 others, and the serious physical injuries of a further 120,000. Anyone with human feelings can only be horrified. This has nothing to do with the identity of the victims; it’s just a question of humanity.
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is just a police operation to arrest the assailants of October 7, but everyone has understood that there is no connection between this attack and the current Israeli operation. It’s all about making life unbearable for the Gazans until they leave of their own accord. This was the program of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his secretary, Benzion Netanyahu. It had been validated by the Nazi negotiator and founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.
Throughout the massacre, and even today, the Anglo-Saxons provide Israel with weapons to carry it out.
However, just as demonstrations against the bloodshed have begun in American universities and are spreading across the country and then to France, the Biden Administration has considered dismissing Benjamin Netanyahu in favour of General Benny Gantz. Admittedly, the decision is not legally his to make, but Washington has a long history of coups d’état and color revolutions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken therefore invited him to "discuss the situation". Benny Gantz accepted, while arranging a meeting with the Sunak Administration during his return trip. But things didn’t go well [14]: Benny Gantz understood perfectly well that Washington was asking him to stop the massacre, which he approved of, but he insisted on informing his interlocutors of his desire to protect his country by destroying Hamas. His interlocutors were taken aback and realized that he was not "a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch", in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They immediately notified the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When Benny Gantz arrived in London to meet the Special Security Advisor, Sunak invited himself to their meeting. He tried to explain to a bewildered Benny Gantz that the Hamas "sons of bitches" should not be touched, because some of them are "our sons of bitches". So the Anglo-Saxons didn’t overthrow Benjamin Netanyahu.
The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has come to tell Benny Gantz not to touch our Hamas.
Seen from London and Washington, the massacres of civilians are deplorable, but are merely adjustment variables. As it stands, Israel is an indispensable state. If it were to be pacified and become normal, it would no longer serve any purpose. Like the Republic of Corsairs in the 18th century, Israel enables the most extensive money-laundering operations and serves as a haven for some of the world’s greatest criminals.
An official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) told me that he was a waiter in the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. One day, he witnessed the arrival of a group of diamond dealers, who had arrived without passing through customs and were being escorted by the military. These men and a few customers exchanged diamonds and cash, then left incognito. This kind of deal could not take place in any other state.
“Have you no sense of decency?”
The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence.
I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed.
The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.
The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.
The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots”) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators.
This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.
Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.
Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.
By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.
The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.
The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.
The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.
I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by [God of the Bible](http://1 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=syPELLKpABI 2 https://stefanik.house.gov/2024/4/icymi-stefanik-secures-columbia-university-president-s-commitment-to-remove-antisemitic-professor-from-leadership-role 3 Nicholas Fandos, Stephanie Saul and Sharon Otterman, “Columbia’s President Tells Congress That Action Is Needed Against Antisemitism,” The New York Times, April 17, 2024., and “Columbia President Grilled During Congressional Hearing on Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal, April 18, 2024. https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/370521/columbia-president-grilled-during-congressional-hearing-on-campus-antisemitism/#:~:text=Columbia%20President%20Grilled%20During%20Congressional%20Hearing%20on%20Campus%20Antisemitism 4 Miranda Nazzaro. “Netanyahu condemns ‘antisemitic mobs’ on US college campuses,” The Hill, April 24, 2024.)?”
Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.
Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.
President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.
Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?
Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.
What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?
Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.
Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”
The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welch replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.
The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”
That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.
During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”
Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.
Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.
The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist
A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.
After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle.
Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.
But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.
The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”
This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”
Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for
Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.
What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.
It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.
This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.
What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”
Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”
Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.
Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.
The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, where House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.
Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionist. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.
What CAN the students at Columbia ask for:
Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.
What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.
They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.
They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.
They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.
But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.
The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”
Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay
According to the Book of Judges, Samson is a Jew consecrated to God. He has vowed never to cut his hair and has fabulous strength. However, his mistress, Delilah, cuts off his braids while he sleeps, depriving him of God’s help and strength. He was taken prisoner by the Philistines, who gouged out his eyes and threw him into prison in Gaza. During a sacrifice to their god, when his hair had begun to grow back, he was placed between two columns in the palace. With his bare hands, he pushed them apart, causing the palace to collapse. He committed suicide, killing several thousand Philistines in the process.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have led several leading politicians to compare the current period with the 1930s, and to raise the possibility of a World War. Are these fears justified, or are they just fear-mongering?
To answer this question, we’re going to summarize events that are unknown to everyone, though well known to specialists. We shall do so dispassionately, at the risk of appearing indifferent to these horrors.
First, let’s distinguish between the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They have only two things in common:
- They represent no significant stakes in themselves, but a defeat for the West, which, after its defeat in Syria, would mark the end of its hegemony over the world.
- They are fueled by a fascist ideology, that of Dmytro Dontsov’s Ukrainian "integral nationalists" [1] and that of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Israeli "revisionist Zionists" [2]; two groups that have been allies since 1917, but went underground during the Cold War and are unknown to the general public today.
There is, however, one notable difference between them:
The same fury is visible on both battlefields, but the "integral nationalists" sacrifice their own fellow citizens (there are hardly any able-bodied men under thirty left in the Ukraine), while the "revisionist Zionists" sacrifice people who are foreign to them, Arab civilians.
Is there a risk that these wars will become more widespread?
This is the will of both groups. The "integral nationalists" are constantly attacking Russia inside its territory and in Sudan, while the "revisionist Zionists" are bombing Lebanon, Syria and Iran (more precisely, Iranian territory in Syria, since the Damascus consulate is extra-territorialized). But no one responds: not Russia, Egypt or the Emirates in the first case, nor Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army or the Revolutionary Guards in the second.
All of them, including Russia, anxious to avoid a brutal retaliation from the "collective West" that would lead to a World War, prefer to take the blows and accept their deaths.
If war were to become widespread, it would no longer be simply conventional, but above all nuclear.
While we all know each other’s conventional capabilities, we are largely unaware of each other’s nuclear capabilities. The most we know is that only the USA used strategic nuclear bombs during the Second World War, and that Russia claims to have hypersonic nuclear launchers with which no other power can compete. However, some Western experts question the reality of these prodigious technical advances. Behind the scenes, what is the strategy of the nuclear powers?
In addition to the five permanent members of the Security Council, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel have strategic atomic bombs. All except Israel see them as a means of deterrence.
The Western media also present Iran as a nuclear power, which Russia and China officially deny.
During the Yemen war, Saudi Arabia bought tactical nuclear bombs from Israel and used them, but it does not seem to have them permanently at its disposal, nor to have mastered the technique.
Only Russia regularly conducts Nuclear War exercises. During last October’s exercises, Russia admitted to losing a third of its population in the space of a few hours, then simulated combat and emerged victorious.
Ultimately, all the nuclear powers have no intention of firing first, as this would undoubtedly lead to their destruction. The exception is Israel, which seems to have adopted the "Sanson doctrine" ("Let me die with the Philistines"). It would thus be the only power to imagine the ultimate sacrifice, the "Twilight of the Gods", dear to the Nazis.
Two critical works have been devoted to the Israeli military atom: The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Seymour M. Hersh (Random House, 1991) and Israel and the Bomb by Avner Cohen (Columbia University Press, 1998).
The military atom was never envisaged as a classic form of deterrence, but as an assurance that Israel would not hesitate to commit suicide to kill its enemies rather than be defeated. This is the Masada complex [3]. This way of thinking is in line with the "Hannibal Directive", according to which the IDF must kill its own soldiers rather than let them become prisoners of the enemy [4].
During the Six-Day War, the Israeli Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Levi Eshkol, ordered one of the two bombs Israel had at its disposal at the time to be prepared and detonated near an Egyptian military base on Mount Sinai. This plan was not carried out, as the IDF quickly won the conventional war. Had it gone ahead, the fallout would have killed not only Egyptians, but Israelis too [5].
During the October 1973 war (known in the West as the "Yom Kippur War"), the Defense Minister, the Ukrainian-born Israeli Moshe Dayan, and the Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Golda Meir, again considered the use of 13 atomic bombs [6].
Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations on the front page of the Sunday Times.
In 1986, a nuclear technician from the Dimona power plant, the Moroccan Mordechai Vanunu, revealed Israel’s secret military nuclear program to the Sunday Times [7]. He was kidnapped by Mossad in Rome, on the orders of the Israeli Prime Minister and father of the atomic bomb, Shimon Peres of Belarus. He was tried in camera and sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of which were spent in total isolation. He was again sentenced to 6 months’ imprisonment for daring to speak to the Voltaire Network.
In 2009, Martin van Creveld, Israel’s chief strategist, declared: "We have several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can reach our targets in all directions, even Rome. Most European capitals are potential targets for our air force (...) The Palestinians must all be expelled. The people fighting for this goal are simply waiting for "the right person at the right time" to come along. Only two years ago, 7 or 8% of Israelis thought this would be the best solution, two months ago it was 33%, and now, according to a Gallup Poll, the figure is 44% in favor.
So it’s reasonable to assume that no nuclear power, except Israel, will dare commit the irreparable.
This is precisely what Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit/Jewish Force) envisaged on Radio Kol Berama on November 5. Referring to atomic weapons against Gaza, he declared: "It’s a solution... it’s an option". He then compared the residents of the Gaza Strip to "Nazis", assuring that "there are no non-combatants in Gaza" and that this territory does not deserve humanitarian aid. "There are no uninvolved people in Gaza".
These remarks provoked indignation in the West. Only Moscow was surprised that the International Atomic Energy Agency did not take up the matter [8].
It is very likely that this is the reason why Washington continues to arm Israel, even though it is calling for an immediate ceasefire: if the United States no longer supplies Tel Aviv with weapons to massacre the Gazans, the latter could use nuclear weapons against all the peoples of the region, including the Israelis.
In Ukraine, the "integral nationalists" planned to blackmail the United States with the same argument: the threat of nuclear or, failing that, biological weapons [9]. In 1994, Ukraine, which had a vast stockpile of Soviet atomic bombs, signed the Budapest Memorandum. The United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the transfer of all its nuclear weapons to Russia and signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). However, after the overthrow of elected president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 (EuroMaidan), the "integral nationalists" worked to re-nuclearize the country, which they saw as essential to eradicating Russia from the face of the earth.
On February 19, 2022, Ukrainian President Voloymyr Zelensky announced at the annual Munich Security Conference that he would challenge the Budapest Memorandum in order to rearm his country with nuclear weapons. Five days later, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched its special operation against the Kiev government to implement Resolution 2202. Its top priority was to seize Ukraine’s secret and illegal reserves of enriched uranium. After eight days of fighting, the civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporijjia was occupied by the Russian army.
Laurence Norman, the Wall Street Journal’s special envoy to the Davos forum on the Iranian nuclear issue, reported Rafael Grossi’s statement on the Ukrainian nuclear issue on Twitter, but did not publish an article on the subject. The information was confirmed by another journalist, this time from the New York Times, also on Twitter.
According to Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who spoke three months later on May 25 at the Davos Forum, Ukraine had secretly stored 30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of uranium at Zaporijjia. At market prices, this stockpile was worth at least $150 billion. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared: "The only thing [Ukraine] lacks is a uranium enrichment system. But that’s a technical question, and for Ukraine it’s not an insoluble problem". However, his army had already removed a large part of this stock from the plant. Fighting continued for months. If the integral nationalists had still had them, they would have done what the "revisionist Zionists" are doing today: they would have demanded more and more weapons and, if refused, threatened to use them, i.e. to launch Armageddon.
Back to today’s battlefields. What are we seeing? In Ukraine and Palestine, the West continues to provide the "integral nationalists" and, to a lesser extent, the "revisionist Zionists" with an impressive arsenal. However, they have no reasonable hope of getting the Russians to back down, or of massacring all the Gazans. At worst, they can lead their allies to empty their arsenals, sacrifice all Ukrainians of fighting age and diplomatically isolate the puppet-state of Israel. As Moshe Dayan once said, "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to control".
Let’s imagine that these apparently catastrophic consequences are in fact their goal.
The world would then be divided in two, as it was during the Cold War, except that Israel would have become uninviting. In the West, the Anglo-Saxons would still be the masters, especially as they would be the only ones with weapons, their allies having exhausted theirs in Ukraine. Israel, isolated as it was in the late 70s and early 80s when it was only really recognized by the apartheid regime of South Africa, would still be fulfilling the mission it was originally entrusted with: to mobilize the Jewish diaspora in the service of the Empire, fearing a new wave of anti-Semitism.
This bleak vision is the only one that can keep the Anglo-Saxons from collapsing, and ensure that they will always have vassals, even if this will bear little relation to their power in the days of the "global world". This is why they have placed themselves in the current inextricable situation. The "integral nationalists" and "revisionist Zionists" are blackmailing them, but they intend to manipulate them to divide the world in two and preserve what they can of their supremacy.
The Industrial Revolution in North-Western Europe, studied in innumerable papers and books, happened largely “endogenously” by building upon the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, putting science to direct economic use and creating new technologies. The Industrial Revolution in one corner of the world had been however accompanied, or perhaps even accelerated, by the four “bad” developments elsewhere.
The first was colonization of many non-European parts of the world. European nations imposed political control over most of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and employed it to exploit natural resources and cheap (or forced) domestic labor. This is the so-called “unrequited transfers” whose extent is widely debated although there is no doubt that it was substantial. Angus Maddison puts it, from India to the UK, and from Java to the Netherlands, between 1 and 10 percent of the colonies’ GDP per year. Utsa Patnaik thinks that it was much larger and that it contributed significantly to the British take-off by funding up to 1/3 of funds used for investment.
The second “bad” was trans-Atlantic slavery that added to the profits of those who controlled the trade (mostly merchants in Europe and the US), and those who used the transported slaves in plantations in Barbados, Haiti, Southern United States, Brazil etc. This was clearly another huge “unrequited” transfer of value.
The third “bad”, as argued by Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison among others, was that Northern countries discouraged technological advances elsewhere by imposing rules favoring themselves (bans on production of processed goods, Acts of Navigation, monopsony power, control of internal trade and national finances etc.). They are summarized in the term “colonial contract” coined by Paul Bairoch. Countries as diverse as India, China, Egypt and Madagascar come under this heading. “Deindustrialization and the fact that profits from exports have probably been appropriated by the foreign intermediaries have caused a catastrophic decline in the standard of living of the Indian masses.” (Paul Bairoch, De Jericho à Mexico , p. 514)
These “bads” have been, and continue to be, debated and while learning about each of them is to be encouraged, they do not have direct political or financial consequences on today’s world. The ideas, floated from time to time, for monetary compensation for such ills are far-fetched and unrealizable. Nor is there any ability to clearly identify the “culprits” and the “victims”.
However this is not the case with the fourth “bad”, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus climate change, which is largely the product of industrial development. The fourth “bad” is today’s problem. It is not a simple past injustice that can be studied and debated, but regarding which nothing else can be done. The reason is that fresh industrial production continues to add to the problem of climate change. To the extent that the former Third World nations are now in the process of catching up with the “old” rich world, it is the fast-industrializing countries in Asia, as well as those who have recently discovered large deposits of oil (like Guyana), who may be significantly adding to the stock of CO2. Certainly, much more than they have done in the past. China, for example, is today the largest emitter of CO2. (It is not at all obvious that countries should be the main “parties” to this problem because it is the rich people who are the most important emitters. This is an issue I discussed here , and that for now, I leave out.)
If newly developing countries are then held responsible for their share of annual emissions (that is, for their share in the annual “flow” of emissions) as if the responsibility for the previous “stock” of emissions does not matter, this would slow the growth of the new industrializing countries and impose unjust costs on them. The emissions that exist are a “stock” problem. It is because in the past, the world, i.e. the currently rich countries, have made so many emissions that we face the problem today. In other words, climate change cannot be treated as a “flow” problem alone, and not even primarily so.
This holds especially true for countries that are poor today and that have not contributed to the emissions in the past. Shaming them means slowing their growth and undermining poverty reduction in the world. A poor country that is emitting 100 units of CO2 this year cannot be treated as a rich country that is emitting 100 units of CO2 this year. The rich country is more responsible because of its past emissions. (Whether the net accumulated stock of its emissions is directly proportional to its today’s GDP I do not know—but that it is positively correlated is acknowledged by all.) Thus, by any concept of fairness, the rich country would either have to commit to much lower absolute annual emissions than a poor country (which by itself would reduce income of the rich country) or to compensate poor country for all the income that it would have made through oil production or industrial output that it forgoes in order to reduce emissions.
Rich countries would either have to emit (on per capita basis) much less than poor or developing countries –ideally, in proportion to which they are responsible for the “stock” of emissions—or to compensate poor countries for any loss of income that comes from voluntary reduction of production.
This means that rich countries must either reduce their income levels, or transfer significant resources to the developing countries. Neither is politically feasible. The first scenario would imply GDP per capita reductions of a third or more. No political party in the West can win votes by suggesting income declines that exceed several times those experienced during the 2007-08 recession. The second scenario is likewise unlikely since it would involve open-ended transfers of billions if not trillions of dollars.
As rich countries cannot do either of these two things, and wish to maintain some moral high ground by speaking about the problem, we are treated to the spectacles like the recent interview on BBC where the President of Guyana was lectured about the possibility of Guyana emitting millions of tons of CO2 into atmosphere if its new oil deposits are exploited. Before the recent discovery of oil, Guyana’s per capita GDP was some $6,000 or in PPP terms about $12,000; the first number is one-eighth of that for the United Kingdom, the second, a fourth. Guyana’s life expectancy is 10 years less than that of the UK and the average number of years of schooling 8.5 vs. 12.9 in the UK .
The conclusion is thus: if rich countries are unwilling to do anything meaningful to address climate change and their responsibility for it, they should not use moral grand-standing to stop others from developing. Otherwise, one’s seeming concern with the “world” is just a way to shift the conversation and to maintain many people in abject poverty. It is logically impossible to (a) hold moral high ground, (b) to do nothing in response to past responsibilities; and (c) to claim to be in favor of global poverty reduction.
A comment on this article:
Since developmentalism is rooted in equality, justice and independence, the US painted it as the first step towards godless communism, forever tarnishing it in Americans minds. Then, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched the war on development by appointing the Dulles brothers – who had represented the Cuban Sugar Cane Co. and United Fruit Co. – as Secretary of State and CIA Director. When Iran elected a fervent developmentalist President, Mohammad Mossadegh, the Dulles brothers set out to destroy him and his country, a project that remains a White House priority.
Ike’s anti-development policy was called Capitalist Modernization Theory: Western societies are inherently progressive in ways older civilizations can never be, and the wealth they generate is distributed unevenly because some people work harder than others. But the only road to economic evolution and social modernization leads through free trade, individual effort and capitalism, and those who stray from the path will be destroyed.
So thorough was the anti-developmentalist campaign that the US carried its attack to the UN, where it blocked all resolutions recognizing food, shelter and national development as human rights. Learning of this a horrified Harold Pinter wrote, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. "U.S. foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.” – Nobel Prize lecture, 1958.
The latest judgment by the High Court in the Assange case achieved completely the objectives of the UK and US states. Above all, Julian remains in the hell which is Belmarsh maximum security prison. He is now safely there alone and incommunicado, from the authorities’ point of view, for at least several more months.
Importantly, the United States has managed to keep him detained without securing his actual appearance in Washington. It is crucial to grasp that the CIA, who are very much controlling the process, do not actually want him to appear there until after their attempt to secure the re-election of Genocide Joe. No matter what your opinion of Donald Trump, there is no doubt the CIA conspired against him during his entire Presidency, beginning with the fake Russiagate scandal and ending with their cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. They do not want Trump back.
Biden is politically in deep trouble. Biden’s lifelong political support for Israel has been unwavering to the point of fanaticism. In the process he has collected millions of dollars from the Zionist lobby. That always seemed a source of political strength in the United States, not of weakness.
The current genocide in Gaza has changed all those calculations. The sheer evil and viciousness of the Israeli state, the open and undisguised enthusiasm for racist massacre, has achieved the seemingly impossible task of turning much American public opinion against Israel.
That is particularly true among key elements of the Democratic base. Young people and ethnic minorities have been shocked that the party they have supported is backing and supplying genocide. The mainstream media have lost control of the narrative, when the truth is so widely available on mobile phones, to the point that the MSM have actually been forced to change course and occasionally tell truths about Israel. That also was unthinkable a few months ago.
Precisely the same groups who are outraged by Biden’s support for genocide are going to be alienated by the attack on a journalist and publisher for revealing true facts about war crimes. Assange is not currently a major public issue in the United States, because he is not currently in the United States. Were he to arrive there in chains, the media coverage would be massive and the issue unavoidable in the presidential election campaign.
The extradition proceeding has therefore had to be managed in such a way as to keep Assange locked in a living hell the whole time, without actually achieving the extradition until after the presidential election in November. As the years of hearings have rolled by this has become increasingly difficult for the British state to finesse on behalf of their American masters.
In this respect, and only in this respect, Dame Victoria Sharp and Lord Justice Johnson have done brilliantly in their judgment.
Senior British judges do not have to be told what to do. They are closely integrated into a small political establishment that is socially interlinked, defined by membership of institutions, and highly subject to groupthink.
Dame Victoria Sharp’s brother Richard arranged an £800,000 personal loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and subsequently became chairman of the BBC despite a complete lack of relevant experience. Lord Justice Johnson as a lawyer represented the intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence.
They did not have to be told what to do in this case explicitly, although it was very plain that they entered the two-day hearing process knowing nothing except a briefing they had been given that the crux of the case was the revelation of names of US informants in the Wikileaks material.
The potential danger of an appeal, the granting of which would achieve the United States’ objective of putting the actual extradition back beyond the election date, was that it would allow the airing in public of a great catalogue of war crimes and other illegal activity which had been exposed by Wikileaks.
Sharp and Johnson have obviated this danger by adjourning the decision with the possibility of granting an appeal, but only on extremely limited grounds. Those grounds would explicitly gag the defence from ever mentioning again in court inconvenient facts, such as United States war crimes including murder, torture and extraordinary rendition, as well as the plans by the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.
All of those things are precluded by this judgment from ever being raised again in the extradition hearings. The politically damaging aspect of the case in terms of the Manning revelations and CIA behaviour has been cauterised in the UK.
There has been some confusion because the judgment stated that three grounds of possible appeal were open. But in fact this was really only two. The judgment states that freedom of expression under article 10 of the European Convention is adequately covered by the First Amendment protections of the US Constitution. Therefore this point can only be argued by the defence against extradition if the First Amendment will not be applied in the case.
The second ground of appeal which they stated may be allowed was discrimination by nationality, in that the prosecution has stated that as a foreign citizen who committed the alleged acts whilst outside of the United States, Julian may not have the protection of the First Amendment or indeed of any of the rights enshrined in the US Constitution.
So the first two grounds are in fact identical. Sharp and Johnson ruled that both would fall if an assurance were received from the government of the United States that Julian would not be denied a First Amendment defence on grounds of nationality.
The other ground on which an appeal may be allowed to go forward is the lack of an assurance from the United States that, following additional charges, Julian may not become subject to the death penalty.
I shall go on to analyse what happens now and the chances of success on any of these allowed appeal points, but I wish first to revisit the points which have not been allowed and which are now barred from ever being raised in these proceedings again.
The most spectacular argument in the judgment, and one which I trust will become notorious in British legal history, refers to the application to bring in new evidence regarding the US authorities’ illegal spying on Julian and plotting to kidnap or assassinate him.
There are any number of things in this case over five years which are so perverse that they have to be witnessed to be believed, but none has risen to this height and it would be a struggle for anybody to come up with anything in British legal history more brazen than this.
Judge Johnson and Judge Sharp accept that there is evidence to the required standard that the US authorities did plot to kidnap and consider assassinating Julian Assange, but they reason at para. 210 that, as extradition is now going to be granted, there is no longer any need for the United States to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange: and therefore the argument falls.
It does not seem to occur to them that a willingness to consider extrajudicial violent action against Julian Assange amounts to a degree of persecution which obviously reflects on his chances of a fair trial and treatment in the United States. It is simply astonishing, but the evidence of the US plot to destroy Julian Assange, including evidence from the ongoing criminal investigation in Spain into the private security company involved, will never again be allowed to be mentioned in Julian’s case against extradition.
Similarly, we are at the end of the line for arguing that the treaty under which Julian is being extradited forbids extradition for political offences. The judgment confirms boldly that treaty obligations entered into by the United Kingdom are not binding in domestic law and confer no individual rights.
Of over 150 extradition treaties entered into by the United Kingdom, all but two ban extradition for political offences. The judgment is absolutely clear that those clauses are redundant in every single one of those treaties.
Every dictatorship on Earth can now come after political dissidents in the UK and they will not have the protection of those clauses against political extradition in the treaties. That is absolutely plain on the face of this ruling.
The judgment also specifically rejects the idea that the UK court has to consider rights under the European Convention of Human Rights in considering an extradition application. They state that in the United States—as in other Category 2 countries in terms of the Extradition Act 2003—those rights can be presumed to be protected at trial by the legislation of the country seeking extradition.
That argument abdicating responsibility for application of the ECHR is one that is not likely to be accepted if this case ever gets to Strasbourg (but see below on the possibility of that happening).
By refusing to hear the freedom of expression argument, the court is ruling out listening to the war crimes exposed by the material published and hearing that the publication of state level crime is protected speech. That entire argument is now blocked off in future hearings and there will be no more mention of US war crimes.
The judges accept—hook, line and sinker—the tendentious argument that Julian is not being charged with the publication of all of the material but only with those documents within the material which reveal the name of US informants and sources. As I reported at the time, this was plainly the one “fact” with which the judges had been briefed before the hearing.
That it is a legitimate exercise to remove entirely from consideration the context of the totality of what was revealed in terms of state crimes, and to cherry pick a tiny portion of the release, is by no means clear; but their approach is in any event fatally flawed by a complete non sequitur:
At para. 45 they argue that none of the material revealing criminal behaviour by the United States is being charged, only material which reveals names. Their argument depends upon an assumption that the material revealing names of informants or sources does not also reveal any criminal behaviour by the United States. That assumption is completely and demonstrably false.
Let us now turn to the grounds on which a right to appeal is provisionally allowed, but may be cancelled in the event of sufficient diplomatic assurances being received from the United States.
To start with the death penalty, which has understandably drawn the most headlines: it astonishes me, as this argument has been in play now for several months, that the United States has not provided the simple assurance against imposition of the death penalty which is absolutely bog standard in many extradition proceedings.
There is no controversy about it, and it is really quick and easy to do. It is a template: you just fill in the details and whiz off the diplomatic note. It takes 5 minutes.
I do not believe the Biden administration is failing to provide the assurance against the death penalty because they wish to execute Julian Assange. They do not need to execute him. They can entomb him in a tiny concrete cell, living a totally solitary existence in a living hell. Arguably, he is of more value alive that way as a terrible warning to other journalists, rather than an executed martyr.
I view the failure so far to produce a guarantee against the death penalty as the clearest evidence that the Biden administration is trying simply to kick this back past the election. By not providing the assurance, already they have achieved a delay of another few weeks which they have been given to provide the assurance, and then further time until the hearing on 20 May to discuss whether assurances produced have been adequate. Not giving the death penalty assurance is simply a stalling tactic, and I am sure they will go right up to the deadline given by the court and then provide it.
The second assurance requested by the court is actually much more interesting. They have requested an assurance that Julian Assange will be able to plead a First Amendment defence on freedom of expression and will not be prevented from doing so on the grounds of his Australian nationality.
The problem which the United States faces is that it is the federal judge who will decide whether or not Julian is entitled to plead that his freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. Neither the Department of Justice nor the State Department can bind the judge by an assurance.
The problem was flagged up by the US prosecutor in this case who stated that it is open to the prosecution to argue that a foreign national, operating abroad as Julian did, does not have First Amendment rights. It is extremely important to understand why this was said.
The prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are deemed not to have any constitutional rights, despite being under the power of the US authorities, because they were non-US citizens acting abroad.
A key US Supreme Court judgment in the case of USAID versus Open Society stated unequivocally that non-US citizens acting abroad do not have First Amendment protection. At first sight that decision appears to have little relevance. It concerns foreign charities in receipt of US aid funds which, as a condition of aid, they must oppose sex work. They attempted to claim this was in breach of First Amendment rights but the Supreme Court ruled that, as foreigners acting abroad, they did not have any such rights.
While that may appear of limited relevance, referring to NGOs not individuals, there is a paragraph in the Open Society judgment which states as a rationale that were First Amendment rights to be granted to those NGOs they would also have to be granted to foreigners with whom the US military and intelligence services were in contact – i.e. the Guantanamo problem.
This paragraph of the Supreme Court ruling appears inescapable in the Assange case:
Julian was a foreign national operating abroad when the Wikileaks material was published. So I do not see how the United States can simply give an assurance on this point, and indeed it seems to me very likely that Julian would indeed be denied First Amendment rights at trial in the United States.
The sensible solution would of course be that as a non-US citizen publishing material outside the United States, Julian should not be subject to US jurisdiction at all. But that will not be adopted.
So I anticipate the United States will produce an assurance which tries to fudge this. They will probably give an assurance that the prosecutor will not attempt to argue that Julian has no First Amendment rights. But that cannot prevent the judge from ruling that he does not, especially as there is a Supreme Court judgement to rely on.
In May when we come to the hearing on the permitted points of appeal, it is vital to understand that there will be two parts to the argument. The first part will be to consider whether the assurances received by diplomatic note from the United States are sufficient for the grounds of appeal to fall completely.
However if it is decided that the assurances from the United States are insufficient, that does not automatically mean that the appeal succeeds. It just means that the appeal is heard. The court will then decide whether the death penalty or nationality discrimination points are strong enough to stop the extradition.
The absence of the death penalty assurance should end the extradition process. But the hearing would see the prosecution argue that it is not necessary, as there are no capital charges currently and none are likely to be added. The judges could go with this, given the undisguised bias towards the United States throughout.
The state will again kick in with its iron resolve to crush Julian. I don’t think that the United States will be able, for the reasons I have given, to provide assurances on the nationality and First Amendment rights, but I think the court will nonetheless order extradition.
The United States will argue that it is a free country with a fair trial system and independent judges and that Julian will be allowed to make the argument in court that he should have First Amendment rights. The UK court should accept that the US judge will come to a fair decision which protects all human rights considerations. They will say that it is perfectly reasonable and normal for states to treat citizens and foreign nationals abroad in different ways in different contexts, including consular protection.
A justice system which is capable of ruling that a person should be handed over to his attempted kidnapper, because then the kidnapper does not have to kidnap him, and ruling that the clauses of the very treaty under which somebody is being extradited do not apply, is capable of accepting that the ability to argue in court for a First Amendment defence is sufficient, even if that defence is likely to be denied.
There is, however, plenty of meat in those questions that would allow another adjourned hearing, another long delay for a judgment and plenty of leeway to get past the November election for Genocide Joe.
The British establishment continues to move inexorably towards ordering Julian’s extradition at the time of its choosing. Once extradition is ordered, Julian in theory has an opportunity to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
The European Court of Human Rights can delay the extradition until it hears the case by a section 39 order. But there are two flaws: firstly the extradition may be carried out immediately upon the court judgement before a section 39 order can be obtained, which would take at least 48 hours. Secondly the Rwanda Safety Act has provision, though specifically in the Rwanda context, for the government to ignore section 39 orders from the ECHR.
It cannot be ruled out that the British government would simply extradite Julian even in the face of an ECHR hearing. That would be popular with the Conservative base and, given Starmer’s extremely extensive and dubious role in the Assange saga while Director of Public Prosecutions, I certainly do not put it past him either. It is worth noting that there have been several occasions in recent years when the Home Office has deported people despite British court orders putting a stay on the deportation. There has never been any consequence other than a verbal rap on the knuckles for the Secretary of State from the court.
So the struggle goes on. It is a fight for freedom of speech, it is a fight for freedom of the press, and above all it is a fight for the right of you and me to know the crimes that our governments commit, in our name and with our money.
I am ever more struck by the fact that in fighting for Julian I am fighting exactly the same power structures and adversaries who are behind the genocide in Gaza.
I need to close with an appeal. Please do not stop reading. You will recall that I recently addressed the UN Human Rights Committee on Julian’s case and in doing so had the opportunity to state a few hard truths about the war crimes of the United States.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/video.mp4
My opportunity to do so was organised by the Swiss NGO Justice For All International, who submitted a shadow report (open link and click on red icon) by their lawyers to the UN 7 year Periodic Review of the UK’s human rights record. Justice For All also carried out a great deal of lobbying activity in connection with this to get me onto that stage and into meetings with key officials.
I had agreed a fee to pay Justice For All for this legal and lobbying activity, in the expectation that it would be met from the substantial funds held by the bodies comprising the US/European institutions of Julian Assange campaign.
Unfortunately the Assange campaign has refused to meet the bill and I have been left holding it.
I have been told that I failed to follow correct procedures to apply for the spending. I am frankly in shock and a form of grief, because I thought we were friends working for a common cause, in my own case for free. I am reminded of the brilliant perception of Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement and becomes a business”.
I am left with this bill I cannot pay for the work at the UN. Justice For All could not have been nicer about the situation, but if you could contribute to this Justice For All crowdfunder, I should be very grateful.
Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
In just thirteen minutes, four Kalashnikov rifles, knives, and plastic bottles of gasoline, discharged by four men, were not enough to kill and injure so many people as have been accounted for to date in the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow.
More than half those examined so far in post-mortems “died as a result of the fire from exposure to high temperature and combustion products”, according to Alexander Bastrykin, the chief investigator in his public report to President Vladimir Putin on Monday night. Post-mortems have yet to be reported for one-third of the 139 dead counted by Bastrykin; no analysis of the cause of injuries to 182 of the surviving casualties has been reported yet; 93 of them remain in hospital.
Bastrykin also reported “two AK-74 assault rifles, over 500 rounds of ammunition, 28 magazines with ammunition, and bottles with remaining gasoline were found and seized at the scene.” A NATO military expert explains: “They didn’t strike me as well-trained, so they lost time changing magazines and their fire wasn’t all that accurate. These data tell me the majority of victims died from some other cause than gunshot.”
Yevgeny Krutikov, a writer with military intelligence sources, reported in Vzglyad: “It can be assumed that the weapons were stored in the terrorists’ cache for a long time and not too carefully – the machine guns sparkled during the shooting. This indicates damage to the barrel or breech (dirt got inside the barrel).”
Recruitment of the shooters; pre-placement of weapons and ammunition; accommodation and advance payment to the gunmen; purchase of the car they used; communications and coordination; exit undetected in the crowds escaping the building; and the escape route to the Ukraine border through Bryansk region – the evidence of these details prepared over weeks and months indicate a much larger organization than the four shooters formed with seven others already arrested and under interrogation.
What they know and will tell is likely to reveal a sophisticated command-and-control system which knew how vulnerable the target was, how to maximize the killing in the shortest possible duration, and at the same time allow escape for the attackers – which is almost unprecedented in the recent history of mass terrorist attacks in Russia. .
That’s to say, the command knew — the shooters and their accomplices didn’t. There was advance reconnoiter of the Crocus City Hall so that the shooters knew the route they followed inside the building and then out under cover of fire and smoke, which erupted faster than they were able to shoot almost half of their ammunition which they left behind.
Did the command also know that Crocus City Hall and the surrounding mall were operating without adequate fire alarms, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, sprinklers, and emergency ventilation, none of which has been reported by eyewitnesses? Was the building targeted because the command knew it was constructed without fire-resistant structural supports, allowing ceilings and roof to cave in, choking or crushing those beneath to death?
“Most of the victims in Crocus died not at the hands of terrorists, but from the criminal negligence of the owners and regulatory authorities,” reported Mikhail Delyagin, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, on Sunday evening. “It is known that many people suffocated with carbon monoxide inside the building. There are already more victims of this kind than those killed by terrorist shooting. Nothing like this could happen in a certified building built according to modern standards for such objects. Why? Because all such buildings are equipped with an automatic ventilation system. These are windows or hatches that fire off automatically if the detector detects an increased level of carbon monoxide inside. Holes open in the roof – and the life-threatening gas goes into the sky. This system works, by the way, without electricity, on compressed air.”
“The way the Crocus burned down shows that cheap Chinese materials (glass wool, plastics, cable braid, etc.) were used in its decoration, which are prohibited for use in public buildings. The reason for the ban? Combustibility. In Europe, non-burning glass wool, plastics, etc. have been used for a long time. They are, of course, twice or three times more expensive than the Chinese equivalent. But they have one advantage: they do not burn in case of fire. And they don’t kill those who are inside.”
Delyagin has publicly accused Aras Agalarov, the wealthy founder of the Crocus shopping and development group, and his son Emin of failing “to formally commission this particular concert hall. As it became known, it is not listed as a properly designed capital construction object on the cadastral map of the Federal Register. Apparently, the amount of bribes needed to receive such a dangerous object exceeded all reasonable limits, and for Agalarov, taking into account the above-mentioned monstrous violations of standards, it was cheaper to extend the status of a building under construction than to put it into operation.”
Bastrykin has announced “the investigation is checking the possibility of violation of safety requirements and the fire extinguishing system in the Crocus City Hall concert hall. For this purpose, remote controls, electronic components and control devices for the fire protection system of the concert hall were seized. They are aimed at researching and extracting information about the operating mode of fire safety systems at the time of the terrorist attack. The contents of the fire protection system server are being studied with the participation of experts. To establish the operability and timely operation of all fire safety systems, a fire technical examination has been appointed.”
Emin Agalarov has issued a press statement claiming he arrived shortly after the gunmen had left. He said he “entered the building 40 minutes after the first shots were fired. He noted that the fire safety system was working and the doors were unlocked…The sprinkler fire extinguishing system was also operating normally. The building collapsed only six hours after the start of the terrible fire. Some rooms remained intact and did not burn down.”
“If we focus too hard on the minute details which are being patched together, this might clear up some details of assault,” comments a retired senior intelligence source in a position to know, “we might learn something more but not the fundamentals. These [the four shooters] are no ISIS-K. . The harder New York Times, BBC and The Guardian try to prove they are, the less we have to believe it. They are no jihadists. Just murderers. Mercenaries brought in a month ago.
They are not suicide killers. There are no reports of this ISIS outfit operating away from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Certainly not in Tajikistan. However there are mercenaries at a dime a dozen there who have fought all over. Including in ISIS.”
“At Ukraine entry, they would certainly have been killed, removing all the evidence. The investigation will show they were hired, paid for. A Tajikistan blogger news service reported raids in [Tajik] villages, but then removed it. I am sure their families and friends will be picked up and all connections to jihadists or contractors will be established. They are not migrants, do not speak Russian, and thus cannot claim any ethnic discrimination vendetta [against Russians].”
President Putin claimed in his meeting with the security services on Monday: “We know that the crime was perpetrated by radical Islamists. The Islamic world itself has been fighting this ideology for centuries. But we are also seeing how the United States is using different channels to try and convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to its intelligence, there is supposedly no sign of Kiev’s involvement in the Moscow terrorist attack, that the deadly terrorist attack was perpetrated by followers of Islam, members of ISIS, an organisation banned in Russia. We know whose hands were used to commit this atrocity against Russia and its people. We want to know who ordered it.”
What Putin meant by “radical Islamists” is unclear; the public evidence of the four individuals who have been charged has yet to confirm a record of their religiosity or any ideological conviction.
The officials at the Kremlin meeting on Monday: Prosecutor-General Igor Krasnov, Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Anton Vaino, First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Kiriyenko, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, Presidential aide Maxim Oreshkin, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Emergencies Minister Alexander Kurenkov, Minister of Labour and Social Protection Anton Kotyakov, Healthcare Minister Mikhail Murashko, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Director of the Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov, Commander of the National Guard Troops Viktor Zolotov, Chairman of the Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin, Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobiev, and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Source: [http://en.kremlin.ru/](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73732)
For the time being, the only evidence connecting the four shooters to the Ukraine is the direction they were taking when their vehicle was stopped by the security forces. In a shootout the car overturned, and three of the gunmen fled into the forest beside the road, leaving one man injured in the car.
The head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, is the source for press reporting on the site of the interception. That was on Highway E101 about seven kilometres south of the P-120 intersection east of Bryansk city. From Bastrykin’s report, and from an award ceremony in Bryansk on Monday for the forces who made the capture – Federal Security Service (FSB), Interior Ministry, National Guard, and border forces of the Defense Ministry — the getaway was being tracked for some time before it reached the P-120 intersection. At that point, if the four men planned to head for Belarus, they would have turned right, followed the south circular road around Bryansk, and then turned left on to the A-240 towards the Belarus border, about 100 kms to the southwest.
Instead, the men drove due south and on the highway near Khatsun, they were about 100 kms from the Ukraine border. There have been reports they were expecting to make a rendezvous with accomplices they believed would guide them to safety over the Ukraine border, and to payday. Or, as Moscow sources speculate, to their execution by the Ukrainians.
Above: [Google map of the roads and villages](https://t.me/voenacher/63117), including Khatsun, east of Bryansk city. Below: the view in daylight of the point on Highway E-101 where the gunmen were intercepted about five minutes after they passed the Belarus turnoff, confirming to the security forces tracking the car that they were heading to the Ukraine.
Speculation, however, including analysis of the cui bono, who gains type, the sequence of statements from Washington, and the history of association between the US, British and Ukrainian secret services and Tajik mercenaries, creates a balance of probabilities, but not an explanation beyond reasonable doubt.
“Of course, we must also answer the question of why the terrorists, after committing their crime, attempted to flee specifically to Ukraine,” the president said at his meeting with security officials on Monday. “Who was waiting for them there? It is clear that those supporting the Kiev regime do not wish to be implicated in acts of terrorism and be seen as sponsors of terrorism. But there are indeed numerous questions.”
Public comments to reporters on Tuesday by the FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov and Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev have answered with emphasis on the Ukrainians, backed by the US and UK.
Source: [https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin](https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin) March 26 – 15:34.
Boris Rozhin (Colonel Cassad) has followed their remarks with a detailed statement of the history of the intelligence service operations before the Crocus attack, and a circumstantial detail of Ukrainian border drone operations in the area and on the night the getaway car was headed through Bryansk region. Click to read – March 26, Min 22: 23.
What is evident so far, including from the line of Tajik accomplices now making formal appearances in a Moscow court, is the absence of ideology or religiosity of the radical Islamic type; and ignorance of where their orders and money were coming from, and why. This non-evidence points to the Ukraine as strongly as the road the four shooters were taking when they were caught.
Their subsequent demeanour in brief videoclips after capture, in hospital, and in court confirms what the military blogger Boris Rozhin calls “dumb hysteria…behaviour [that is] typical in a situation where the actions of terrorists do not have a deep ideological basis. This is the case of the Crocus gunmen, where the sole motivation is only money. Already in the moment of flight, the criminals realized what they had committed and, since the terrorist attack was not supported by ideology, the militants were seized with animal fear for their own lives. Therefore, during the interrogation, they are ready to tell everything, cry and so on, just to stay alive.”
The Russian intelligence agency investigations now under way, according to Krutikov, are tracing the “Telegram accounts through which the terrorists received instructions, including during their departure from the crime scene. Most likely, it is this branch which directly links the investigation with the Ukrainian direction due to the indication of a specific square at the border crossing.”
The public recriminations against the Agalarov family are not supported by Alexander Kurenkov, the Emergencies Minister, who told the Kremlin meeting on Monday in a brief, ambiguous report: “The building was equipped with an automatic fire alarm system. This system responded to the fire as expected. There was also a set of four robotized fire-fighting hoses and a software control system, which worked in conjunction with other fire protection systems. They were activated during the terrorist attack, but the arson involved the use of flammable substances. According to experts, the system failed to extinguish the fire due to its wide spread. This is what I wanted to say. We managed to totally extinguish the fire on wall panels, given the materials they were made of, only at 6.40 pm today [March 25]. The search and rescue operations continue. They are expected to be completed by 5 pm tomorrow [March 26]. This concludes my report.”
An Emergencies Ministry (MChS) expert has released data indicating the fire covered 12,900 square metres and more than 900 cubic metres of collapsed structures were removed. In the videoclip the roofless exterior wall can be seen, and the destruction of the inner auditorium.
Source: [https://www.kommersant.ru](https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6594893?from=top_main_1)
A local fire brigade source comments: “this was a Category-5 fire — Class 5 is an extreme fire hazard — and the services did an extraordinarily professional job to contain and extinguish a fire of such intensity.” He said the roof “may have collapsed between 2:30 am and 3:30 am.” This corroborates Emin Agalarov’s report of the timing.
The fire expert explained: “If lots of fuel was spilled in the auditorium among the chairs with synthetic fabric and plastic elements, then even low-inflammable things could start burning. They are resistant to high temperatures, but not to extremely high ones. In this case the sprinkler system can be useless.”
The Moscow region governor, Andrei Vorobiev (Vorobyov), was at the site half an hour after the gang had left. “An operational headquarters has been established. All the details will come later.” At 10:39 on Saturday evening [March 23] he reported by video that the roof was still ablaze and that firefighters were pouring water on it from extension ladders.
Governor Vorobiev is at lower left. Source: [https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6164](https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6164)
Six hours later, at 04:43, Vorobiev posted a new video clip from inside the building in which he confirmed with firemen that the roof had fallen in. “The collapse of structures continues now,” Vorobiev reported. “There are still some pockets of fire, but most of the fire has been eliminated. Rescuers were able to enter the auditorium, where the temperature had been high for a long time and where, apparently, the epicentre of the fire was. The roof over the auditorium has collapsed, and the debris is still being dismantled.”
Source: [https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6170](https://t.me/vorobiev_live/6170)
Delyagin was asked to say if he wished to correct his initial report and modify his allegations against the Agalarovs; he has not answered.
The political repercussions of the attack have been amplified in the Moscow media. But at a meeting of the Prosecutor-General’s Office Board on Tuesday, Putin played down his claim about “radical Islamists” of the day before. “As you know,” he said, “the perpetrators responsible for this mass murder have been arrested, and our law enforcement agencies are diligently investigating the circumstances surrounding this barbaric crime. They are piecing together the details of the attack, determining the roles and culpability of each individual involved, and analyzing the findings provided by criminalists and experts. The Federal Security Service [FSB], alongside other intelligence services, is actively addressing pertinent issues in coordination with the National Anti-Terrorism Committee.”
The president added: “I trust that the prosecutors, within the scope of their authority, will ensure that justice is served when charging the accused and during the legal proceedings.” This appears to be a response to western media reports that the four gunmen were beaten up and tortured after their capture.
Prosecutor-General Igor Krasnov said to Putin: “These atrocities have a common goal – to intimidate people, to destroy the unity of our people. Their performers, customers and curators will inevitably be punished. That is why the most important task for Russia remains to achieve the goals of a special military operation.” Putin had said the same thing the day before: “Their goal, as I mentioned, is to sow panic in our society while demonstrating to their own people that not all hope is lost for the Kiev regime. All they need to do is follow the orders of their Western patrons, fight until the last Ukrainian, obey Washington’s commands, endorse the new mobilization law, and form something resembling a new version of the Hitler Youth. To comply with all of this, they will seek new weapons and additional funds, much of which will likely be embezzled and, as is customary in Ukraine today, put into their own pockets.”
As more time has elapsed and the interrogations of the attack group have produced no new official evidence, the Russian media have been publishing angry calls to restrict migration into Russia, both legal and illegal; attacks on ethnic communities like the Tajiks; and on the corruption of Russian officials providing them with entry, residence, and work permits. The Kremlin has responded with a brief communiqué of a telephone call between Putin and the Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon: “During the conversation, Vladimir Putin and Emomali Rahmon noted that the security services of Russia and Tajikistan were working closely together to counter terrorism and that they would build up their cooperation.”
Konstantin Malofeev (Malofeyev), owner of the Tsargrad media group in Moscow, has published several policy calls under the slogan, “the internal threat has turned out to be no less serious than the external one”. “There should be no xenophobia towards Ukrainians, Jews, and Muslims,” according to Malofeev. “We are a multinational country. That’s the only reason she became an Empire. Because she is not only strong, but also kind. And xenophobia is the lot of the weak. The strong are not afraid. But a competent migration policy, of course, must be carried out. There should be no migration enclaves. There should be no diasporas which try to replace the government, whom the government consults and fears. Members of these diasporas should not be above the law. If they come to Russia, then the main thing for them should be the law.”
“Imagine what three million ‘hardworking’ migrants would do in Moscow, for example, if they all came out at once… It’s not a bell anymore – it’s a bell ringing, a rumble. It’s time to take up migration legislation. Only in this case will we be able to protect ourselves. Fortunately, I have evidence that the people in power who are responsible for migration have heard this ringing. I hope this will affect our streets and our safety. I hope that we will no longer have to catch Tajiks a hundred kilometres from the Ukrainian border who cannot speak Russian, but at the same time live freely in Russia.”
Home page of _Tsargrad_ illustrated with a collage of armed Tajik fighters appearing to pose in front of the Kremlin; Konstantin Malofeev is pictured at upper [right](https://tsargrad.tv/articles/vsegda-ulybalis-terroristy-iz-krokusa-okazalis-ne-prosto-migrantami-ubivali-uzhe-sograzhdan_977563). For more on how Malofeev made his first fortune, click to read [this](https://johnhelmer.net/the-window-of-opportunity-vtb-accuses-itself-of-ripoff-and-is-told-by-the-uk-courts-to-take-its-case-to-the-russian-prosecutor/) and the [archive](https://johnhelmer.net/?s=malofeev).
Putin responded swiftly in his speech to prosecutors on Tuesday; the State Duma followed. “[Prosecutors should] consider implementing a system of additional preventive and anti-crime measures,” the president said, “including supervision of compliance with migration legislation. The situation in this area, which is very important and of great concern to millions of people, must be closely monitored.” The same day, Vyacheslav Volodin, the Duma Speaker, told a parliamentary session that he is appointing a multi-party working group “that will analyze the entire range of legislation that is relevant to the challenges of today, and legislation in the field of migration.”
Pro-US reporters in Moscow reverse the direction of the crackdown Malofeev and his supporters advocate. “Russians will likely face the security crackdown that, ironically [sic], they have largely avoided over two years of war in Ukraine. That would mean a further tightening of the screws on speech and make it much harder to use public transportation or gather in large groups. Communities of migrant workers will likely face a real crackdown… the tactics once adopted to deal with terrorists became quickly accepted as a new norm to treat political dissent. Thus the torture the Russian security services used against four suspects might be used against all sort of people in the country. This is the most direct consequence of the attack.”
Malofeev and the Tsargrad group are not alone in saying the Crocus City Hall attack should lead to intensification of the military operations in the Ukraine. “They struck at us, at our civilians” Malofeev has written, “in the very center of our Homeland. This is an act of war. It needs to be answered as we have said many times. It must finally be answered with the massive real use of weapons that will allow us to win this war. We must give the civilian population [in the Ukraine] 48 hours to leave the cities and then strike with all our might. Then the war will end quickly, which means that the sponsorship of terrorist attacks will stop. No Americans and British, without the Armed Forces of Ukraine, without Kiev, without the current war, will sponsor terrorist attacks on the territory of Russia.”
For the time being, there has been no impact of the Crocus attack and the Moscow media debate on the operational or strategic plans under way in the Ukraine. The intensification of the General Staff’s offensive along the line of contact in the Donbass; in the electric war against Kharkov and other cities east of the Dnieper River; and in the missile attacks on targets from Kiev to Lvov – reported here — commenced before the Moscow events; they are continuing as planned.
“Those in political command who have been favouring an outcome to the war that falls short of regime change in Kiev and extension of demilitarization to the Polish border,” observes a Moscow political source, “have lost their voice since Saturday night.”
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.
The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized. While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume. It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior. It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void. At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best. Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.
The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.) His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception. “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.” Ah, soul!
Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.
Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.
Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”
Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”
Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away. I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.” I didn’t know this. I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information). I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. He writes:
CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.
Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become. “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.
For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”
The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes: “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA. Kennedy, Jr. writes:
Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.
Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency. She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians. Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?
Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent. They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe. Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.
And here we are in another presidential election year. When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh. I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time. It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny. It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes. Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history. They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands. They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector. But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will. The military needs good people. To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win. Ha! Ha! Never reject the system is always the message.
Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world. But we can pretend otherwise. For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.
That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.
That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.
We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.
What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money? Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government. For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.
Scotte Ritter has recently written the following about the CIA and its spearheading of the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine:
Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.
Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.
That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.
If this is soulful work, God help us.
Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.
“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”
And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality. Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also. He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.
There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?” “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”
Mainstream Western journalists are just as guilty as the henchmen who did this. #GazaHolocaust pic.twitter.com/W0WlFl4ADK
— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) March 11, 2024
Merch 10, 2024, RT.com
*(blog title updated from original published; blog version slightly longer)
-Eva Karene Bartlett
Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, at least 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.
Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”
The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”
Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”
“Chaos” and “die” in the headline. Israel’s denial (lies) in the sub-heading. A lesson in how to both report on and deny a cold-blooded massacre simultaneously: https://t.co/rzWeLX0Mrt
— Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) March 1, 2024
The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.
In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”
The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am”
But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.
Fadi Al-Zalat, a six-year-old Palestinian child, is currently battling malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital, a consequence of the Israeli blockade in northern Gaza. pic.twitter.com/PGL0psGDsi
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 11, 2024
On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.
Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.
It mentions the hunger, “is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information.”
The pitiless Israeli war on Gaza has been documented live since October 7. Cobbling scraps of information is not necessary; Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been done with the whole world watching.
As Professor Sachs stated, ”…Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, ”Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”
Before yesterday's "Flour Massacre", the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!
A 🧵of some of these incidents:
Feb 28: IDF soldiers take potshots at famished desperate Gazans pic.twitter.com/8dOztIzvdk
— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 1, 2024
The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.
The final post in the thread, referencing February 18, shows a Palestinian man splayed on the ground, “shot in the head by the IDF at the Rasheed street as he came looking for food.”
You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.
Starvation in Syria was a media trope
The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.
In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syria government.
Palestinians are starving to death, preventable starvation orchestrated by the genocidal Israeli regime & enabled by the majority of Western states.
Western media was outraged over starvation in Madaya, which media blamed on the Syrian government…https://t.co/K0VNG40xUP https://t.co/epKQhfi667
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) January 26, 2024
Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.
As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.
In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.
Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.
(it wasn't the government which caused the starvation, the govt sent aid into Madaya, it was the West's terrorists within Madaya who hoarded food).
Media were SO outraged..& used photos from places outside of Syria to claim it was in Madaya.https://t.co/GMnh6pDjB0
— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) January 26, 2024
Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”\=good, Assad=bad.
But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.
Open the borders
Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.
“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.
"This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen."@melanie_ward speaks with @IsaCNN about the catastrophic levels of hunger that Israel's blockade is causing in Gaza pic.twitter.com/FthwccFEBG
— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) February 29, 2024
She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”
This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.
Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”
Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none…They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support…that is not stopping this slaughter.”
Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that the death toll of the Israeli aggression has reached 31,045, with 72,654 injuries since October 7 last year. pic.twitter.com/JXDIDEtha5
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 10, 2024
Point to point navigation describes the long-lost art of celestial navigation, the ability to use the stars to chart a course across the open seas in the age before compasses. The key to successfully executing point to point navigation lay in fixing one’s position vis-à-vis the North Star. Failure to do so meant risking sailing aimlessly about a sea with no fixed reference points, an act that leads to death or, perhaps worse, becoming a castaway on some unchartered point on earth.
After a storm, a ship’s captain and his navigator would scan the skies for the North Star, from which they could establish not only what direction true north was, but also where they were in reference to the position of the North Star in the sky, so that they might navigate to safety.
When special operations forces are compromised behind enemy lines, they conduct what they call “escape and evasion,” the act of avoiding detection and probable death or capture, while making their way to a pre-designated haven from which they can regroup or be extracted. The CIA trains its operations officers in similar skill sets. Both colloquially refer to such actions as “finding their true north.”
The perpetrators of the horrific attack on the Crocus City Hall and Concert Center in Krasnogorsk, a metropolitan community located to the northwest of Moscow, were no different than any other terrorist/militant before them; after their act of mass murder, they sought out their “true north” to make good their escape.
Western governments, analysts, and pundits have loudly proclaimed that the men who carried out the attack on the Crocus City Hall had nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine, and instead have collectively embraced a narrative that paints the men as members of the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K). ISIS is an off-shoot of Al-Qaeda-Iraq (AQI) which emerged in 2013 when core AQI members relocated to Syria. In 2014 ISIS declared itself to be a caliphate and began a series of operations which saw it take control on a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq before being driven back and ultimately defeated by a coalition which included Iraq, the United States and Iran.
In 2014 Central Asian fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan formed a branch of ISIS in Afghanistan known as ISIS-K, where they stood for Khorasan (ISIS-K). Khorasan is an ancient term for the territory encompassed by modern day Iran, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan. ISIS-K continues to operate today in Afghanistan and Iran, as well as inside the former Soviet Central Asian republics, including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Terrorists attacking the Crocus City Hall
According to US officials, the United States collected intelligence that ISIS-K was planning an attack on Moscow in early March. This intelligence was behind a public warning issued by the US embassy in Russia on March 7 that “extremists” were planning an imminent attack on large gatherings in Moscow. “US citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours,” the warning, published on the embassy website, stated. American citizens were warned to avoid crowds, including concerts. These US officials likewise claimed (and Russia has acknowledged) that Russia had been informed about the intelligence behind the March 7 warning. This information was shared based upon the “duty to warn” principle where US intelligence about potential terrorist attacks must be shared with the suspected targets. However, rather than passing this information through formal channels, it was done unofficially, through informal channels, significantly diluting the impact of the information.
The attackers posted a photograph of them reciting the Shahada, or Islamic oath and creed ("I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God") which, if made sincerely, is all that is required to be identified as a Muslim in the eyes of God. While Islamic scholars note that it is only necessary to recite the words, for jihadists reciting Shahada accompanied by a raised right index finger, has become de riguere—Osama Bin Laden delivered it in this fashion, as did Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State.
Shahada is a ritual, and those who make Shahada must understand its importance for it to have any meaning. As such, if one incorporates the raising of the right index finger as part of the Shahada ritual, it must be done piously. The use of the right hand is critical—in the Muslim faith, the right hand symbolizes all that is good, and the left is reserved for unclean acts: “No one among you should eat with his left hand or drink with it, for the shaytaan (devil) eats with his left hand and drinks with it.”
The four attackers delivered this oath by raising their left hands.
They also published this photograph with their faces blurred—they were shielding their identity.
There can be no subterfuge when reciting Shahada—it is an oath made before God and in the eyes of men.
Moreover, the blurring of their faces indicated that the attackers intended to survive their mission.
media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb502a5cf-1c6b-4c2f-9cd2-4517db0cc116_772x472.png)
The Crocus City Hall attackers making Shahada
For most militants affiliated with ISIS-K, true north is the path to martyrdom, a one-way ticket to paradise. Their goal is to inflict as much harm as possible before being dispatched from this mortal earth, an act that is usually made certain using a suicide vest detonated at a time when more death and destruction can be wrought.
The perpetrators of the Crocus City Hall attack, however, did not wear suicide vests. Indeed, they had no intention of losing their lives, but rather to live and be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, a purported $5,500 payment for services rendered.
These weren’t Islamist militants.
These were mercenaries who disguised themselves as Islamic militants.
The Crocus City Hall attackers in their getaway car
And when they finished their murderous rampage, the purported ISIS-K fighters jumped into their car and headed toward their “true north.”
Ukraine.
Ukraine. The source of their money.
Ukraine. The source of their motivation.
The Russian investigation into the terror attack is still in its early stages. There are many facts left to be uncovered.
But there is a plethora of data which allows one to populate the puzzle with enough pieces to begin to see a discernable shape take form.
Russian authorities went out of their way to make sure that all four perpetrators were captured alive.
The perpetrators are in the process of being interrogated. Many of the techniques being used by Russia would not be permitted in the United States as they could readily be classified as torture. And many intelligence professionals—me included—discount the value of any confession made under severe duress.
But the Russian interrogations are aided by the fact that the Russian investigators are not engaged in a fishing expedition, but rather are guided by specific facts derived from the forensic examination of the cell phones of the four terrorists, which are currently in the possession of Russian authorities. One of these phones was recovered at the crime scene, and the data contained on this phone was used by Russian security officials to track the terrorists as they drove out of Moscow, toward Ukraine. Telephone numbers contained on the recovered phone allowed the Russians to zero in on the remaining phones, and monitor phone calls made by the terrorists in real time—including numerous calls to persons inside Ukraine who were working to create a gap in the Russian-Ukrainian border that the terrorists could escape through.
The Russians have been able to identify the core structure of a support network in Moscow which provided the four terrorists with transportation and housing.
Eleven arrests have been made in this regard.
The Russians have identified a network operating in Turkey who were affiliated with the recruitment, training and logistical preparation and support of the terrorist operation in Moscow.
Forty arrests have been made as a result.
But more importantly, Russia has gathered enough information to issue a warrant for the head of the Ukrainian security service, Vasyl Malyuk, on charges of public incitement of terrorism. Likewise, the head of the Russian security service, Alexander Boritnikov, has stated that when it comes to delivering justice to Ukrainians who may have been involved in the attack on the Crocus concert venue, “Everything is ahead of us.”
Russia, it seems, is navigating point to point.
Not toward a safe haven, but rather on a path of retribution.
And its “true north” is the same as that of the terrorists.
Ukraine.
Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the Ukrainian SBU
Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, visited Israel in February 2024, a few months after leaving office. He came to show his solidarity with Israel during its war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and to praise its rescue of two hostages from Gaza. He also met with senior Israeli officials and military commanders to discuss the security situation and the US-backed plan to annex parts of the West Bank
Pompeo is a staunch supporter of Israel and its right to defend itself. He played a key role in the Trump administration’s policies that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and rejected the notion that the settlements in the West Bank are illegal. He also helped broker four Arab-Israeli peace deals known as the Abraham Accords.
Jeffrey E. Paul discusses the deep history, roots, and trajectory of how it came to be that the United States is now on the verge of becoming a “fascistic autocracy” and one-party state. The origins emanate from 19th century Germany and its autocratic collectivist mindset which permeated American academia and government in the late 1800s. These German authoritarian ideologues were the same who later went on to mentor Hitler and the Nazi regime. The clock is fast running out on the American experiment.
From Russian Wikipedia - Nechay, Mikhail Mikhailovich:
...
Mikhail Nechay often called himself the last Carpathian molfar who once entered the Karlfara circle, where « issues inaccessible to the understanding of mere mortals » were discussed[2]. . According to the evidence of the fellow villagers, he provided all those who wanted medical assistance with conspiracies and herbs. At the same time, he was called not so much « the wizard » as a very well-read person[eleven]. . Sometimes Nechay returned part of the money that he was offered for services[eleven], but never set his own prices[8]. . In some interviews, he stated that taking money for the provision of such services was considered a sin[9]. . He also said that even after long persuasion he did not agree to do something bad at the request of the client in relation to any person[6].
...
Follow the link to the Video to hear the prophesy.