On history's repeating itself
Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.
What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.
Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.
Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.
These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.
If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.
Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.
And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.
Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.
In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.
Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.
[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]
As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.
As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.
Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.
There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.
Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.
Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.
…
People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC
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
In ancient times, people would spend their summer vacations reading books. It is a little quaint nowadays, but you can still do that. Above, you can see two novels I have been reading recently: “War and Peace” (1868) by Lev Tolstoy, and “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” by Serena Bedini (2016). Strangely, these two widely different entities have something in common beyond being both definable with the same term, “novels.” Sometimes, differences are the key to understanding what some things have in common with each other. In this case, common element is evil. More exactly, love.
A few months ago, I found a copy of “War and Peace” on my shelves, realizing that I had never read it from start to finish. So, I set myself to engage in the task. My gosh, that was a task.
This novel is more than 1300 pages in its English translation. It starts by doing all those things that manuals about novel writing tell you a writer should never do. It is a slap in the face to the basic suggestion “don’t tell, show.” Tolstoy tells all the time and rarely shows. He tells in the “omniscient” viewpoint that has the writer playing God and telling readers about the details of how characters feel and think. And it starts by throwing in a true crowd of characters. Evidently, when the novel was written more than one and a half centuries ago, people were able to manage such a feat of reading it and enjoying it. At the time, it was what we would call today a “bestseller.”
For a modern reader, it is a feat comparable to climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes — we are just not equipped for that kind of task. Anyway, I managed to do that, but I frequently lost track of what was going on. There are no less than five separate plots ongoing, and I often had to backtrack to understand who was doing exactly what and why. Let me tell you, some books on quantum mechanics I read in the past were easier. But I can tell you it was worth doing — oh, yes. Worth a lot.
It is a story that, if Tolstoy were alive today, could be lifted almost intact from its settings in the early 19th century to our times. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, with all its ramifications in European politics, looks so much like what is happening today that it is both bewildering and mesmerizing to read how Tolstoy chronicles the story. Tolstoy is considered to be a genius as a novelist. He was a genius, full stop.
Before I tell you more about “War and Peace,” let me tell you something about another book I have been reading these days. It is “La Filosofia della Torta di Mele” (The Philosophy of the Apple Pie), a 2016 novel by the Italian writer Serena Bedini. In literar terms, it is the complete opposite to Tolstoy’s war and peace. It is light, like a pâte feuilletée, written from the personal viewpoint of a character whose main problem is a persistent cough. She engages in a search for a special recipe for an apple pie in the Tuscan countryside; not the same kind of drama you find when Napoleon’s armies invade Russia. An easy novel for the blasé 21st-century reader that you can complete in one hour or even less. It leaves you with the sensation of a session of wine tasting that didn’t make you drunk, just relaxed and happy.
Comparing the “philosophy of the apple pie” to “war and peace” looks like comparing a bicycle to a space shuttle. Yet, the universe is fractal, and the two novels do have one fundamental thing in common (besides the fact of being, well, “novels”). Before I tell you what is this thing in common, allow me to digress a little.
You know that one of the masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges is “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva” (history of the warrior and the prisoner). It is above and beyond the “masterpiece” term — it is on another celestial plane. And what makes it such a master-masterpiece is the audacity of the author, who puts together two stories so different that the very idea of trying makes your head buzz: what does a Germanic Warrior of the early Middle Ages have in common with an English woman captured by an Argentinean Indio tribe and wed to their chieftain? There is something, yes, a very fundamental thing: the acceptance of the “other”, that some of us call “love” which, if you think about that, means exactly “accepting the other even though different.” It is too easy to love something that’s exactly like you; that’s called “narcissism.”
Only a master-master writer such as Borges could take up the challenge of writing such a story. Picking up enormous challenges and meeting them in full is the hallmark of true genius. Now, of course, I don’t dare compare myself to Borges. I just like to point out how the two stories have exactly one point in common: they are acts of love. Read “War and Peace” from start to finish, and you’ll note something that you might have missed at first, but then it appears to you like a flash of light from heaven.
There is no evil in the whole novel.
There is drama, there are emotions, bewilderment, rage, folly, madness, the whole spectrum of human emotions is there in “War and Peace” — but you won’t find in it a character hating another character. Not that it is a light novel about apple pies and curing one’s cough. Tolstoy is a master writer who masters every facet of the events he describes. Even when he tells us of characters that he finds unpleasant, such as Napoleon himself, he describes them as bumbling idiots, which probably they were, but still human beings with all their feelings, their emotions, their desires. In the novel, French and Russian soldiers fight each other, but do not hate each other. When the French or the Russians take prisoners, they treat them as humanely as it is reasonably possible given the circumstances. Nowhere is there talk of exterminating inferior races nor of herrenvolk who should rule them. There is only one event in the novel that you could be said to be evil. It is a real historical event: the lynching of a Russian student named Vereshchagin guilty (perhaps) of having diffused pro-French pamphlets. But even Count Rostopchin, the person who acts in cold blood to direct a crowd to attack Vereshchagin, is described as having human feelings and conscious of his mistake.
You see the same in “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” where, of course, you won’t find battles or lynchings, but that has a light touch that makes everything glow with a certain inner light. A firefly in a hot summer night.
Now, think for a moment about the sad spectacle of our times, where hate for everything different has become the exchange coin of all discourse on the media or anywhere else. How is it that nothing can be done anymore without hating someone or something? What madness is overtaking us? We drink evil, eat evil, breathe evil, continuously see evil, think evil, speak evil.
Tolstoy, philosopher, and historian, couldn’t explain what madness had taken millions of Christians in 1812 to march on to massacre and slaughter other Christians without any conceivable reasons for doing that. He would be even more baffled by our age when millions of human beings can be so easily convinced to hate other human beings without any conceivable reason — they are not required to massacre them with their own hands but, at least, to acquiesce to their slaughter by hunger, artillery, and drones.
We know that love is mostly in the foolish things of the world that God chose to shame the wise and the weak things of the world that God chose to shame the strong. Maybe an apple pie is one of these foolish and weak things that are nevertheless God’s choice to send us a message.
A new report from Britain's Sky News provides details of Adnan al-Bursh's death by torture in Israel's Ofer Prison
NOV 16, 2024
(Photo credit: CNN)
A Sky News investigation published on 16 November has revealed new details surrounding Israel's torture and murder of the famous Palestinian surgeon from Gaza, Adnan al-Bursh, at Ofer Prison in the occupied Palestinian West Bank last May.
A fellow Palestinian prisoner at Ofer told the British news channel that Israeli guards severely tortured Dr Bursh and then left him to die alone, naked from the waist down, in the prison yard.
The prisoner, who previously knew the doctor in Gaza, provided the new details in a deposition to lawyers from HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization.
“In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body,” the prisoner's deposition states.
“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh (was dead).”
Bursh was widely regarded as one of the best-qualified and well-known surgeons in Gaza.
When Israel's war on Gaza began in October of last year, the renowned surgeon worked at Al-Shifa Hospital as the head of orthopedic surgery. He worked around the clock, performing surgeries on Palestinians injured by Israel's horrific bombing campaign.
When Israeli troops laid siege to Al-Shifa in November, the staff was forced to flee.
Bursh fled by foot to the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia to continue serving wounded patients.
He documented his experiences on video, including when Israel shelled the hospital, killing 12 people.
He was then forced to leave the Indonesia Hospital as well and moved to the Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza's north, where he was abducted by Israeli forces.
After the soldiers surrounded the hospital, "They told [Dr Bursh] that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it," a fellow doctor at Al-Awda, Mohammad Obeid, told Sky News.
After Dr Bursh left the hospital, Israeli soldiers “called his name out” and then “roughly” took him away, Obeid stated.
Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev Desert.
The facility became notorious this summer after prison guards, doctors, and former inmates gave testimony of prisoners being tortured and raped there.
Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate at Sde Teiman, told Sky News that of the 100 prisoners in the section of the camp where he was held, at least a quarter were healthcare workers.
Dr Bursh was beaten severely at Sde Teiman.
“He thought he may have broken ribs,” Dr Hamouda said. ”He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”
The doctor was then transferred to Ofer Prison in the Israeli prison system but was never charged with any crime or terrorism.
Since 7 October 2023, at least 43 prisoners have died in Israeli jails, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society.
Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."
Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024
Selected transcript:
MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.
...
We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."
Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?
George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.
The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."
Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."
What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.
About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.
The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.
The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."
Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.
When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.
...
This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.
But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.
George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."
Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.
You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.
Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.
I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.
This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.
You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.
What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."
This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.
I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."
We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.
The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.
While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.
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In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."
Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."
For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.
So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.
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One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.
Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.
In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.
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What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.
Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.
The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.
Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.
The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.
Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.
This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.
On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.
At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.
Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.
Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.
Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.
Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.
When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.
Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.
“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” This is how Khaled Mahajneh describes the Sde Teiman detention center as the first lawyer to visit the facility. More than 4,000 Palestinians whom Israel arrested in Gaza have been held at the military base in the Naqab/Negev since October 7; some of them have subsequently been released, but most remain in Israeli detention.
Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking information about Muhammad Arab, a reporter for the network who was arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “I contacted the Israeli army’s control center, and after providing them with a photo and an ID card of the detainee, as well as my official power of attorney document, I was informed that [Arab] was being held at Sde Teiman and that he could be visited.”
When Mahajneh arrived at the base on June 19, he was required to leave his car far away from the site, where an army jeep was waiting to transport him inside. This was “something I had never encountered on any previous visit to any prison,” he told +972. They drove for about 10 minutes through the facility — a sprawling network of trailers — before arriving at a large warehouse, which contained a trailer guarded by masked soldiers.
“They repeated that the visit would be limited to 45 minutes, and any action that may harm the security of the state, the camp, or the soldiers will lead to the immediate cessation of the visit. I still don’t understand what they meant,” Mahajneh said.
Soldiers dragged out the detained journalist with his arms and legs tied, while Mahajneh remained behind a barrier. After soldiers removed his blindfold, Arab rubbed his eyes for five minutes, unaccustomed to the bright light. “Where am I?” was the first question he asked Mahajneh. Most Palestinians at Sde Teiman do not even know where they are being held; with at least 35 detainees having died in unknown circumstances since the war began, many simply call it “the death camp.”
“I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7,” Mahajneh noted. “I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”
Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer who visited Sde Teiman detention center. (Courtesy)
‘Even the courts are rife with hatred’
Mahajneh told +972 that Arab was nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings. The journalist had not been given new clothes for nearly two months, and was only allowed to change his pants for the first time that day because of the lawyer’s visit.
According to Arab, detainees are continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding. Their iron handcuffs are removed only during a weekly, minute-long shower. “But the prisoners began refusing to shower because they don’t have watches, and going beyond the allotted minute exposes prisoners to severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain,” Mahajneh said.
All detainees, Mahajneh noted, face deteriorating health conditions due to the poor quality of the daily prison diet: a small amount of labaneh and a piece of cucumber or tomato. They also suffer from severe constipation, and for every 100 prisoners, only one roll of toilet paper is provided per day.
“The prisoners are prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors,” Mahajneh told +972. “They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur’an.”
Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’” Mahajneh recounted. “But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”
Multiple media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, have reported on instances of rape and sexual assault at Sde Teiman. In a video circulating on social media earlier this week, a Palestinian prisoner recently released from the detention camp said that he had personally witnessed multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.
Muhammad Arab, a Palestinian journalist with Al Araby TV. (Courtesy)
In just the past month, according to Arab, several prisoners were killed during violent interrogations. Other detainees who had been wounded in Gaza were forced to have their limbs amputated or bullets removed from their bodies without anesthesia, and were treated by nursing students.
Legal defense teams and human rights organizations have been largely unable to counter these serious violations of prisoners’ rights at Sde Teiman, and most are prevented from even visiting the facility to prevent greater scrutiny. “The State Prosecutor’s Office said that this detention center was going to be closed after harsh criticisms, but nothing happened,” Mahajneh said. “Even the courts are rife with hatred and racism against the people of Gaza.”
Most of the detainees, Mahajneh noted, are not formally accused of belonging to any organization or participating in any military activity; Arab himself still doesn’t know why he was detained or when he may be released. Since arriving at Sde Teiman, soldiers from the Israeli army’s special units have interrogated Arab twice. After the first interrogation, he was informed that his detention had been extended indefinitely, based on “suspicion of affiliation to an organization whose identity was not disclosed to him.”
‘To take revenge on whom?’
In recent months, international media outlets have published several testimonies of released prisoners as well as doctors who worked at Sde Teiman. For Israeli doctor Dr. Yoel Donchin, who spoke to the New York Times, it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had detained many of the people he treated, some of whom were “highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war” based on pre-existing physical ailments or disabilities.
The Times also reported that doctors at the facility were instructed not to write their names on official documents or address each other by name in the presence of patients, for fear of being later identified and charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court.
“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” one witness who worked as a medic at the facility’s makeshift hospital told CNN. “[The beatings] were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” another witness said. “It was punishment for what they [the Palestinians] did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
Members of the Keter unit, an Israeli prison service response unit, seen while detainees put their hands on their heads, at a prison in southern Israel, February 14, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Since his visit to Sde Teiman, Mahajneh has felt deep frustration and anger — but above all, horror. “I have been in this profession for 15 years … I never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And all this is not for the purpose of interrogation — since most prisoners are only interrogated after many days of detention — but as an act of revenge. To take revenge on whom? They are all citizens, young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israeli Prison Service].”
In its response to queries for this article, the Israeli army stated: “The IDF rejects allegations of systematic ill-treatment of detainees, including through violence or torture … If necessary, military police investigations are opened when there is suspicion of unusual behavior justifying it.” The army denied Arab’s and Mahajneh’s accounts of deprivation, and insisted that detainees are provided with sufficient clothing and blankets, food and water (“three meals a day”), access to toilets and showers (“between 7 and 10 minutes”), and other amenities.
The army also added: “Since the beginning of the war, there have been deaths of detainees, including detainees who arrived wounded from the battlefield or in problematic medical conditions. Every death is investigated by the military police. At the end of the investigations, their findings will be forwarded to the Military Advocate General’s Office.”
Youtube - How the U.S. Took Over the World: The End of International Law
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 17th, and we’re having Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson with us to talk about U.S. foreign policy. And the title of this video today, Richard and Michael, is over the world, the end of international law. We know whenever they’re talking about the foreign policy of the United States, they’re talking about the rules-based international order. And Michael, let’s start with you. Why have they decided to put an end to international law?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right. That the build-up of this whole U.S.-sponsored aggression from Ukraine to Israel has caused a breakdown of international law. And just as important, what does international law mean when there’s no means of enforcement if there’s laws against genocide, laws against ongoing attacks on civilians? What can anyone do about it? There seems to be a global war, and all of the tactics now are different from all the wars that we’ve seen before, and we’ll get into that.
The basic political issues today in this new Cold War, very much like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (from 1618 to 1648). That Thirty Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia, and that led to the creation of international law that has ruled the world all the way from 1648 until the creation of the United Nations. Until just a few years ago, when the United States replaced it and said, ‘We are no longer following international law. We are following our own law. We call it the rules-based order, and it’s our rules, and our rules of order are the reverse of everything that international law has said before.’
It’s a radical change, and hardly anybody’s talked about this, because what do you do about the fact that you have the United States, Ukraine, Israel, NATO, all of a sudden reversing the principles that were considered to be the very basis of civilization for almost four centuries now? It’s very radical.
The United States has a unipolar drive for control over countries. The whole basis of international law after the Thirty Years’ War was to prevent future wars by saying no country can interfere with the political affairs of other countries. Every country has its own autonomy, and that’s what, essentially, the war was fought over. The Catholic countries were attacking the Protestant countries, and it was the largest and most devastating war that Europe had until World War I. But at the end they got together, and at the Peace of Westphalia they said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?
We’re going to recognize all nations are sovereign, and no country, as I said, permitted to interfere with other countries to bring about regime change.’ There was to be religious and political freedom, and the world was to be multipolar. They didn’t use that word, but that meant there wouldn’t be any single group dominating them, and they were referring specifically to the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy. The Hapsburgs controlled Spain, that had all of the silver coming in from the New World, and was the big military power – as was France – and they were allied against Germany, Sweden, and the northern European Protestant countries.
A multipolar world was the whole basis of international law, and that was supposed to be the basis of the United Nations. And violation of these principles was viewed as if it was an attack on civilization itself. Emmanuel Kant and other German philosophers wrote about how this was finally a universal law, and you needed this universal law of individual freedom for persons, but also for nations.
Well, all this is now being rejected by the United States and its allies, and the proxy state of Israel in the Near East. The world is being separated into blocks between the East and West. In the conflict today, really, is whether the [?] nations, the BRICS – Russia, China, Iran, and the allies that they’ve been putting together – are going to be able to design their own destiny, or whether they’re going to have to be subject to whatever the United States does.
And you’ve seen in the last few days in Ukraine, the non-president Zelensky has just said, ‘We’re going to raise the money to buy arms and to bribe all of our officials to be loyal by selling off Ukraine’s titanium mines, to sell off the natural resources. So even if Russia takes over, the international law that America supports is going to say, wait a minute, we’ve already privatized all these resources.
Yes, you can take them over, Russia, but you won’t have any control over the land, or your ability to tax them, because we’ve privatized it all.’ That’s the kind of transformation of the way the world has organized that nobody could have expected before. So there’s a kind of ideological inquisition that’s taking place throughout the world by the United States that rejects the most basic principles of national sovereignty.
And what’s so remarkable in this is we’re seeing an economically shrinking and deindustrializing – the United States and Europe – trying to prevent the global majority from aiming at its own economic and political independence. The rest of the world has 85% of the world’s population, and it’s trying to recover from over a century of colonialism, and the financial neo-colonialism that the United States put in place after 1945.
The U.S.-centered rules of international trade and investment that sort of forced other countries to supply raw materials instead of industrializing and feeding their own population and their own economies and raising their own living standards. So you have this U.S.-NATO “Golden Billion” waging this new Cold War against most of the Western world, without an army, really, to enforce it.
Its policy makers have followed an entirely different track than was done before. They deem other countries and adversaries to be a different civilization altogether. And I’ll get to that shortly. It’s trying to dominate the world, but it no longer has the military dominance that it had in 1945. It’s lost its former ability to dominate the world monetary system, and by economic means. Its aim of retaining its former unipolar policy has been replaced by a whole different strategy, by escalating it all. We’re dealing with the end of civilization, and the end of civilization is supposed to be the United States taking control of the whole world, by imposing a neo-liberal privatization ethic, Thatcherizing and Reaganizing the whole world.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me come at it. I appreciate very much Michael’s historical framework. I think it’s very helpful to keep that in mind. It avoids all kinds of mistakes. Let me add some comments to the story he’s told. In my view, what is going on is a desperate effort of a declining situation – a declining regime, if you like, a declining historical phase, that doesn’t want to give up, which I understand. They don’t usually go quietly, these empires, when they go down. I think the theory that you’re breaking all the customary rules that were in place – either explicitly or implicitly – for several centuries, is the right way to look at this. It’ll help us understand things that we might not see connected, but that are.
Number one, a level of horror in Gaza. I want to be clear. What was denied by people who could not face what was done to Jews in Europe in the Holocaust. We have the phenomena of people who have to deny it. That’s a way of recognizing how horrible that thing was that you can’t stand it. So you literally erase it.
It’s not the appropriate response – one should recognize it – but it helps you underscore just how horrible it was that people have to do that. It underscores in Gaza that the Israelis don’t want you to call this a genocide because if you do, then the victims of one Holocaust are busily perpetrating another one. This is horrible.
And you can’t have the United States quite deal with it, for a number of reasons. Number one, because Israel is the same settler colonialism that the United States is. We are a country of Europeans who come over to the Western hemisphere and ethnically cleanse the indigenous population out of existence, with the exception of the horrible condition the few remaining ones live out in the so-called reservations scattered across the United States, making their living from gambling, casinos, and so on. It’s this remarkable obliteration.
The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa: These are horrible examples of settler colonialism, but they were accomplished at a time when that was historically possible. Israel has the unfortunate historical fact that it isn’t possible anymore and trying to do it now is self-destructive – although it might take them a while.
But let me show you some other ways to connect. The international rules were that countries could keep their reserves, the backing for their currency in foreign banks. Russia kept a good part of its dollar and gold holdings in foreign banks. Those were seized early on in this war. That’s a violation.
To this day, there are legal ramifications percolating in Europe, even in England, questioning. For example, they couldn’t, they decided, because they’re torn too, about obliterating existing law. So they didn’t take that money. They froze it, which is already not legal. But when it came to giving the money to Ukraine, they have decided just to give the interest earned by those stolen funds. This is a playing-with-giving-up the rule, the idea, of the sacrosanct private property of Russia. And then you take the interest from it. That’s stealing too. These are lawyerly games. What’s important here is, as Michael says, leaving it.
Then there’s the war in Ukraine itself. Okay. Ukraine says it needs to have security. Russia says it needs to have security. Ukraine is behaving badly towards its Russian minorities. The Russians want to protect their minority. Okay. This has to be worked out. This is not the first time you’ve had this kind of a conflict. There’s nothing unique about that conflict.
You know, there were Germans living in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. There were other examples. This could have been worked out as those others were, but it wasn’t. And that’s what’s interesting. The decision was made not to. Now, yes, it’s the United States flexing its muscle. But I see it a little bit less grandiosely, as – Michael put it – reshaping the world. It is that, but it comes out of a defensive posture. It comes out of desperation. It comes out of, ‘We are losing in the world and we will not tolerate losing again. You will not stop us from doing what we want to do in Ukraine. You will not stop us from having Israel as our secure outpost. You cannot attack it. We don’t care what your issue is. You are Palestinians, you were there, that’s not interesting for us.
For us, we need a reliable agent in the Middle East. Israel has been that, and we will protect it. And we have now controlled Ukraine. We rearranged their politics a few years earlier to make that the case. It’s ours. It’s part of our expansion of NATO.’ And the horror is that the Russians should resist. The Russians should say – and this has nothing to do with whether the Russians are right or wrong in any of this – ‘This is an empire,’ say, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, “So far and no further” (in good Texas English). So, I see the taking of the reserves from Russia, I see the misunderstanding of what’s going on, in terms of Russia’s allies, the power that the BRICS have. Forget, yes, that it takes time to replace the dollar.
The BRICS have made some moves in that direction, but they still have a long way to go. No question. No question. But the reality is the BRICS have made real moves. And one of the most important was supporting Russia against the United States and Europe in the Ukraine. That’s the reality. It’s not about right or wrong or anything else. This is about how you try to handle and understand what’s going on.
The United States is desperate. And, by the way, I want people to see it internally. If it were just external I wouldn’t be saying these things. But it’s internal too. The reason we have a character like Trump in a position to be president, there it is. That’s a symptom. People are so angry with what is happening to their lives here that they want something different and they don’t care who he has abused, or what he has said, or how many times he’s gone bankrupt. These are details.
He says he’s going to change everything and go back to when it was better. That is understood by people whose reality has decreased. When production leaves the United States, as it has. Manufacturing, in huge portion, has left the United States and moved overseas. It took the best jobs, it took the strongest unions, and decimated them by moving. UAW is a shadow of what it once was.
The same is true of the steelworkers, and all the rest of them. That’s a reality. That means jobs are not what they once were. That means the standard of living isn’t what it was, and the security of your job isn’t what it was. And what was done by the relocation of jobs to profit from overseas expansion will now be continued with another technological wave. This time not the computers and robots. This time artificial intelligence, which will be used for profit-making purposes at the expense of the quality and the quantity of jobs. People are correct. The empire that concentrated production and income growth here, is now not here anymore. It left. And the people understand that they are left behind. There is no mystery.
My last point. The media have been obsessing for several years now, with the Democrats, over the problem: The economy is doing well: Why do the mass of people answer every public poll with the statement, the economy is a disaster? The economy is a disaster. I’m in a disaster.
This is not because they are stupid. It’s not because they aren’t educated. None of those things. It’s a different experience. People question me: The stock market is doing well? Well, 85 to 90 percent of stocks are owned by 10 percent of the people. They’re doing well. But the other 90 percent are spectators about a process of prosperity from which they are excluded, and they identify with the shrinking American empire abroad.
For them, they’re losing their status as an American worker and they’re losing their status as an American. In short, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose. No one addresses any of that. The Republicans say, ‘Let’s go backward.’ Okay, that’s a fantasy. That’s not a very good long-term proposal. That won’t go very far. He lost a good bit of the benefit of that the first time when he didn’t do shit (if you pardon my Spanish) to take us back to anything. He’s not going to do it in the second term either.
What you have is a declining situation and the spectacle of a politics that doesn’t either understand, or have any handle whatsoever on any of it. So you’re watching a dysfunctional system run by a dysfunctional government. I want to remind everyone of, what a great tactician once said are, the preconditions for revolution. They are two. Number one, that the people in charge don’t know how to govern anymore. Number two, that the mass of people feel that the people at the top can’t govern anymore. If you have those two conditions met, you’re going to have a revolution. We are getting real close in this country.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you begin by discussing what’s unique in the situation we’re in today. You use the word “desperation.” What you’ve been describing is desperation right along. That indeed is what makes it unique. The United States and the West no longer can mount a war of military occupation. That’s another part of the by-product of what you’ve been describing economically. Ukraine showed that the United States can’t win a war and that NATO needs proxy armies because their own population would resist if there were a draft. So the U.S. and NATO forces have only one policy to use: They can only bomb and shoot missiles. The basic political fact remains that they are too weak to win on the battlefield, according to the rules of war that formerly guided international law, and that made genocide illegal.
I want to focus on the effect of all of what you’ve described on what it means for international law and the global fracture that we’re seeing today. I think the U.S. and NATO fight to control the world – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the United States and England all the way to the China Sea – can only be won in a dirty way – in violation of international law – by focusing on killing civilians, bombing hospitals, schools, and other basic institutions. That’s what makes this war unique.
U.S. naval fighting concentrates on civilian, instead of military, targets. You’ve seen Ukraine, focusing on the Russian-speaking civilian population, hoping that the civilians will say, ‘Please don’t bomb us anymore. We want our own Boris Yeltsin, or some Pinochet or Zelensky, to take over. We’ll do anything for peace.’ But that’s not what they did. They rallied around Russia and say, ‘You know what, you killing us is wrong and we’re not going to submit to you, because if you’re killing us now, what are you going to do if there were peace?’ So this is genocide in Ukraine, just as it’s genocide in Palestine.
The other countries are seeing that it’s a moral evil and it’s an attack on the very principle of civilization and common humanity. So what is the U.S. and NATO to do?
They’re relying on Ukraine and Israel Nazis to uproot or destroy any population that resists its economic or financial and political control, or are simply in their way. It’s a war of extermination – not a military war against armies – but a war of extermination of people, in order to create a neo-colonialism. That’s what the U.S. and NATO are doing. They are trying to create a neo-colonialism to make one world. Not a group of different civilizations. One civilization, that is the U.S. neo-liberal civilization. And other countries in their way are not really an alternative civilization. There’s no plurality of civilizations where each country or region can make its choice. There’s only supposed to be one.
Now this is evil, but it’s historically a characteristic of religious wars and wars of hatred – ethnic, national and even racial hatred – in the case of Europe’s colonialism and America’s war in Asia. Soldiers, and even the domestic civilian population, are propagandized to view the enemy as being sub-human and therefore it can be treated in utterly different ways than the rules of war. That’s the character of Israel’s war against Islamic countries, and against any population that stands in the way of Israel expanding from the sea to the ocean.
That is, all the land, and oil, and natural resources, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. That’s the aim. The broad West Asian area is to be turned into a land without a people. That’s what Netanyahu means. A land without a people, just as what Israel’s settlers did to the Palestinians who lived there for millennia. The occupants are held to be non-people, to be treated as the biblical Amalek whom the Lord directed his religionists to exterminate, along with all their cattle, trees and productive resources capable of sustaining life.
So when Israel goes into Gaza or the West Bank or now into Lebanon, they’re not fighting another army. They’re destroying the hospitals. They’re tearing up the olive trees that take 30 to 50 years to develop. They’re tearing up the infrastructure. They’re making it impossible to continue to live there. That’s what makes this unique, and even more destructive than the earlier wars, which at least left the civilization and the basic infrastructure in place. But it’s destructive because of what you said: Desperation of the West, and the U.S. and Europe, is the only kind of war they can fight.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me tell you a story, even if I’ve done it once before, that I hope we’ll bring it home to an American audience. I once took some European visitors to a town in Massachusetts called Old Deerfield. It is a part of a little town called Deerfield located on the Deerfield River in Western Massachusetts. The town of Old Deerfield is a recreated community that has recreated all the houses in it to look like they did in colonial days, before the United States emerged as an independent country. If you visit this place and you start looking at these interesting old reconstituted houses, and you go inside and you see the colonial furniture and all that, you will be confronted with little plaques on the outside of each house that give you a little thumbnail description of life when this house was occupied by living family, etc.
I went and I looked at it, like my guests, and we all immediately reacted because of what it says on the plaques. To my knowledge, that’s what it says right now, as we’re speaking. It describes the family of John Jones and his wife and the children, and then on this difficult day back in 1691, the savages attacked. And then periodically it’s all about the savages who were then eventually beaten back. And the Europeans looked at each other, and I looked at them and they at me. The Europeans arrived here, killed these people, took their land, and called them savages; shot them like animals because the indigenous people didn’t have guns and gunpowder, and all the rest of that, whereas the Europeans did. So, it was quite easy to shoot them, and to deal with them as animals. They were savage.
When they resisted their land and their animals being taken from them, then they became more savage, and absolutely subject to extermination, which was considered a 100% acceptable social solution. The final solution to the Native American ‘problem,’ you might call it.
But you know, again, this is not about Europeans or Native Americans. It’s about settler colonialism that has a ‘problem.’ That’s why it has to imagine that the land is empty because otherwise it would be confronted with, ‘What are you doing if the land is full?’ Well, you are creating a Them versus Us. If you read the literature of those who support Netanyahu, that’s what they say every day. It’s them or us.
That’s what the colonial people in Old Deerfield felt. It was them or us, and they would celebrate the attack of the savages because it confirmed how savage they were. It didn’t confirm that settler colonialism might be questioned. That never occurred to them. I mean, it’s a study in what can happen to human beings when they trap themselves, or are trapped, in a dead end that they don’t want to confront. Well then, they rethink it, so it isn’t a dead end, it isn’t a problem. It is now [as] understandable as getting rid of these pesky animals that stand in the way of the noble Christian civilization we are constructing.
And in Israel simply substitute Jewish, or Zionist, or whatever word you want. But we do have to understand that this isn’t new. Michael is right. It is a particular historical conjuncture. That’s what’s fading. My fear is if we give it too much uniqueness, you’ll miss the fact that it is a rerun.
Look, the world looks back on those years 1933 to 1945. Twelve years, a long time. Twelve years. Mr. Hitler came to power in January of 1933 and he was finished in World War II. So from ’33 to ’45 – twelve years – he, the Nazis ruled, and the whole world has ever since looked back in horror at what they did, and what they were. For those twelve years it was scary, and people shook their heads and didn’t want to believe it, and turned away from it. But eventually – and it took 75 years for right-wing fascistic types to put their heads up above the sand – and we see them now again. But again, it took a long time.
The Israeli behavior will take a long time, and we will look back on it the way we look back on what the Nazis did in their part of Europe with the same horror, except we will have learned, maybe, something from this time more than we learned the first time.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think, Richard, what you’re describing is there is something unique today, and that is that there’s a whole ideology to support something that supports what the settlers did in America – and you’re quite right to draw that parallel – and what settler states are doing elsewhere, and what the United States and NATO are trying to expand other countries. It’s much more than a clash of civilizations, like between the English settlers and the domestic indigenous population here.
It’s an attack on the very principle of what people traditionally have considered to be civilization, and I think America’s policy makers have come to realize that their plan for world dictatorship that they celebrated in 1992 as the “End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, has been a failure. That their idea of civilization, as everyone will funnel Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and will privatize the economy – and now that the Soviet Union is dead there is no alternative?
Well, Fukuyama’s book was very quickly replaced a year later by a book by his teacher at Harvard Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. And Huntington described the real organization, civilization, is U.S. nationalism, a neo-liberalism and its doctrine of a unipolar world, that was his definition of civilization as a universal world. Other civilizations are basically how indigenous populations were treated, and Huntington warned that the United States faced future fights that were not simply a move from a different trade and monetary policy by countries seeking to escape from the legacy of colonialism and U.S. dominance.
He meant a clash of culture and that’s really the key: Not to accept U.S. dominance was deemed to be trying to create a new civilization. So it wasn’t just the fight of the English settlers of America or the Jewish settlers of Palestine to take land. It was a cultural civilizational fight. That’s what made it basically different for all this and the principle of national self-determination and personal religious and political freedom used to be considered the basis of civilization.
Obviously, even though it was during the time of the Thirty Years’ War that what you’re describing was occurring in the settlement of America, but the U.S. neo-cons treated the idea of policy independence of other countries as all of a sudden a new alien civilization that threatens the entire West. The idea that there could be an alternative and that way of framing international relations inverts the whole traditional universal morality.
Well, so did the English settlement of America do it, and the Spanish settlement of America, but it was almost not even discussed by the legal theorists. It seemed to be outside the realm of something that could be discussed in terms of international law. And that gap, that creation of a new international law justifying settler colonialism, justifying the right of one nation to take over and destroy another’s people and culture, as well as just taking their land, is essentially what World War II was fought against, the principle of Nazism.
RICHARD WOLFF: If I could add, the way this is spun nowadays, I think, illustrates what Michael is trying to get us to understand. Only let me show you the words. The clash of civilizations is a very convenient way, and here’s a second way that is being used to make the same point: that one civilization is in favor of, and is roughly the equivalent of democracy, whereas the other civilization is the equivalent or equal to authoritarianism.
This is a wonderful dichotomization because what it allows you to do is to look at China and no matter how many times the Chinese tell you, ‘We have two goals.’ By the way, they’ve been saying this for 50 years. Number one, to end a hundred years of humiliation by which they mean colonialism, because even though China as a whole never became a colony, parts of it did: The cities along the coast were taken over, some by the Germans, some by the British (it was horrible); and they fought the Boxer Rebellion and they were defeated, and all the rest.
The second goal of China was to raise its people out of the worst poverty the world has ever seen. Two goals: not to be humiliated by foreigners and to raise their standard of living, basically. That’s what they set out to do and they have been the most successful in doing that in the history of the world, if you measure the amount of improvement and the time it took to achieve it. By those standards they are a roaring success. Notice I’m not commenting on their internal civil liberties or a whole lot of other qualities that are another conversation. But for the United States, it cannot see what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They don’t anymore have the lingo of a great struggle between Capitalism and Socialism because that really doesn’t fit anymore.
So they have it between Democracy and Authoritarianism, which has no more pull or power of analysis than the old Capitalism versus Socialism ever did. These are ways of handling the rationalization that the United States needs to achieve what, for it, has become security. If you become a world power, then security requires you to control the world. If you don’t want to be worried about the rest of the world then don’t be a world power. Be a real strong power where the hell you are. But the United States has its 700-800 bases around the [world]. That’s the aspirations of a world power. And now it has the problem: How do you rationalize wanting to be perpetually what no empire has achieved? Answer: Everybody else is a threat to all that is good in the world. It is either non-human, or a real bad civilization, or authoritarian.
Last point. The irony here which – either a Hegel as philosopher, or a Bertolt Brecht as a theater writer, or a George Carlin as a comedian – you need that level of brilliance to capture. The most authoritarian political structure exists inside every capitalist corporation. The CEO tells everybody else what to do. And the people he orders about, the employees have absolutely no recall over him whatsoever. They don’t vote for him. They don’t approve anything he does. If he doesn’t like them, they’re fired. Oh my god. Finding other societies authoritarian when this is your reality five out of seven days a week for the vast majority of, that takes extraordinary ideological discipline, because it’s hard to be so blind in one area that you can call another area bad names that apply to you.
This is an extremity and I don’t think these cultures can long sustain it. And if I’m right then that’s another reason for those who run the United States to be very, very worried about their situation.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well then, the question is what are we going to do about it? What’s the outcome going to be? When the English attacked the Native Americans, they didn’t have an opportunity to create an alternative. All they could do is retreat further and further westward until they were backed into reservations, or what the Nazis called concentration camps.
Well, U.S. Presidents Biden and Donald Trump both have repeatedly tried to express their great fear that other countries will do what the Native Americans and the Palestinians couldn’t do, that they’d create an alternative. And that’s why they’ve designated China as America’s existential enemy, and to prepare the ground for conquering it, they’ve said, ‘well, that requires weakening Russia and Iran because they’re China’s two great military allies and suppliers of oil of the energy that it needs.’
However U.S. foreign policy suffers from the Hubris that it has always had. It assumes that foreign countries will have no active response. They’ll passively surrender like the Native Americans did to the settlers or, like the Palestinians did when they simply left the country or got killed.
China and Russia have taken the lead in moving to create an alternative world order that is going to defend their independence. And that’s what we’ve been talking about on this show for about a month now. They’ve created a set of alternative organizations to those of the West.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a defensive counterweight to NATO, and the BRICS are creating a full-spectrum alliance to achieve trade and financial self-reliance independent of the U.S. and NATO bloc. Well, NATO’s foray into Ukraine to try to end Russia’s ability to survive as a fiscal state has failed. Russia’s got even stronger and Ukraine’s NATO-backed troops are close to total defeat.
So, the United States has shifted its military support to its long-term aim of gaining control of the world’s oil trade. For instance, well, if we can’t win on the battlefield, let’s control the key organs of control. And its policy here is very similar to that which it followed in Ukraine. It’s backing Israel to conquer the entire Near East, starting with the domestic Palestinian population and extending territory to absorb Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, culminating in the long-expressed hope that they’re going to be able to defeat Iran and pull it into greater Israel and control, as I said, the whole swath of oil, lands, and geography from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And like Ukraine, Israel’s military is focused much more on the population that’s in its way than on military targets. It really doesn’t care about that.
If you can destroy a civilization’s hospitals, infrastructure, its culture, the basis that holds it together politically and culturally, then you don’t need to engage in a military war that you’re sure to lose. Well, it is this focus on attacking civilians and cultural genocide that violates the civilized world’s rules of warfare that I talked about at the beginning. The U.S.-NATO countries don’t have any troops of their own, so their target is extended to include entire populations: ‘Well, we can bomb them. We’re not going to fight them.
All we can do is bomb them, as long as they don’t have a bomb to fight back.’ And the Palestinians have no bombs, and they’re not being supported by other Islamic countries. There’s no religious or ideological support of the countries around the Near East and West Asian area that are willing to realize that they’re all under threat, that this drive for Lebensraum is not simply a Judaic Lebensraum, for its own population, it’s for the Western Lebensraum to control natural resources, sub-soil resources, oil, minerals, the land, infrastructure.
The concept of Lebensraum has morphed into great control of all of the pre-conditions of social survival. That’s why the Israeli soldiers concentrate on killing children and bombing hospitals and schools. If you kill the children, there won’t be any population you have to fight in the future. Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet: Again, ‘that’s why we’re killing children. That’s why we’re bombing hospitals. We don’t want the population to survive.’
Well, that aim is genocide and it’s to prevent other peoples and countries from surviving and living to provide an alternative. Like Ukraine, Israel’s promoting racial hatred to justify its genocide against the Palestinians and Arabs. Just as it calls adversaries sub-human, just as the Ukrainians called the Russian speakers cockroaches, sub-human, the Israelis are treating the Arabs as that. That’s really what Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations means in progress, in practice: There’s really only one civilization in his view, and the other civilizations are the indigenous population in the way of the settlers. What’s this done? It’s reviving World War II Nazi ideology of hatred that was so shocking that it’s driving the whole world into an alliance to defend itself.
That’s what the United States, our planners, didn’t realize: that countries fear that the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s West Bank may be their own fate if the United States seeks to prevent them from following their own independence or achieving their own self-reliance, their own monetary system, their own trade, their ability to tax American corporations or to fine them if they’re polluting their land, if they deviate from the U.S. neoliberal policies. That is basically the U.S.-new religion. If other countries try to escape from their dollar debt or the incessant regime change consequences, they’re going to end up like the victims of the settlers.
So we can think of economic settlement of a country, economic settlement of taking over the rules of a country’s trade, its domestic laws, its ability to tax corporations to control its oil and mineral resources in its own natural interest, instead of letting American and European firms take them over and siphon off all of their output and the economic value of these resources for itself.
So we’re really in a fight for what kind of civilization we’re going to have. And there may be a global fracture, but if there is a global fracture between the 15% of the population that’s U.S.-NATO and the 85% of all the rest of the world, the part of the world that is industrialized, the part of the world that has the natural resources, well then, the fight that we’re seeing today, this new Cold War is really about what civilization’s all about, in contrast to the U.S.-NATO’s really anti-civilization.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add, if I could, because I think there’s another dimension. You get a different insight if you ask yourself, what comes next? Israel presumably is concerned about its security. That’s what it says all the time and I assume that that’s part of the story. Okay.
If you’re a nation worried about your security, here’s what you’re doing: You’re making yourself the absolute enemy of all Arabs and most Muslims by what you are doing, which, in case Americans don’t know, is widely advertised. The destruction in Palestine is front-page news in every Muslim country on this planet, every day. So, not like the United States, this is we, our people, our co-religionists, our brothers and sisters, being slaughtered.
Number one, Israel is going to have to deal with however this ends, whenever it ends, with a level of global isolation and enmity that is going to be expressed in a million big decisions, little decisions and medium decisions made by hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world, every chance they get. It’s not just the Houthis who figured out how they can strike a blow. Everybody else.
Number two and probably more important. This effort is destroying the Israeli economy. They will be dependent on the United States, totally, utterly, for many, many years, if not indefinitely. They will have no independence from the United States. It won’t just be a question of needing weapons all the time, but needing cash infusions, trade deals. You name it, they’re going to need it.
And the United States with whatever regimes come to power in the United States will hold all the strings. In short, Israel is creating by its war a level of insecurity, dependence, uncertainty that will haunt that society indefinitely into the future. This is not a strategy that gets them either security or independence. It is a joke. It’s not a funny joke. It’s a joke on them, by telling themselves it’s us or them, by refusing to try to find a way out. They are creating, they are painting themselves into an international, political, ideological corner. They’re going to be desperate for a long, long time.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that Israel is only one of the first arenas in this large international fight. The United States hasn’t said the Palestinians are an existential enemy. They noticed that the other Islamic countries are supporting Israel. Turkey is supporting Israel. Saudi Arabia is supporting Israel. Egypt is especially supporting Israel. They’re not fighting against it because the leaders are essentially bought off and are making money by supporting Israel, and they’re putting the benefit of their own leaders over their whole national destiny.
I’m more concerned about what other countries are going to do that will be able to mount a much stronger response than the Near Eastern countries are doing. Essentially, the response is going to be something that the Near Eastern oil countries haven’t done. The BRICS are moving to decouple from the West in order to create their own multipolar world, mutual benefit and development. This is the same issue that was fought over in the Thirty Years’ War.
The problem is that there seems little chance of the West accepting a Peace of Westphalia, permitting such a world, or at least a world that the United States, Europe, and Israel would want to be a part of. That’s the difference. At least at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe did accept a common interest in ending war and establishing ‘We don’t want more to tear our civilization – if you can call it that – apart.’ That’s not the case today.
The United States’ policy is to tear other countries resisting American policy apart, saying they’re not only a different civilization, they’re actually different species. Each civilization is a species and, somehow, we’re back into the ethnic racial stereotyping that underlay the settler colonialism and the American wars in Asia, Vietnam, Korea, everywhere else. The problem is that they’re not interested in mutual gain. They’re not interested in a world where everybody can live peacefully together. That’s why there’s not going to be a two-state solution to Israel. All the U.S. wants is the ability to use its brute power to control, grab whatever resources and revenue it wants. The aim is conquest without regard for the economic costs and benefits.
So you can’t look at it and say, ‘Well, what’s in the economic interest of the United States and Europe? Isn’t their economic interest to join with Russia and China and all have a prosperous world for mutual gain?’ Its leaders say, ‘No, we don’t care.’ The German leaders are willing to sacrifice the German economy, to destroy its industry, to shrink its GDP, quarter after quarter after quarter, to reduce its living standards, all because that’s the price of preventing an alternative world order to what the United States – which supports us – is interested in.
Andrei Martyanov has suggested that the United States is fighting today the closing years of World War II, in the sense that it’s fighting over the principles, what all of that was about, about what kind of international relations are going to be established, and it’s a fight against all other peoples as if it were a struggle for survival between different species, a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
And yet, the West is now the least economically fit, and the least militarily fit, except for its atomic weapons. And there it’s a tie, because both the U.S. and Russia and China all have the power to blow up the whole world and start again with the Neo-Paleolithic age. So this fight treats populations that seek their own policy independence as a species to be exterminated.
That’s the essence of Nazi ideology and it’s being repeated today. So if there is a clash of civilization, where does all this leave the United Nations? All the countries except the U.S.-NATO and Israel want peace. But the United Nations is powerless to exclude the most genocidal violators of international law.
When Israel blocks humanitarian United Nations emergency food from being delivered to the starving victims of Gaza, the United Nations has no military power to just overcome Israel’s blockage. It doesn’t have its own tanks to just say, ‘You want to let their trucks in, we’re going to send the trucks in behind the convoy of tanks and if your Israeli guards block us, we’re just going to shoot you down.’
It doesn’t have any power like that. Egypt has the power, but the Americans manipulated the Arab Spring to put in the chosen successor to Mubarak. The dictator was put in place by the entirely corrupt Egyptian ruling class. And the only question is whether the army somehow is going to have a memory of Abdul Nasser. It doesn’t have to be this way. So far there is no sign that Egypt will not be an applauder of Israel and a backer of Israel, as it’s been right now. It’s not going to help deliver food aid. It has put up just the opposite. It puts up blocks saying, ‘We don’t want any Palestinians here. We want them to be starved instead of coming into Egypt.’ That is utterly contemptible.
I don’t think that arenas further eastward around China, Russia, Central Asia, South Asia are going to be anywhere near as passive and corrupt as you’ve seen in the Islamic states. You can see that they are working very rapidly to create an alternative in which the Islamic countries basically have no interest at all in joining. They’re trying to play it both ways, just as Turkey is trying to say, ‘Well, we’re going to be part of NATO but at the same time going to be part of BRICS.’ As the Chinese say, a man who tries to take two roads at once is going to have a broken hip joint. That’s basically what we have there.
So, if the United States cannot even admit Palestine as a member, what will it do? It was the United Nations that created Israel and it itself bears the responsibility for recognizing Israel and endorsing its explicit aim of genocide against Palestinians from the new settler countries.
In 1948, the United Nations accepted the settler state, even as the Stern Gang was killing all the Palestinians to let its Zionist followers come in, and the United Nations was powerless to stop it. And the United Nations is powerless to act in the very way it’s constructed, with a Security Council that can be blocked by the United States, and where you can have votes to condemn Israel by the only two countries opposing the United States, Israel and a few Pacific Island countries. The whole rest of the world is against them and cannot do anything.
It’s obvious that if there is going to be any way of preventing what we’re describing, this attack on civilization, there has to be a new alternative to the United Nations, and that alternative has to have a military enforcement arm of international law, and it has to realize that this is an existential issue that requires its own ideological doctrine to be spelled out, what the principles are and how these principles are going to be defended. I don’t see any sign of that happening right now.
United Nations officials tend to paper over this problem by expressing the fantasy that somehow, ‘well, we really want a two-state solution but we’re not going to recognize Palestine and we’re not going to do anything at all about Israel’s genocide. We’re not going to order the arrest. We’re not going to isolate Israel. We’re going to let trade with Israel. We’re going to accept Israel genocide because it has its own freedom to do whatever it wants.’ So, the United Nations has essentially become an arm of the U.S. State Department and military, and that’s an impossible way to survive if there’s going to be an alternative to the U.S. kind of order that we’ve been talking about.
President Netanyahu claims that the essence of Judaism itself is to exterminate the non-Jewish population there and he says it to protest against genocide. To claim that the Palestinians are people and should not be killed is anti-Semitic because Israel is a Jewish state and its settlers may suffer retaliation if, as they kill the indigenous population, and because they’ve killed so many Palestinians, it’s only natural that the Palestinians and Arabs would want to fight back.
And it’s that reality that they want to defend themselves that, as you’ve just said, is an existential threat to Israel. And so, any country that fights back against the attacks by the bombs of the United States (they’re the United States’ bombs that Israel is dropping) is anti-Semitic. Germany and the United States then pass laws that any support of the Palestinians, any claim that they are human beings, any demonstrations on campus, any political demonstrations are legally breaking the law.
That’s what’s so contemptible, certainly about Germany, but also about the United States and the other NATO nations. We’re talking about an ideology that is anti-civilizational in principle. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because the wheel was basically already invented, in many ways, after the Thirty Years’ War. That became, I think, the basis for German philosophy and the whole European philosophy of law. They’re trying to reinvent it, but international law needs a means of enforcement. As long as you have the United Nations subject to veto power, you can’t do anything.
So, the principles of the United Nations are pretty clear. The principles, the aims should be similar to those of 1648, aiming to end the opportunities by America’s neo-liberal inquisition to interfere with the policies of other nations. The nation of Georgia has recently made a positive start in all of this. They’ve closed down the NGOs that are being financed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. That is fascism to promote regime change, and to meddle in the internal politics of countries in the hope of creating a local Boris Yeltsin or Zelensky or a Shah. The National Endowment for Democracy wants to make Georgia into another Ukraine fighting to the last Georgian, if they can put in some U.S. puppet to go to war with Russia.
So, here’s the problem that has to be addressed. The West has to go beyond the idea of a clash of civilizations. It’s going beyond this idea of a clash of civilization, it wants to be the only civilization left, in fact. But it’s uncivilized. So its ideology of destroying countries moving to resist its political and economic conquest is the opposition of civilization. It’s barbarism.
So, instead of having a clash of civilization for nations, as in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we’re experiencing a war against civilization itself, and the great question is whether the global majority of civilization is going to realize how truly existential America’s fight to reverse the principles of civilization is for these other countries. And the most immediate short-term test is going to be America’s sponsorship of Israel’s fight against Iran, I think.
What appeared in the 1990s to be the end of civilization is a war of survival for countries seeking to withdraw from the U.S.-NATO orbit and this U.S.-Israeli-Ukrainian policy of dehumanizing the enemy is a military tactic going way back to biblical times, as we’ve discussed – what Israel calls Amalek and U.S. diplomacy calls Autocracy or Socialism.
Russia’s President Putin regrets now how gullible he was in believing that the West would somehow act in a way to avoid war in Ukraine because that was in the West’s interest. It was in Europe’s interest to import Russian oil because that was the basis of its industry and yet it didn’t do that. U.S. officials never had any intention of keeping their promise not to expand NATO eastward.
Likewise, Iran’s newly elected president regrets how gullible he was in believing that if Iran refrained from defending its country against Israel bombing and assassinating its officials, the West would remove, or at least lighten, the trade and financial sanctions against Iran. That didn’t happen so now he’s hardened his position. So, the big question is, where does this leave Chinese foreign policy – since America says China is America’s existential enemy – based on offering a win-win agreement that would benefit both countries for international gain?
But the U.S. leaders have no intention in that kind of policy because it doesn’t want anyone else to have the gains that are to be made from technological and economic progress. They have only one goal: unipolar control of the entire planet and its governments, its economies, its natural resources, its land, and its water. As in a religious war, they’re willing to die for the ideal and to bring all the world down in an atomic war if they fail. That’s what’s being threatened in Ukraine today, and in Israel and Iran this week.
RICHARD WOLFF: One of the questions that a lot of people have about all of this is why governments, particularly in Europe, but also governments elsewhere, remain – most of them – unwilling to challenge what the United States is doing. You have the Houthis – they do – but they’re not even a government. They are a part of Yemen.
Yemen is one thing and the Houthis are a community within Yemen. But you have to look long and far, where else you get people willing to do stuff. I understand, much is done – hidden – that we don’t know about, or we can’t measure, or we can’t see. So, I want to address if I can, in the time we have, why it would be that Olaf Scholz in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron in France, or the E.U. leadership, and on and on and on and on, are willing – as Michael correctly says, and as many have pointed out – to go along with the United States in Ukraine.
And I mean go along: condemn Russia as the total evil here, supply weapons, supply money, all the rest of it, to the Ukrainians; why they basically go along with Israel in the Middle East, some more, some less, I understand, but why are they doing it? And then people ask, well, why would Sweden and Finland join NATO? Why is that happening? Why, even when Germany is in recession? I believe last quarter, and this quarter they came in below zero in GDP growth, so that qualifies (two quarters in a row below zero, you’re in an official recession, at least by the usual standard of that measure).
So here’s my answer. For the last 75 years of United States dominance coming out of World War II, any government that the United States found in power anywhere in the world, but particularly in Europe, that wasn’t aligned with American objectives was considered unacceptable. In the beginning, for example, coming out of World War II – just to remind people since the history of this is so poorly known – the first post-World War II government in France had several members of the French Communist Party in the cabinet of Charles de Gaulle. Okay.
That meant that the United States had to deal with a government of France, a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, which had a Communist Party (which at that time was very pro-Soviet), sitting in the cabinet. The second largest political party for 20 years after World War II was over in Italy, the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party outside of Russia anywhere in the world. So, you developed in Europe, in places like Germany, France, Italy, everywhere, even Britain, you had a version of what in the United States was called McCarthyism. It wasn’t as bad as the United States. You couldn’t do to the Communist and Socialist Parties there what you were able to do in the United States.
That’s because of particular historical cultural differences between them. But you were able to shut them down. What you were able to do was to create a situation in which the heights of political power, the dominant role in the major political parties, was people who were acceptable to the United States. And this became so routine and so normal that you didn’t have to impose it anymore from the outside. It was understood inside. People who sided with the United States saw their careers much more smoothly upward bound than people who had the temerity not to go in that direction. And there’s one after another in every one of these countries that learned that. So now we get to the present.
What you have are dominant political structures overwhelmingly populated by people who have decided, from their own experience, that going with the United States is the way to go, and going against the United States is a recipe for defeat and for decline, for disaster. They’re not unaware of what the Russians and the Chinese are doing, but they’re not yet convinced that the United States won’t be able to impose on those others what they have so successfully imposed on the Europeans. Olaf Scholz can’t think outside that box, neither can Mr. Macron, neither can Jens Stoltenberg, or Josep Borrell, or any of the other leading figures in European politics. And that’s true from Scandinavia to Greece, and from England to the Central European countries. That’s how they see the world.
The effort of the Soviet Union, let’s remember, was shown not to be up to the task by the reversals of 1989, 1990, 1991, and the place where that hasn’t happened – the far east – is far away from Europe. So, here’s what’s going on. The European leadership has decided to go with the United States – that’s the horse they’re betting on to win the race because it always has – but they are very worried, more now than ever, that they may have bet on the wrong horse. Right below the surface in European politics is a movement, partly on the right – that’s the rise of all the quasi-fascists, you know, the government in Italy, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France – but also on the left with the arrival of Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, very clear on her position against the war in Ukraine; Jean-Luc Mélanchon in France, who now is the head of the largest political party in the French Assemblée Nationale, is a Marxist. So is Sarah Wagenknecht on the left, they have been Marxists all of their political lives, and they’re known as such in their countries, very clearly.
Okay. I think you’re going to see, very disturbing to the United States in the months and years ahead, you’re going to see eruptions of difference. You’re going to see emergence of more governments like those of Mr. Orbán on the right in Hungary, the Czech government, and others, that are going to be even less and less sure.
That’s why the United States is desperate. That’s part of why Israel is desperate. They are now convinced that time is not on their side. They’re frightened. They won’t say so, and they’re right to be frightened, because their allies in Europe – the ones they still count on even though they’re disrespectful of them, but they’re convinced they need them – and they do.
It’s very important people understand: Europe is in a terrible, terrible situation and the Europeans kind of know it. They’re caught between the United States and China. It’s not clear what place for Europe will emerge in this new BRICS versus G7. In the G7, Europe is a footnote. In the G7 versus China, Europe is even more of a footnote.
Europe is not used to being a footnote.
Europe is used to being in charge. They have a hard row to hoe, how to manage all of this. It’s going to be tumult, it’s going to be turmoil inside Europe now for a long time, and it’s going to be rough and difficult. And one of the things that may emerge is an attempt, either to make a real third player in the world out of Europe – with its own army, its own nuclear, its own ‘all that’ – or to join with BRICS and China and go after a multipolarity in which the Europeans, by getting in on it, have a place they won’t have if they don’t get in on it.
These are real existential conditions that are going to be fought out over the next period, and the horror of much of it is that – and here I want to take off my hat to you, Nima, for making these conversations happen – this is what has to be talked about. If you believe, à la Aristotle and Plato, that the unexamined life is not worth living; if you think it’s better to understand what’s happening to you than not to; to want to know the good, the bad, the risks, the hopes; then these are the conversations that have to happen, and the mainstream media keeps as far away from them as it is possible to be.
People like you, and these programs, are therefore crucial. It’s not a question about agreeing with what I say, or with what Michael says, it’s not. It’s important to have these questions opened up, to have to contend with the history that Michael reviewed with us and for us today; to have to contend with what that points to, rather than living in a make-believe world in which a clash of civilizations is going on, so you don’t have to face the real issues that are going to shape what happens to us all.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, President Putin said a few months ago that someday Russia and Germany and Europe will trade again, but it may take 30 years.
RICHARD WOLFF: It might. Here’s my guess: From the little I know (and it isn’t much) but I speak German, I read German, you know, so I’m able to access what goes on in that country. I can assure you, whatever else, it will be less than 30 years. Inside Germany is an enormous conversation and debate going on about these issues, with much more blunt honesty than we imagine here in the United States. Just like you have to say inside Israel, there’s more opposition to what Netanyahu is doing than we have allowed here in the United States.
The irony: they have a newspaper, they had access, they can actually have (I’m not saying it’s adequate and I’m not denying what Israel is basically doing not for a minute), but there is an opposition that the Israelis have mounted to the policy of their government. We shouldn’t forget that, and that these political winds can change. Israel is not (let me say this to my American audience) winning in Gaza, is not winning in Lebanon. It may win.
I’m open, I understand, but not yet. And, wow, you know, a year into Hamas, and there’s still a Hamas? After what you’ve done? That’s amazing! I ask my fellow Americans if, in this country, one of our 50 states was subjected to the kind of destruction that Israel has done in Gaza, would there be a strong resistance? Don’t answer so quickly because the truth is we don’t know.
In Israel, we do know. There is a Hamas; they’re still fighting back. That’s amazing, and in the long run, that’s going to be just as important as it turned out after the end of World War II, when we all learned about the Norwegian resistance and the French resistance and the Italian partisans, turned out that there were opponents to the Nazis in every country, including Germany.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I do write a monthly column for the German financial press auf deutsch. So you’re right, there is a resistance.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: I don’t know if you’ve learned that CNN reported that Joe Biden is going to be in Germany to receive Germany’s highest award.
RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, we see that’s Mr. Scholz trying to play ‘We are on your side, don’t worry, we are loyal, you help me get here, so I’m going to help you get there’. Absolutely. By the way, same relationship between Biden and Netanyahu.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us today, Richard and Michael. See you soon.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The group that murdered 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza is not representative of Jews in general. It is the heir to an ideology that has been committing such crimes for a century. Thierry Meyssan traces the history of the "revisionist Zionists" from Vladimyr Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 25 January 2024
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Josep Borrell denounces the links between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, receiving an honorary doctorate in Valadolid, declared: "We believe that a two-state solution [Israeli and Palestinian] must be imposed from outside to bring about peace. Even if, and I insist, Israel reaffirms its refusal [of this solution] and, to prevent it, has gone so far as to create Hamas itself (...) Hamas has been financed by the Israeli government in an attempt to weaken the Fatah Palestinian Authority. But if we don’t intervene firmly, the spiral of hatred and violence will continue from generation to generation, from funeral to funeral".
In so doing, Josep Borrell broke with the official Western line that Hamas is the enemy of Israel, which it attacked by surprise on October 7, justifying the current Israeli response and the massacre of 25,000 Palestinian civilians. He asserted that enemies of Jews can be supported by other Jews, Benjamin Netanyahu in particular. He rejected the communitarian reading of history and examined personal responsibilities.
This narrative shift was made possible by the UK’s exit from the European Union four years ago. Josep Borrell knows that the European Union has financed Hamas since its 2006 coup, yet today he is free to say what’s on his mind. He didn’t mention Hamas’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "Palestinian branch" the organization claims to be, or with MI6, the British secret service. He simply suggested withdrawing from the mess.
Gradually, the veil is being torn away. A historical reminder is in order here. The facts are known, but never linked, nor listed in sequence. They have an illuminating cumulative effect. They take place mainly during the Cold War, when the West turned a blind eye to the crimes it needed, but they actually began twenty years earlier.
In 1915, the British Jewish Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, wrote a memorandum on the Future of Palestine. He wanted to create a Jewish state, but a small one so that it "could not be large enough to defend itself". In this way, the Jewish diaspora would serve the long-term interests of the British Empire.
He tried unsuccessfully to convince the Prime Minister, the then Liberal H. H. Asquith, to create a Jewish state in Palestine at the end of the World War. However, following Herbert Samuel’s meeting with Mark Sykes, just after the conclusion of the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreements on the colonial division of the Middle East, the two men pursued the project, gaining the support of "Protestant Nonconformists" (today we would say "Christian Zionists"), including the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He and his cabinet issued the famous Balfour Declaration, clarifying one of the points of the Sykes-Picot Sazonov Accords by announcing a "Jewish national home".
At the same time, Protestant Nonconformists, through U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to support their project.
Also during the First World War, during the Russian Revolution, Herbert Samuel proposed integrating Jews from the former Russian Empire fleeing the new regime into a special unit, the Jewish Legion. This proposal was taken up by a Ukrainian Jew, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who imagined that a Jewish state in Palestine could be his post-war reward. Herbert Samuel entrusted him with recruiting soldiers from among Russian émigrés. Among them was the Pole David ben Gourion (then a Marxist), who was joined by the Briton Edwin Samuel, Herbert Samuel’s own son. They distinguished themselves in the lost battle against the Ottomans at Gallipoli.
At the end of the war, the fascist Jabotinsky demanded a state as his due, but the British had no desire to part with their Palestinian colony. So they stuck to their commitment to a "national home", and nothing more. In 1920, a section of Palestinians led by Izz al-Din al-Qassam (the tutelary figure of the armed wing of today’s Hamas, the al-Qassam brigades) rose up and savagely massacred Jewish immigrants, while a Jewish militia responded. This was the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. London restored order by arresting fanatics, jihadists and Jews alike. Jabotinsky, at whose home an arsenal was discovered, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
However, David Lloyd George’s "Protestant Nonconformist" government appointed Herbert Samuel governor of Palestine. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem, he pardoned and released his friend Jabotinsky. He then appointed the anti-Semite and future Reich collaborator Mohammad Amin al-Husayni as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Fresco in homage to Vladimir Jabotinsky in Odessa (Ukraine).
Jabotinsky was elected director of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). But he returned to the former Russian Empire, where Symon Petliura had just created a Ukrainian People’s Republic. Jabotinsky and Petlioura signed a secret agreement to carve out a place for themselves in the lands of the Bolsheviks in the East and Nestor Makhno’s anarchists in the South (present-day Novorossia). Petliura was a fierce anti-Semite, and his men were used to massacring Jewish families and villages in their own country. Petlioura was the protector of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" and their mentor, Dmytro Dontsov, who later became administrator of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute responsible for carrying out the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" [1].
When word spread that Jabotinsky had formed an alliance with "Jew-killers", the World Zionist Organization summoned him for an explanation. But he preferred to resign his community office rather than answer questions. He then founded the Alliance of "Revisionist Zionists" (mainly present in the Polish and Latvian diaspora) and its militia, Betar. He turned away from the British Empire and became enthusiastic about Fascist Italy. He set up a military academy for the Betar near Rome, with the support of duce Benito Mussolini.
Betar honor guard in front of Jabotinsky’s portrait at the Ze’ev citadel.
In 1936, Jabotinsky devised an "evacuation plan" for Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine. He won the support of the Polish head of state, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, and his foreign minister, Józef Beck. But also that of the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, not forgetting that of the Romanian prime minister, Gheorghe Tătărescu. The plan never came to fruition, however, because the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were frightened by Jabotinsky’s allies, and because the British Empire opposed mass emigration to Palestine. In the end, Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, assured that Jabotinsky was involved in the Franco-Polonian-Nazi plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar.
It was during this period that Vladimir Jabotinsky prophesied the Holocaust to astonished Jewish audiences. According to him, by refusing his evacuation plan, the Diaspora would provoke a surge of violence against it. To everyone’s surprise, this is what his friends actually carried out: the extermination of millions of Jews.
Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) and Menachem Begin (left), at a Betar meeting in Warsaw.
In 1939, Jabotinsky drew up a plan for an uprising of the Jews of Palestine against the British Empire, which he sent to the local section of the "Revisionist Zionists", the Irgun. World War II postponed this project. Jabotinsky did not settle in Fascist Italy, but in the then-neutral United States, where one of his disciples joined him to become his private secretary. He was Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu.
During the war, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Benzion Netanyahu were visited by a Chicago philosophy professor, Leo Strauss. He was also a Jewish fascist. He had been forced to leave Germany because of Nazi anti-Semitism, but remained a staunch fascist. Leo Strauss went on to become the standard-bearer for "neo-conservatives" in the USA. He created his own school of thought, assuring his few disciples after the Second World War that the only way for Jews to prevent another Shoah was to create their own dictatorship. His pupils included Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, the man who today stands behind Benjamin Netanyahu and financed his "reform of institutions" this summer.
Vladimir Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940. David ben Gourion opposed the transfer of his ashes to Israel, but in 1964, Israel’s Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Levi Eshkol, authorized it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pays tribute to his hero, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
After World War II, the "revisionist Zionists" of the Irgun declared war on the British Empire for restricting Jewish emigration to Palestine. Under the command of the future Prime Minister, the Byelorussian Menachem Beguin, they organized a series of attacks, including one on the King David Hotel, which killed 91 people, and the Deir Yassin massacre, which claimed at least a hundred victims.
In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a plan to divide Palestine into two zones, Jewish and Arab, in order to form a bi-national state. Taking advantage of the slowness of the intergovernmental organization, David ben Gourion unilaterally proclaimed the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The Arab states reacted by taking up arms, while Jewish militias began the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Concerned by these rapid developments, the General Assembly sent a Swedish emissary, Count Folke Bernadotte, to demarcate the two federated states. But on September 17, 1948, other "revisionist Zionists" belonging to the Lehi (known as the "Stern Group"), under the command of another future prime minister, the Byelorussian Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated him. They were all convicted by an Israeli court. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Moshe Shertok (or Sharett), wrote to the General Assembly requesting Israel’s membership of the United Nations. He "declared 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". Under these express conditions, Israel became a member of the UN on May 11, 1949. In the days that followed, Yehoshua Cohen, Count Bernadotte’s assassin, was discreetly released. He became the bodyguard of Prime Minister David ben Gourion.
Benjamin Netanyahu as a young man and Yitzhak Shamir.
From 1955 to 1965, Yitzhak Shamir headed a department of Mossad, the foreign secret service of the new state. Without informing his superiors, he organized the secret police of the Shah of Iran, the Savak. Some two hundred of his men came to teach torture alongside former Nazis [2].
Then, in 1979, while negotiating the Camp David Accords with Egypt, he moved the men he had sent to Iran to the Congo. Probably with the support of the US CIA, they now supervised Mobotu Sese Seko’s secret police. He went there to check them out.
As part of the Cold War, Yitzhak Shamir also helped the Taiwanese dictatorship [3].
This time, unbeknownst to the United States, he set up a terrorist group in New York, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League [4]. He supervised a campaign for the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, attacks on the Soviet delegation to the UN and, finally, on the legation of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
He forged alliances with South Africa [5]. He took part in the creation of "Bantustans", false African states that enabled South Africa to treat its black population not as nationals, but as emigrants; a model that "revisionist Zionists" would later apply to the Palestinians.
In this vein, he had Israel finance the research of President Pieter Botha’s personal physician, Dr. Wouter Basson. Basson, at the head of 200 scientists, intended to create diseases that would affect only blacks and Arabs (Project Coast [6]) [7].
One crime leading to another, he also supported Rhodesia [8] and the fight against the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.
In Guatemala, Yitzhak Shamir became close to the dictatorship of General Rios Montt. He not only supplied him with weapons, but also supervised his secret police. He set up a computer institute to monitor water and electricity consumption, enabling him to detect and locate clandestine activities. He organized the Mayan population into kibbutzim so as to make them work and keep an eye on them without having to carry out agrarian reform. Thus protected, Rios Montt murdered 250,000 people. [9]; a model that revisionist Zionists wish to apply to the Palestinians. Relations between Israel and the United States regarding the Guatemalan experiment were channeled through the Straussian Elliott Abrams.
Throughout the Cold War, the "revisionist Zionists" did not act in the interests of the Western camp; they used the opportunities presented to them to do what Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky had always done: exercise power by force with no regard for anyone else.
Towards the end of the Madrid Conference, the Israeli delegation brought out this old poster from the British police in Mandatory Palestine: it asks for information on the Lehi terrorist group. Top left: Menachem Beguin.
At the end of the Cold War, President Bush Sr. convened the Madrid Conference to finally resolve the Israeli-Palestinian question. During the conference, the Israeli delegation, chaired by Yitzhak Shamir, now Prime Minister, demanded the repeal of UN General Assembly resolution 3379 [10] before any further discussions could take place. This states that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". "With an open heart, we call on Arab leaders to take the courageous step and respond to our outstretched hand in peace", declaims Shamir, grandiloquently. Anxious to reach an agreement, the General Assembly complied. But, deceiving its interlocutors, Israel made no commitments and even did everything in its power to defeat George H. Bush’s bid for a second term.
Before concluding, I’d like to say a few words about today’s personalities.
Ukrainian Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenski and "white führer" Andriy Biletsky
The alliance of Ukrainian "revisionist Zionists" and "integral nationalists" was reformed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A mafia oligarch, the Jew Ihor Kolomoïsky, propelled a young Jewish humorist, Volodymyr Zelensky, into politics, while financing the integral nationalist militias that besieged and bombarded the Russian-speaking Ukrainian populations of the Donbass. Refuznik Natan Sharansky, a former minister under Ariel Sharon, organized meetings between Jewish world figures and the Ukrainian president’s cabinet. While Voldymyr Zelensky entrusted the command of the two major battles of Marioupol and Bakhmout to Andriy Biletsky, the "white führer".
On July 19, 2018, on the initiative of "revisionist Zionists", the Knesset passed a law proclaiming Israel as a "Jewish state", with Hebrew as its sole official language and unified Jerusalem as its capital. Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory were deemed to be in the "national interest".
Four years later, Benjamin Netanyahu formed a government with a coalition of followers of Rabbi Kahane. In 2022, Itamar Ben-Gvir, chairman of Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power Party), declared that he would expel the Arabs from Palestine. Members of his party launched an attack on the West Bank village of Huwara in February 2023, seven months before the Palestinian attack of October 7. In the space of a few hours, they set fire to hundreds of cars and 36 houses. They attacked the inhabitants, injuring 400 people and killing one man before the eyes of the Israeli army, which surrounded the village without intervening in the face of their exactions.
This brief historical summary shows us that there is no Arab-Israeli problem any more than there is a Ukrainian-Russian problem, but a huge problem of all of us with an ideology which, in different places and times, has done nothing but sow suffering and death. We must open our eyes and no longer accept to mobilize with false-flag actions and other lies.
Translation
Roger Lagassé
[1] “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 15 November 2022.
[2] «SAVAK: A Feared and Pervasive Force», Richard T. Sale, Washington Post, May 9, 1977. Debacle: The American Failure in Iran. Michael Ledeen, Vintage (1982).
[3] תמכור נשק." ש’ פרנקל, העולם הזה, 31 באוגוסט 1983.".Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services. CIA, March 1979.
[4] The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, Robert I. Friedman, Lawrence Hill Books (1990).
[5] The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Vintage (2011). The Unnatural Alliance: Israel and South Africa, James Adams, Quartet Books (1984).
[6] Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, Chandré Gould & Peter Folb, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, UNIDIR/2002/12. The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, Dr. Stephen F. Burgess & Dr. Helen E. Purkitt, USAF Counterproliferation Center (2001).
[7] “South Africa, a former secret biological terrorism lab for a few “democratic” countries”, Voltaire Network, 28 October 2002. Dr la Mort, enquête sur un bio-terrorisme d’État en Afrique du Sud, Tristan Mendès France, Favre (2002).
[8] «The Rhodesian Army: Counter-insurgency 1972-1979» in Armed forces and modern counter-insurgency, Ian F.W. Beckett and John Pimlott, Croom Helm (1985).
[9] «Israeli Connection Not Just Guns for Guatemala», George Black, NACLA Report on the Americas, 17:3, pp. 43-45, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.1983.11723592
[10] « Qualification du sionisme », ONU (Assemblée générale) , Réseau Voltaire, 10 novembre 1975.
Thierry Meyssan
Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network).
Latest work in English – Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Progressive Press, 2019.
“I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do,” Refaat Alareer vowed in one of his final interviews.
My friend Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israeli invaders in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City, on December 6. He is now among the more than 16,000 civilians killed by Israel in the besieged enclave since October 7.
Our correspondence continued off-and-on for the past nine years. In our final exchange, on November 27, as the bombing grew closer to his home, he told me, “Everything is running out. Food. Water. Cooking gas. Israel is bombing all sources of life. Solar panels, water tanks and pipes. Not one bakery is functioning.”
Refaat was an author and educator who taught English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, which has been completely destroyed. “Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” he explained to me. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”
In one of his last public interviews, with Electronic Intifada, Refaat vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen by which he lived: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”
Refaat was a model of the resistance which Israel and its patrons aim to destroy. I tell his story in the passages below, which are excerpted from my 2015 book, The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.
The Teacher
Just a few months before I traveled to Gaza to cover the 51 Day War, I was dining with the literature professor Refaat Alareer, who usually lives in Gaza City, at an upscale Italian restaurant in Berkeley, California. We had been invited there by the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based foundation that supports a mix of artistic endeavors and progressive political causes. I had just delivered a talk on my book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, in San Francisco, beside the Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah. For his part, Refaat had been touring the US with a group of Palestinian authors from Gaza to promote the compilation of essays he had edited, Gaza Writes Back.
We had followed closely on each other’s heels throughout our book tours that spring. When I spoke at Western Washington University, a picturesque campus on the US border with Canada, I was peppered with questions by a Jewish-American undergrad who seemed to have never encountered a critical analysis of Israel and Zionism. A week later, I learned from Refaat that the student had cried openly as he and two other young writers from Gaza, Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, described growing up under siege to the campus audience.
By the time we gathered at the long dining table in downtown Berkeley, everyone seemed to be struggling with varying levels exhaustion and bewilderment from our long cross-country tours. I felt slightly uncomfortable seated beside three young people on a brief furlough from the Gaza ghetto before white tablecloths spread with crystal goblets of Merlot and smooth wooden boards of artisanal cheeses. But I quickly forgot my discomfort as I fell into conversation with Refaat.
We spent the next hour chatting about his impressions of the vast and blindingly colorful country he had just barnstormed across. The American landscape had offered Refaat the chance to meet Jews who did not greet him from behind the barrel of an M-16, from inside the cockpit of an F-16, from the turret of a Merkava tank, or behind an occupation administrator’s desk. Refaat described it as his “Malcolm X moment.”
“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, ‘Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil.’ He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them,” Refaat explained. “This is what’s happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who’s not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”
It was not until Refaat visited the United States that he came face-to-face with a Jew who sympathized with his plight as a Palestinian. “When you talk to Jewish people about their lives, they host you in their homes, you spend time with their families, they can educate you in ways beyond imagination because they know about Israel, about Jewish life, about Zionism,” he marveled. “You learn so much because they are insiders. It was the tour to America that changed me in so many ways.”
Even as it stimulated his imagination and broadened his perspective, Refaat’s trip to the US summoned pangs of regret. Like any other Palestinian academic, the occupation had cost him countless opportunities to study abroad and form relationships with his intellectual counterparts. In 2005, Israeli authorities refused to allow him to complete his master’s degree in the UK. He lost an entire year of his studies along with his scholarship. Over the following two years, the Israelis refused to allow him to leave Gaza on ten separate occasions. He remembered telling them, “If you have something against me, just put me in prison!”
When Refaat finally managed to secure permission to travel to the US in 2014, Sarah Ali, a twenty-two-year-old English literature student and teaching assistant at Islamic University who had contributed to Gaza Writes Back, was refused a permit to join him on the book tour. Thus, at events around the country, Refaat and his fellow Gaza writers, Yousef and Rawan, delivered lectures next to a chair with a cardboard cutout that read: “Sarah Ali Should Be Here.”
“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” Refaat reflected. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”
When Refaat returned to Gaza from the US, he redoubled his efforts to educate Gaza youth out of the narrow prejudices spawned in the seedbed of siege and occupation. At Islamic University, the conservative higher education institution co-founded by the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1978, Refaat introduced his students to Hebrew literature. Among the Jewish Israeli writers he assigned them was Yehuda Amichai, the legendary poet whose famed work, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” tells of short lives consumed in war and punctuated by intimate encounters with violence. The poem’s opening stanzas resonated easily with Refaat’s students:
God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.
Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.
When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.
In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:
Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Refaat stored his students’ papers in his desk at Islamic University’s English Department like small treasures. Then, on August 2, the Israeli military bombed his department along with the university’s administrative offices, sending those papers up in flames. The office where students met him during office hours was pulverized and the student library next door was decimated. When Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that the air force had targeted a “weapons development center” in the school, Refaat’s students responded with a wave of jokes about PMDs, or Poems of Mass Destruction. “Open minded Palestinians are more dangerous,” Refaat said. “That’s why [Israel] attacks the Islamic University. That’s why it attacks other colleges. Of course, they lied when they attacked it.”
Refaat had seen his school attacked by Israeli forces before, and he watched it be rebuilt. But there was little that could console him over the violence that sheared branch after branch from his family tree. During the war, he lost his brother-in-law, who also happened to be his best friend. He learned that his cousins were massacred in Shujaiya — Fathi al-Areer was among the survivors of Refaat’s extended family whom I interviewed in the rubble on August 14. Next, he received news that his brother was killed.
In the months after the war, his brother’s young son, Ranim, slipped into desolation. “I hate Dad,” Ranim muttered on a routine basis. “He won’t come back.”
Holy work
In early 2015, as electricity shortages plagued Gaza, I struggled to stay in touch with Refaat. His electricity came on for less than six hours at varying times depending on which day it was, leaving us with only a brief window of time to connect on Skype. When I finally reached him in late January, I found him coping with the malaise spreading through Gaza after the war. His house and his neighbor’s house had been bombed, forcing him to spend days at UNRWA offices attempting to negotiate the reconstruction process. It had taken three months to demolish a section of his family’s home that threatened to collapse atop passersby. “If it took that long, imagine how long the bureaucracy of getting it built again will take,” Reefat sighed.
One of Refaat’s brothers lost his job when the ice cream factory he worked in was bombed by Israel. He was left to scramble to collect enough money just to pay his monthly rent. His father, who had not been able to find work in twenty years, depended on help from his unmarried sons. But they considered themselves lucky compared to the thousands of government employees who had not worked in months and had no family assistance. “We always ask ourselves how they survive,” Refaat said of the unpaid workers. “You get to the point that you will do anything for a buck. It’s no surprise that crime is up, that domestic violence is up, that divorce is skyrocketing. Does the PA or Israel understand that sooner or later this will lead to an explosion?”
With the Rafah border crossing almost hermetically sealed by the Egyptian junta, Refaat had little chance of escaping Gaza to complete his PhD. His only release from frustration was in the classroom. As the siege tightened in the immediate aftermath of the war, he returned to Islamic University and redoubled his efforts to expand his students’ intellectual horizons. “I find myself releasing most of my anger at the situation by teaching young people about the struggle and about being creative in the way we fight for our rights and freedom,” Reefat said. “It’s very rewarding.”
In December 2014, Refaat’s class played host to my colleague Dan Cohen. Dan observed as Refaat presented his class with a story by one of his students, Noor Elborno, written from the perspective of an Israeli veteran of an assault on the Gaza Strip. The soldier had returned to his family in Israel plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder and consumed with nightmares about the children he had killed back in Gaza. As the Palestinian children in his nightmares turned to his own, the soldier descended into madness. If the story had been written by an Israeli, it would have fit neatly into the country’s hackneyed shooting-and-crying literary sub-genre, the most notable example being Waltz With Bashir, in which soldiers sought personal absolution through anguished confessions of crimes they committed against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Authored by a young Palestinian in Gaza taking on the perspective of an Israeli directly engaged in violence against her society, however, it reflected an unusual yearning to understand the psyche of the occupier.
Refaat turned to his class and asked them if they could sympathize with the soldier in the story. Some among the class said they might be able to, but only on the condition that they were released from the bonds of occupation. Others protested that the soldier was complicit in their oppression, and that he was a baby killer who deserved to suffer for his crimes. The angry voice of a young woman suddenly rose above those of her classmates. “I hate them all!” she exclaimed. She emphasized that she was referring to all Jews.
Refaat emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name. “I told my students about my time in the US staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians,” he recalled. “It’s abstract to them because Israel won’t even let my students travel to meet other people. Actually, three of my students have been prevented from leaving recently. But if these kinds of discussions help ten percent that’s wonderful, because later on, when they get to break the walls of isolation the occupation and Egypt are creating, when they meet Jewish people who are working for our cause, it’s going to make all the difference.”
Towards the end of the class, Refaat asked his students to raise their hands if they had lost their home or friends and family during the war. Most in the room threw a hand in the air. The young woman who declared her hatred for Jews had, in fact, lost her home in Shujaiya and witnessed the death of family members and neighbors. “It clearly showed how Israeli violence is pushing everyone to the extreme,” Refaat remarked. “This war was so horrible, it really touched everyone.”
When class was over, fifteen young women in colorful headscarves and long dresses approached Dan all at once, peppering him with questions. “The class had apparently known that I was a Jew,” Dan told me, “and they wanted to know what I thought about them, about Gaza, about my life in the US. They had never met a Jew before and they really showed me a lot of respect.”
The following day, the young woman who declared her hatred for Jews approached Refaat to express regret. Hearing herself verbalize her resentment left her feeling ashamed, she told him. And the meeting with Dan after class had provoked her to consider redirecting the anger that had gripped her after the war.
“Gaza is the most maligned place in the world, and if we were to believe what we’re told by established Jewish groups in the US and mainstream media, we would think that a Jew in Gaza would be ripped apart, that Gazans are running around looking for a Jew to kill,” Dan reflected later. “In this supposed hotbed of anti-Semitism, everything was completely the opposite of the way I was told it was going to be. What I found were people like Refaat fighting to keep the violence that had consumed the physical lives of his students from consuming them internally. What he’s doing is holy work.”
Days before his death, Refaat pinned the following poem he wrote to the top of his Twitter/X timeline:
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 on X:
The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza 🏳️🌈 Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.
To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.
“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”
It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.
As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.
During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.
Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.
You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.
Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.
“My late friend Manoel Santos…took his own life just eight yards from my cell”
Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.
But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.
I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.
Your most devoted subject,
Julian Assange
This is a third talk in a series that began with Relationship Based Medicine , continued with Beware of Doctors Bearing Gifts and concludes with this talk, which could called History of a Medical Psychosis, Medical Neoliberalism, Evident versus Evidence Based Medicine, A Lutheran Moment, or Does Objectivity Come from using Chance to Control Bias or Bias to Control Chance?
It is the most important talk I have ever given.
The first lecture was delivered to clinicians in New York with a Q and A afterwards.
The second was delivered to the public in Lethbridge Alberta, thanks to Jennifer Williams and Dan Johnson but owing to tech difficulties at the venue (See In Memory of Dexter Johnson), it was difficult to record the Q and A with the public. Suffice to say though between the technical difficuties, the lecture and the Q and A, we were all there for the better part of 3 hours and the discussion was great.
This third lecture was delivered to Aaron Kesselheim’s PORTAL group – Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law. There are two versions. The History of a Medical Psychosis was recorded by Bill James the day before in case of glitches – same day as Putin and Biden gave speeches. The second was recorded by Aaron – Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard.
There are slight differences between them. The text and slides below add some detail to both talks but the tone of voice and gestures in the talks likely convey things not in the text.
Slide 1: Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard
Welcome to a very conservative talk – based on a belief in the medical model and in evaluating the drugs we use thoroughly.
Slide 2: These quotes are a precis of key points in the deposition of Ian Hudson, Chief Safety Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2000 in the Tobin v SmithKline trial.
Forty-Eight hours after starting Paxil Don Schell shot his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself. Hudson is being asked – Can SSRIs cause Suicide?
The jury dismissed Hudson’s Evidence Based Medicine view in favor of Evident Based Medicine and in this Civil trial found GSK guilty of negligence that resulted in the death of this family.
Hudson’s view, however, remains ensconced at the top of Britain’s drugs regulator, of which he was later the CEO – as well as FDA, EMA, TGA, Health Canada, WHO, and Boston institutions like Harvard, MRCT, and Vivli. Joe Biden and the Pope’s advisers will also endorse and tell their bosses to say – Yes RCTs are the Way the Truth and the Light.
Slide 3: Hudson’s views originate 70 years earlier in the work of a strange man – Ronnie Fisher.
Here you see Fisher smoking a pipe. He dismissed the later link between smoking and lung cancer, saying personality types predisposed to both cancer and smoking. Evidence was not Fisher’s strong point.
He had nothing to do with medicine and never ran an RCT. Controlled trials and randomization were there before Fisher and were no big deal but for no clear reason his book the Design of Experiments transformed what came next.
Fisher ran a thought experiment to characterize expert knowledge. He mentioned randomization as a means to control for any trivial unknown unknowns. Randomization later became semi-mystical.
Fisher’s expert knew parachutes worked so if we set up two groups, one with parachutes and the other not, we might randomize in case there was someone with webbed feet who might behave differently when falling. Otherwise, we would expect those wearing parachutes to live and those not to die – unless a chance strong wind lands a person in snow covered trees.
If randomization eliminated webbing as a factor, the only thing that could get in the way of an expert being right was chance and this could be assigned a statistically significant value. If 1 in 20 of those without parachutes lived we wouldn’t say the expert didn’t know what he was talking about. Fisher was characterizing expertise rather than characterizing an exploration of the unknown.
Randomization can’t control for ignorance.
Slide 4: Fisher’s expert is a Robin Hood who 19 times out of 20 can split a prior arrow lodged in the Bull.
Slide 5: But the trials done to license drugs especially antidepressants look more like this. A mismatch on this scale indicates medical RCTs are nothing like what Fisher had in mind.
Slide 6: The first RCT in medicine was a trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis. Tony Hill used randomization as a method of fair allocation – he was not managing mystical confounders. Hill helped put the effects of smoking on the map. He had no time for Fisher. He also knew doctors were not experts. His trial was not a demonstration of expertise.
Hill’s RCT found out less about streptomycin than a prior non-randomized trial in the Mayo Clinic, which showed it can cause deafness and tolerance develops rapidly.
Slide 7: Twenty years later, here is Tony Hill taking stock of controlled trials. In this 1965 lecture, he mentions that it is interesting that the people who are most heavily now promoting controlled trials are pharmaceutical companies.
Hill didn’t think trials had to be randomized. He thought double-blinds could get in the way of doctors evaluating a drug. He was a believer in Evident Based rather than Evidence Based Medicine.
Hill said we needed RCTs around 1950 to work out if anything worked. By 1960 he figured we had lots of things that worked – none of which had been brought on the market through an RCT – and he thought the need was to find out which drug worked best. This is not something RCTs can do – there is no such thing as a best drug. RCTs have instead become a way for companies to get weaker drugs on the market.
He said that RCTs produce average effects which are not much good in telling a doctor what to do for the patient in front of them.
All drugs do 3000 + things – one of which might be useful for treatment purposes. In focusing on one element, by default, Hill is saying RCTs are not a good way to evaluate a drug. All RCTs generate ignorance. But we can bring good out of this harm if we remain on top of what we are doing. Hill never saw RCTs replacing clinical judgement.
Slide 8: This 1960 RCT run by Louis Lasagna makes Hill’s point well. Thalidomide has therapeutic efficacy as a sleeping pill but the trial missed the SSRI-like sexual dysfunction, suicidality, agitation, nausea and peripheral neuropathy it causes.
Two years later, Lasagna was responsible for incorporating RCTs in the 1962 Food and Drugs Act Amendments – in order to minimise the chance of another thalidomide. By doing this, more than anyone else, Lasagna was the man who got us using RCTs
This trial would have licensed thalidomide today. The 1938 Act had no requirement for RCTs.
Slide 9: Many claim RCTs demonstrate cause and effect in a way no other study design can.
The 1950s was a golden age of new drugs that gave us the best antihypertensives, hypoglycemics, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs we have ever had without RCT input into any discoveries.
Imipramine was the first antidepressant. It and other antidepressants beat SSRIs in later RCTs. It can treat melancholia – SSRIs can’t. Melancholia comes with a high risk of suicide.
Imipramine was launched in 1958. At a meeting in 1959, European experts made clear that while it was a wonderful treatment imipramine made some people suicidal. Stop the drug and it clears. Re-introduce and it comes back. This was Evident Based Medicine showing this drug can cause suicide.
Like Fisher, let’s do a thought RCT of imipramine versus placebo in melancholia. The red dots here are suicides or suicide attempts.
Even though it can cause suicide, we would expect it to reduce the number of suicides because it treats this high risk condition. If you didn’t know better, this RCT would look like evidence antidepressants do not cause suicide.
Slide 10: Here is the data on the trials in mild depression that brought the SSRIs to market – mild depression because SSRIs are no use in melancholia. You see an increase of suicidal events compared to placebo in people at little or no risk of suicide.
Slide 11: This is what the data for imipramine look like in the same mild depressions. This is not a thought experiment – it was used as a comparator in SSRI trials. Now it too causes suicides.
RCTs can give us diametrically opposite answers. This is because these are not Drug Trials. They are Treatment Trials and if the condition and treatment produce superficially similar effects, randomized trials cause confounding rather than solve it. This is true for most medical conditions and their treatments.
People evaluating drugs in traditional clinical trials, before RCTs, knew this. When a patient becomes suicidal in a trial you have to use your judgement to work out what is happening but in RCTs clinicians are not supposed to use their judgment. RCTs are more objective than our judgments – supposedly.
Slide 12: Here is what a Drug Trial looks like. In healthy volunteer studies in the 1980s, companies found SSRIs cause volunteers to become suicidal, dependent and sexually dysfunctional. We heard nothing about these problems when the drugs launched in part because Drug Trials enabled companies to engineer Treatment Trials to hide these problems.
Slide 13: If you break a limb and get recruited to an RCT randomly applying casts to one limb – not necessarily the broken one – the trial will show random application beats placebo. Practicing Evidence Based Medicine rather than Evident based Medicine here would clearly be crazy.
Slide 14: Here is a James Webb telescope image. James Webb is marvellously bringing out the infinite individuality of stars.
In addition to randomization, Fisher put a premium on Statistical Significance. By 1980 every leading medical statistician was saying we need to get rid of statistical significance in favor of Confidence Intervals.
Confidence Intervals had been introduced by Gauss around 1810. Because of measurement error, the telescopes in use often failed to establish whether there was one or two stars in a location. Measurement errors should distribute nornally and so constructing confidence intervals could help us distinguish individual stars.
We have moved a long way forward in this respect with the James Webb telescope you see here.
Slide 15: Confidence intervals rushed into medicine in the mid-1980s. All the authorities on the right – many linked to Boston – argued they were much more appropriate than significance testing. They are appropriate for measurement error but are they any more a cure for ignorance than statistical significance?
Slide 16: Confidence intervals we are told allow us to estimate the size of an effect and the precision with which it is known. We have much more precise details on the likelihood of the Red Drug here killing you than we have for the Yellow Drug. The best estimate of the lethal effect for the Yellow Drug however is greater. The standard view is that if we increase the size of the Yellow Drug Trial we will have greater precision and know better what the risks are. As we shall see, this is wrong.
As things stand, if you are asked to take one of these drugs, should you be guided by precision or effect size? Ian Hudson, FDA and WHO say the only dangerous drug here is the Red One. This is because more than 95% of the data, more than 19 out of 20 lie to the right of the line through 1.0 – confidence intervals have defaulted into statistical significance.
I would take the Red rather than the Yellow one. This is not measurement error and we don’t know what confidence intervals represent when they are not representing measurement error.
Slide 17: Faced with claims Prozac causes suicide, Lilly analysed their clinical trials and claimed there is no evidence their drug causes suicide. Confidence Intervals are being spun here as indicating we don’t know Prozac causes suicide as nothing is statistical significant. This is Ian Hudson thinking – at odds with all statistical expertise. It’s wrong. The consistency across young and old, depression and eating disorders strongly suggests in real life there is an excess of suicidal events.
Slide 18: There is an intriguing mystery behind these figures. Here you see a representation of suicidal events that happened in the trials that brought Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft to market around 1990. You’ll note there are events under the word screening here. There is a 2 week washout period before a trial starts where people are whipped off their prior drugs before being put on the new treatment or placebo. This is a highly dangerous phase where people are in withdrawal and very likely to go on to a suicide attempt.
Slide 19: And here you see the moves companies made to avoid having a confidence interval excess of suicidal events on treatment. Companies only moved the events – not the people.
These moves were justified on the basis that people in the run in phase were not on active treatment – which is equivalent to being on placebo – but they often were withdrawing from active treatment which is highly dangerous. Some who stopped treatment at the end of the active phase of the trial committed suicide and were designated placebo too. Some on placebo, put on active treatment in the follow up period, committed suicide and were designated as placebo suicides on an intention to treat basis.
There are two articles from 2006 that bring out this point Did Regulators Fail and The Antidepressant Tale: Figures Signifying Nothing. The Antidepressant Tale gives other examples of confidence interval abuse.
After all these maneuvers, there was still an excess of suicidal events on these SSRIs but the confidence interval was no longer entirely to the right of 1.0. Confidence intervals have degenerated into statistical significance tests because regulators need a Stop-Go mechanism and statistical significance provides this. But doctors don’t need an external Stop-Go mechanism to replace their clinical judgement, so why do they go along with this?
Slide 20: Nobody noticed these maneuvers around 1990, but fourteen years in a crisis about children becoming suicidal on antidepressants, questions began to be asked. GSK and Pfizer responded:.
‘GSK did not intentionally submit any erroneous or misleading information to FDA. The suicide data submitted to FDA explicitly identified when events occurred during the placebo run-in period. FDA had all this information right from the beginning.’
“Pfizer’s 1990 report to FDA plainly shows … that 3 placebo attempts as having occurred during single blind placebo phases… FDA has neither criticized these data or the report as inappropriate, nor required additional analyses”.
These maneuvers breach FDA regulations and FDA staff noted this in memo’s at the time. But not only did FDA ignore these breaches of regulations senior figures, like Tom Laughren, put their name to articles that embraced these breaches of regulation – in one case in the cause of showing it was not unethical to have placebo controls in RCTs, as those on placebo were not at any greater risk than those on treatment.
There was much back and forth between FDA and companies in 1990. Was it criminal? Perhaps. I prefer the idea of strategic ignorance.
What I think we are seeing are events circling around a major crisis in knowledge production. This is not something you can expect FDA to take a lead on – they are not political actors, they are bureaucrats. Companies create knowledge or were creating the appearances of knowledge at this point, but doctors are surely primarily responsible for the creation of medical knowledge and doctors were missing in action around 1991– other than as spokespeople for companies.
Slide 21: The Sacred Mantra is that randomization controls for all possible confounders in all possible universes. The reality is randomization introduces confounders into clinical trials.
The images for the next 3 slides come from a GSK paper prepared in 2006 for submission to FDA. The small print is hard to read – the bold at the bottom gives you the key details.
The data for suicidal events on Paxil in Major Depressive Disorder trials in this first slide show it causes suicidal events. Even Ian Hudson would have to agree and these data were available at the time of the Tobin trials. But randomization is about to come to GSK’s rescue.
Slide 22: Faced with a problem like this, had GSK consulted me I’d have said do a trial in Intermittent Brief Depressive Disorders (IBDD). They might have said but there are trials of SSRIs in IBDD and they don’t work. I’d have said do one. They did and it had to be terminated early, Paxil did so poorly. I’d have said do another. Why – the figures for Paxil still look bad in this group?
Slide 23: But when you add the IBDD data to the MDD data, all of a sudden the figures say Paxil protects against suicidal events.
This scenario can happen every time a condition we are treating is heterogenous – that is dementia, diabetes, parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, back pain, hypertension – pretty well everything in medicine. In these cases randomization will act to hide effects good and bad and leave us able to use a problem a drug causes to hide a problem a drug causes.
Slide 24: Graphically this is what it looks like. The Red Drug here is the MDD curve alone – more than 95% of the data are to the right of the 1.0 line. The traditional wisdom is that adding some more events to the Red Drug above should give us a more precise version of the same estimate
In fact when you add a few more people, about 3%, we have shifted the curve to the opposite side of the 1.0 line. Its far a more precise confidence interval but this is a precision that speaks to our ignorance rather than to better knowledge. No medical statistics book ever hints at this possibility.
We could add 40 suicidal events to the paroxetine IBDD arm before Ian Hudson would have to admit paroxetine causes a problem – on the basis that the results are now statistically significant.
IBDD patients could be admitted to MDD trials – we have no way to distinguish them. Some patients become IBDD by virtue of a poor response to an SSRI.
Randomization in heterogenous conditions will hide effects drugs cause. It allows us to use an adverse effect a drug causes to hide the same adverse effect that drug causes. Confidence intervals do not help us work out what is going on in these cases.
Nor do they help in heterogenous drug responses. Lets take 20 Aarons who are all sedated by a Red Drug and 20 Davids all stimulated by it. The best estimate in the confidence interval in this case will lie on the 1.0 line, showing the drug has no effect. A method to distinguish between one and two stars should not produce an answer that there are no stars here. Algorithmic judgements cannot substitute for a human judgement.
Slide 25: Here is another problem with Confidence Intervals. Young men take Finasteride to restore a thick head of hair. We could count hairs and build confidence intervals around before and after hair follicle numbers.
Finasteride also causes suicide and permanent sexual dysfunction and like most drugs has 3,500 other effects. Confidence intervals for hair numbers before and after is one thing, but applying them to suicidality or sexual function, which were not measured in the trial, and for Merck to then claim on this basis that the science does not support a link between finasteride and suicide on the basis that not all the data lie to the right of the 1.0 line isn’t managing measurement error. It’s a confidence trick – that happens all the time.
Slide 26: There are more dead bodies on antidepressants in trials than on placebo, yet the RCTs as Ian Hudson told you show the drugs work. This is because most RCTs have a surrogate outcome. For antidepressants its the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.
Fifteen years after its creation, Max Hamilton commented on his scale:
It may be that we are witnessing a change as revolutionary as was the introduction of standardization and mass production in manufacture. Both have their positive and negative sides
Hamilton saw this scale as a checklist of things to ask about in an interview – a mixed blessing.
Slide 27: Checklists are now viewed as more scientific than David Healy in a clinic asking you about your family. They will produce standardized but possibly disastrous interviews.
For instance, on this scale, there is a suicide item. Suicidality can stem from the illness or the drug. This needs a judgement call. If caused by the drug you should rate a Zero. If caused by the illness you might rate 3 or 4. If you just check yes for suicidality, the default is to the illness. Ditto for sex, and for sleep.
In the case of sleep, the illness can produce too much sleep or not enough sleep and each of the medicines can inhibit sleep or heavily sedate. There are 3 sleep questions. A scientific interview has a multitude of options requiring judgement calls.
In the 1980s, we brought problems to doctors needing help to get on with the lives we wanted to live. Since then, for drug companies, rating scales, sometimes left in the waiting room, ensure you do an interview that produces figures for which a company drug might seem an answer. Your interview will help you to help your patient to live the life Pfizer want him to live. Do that and you are no longer practicing medicine.
Slide 28: Many think RCTs are fine if only they were done by angels.
Study 329 was conducted in the very best university centres in North America. It has an authorship line to die for, starting with Marty Keller and including a Canadian Liberal Party Senator – Stan Kutcher. It was published in the Journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry. The article claims Paxil works wonderfully well and is safe for depressed teens.
What I am about to tell you applies to all industry trials across medicine.
Slide 29: Three years earlier, in 1998, GSK concluded Paxil didn’t work in Study 329 and was not safe. That could not be published so they were going to pick out the good bits of the data and publish them. The good bits formed the Keller et al 2001 paper.
This 1998 internal SKB document led New York’s Attorney General to file a fraud action against GSK. As part of the resolution of this, GSK agreed to make their Paxil trial data public. A decade later, GSK resolved a Dept of Justice action, which also involved Study 329, for $3 Billion dollars.
Slide 30: These actions gave a team of us an incentive to Restore Study 329 and we now had more raw data from this study than FDA or other regulators had seen for this or any company study.
Slide 31: In contrast to Keller, we found the 8-week acute phase showed no difference between Paxil or placebo. We found the same for the never published 6 month continuation phase – never published till we published it 18 years after the trial ended.
Slide 32: Keller noted 6 emotionally labile events in the trial, some of which might have been suicidality, 4 on paroxetine. But in our hands a fifth of the children on Paxil had a behavioral event mostly suicidality – 18 out of 93 children.
Suicide is not what I want to focus on. It’s the ability of company studies to hide adverse events. Our paper lists 10 ways to hide things. Coding – as in calling suicidality emotional lability, is top of this list – this is the first act of authorship but no reviewer or journal pays any heed to it.
Slide 33: In a Pfizer trial, at the same time, a man on active drug got agitated, poured gasoline/petrol on himself and set fire to it intending to kill himself but he only died from his burns 5 days later. Pfizer coded him as death by burns. Once the coding is done, the paper is all but written.
There is some chance FDA found out about this man because if you have to go to hospital or you die companies had to file a report outlining what happened and did so for this man.
Slide 34: But in Study 329, FDA know nothing about a 15 year old boy, 2 weeks after being put on Paxil, who was out on the street waving a gun, threatening to kill people. He was brought to hospital by the police. There was no report to tell FDA what happened. Thirty years ago companies found a way to legally avoid filing these reports. Companies are still using this trick in trials published this year in all major journals and regulators either don’t spot or are not bothered to close a very obvious loophole. In Study 329, 4 children vanished through this loophole.
Slide 35: The sentences on the right are the 3 sentences with which this article ends – the message is companies have created an impression that RCT articles are like tablets of stone brought down from the mountain top, commanding doctors to prescribe and us to take. But when we have access to RCT data, this raises questions – as science should – rather than issues commands.
In addition to Coding, Grouping is also an act of authorship. If you have 500 events in 93 children on Paxil, rather than list them all, cardiac events are usually grouped in a Cardiac group etc. Behavioral events are usually grouped in a Psychiatric group. GSK grouped all behavioral events under Neurological. This groups emotional lability with headaches and dizziness, which are very common. Grouped this way the behavior problems disappear. Grouped as Psychiatric, the problem is immediately clear.
The Restoring Study 329 article took over a year to get it published. What was fascinating was the BMJ did not contest the data but they were very exercised by the act of interpretation. They appeared to assume that the data had spoken and GSK faithfully transmitted what they had heard. They found it heard to grasp that GSK used a coding dictionary that even FDA had never heard of.
Any scientific analysis inevitably involves an act of authorship or interpretation. But BMJ found it hard to let us author the behavioral events out of the neurological group into a Psychiatry group. There is no such thing as data without an interpretation. Ideally the interpretation should command consensus but for BMJ this appeared to mean that we should adopt what GSK had done without question.
Slide 36: Everyone knows Prozac was approved for children who are depressed but not that Paxil was too. A year after the Keller paper came out, this is part of an FDA approvable letter for Paxil.
It says GSK have told FDA Study 329 is negative. FDA agree its negative – in fact all 3 trials are negative – but FDA will still approve Paxil for kids. FDA also agree with GSK’s suggestion not to mention the negative trials in the label of the drug. Why would FDA agree to this?
Before answering that, let me note FDA also viewed the Prozac trials in teens as negative.
Slide 37: This slide from Erick Turner’s 2008 article shows published adult ‘trials’ on various antidepressants, almost all indicating the drugs work well and are safe. Look at the sertraline column – 3 from the right. It shows two studies – the minimum needed for approval.
Slide 38: Another slide shows the trials as FDA viewed them. 46% of these trials are negative. Many published as positive were negative to add to the unpublished negative trials. Look at the sertraline column – only one positive study.
Why do FDA say nothing about this? Well if FDA said trials are negative – the companies might get sued for fraud or fined – as happened for Study 329.
Slide 39: Here you see the PTSD page of a 30 page document listing Zoloft articles in progress. These papers aim at capturing markets not at informing us on how to use Zoloft safely.
Pfizer did 4 Zoloft PTSD trials. All negative. FDA approved it on the basis of 2 trials with a minimal benefit for women. These good bits plucked out are what’s being published. You see under Status on the right two articles are complete and will be sent to the very best journals. On the left you see TBD – to be determined – when Pfizer decide which names would sell most Zoloft.
You saw a 24 person authorship line for Study 329 but the real author is not there. Across medicine studies of on-patent drugs are ghostwritten.
In the case of children’s antidepressant trials the entire literature was written by ghosts and there is a complete mismatch between the published claims and the data – the greatest mismatch in all of science. On the basis of published claims the use of these drugs is escalating rapidly in teenagers with predictably bad results.
Slide 40: Fifty years ago, Britain joined the EU and ran into trouble. Cadbury’s chocolate, their favorite chocolate, they were told, could not be called chocolate. It didn’t have the right quota of cocoa solids. British consternation over chocolate led to Brexit some decades later.
What FDA do is in their name – they regulate Food and Drugs. Faced with butter or chocolate or drugs, companies must meet an assay standard – so much cocoa solids, animal fats, or so many points on a Depression rating scale in 2 trials. Meet that and FDA let you use the words chocolate, butter, or antidepressant. It’s not FDA’s job to decide if this is good butter, or if chocolate is good for you, or to police the medical literature.
Sllide 41: Since 1990, however, regulators increasingly say they approve drugs on the back of a supposed positive Benefit-Risk ratio. This is Ian Hudson thinking. If there are no proven adverse effects and just a benefit then of course there is a positive Benefit-Risk ratio.
The medical act of bringing good out of the use of a poison is incompatible with all this.
We would all agree there is a positive benefit-risk ratio for parachute approval in terms of lives saved versus lives lost – even though some men might have difficulties making love in the weeks afterwards, owing to harness effects. If things aren’t clear enough for us all to endorse, regulators are de facto getting us to live the lives companies want us to live when they make Benefit-Risk claims.
Unlike parachutes, SSRI RCTs have more dead bodies on SSRIs than placebo. In addition. the commonest effect of an SSRI is to cause genital numbness in close to everyone who takes one within 30 minutes of a first tablet. Almost everyone will have the way they make love changed while on an SSRI and they may later find themselves unable to make love ever again, either because they can’t stop or because the drugs can wipe out sexual function for ever. This may be far more important to a person than any mood benefit.
But the focus on the mood effect, means the sexual effect was missed entirely in the trials regulators scrutinized both because that’s how trials work but also with a little extra gaming from companies.
Some years ago treating a man with OCD, I tried an SSRI – the first line treatment and then more heavy duty drugs when the SSRI didn’t work. All made him worse. One day he came in much better – he had stopped all his drugs but he was cured by going back smoking. He had also googled nicotine and OCD and found studies showing nicotine and related drugs can help OCD.
When I say the Art of Medicine lies in Bringing Good out of the Use of a Poison, people hiss at me but everyone would likely agree this man was bringing good out of the use of a poison. SSRIs however are prescription-only because we expect them to be more dangerous than over the counter alcohol and nicotine.
The important thing is that this man (perhaps with input from me) is the only person in a position to make a meaningful Benefit Risk call. I can’t see what role FDA could have in this. Benefit-Risk calls are an individual matter. Making the claims FDA now make puts them in a role of getting people to live the life Pfizer want them to live.
Am I making all claims on the basis of Citizen Research more than Expert input? No – among the articles this man found about nicotine and OCD was one whose significance passed him by. One of the authors was Arvid Carlsson, who created SSRIs and won a Nobel Prize for Medicine.
But when you have Skin in the Game, Motivation can be worth just as much as Expertise.
Slide 42: As a result of Ian Hudson’s views, as I wrote 25 years ago, everyone who participates in a company trial today puts all the rest of us in a state of Legal Jeopardy. We should boycott trials, until this changes. See Clinical Trials and Legal Jeopardy.
Slide 43: That article was 25 years ago, this is 25 days ago and argues everyone entering a trial now are deceived by consent forms that promise coverage for injuries, unaware that there are no injuries on modern treatment, or no injuries that can be admitted. See The Coverage of Medical Injuries in Compary Trial Informed Consent Forms.
Slide 44: However, since 2010, the US Supreme Court in the Matrixx case made it clear that Ian Hudson’s views do not apply to investors wanting to make up their mind about the Benefits and Risks of investing. We who are investing our lives in these treatments still do not have such rights.
Slide 45: The beating Tell Tale Heart of this talk came with the publication of this article 33 years ago this month, in which 3 Boston clinicians claimed fluoxetine caused 6 people to become suicidal. Analyzing the cases closely and following traditional clinical approaches for determining causality, this article nailed beyond doubt that fluoxetine could cause some people to become suicidal.
Lots of other groups reported similar findings. I published 2 cases of men, who were challenged, dechallenged and rechallenged with an SSRI. There was no other way to explain what happened them except that fluoxetine had caused it. This was Evident Based Medicine .
Slide 46: Almost the same week as my article came out, BMJ published an article in which Lilly claimed an analysis of their clinical trials showed no evidence fluoxetine made people suicidal. The cases being reported, therefore, were sad but anecdotal – and the plural of anecdote is not data. Depression was the problem not fluoxetine. Clinical trials are the science of cause and effect. Doctors, the public, media, and politicians were being asked – are you going to believe the science or the anecdotes?
This was a knowledge creation moment that likely had input from all companies and perhaps FDA. This article created Evidence Based Medicine and just as with RCTs 30 years earlier, the people most commonly exhorting doctors to practice EBM today are Pharma companies.
In fact, the original phrase is the plural of anecdotes is data – otherwise Google wouldn’t work.
The idea the disease is responsible for suicide attempts and suicides in healthy volunteers is hard to believe but companies can wheel out experts to say just that.
My key point is that the Teicher paper is the science – the Lilly data is an artefact. My challenge to you is which are you going to believe the Science or the Artefact?
The Science of Medicine lies in making hard judgement calls. The made by algorithm approach, combined with inappropriate statistics, creates artefacts not science.
You’ve seen earlier how Lilly cooked the books. When you get the trial data, the Evident Based Medicine and Evidence Based Medicine approaches here can be reconciled – as you might expect with real science.
But even there was an incompatability there isn’t a problem. Resolving discrepancies is how we do science.
This points to a deep problems with Lilly’s argument. They are not in the business of being scientific – resolving discrepant observations. Lilly’s argument is a religious one – a dogmatic one – they forbid us to believe the evidence of our own senses.
This is papal infallibility riding again.
Peter Drucker, the doyen of marketing gave us a secular update – the goal of marketing is not to increase the sales of Prozac, its to own the market. This was the moment Pharma took ownership of the market.
This ownership allows companies to dictate what the risks, the benefits and the trade-offs of drugs are. Allows them to force us to live the lives they want us to live rather than engage with the risky and unprofitable business of producing products that will help us to live the lives we want to live. Following this Artefact is profoundly alienating.
Slide 47: This faces us with a what is science question? The usual histories start with the foundation of The Royal Society in 1660, which established the ground rules for Science. Science would deal with matters that could be Settled by Data. Participants could be Xtian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, or Atheist, but participants were called on to leave these badges at the door and make a consensus based judgement call about the best way to explain the experimental outcome in front of them.
The histories of science emphasize the word Data. Settled is the more important word. Statistics played no part in this science. The experiments were events and didn’t need the descriptions statistics can provide. Science was emphatically not about replacing judgment calls with a statistical artefact. It only became so 33 years ago.
Slide 48: This account of our history overlooks an earlier event. In 1618, Walter Raleigh was executed – for being too close to those pesky Europeans. Raleigh was convicted on the basis of things said about him by people who did not come into court to be cross-examined.
Legal systems worldwide recognized the injustice of this and introduced Rules of Evidence. Hearsay could not be used as evidence. Jurors – a group of 12 people, Xtians, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists and Jews, can only base a verdict on material put in front of them that can be examined and cross-examined. The process of forcing 12 people with very different biases to come to a Verdict about what is in front of them is the essence of science.
Verdicts and diagnoses are provisional – the view that best fits the current facts. This might appear to contrast with the objectivity of science, but scientific views are similarly provisional. Scientists attempt to overturn verdicts with new data.
Let’s say I gave Aaron fluoxetine 33 years ago and he became suicidal. I could examine and cross-examine him, run labs and scans, raise the dose, stop the drug, add an antidote, check with colleagues has anyone else seen anything like this or can they explain it in any other way. Aaron is the data – all of the data. He is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place.
If Aaron and I conclude fluoxetine made him suicidal and report this to FDA, the first thing FDA does is to remove his name. No-one can now examine or cross-examine him and come to a scientific view about whether there is a link or not. His injury has been made Hearsay – indeed misinformation.
If you are later injured in the same way and see tens of thousands of reports of suicidality on SSRIs on FDA’s adverse event reporting system, you cannot bring this into court because no-one can be brought into court. It’s Hearsay not Evidence.
Company RCTs are equally hearsay and should not be let into Court as evidence. Accessing the data in this case means accessing people – like Aaron or me – and we cannot do that with the people in company trials, who often don’t exist. Except rarely, the authors on the articles have seen none of these people and cannot speak to what happened either.
In contrast, if Aaron and I report his case in he New England Journal or the American Journal of Psychiatry as a Case Report, with our names on it, we can both be brought into Court.
Slide 49: By 1983 the view was emerging that RCTs offered the scientific and sophisticated way to establish if a drug had adverse effects as this quote by Rossi et al indicates:
Spontaneous reporting is “the least sophisticated and scientifically rigorous . . . method of detecting new adverse drug reactions.
A mid-career Lasagna, the man who more than anyone introduced RCTs, responded:
This may be true in the dictionary sense of sophisticated meaning ‘adulterated’ . . . but I submit spontaneous reporting is more ‘worldly-wise, knowing, subtle and intellectually appealing’ than grandiose, expensive RCTs.
Slide 50: Here you have an older Louis Lasagna saying:
In contrast to my role in the 1950s which was trying to convince people to do controlled trials, now I find myself telling people that it’s not the only way to truth.
Evidence Based Medicine has become synonymous with RCTs even though such trials invariably fail to tell the physician what he or she wants to know which is, which drug is best for Mr Jones or Ms Smith – not what happens to a non-existent average person.
Slide 51: Here is James Webb again to remind you that confidence intervals were a step on the way to revealing the individuality of stars. In medicine, statistical approaches operate against individuality.
Using Chance to control Bias does not foster clinical science, especially when we allow a mindless algorithm to replace clinical judgement. Clinical medicine, like law, and the first 300 years of science uses Bias to Control Chance and both medicine and law need to assert the validity of this approach.
Slide 52: Using Bias to control Chance rather than some algorithmic method of controlling Chance is critical when numbers enter the frame. This is our only defense against medical neo-liberalism.
Around 1980 Pharma began treating healthy people. They discovered that numbers for our peak flow rates, bone densities, blood pressure, lipids, or sugar provided opportunities to sell drugs. Up to 1980, we brought our problems to healthcare – seeking help to live the lives we wanted to live. After that health services began to give us problems and the amount of medicines consumed rose dramatically. We began treating numbers rather than people.
Remaining on top of data like this is difficult. Just after weighing scales for people were introduced in the 1860s, we got the first descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In the 1920s, weighing scales in drug stores came with norms for our ideal weight given our height and sex and eating disorders mushroomed. When scales migrated into our homes in the 1960s eating disorders became epidemic – in the countries that had weighing scales. Measurements can make both us and our doctors neurotic.
Slide 53: There is an extra element to the equation. The service industries emerged in the 1950s. Through to 1980, no-one viewed health as a service industry – doctors were professionals who exercised judgement the way a Judge might. But service industries have managers and health got managers. With this the exercise of clinical discretion, the jewel in the crown of Health Care became a problem for those who manage services.
The idea of bringing good out of the use of a poison does not compute for managers, insurers, politicians or increasingly the public.
Before 1980, clinicians mobilized the resources of the organization they worked to handle the risks your condition posed to you. Now instead you can palpably feel the clinicians you meet are managing the risks you pose to the organization we work for.
Slide 54: Managers manage what they can measure. For them figures have a sheen of scientific gold. We are re-running the King Midas story – this gold coating is incompatible with Human Care and Life.
This governance by numbers is the essence of the neoliberalism that began in Chile and Britain – treat the money supply numbers or inflation numbers regardless of what is happening a country. Medicine is the best place to see this and its deleterious effects in action – aggravated by the fact that bowing down before a golden algorithmic idol inhibits anyone from leading us out of this desert in which we now wander.
Slide 55: When the pilot here reports problems, safety systems pay heed because they know she won’t fly if they don’t because of the consequences for her.
Jane Frazer is the CEO of Citibank. Since the financial crisis, bankers have an Early Warning System. Who knows if it helps? The financial crisis was linked to a moral hazard. Bankers were outsourcing risk, knowing that if things crashed you and I would suffer but they would continue to collect their bonuses. This made it hard for them to do the right or brave thing.
If the doctor on the left reports a problem, no-one pays any heed. She too outsources risk putting pills that like mortgages look too good to be true in our mouths. This is morally hazardous. Like a mortgage, if a drug looks too good to be true it probably is. If we blow up, she continues to be well paid. There is no incentive for her to do the right thing.
Slide 56: This moral hazard is leading to a pharmaceutical crisis that maps onto the financial crisis of 15 years ago. Here is a recent New York Times image of Life Expectancy in the US. You’ll see it began dropping in 1980, when we began treating numbers rather than people and converted health into a service industry. This Fall cannot be attribued to COVID. My view is that it is most likely linked to polypharmacy. The UK has similar falling Life Expectancy data – again pre-COVID.
Slide 57: Drugs like guns are techniques – amoral. The morality of their use lies in us. If we stop thinking about what we are doing when we use them, we are highly likely to be diminished.
Like Guns, Drugs create an arms race. The country with the best Medical Techniques and Guns wins wars and both armament and medical developments have been driven forward by military needs – to keep men able to fight in the case of drugs.
There is difference between Guns and Drugs. The chemicals in drugs are always risky. The information that transforms those chemicals into medicines has become increasingly dangerous. At the moment, the Drugs Race is not a better Chemical Race – it’s about creating more effective propaganda. The best propaganda is invisible – in this case it masquerades as science. The greatest concentration of fake literature on earth now centers on the reports of RCTs on the Drugs our doctors give us.
With both Guns and Drugs there is a limit to effectiveness. In the case of the Atom Bomb it is so effective that it cannot be used. It is the same with Drugs, if you are on more than 3, the effectiveness of each falls off as you add more meds into the mix.
To get the most effectiveness you need to be on 3 or less. As of 2016, over 40% of over 45s in the United States were on 3 or more drugs every day of the year – this figure includes the people who never come to see doctors. Over 40% of over 65s are on 5 or more drugs every day of the week. Knowing what is happening teenagers, this can only increase.
We know that reducing medication burdens can increase life expectancy, reduce hospitalizations, and improve quality of life.
Slide 58: Reducing a medication burden is not easy – as this image from the movie The Hurt Locker illustrates. Many of these drugs explode on attempting to withdraw them. This is the primary medical task of our age and there will never be any RCTs to help us out. The best evidence will likely lie in clinical experience of tackling similar situations. Great if I have a walkie-talkie to clinical colleagues but my key partner in this is you – you bring cues from missing doses of some of these drugs, and your sense of what they are doing that I can only access through you. And of course you ultimately dictate which risks we take.
In the 1940s and 1950s, RCTs had a role when we didn’t know if things worked. From the 1960s we had so many good drugs that worked – brought on the market without an RCT in sight – a new role beckoned for RCTs – to work out what worked best. RCTs cannot do this and besides it did not suit company interests. Companies instead created Randomized Controlled Assays which among other things allow weaker and weaker drugs on the market.
The pressing medical need now is to get people off the meds they are on and RCTs and what is called EBM have little or no role to play in helping us with this.
Slide 59: If a doctor tries to modestly reduce medication burdens or recognize that in some cases a treatment might have become a problem, current public health systems will not accommodate her. In the US, it is current culture that will mobilize against this. The doctor will be told this would be a good private practice offer that people can choose, but the public health system expectation is that people want and should get more diagnoses and drugs.
This is because getting treatment to save our lives was once a privilege and wealth and public health systems want everyone to be able to access treatment. They cannot now see that these good intentions are killing people. Now we have to be wealthy to get off medicines to save our lives.
Canada now leads the world in MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. In places like Belgium and Holland young women are getting MAiD because they have drug induced treatment resistant depression. While there must be concerns when young women in their 20s get MAID for treatment resistant depression – an antidepressant induced illness – I’m not quibbling about the morality of MAiD – any good doctor will almost certainly have cases where MAiD is the caring thing to do.
What I am quibbling about is the morality of a system that encourages us to have any service we want, including MAiD, but denies us the option of having less services. Denies us a Greener, more sustainable HealthCare. At the moment, not even Green parties have got a handle on this.
Slide 60: This lady comes from an Arthurian Legend. Arthur has been out-fought by a Black Knight who spares his life if he can answer a riddle – What do Women Most Desire. He has a year to find the answer. He and his court hunt desperately for it. The day he is due to die, Arthur and his troop meet this woman who tells him that she has the answer to the riddle but one of his knights must become her husband. Gawain jumps down and offers himself up. Arthur answers the riddle, and a furious Black Knight lets him go.
Slide 61: Gawain gets married. Everyone at the Court is unhappy for him.
Slide 62: In the bedchamber Gawain can’t bear to look at her. She takes control and asks him – do you want me to look like this by night with you and the way I was by day in court or like this by day in court. He has no idea and says – whatever you want. This is the right answer.
The answer to both riddles is she, like us, wants to control her own life. There may be a disease that needs treating – but she doesn’t want us to tell her how to live life, or want her negative emotions eliminated with a pill. She may be doing better at living life than you or I.
The evidence based medicine we now practice creates a False We – a non-existent average person – a fairy tale.
Rather than paying heed to the non-existent average person who comes out of clinical trials, when we relearn that we can learn much more from the person right in front of us, she and others who come to see us will seem more interesting and as they sense that we will be more attractive to them – easier to work with.
A relationship based medicine is the only validly scientific form of clinical practice. If you can’t build up a relationship with people because you and they see a different doctor every time, a relationship in which you are looking closely at and listening attentively to them – perhaps even detecting if there is a change in their smell, you are not doing science. The person in front of you is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place. The computer screen is not.
Both science and morality depend on collaboration. Collaboration creates a virtuous circle – an Us – that leaves us all better placed to live the life we want to live. It creates Social Capital.
Redesignate Company Trials as Assays
Government of the People by the People has been replaced by governance.
If it is not to perish entirely from the earth…
We need to do…
Footnotes
This may be the most important lecture I have ever given – it’s the longest at least. It has been heavily shaped by Dee Mangin, Peter and Julie Wood and everyone linked to RxISK – Bill James, Johanna Ryan, Peter Selley, Sarah Tilley, Mary Hennessey, Annemarie Kelly and many others who have worked behind the scenes but don’t want to be named and others whose comments on posts are often more illuminating than the posts themselves.
It has been shaped over a 25 year period by Andy Vickery, Cindy Hall, Skip Murgatroyd and Michael Baum who in the legal cases they involved me in brought me face to face with the many issues covered here.
It has been shaped by Jon Jureidini, Melissa Raven, Joanna Le Noury, and Elia Abi-Jaoude, who along with Mickey Nardo and Catalin Tufanaru, both now dead, were the team behind the Restoration of Study 329 – see the final article at Restoring Study 329.
It would not be possible to leave Peter Goetzsche out of the frame and an intense struggle to restore the Prozac trials in adolescents – along with the bravery of Ralph Edwards in publishing this paper. See Flat as Kansas.
Finally to complete a set of Peters, Peter Doshi has been one of the most remarkable people working on all these issues extraordinarily effectively.
There have been any number of fabulous media people like Shelley Jofre and Andy Bell who brought key issues to light, along with Ariane Denoyel and others who have grappled with the issues outlined here.
More recently, Dan Johnson, along with Yoko Motohama and Vincent Schmitt who have lost teenage sons to the drugs mentioned here, triggered the series of lectures noted above of which this is the third in the series. Jon Thompson and his colleagues in the math department in the University of New Brunswick, along with Peter Selley and colleagues in the Devon and Exeter Medical Society allowed me to dress rehearse and improve the talk.
I have stolen ideas from lots of people such as Steve Lanes – too many to acknowledge. As Steve’s example shows, some of the best help has come from people working in industry.
The Q and A after this talk in Boston reveals a tendency we all have to say things would be fine if industry just weren’t involved in trials. This is not my view. Industry don’t help but they are primarily exploiting medical failures to get to grips with the faultlines in RCTs – and a medical willingness to accept a simplistic solution to the problem of objectivity rather than engage with others in establishing what is objective or at least the best provisional version of objectivity.