We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox.  Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neill’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neill sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neill’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neill amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neill on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neill is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neill. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neill had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neill did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neill said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view [this]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTQe_TskIo) Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.

It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in western philosophy.

This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superceded.

If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.

Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bernard Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst now left wing academics ware most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.

A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.

The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major western states.

They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930’s.

The great irony of course is that it is the western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the west was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.

Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a western backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably zionist Anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.

The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively immigrants viewed as on the West’s sides side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.

Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.

Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline
a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.

Incredibly, for a year the entire western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.

We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by zionist interests – itself a consequence in the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support for the western establishment.

It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the western “democracies”.

It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.

The zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.

I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.

The UK, US and other first world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the western world in my youth involved much dull compromise: but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.

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A dear friend reached out to me today, an esteemed elder in the Way of Council, to ask how I was doing. I told her I have the sensation of watching a slow-motion car crash, yet feeling an odd sense of serenity as the catastrophe unfolds. Because, the time of pleading with the drivers to turn the wheel and hit the brakes is over. We did that for a long time, but they accelerated instead, and now the long-foreseen collision is inevitable. In fact it is already happening.

Someday everyone, drivers and passengers and onlookers, will step out from the wreckage and dust, sober, eyes blinking, to tend the injured and grieve the dead and ask what they shall create together in their new-found freedom.

Who knows when that day will come. In one timeline, it is about three years. That timeline depends on our collective willingness to accept and integrate information that profoundly violates the old consensus reality. This information will feed a new human drama, if we so choose.

Predictions of a new chapter in the human story starting (fill in the date: 2028, or was it 2012, or perhaps the Harmonic Convergence in 1987) are not actually predictions, but prophecies. A prediction is objective. It denies the agency of the participant. When I predict the winner of a football game (that’s my side gig), I assume that I have no way to influence the result. I am not a player. A prophecy, on the other hand, becomes true only if people align their choices with the possibility it invokes.

I used to believe that collapse would save us; that we would stop destroying nature, each other, and our own bodies because we would have to stop. I no longer believe that, any more than hitting bottom can rescue an addict. “Bottom” is the moment when the addict makes a different choice. The collapse of first one, then another, then another dimension of his life—his work, his marriage, his family, his health, his freedom—offers him a series of invitations. These are moments when a choice is available, when the momentum pauses and he is asked whether he is ready to take a different path. What is bottom for one addict is, for another, just a way-station on the road to hell.

Our society is approaching just such a moment, just such a choice point.

Of our many collective and individual addictions, the one I will speak of now is the addiction to the habits of war.

War mentality isn’t a thirst for violence nor a lust for fighting. War mentality is a pattern of thinking and a habit of seeing. It organizes the world into us and them, friend and foe, hero and villain. It poses solutions in terms of victory and success in terms of winning. It traffics in punishment and blame, deterrence and justification, right and wrong. It is addictive, because when it fails to solve a problem, the solution is to up the dose. It escalates to new enemies and new battles. If there is no obvious foe to blame for the worsening situation, it looks harder to find one, or creates one instead.

The solution that war mentality offers for every problem is to find the bad thing and eradicate it. That solution applies to diverse areas of human activity: agriculture (kill the pests); medicine (find a pathogen); speech (censor bad ideas); political conflict (kill the terrorists); public safety (lock up the criminals). Complex problems, such as mass fentanyl addiction in America or industrial decline, collapse into simple but futile solutions as soon as someone can be found on which to pin the blame. The Chinese! The Mexican cartels! There is a kind of relief in this formula, even though it rarely succeeds.

The disastrous public health response to Covid drew on war mentality. After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.

Our leaders construct a narrative that locates evil in a certain person, nation, or group, and the habit of war thinking does the rest. Soon the public is ready to support war, censorship, lockdown, suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law, and crimes against humanity.

The same basic pattern of thought also drives conspiracy narratives. If we can locate the cause of the world’s injustices and horrors on a discrete set of bad actors, a psychopathic cabal, then in theory our problems are easy to solve.1 Just as, if a disease is caused by a pathogen, killing the germ cures the disease, so also can we cure society’s malady by removing the pathocrats from power.

Even in cases where a pathogen is the direct cause, we still have to ask what conditions make the organism vulnerable to that pathogen. Some of my readers think me naive for understating the influence of a satanic cabal within the power elite orchestrating world events. For me though, the most important question isn’t whether such a cabal exists. It is the psychosocial patterning that allows it to maintain control whether it exists or not.

That patterning is, again, war mentality. It is us-versus-them thinking. It is dehumanization and othering, the division of the world into the full human and the subhuman. The latter category can adopt the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, or just simple contempt for an opposing opinion tribe.

Once two sides are locked into war thinking, it escalates like an addiction until all else is consumed.

Hate and contempt have spiraled out of control in American politics. Trigger warning: it is impossible to write about this while remaining faithful to the narrative of either side. If you are fully convinced either (1) that Trump represents a fascist oligarchic takeover of democracy drawing on the worst racist, misogynistic, xenophobic elements of the American psyche to destroy everything good and humane about America, or (2) that the MAGA revolution will restore freedom and sanity to a system that had been taken over by a deep state that used environmentalism and social justice as excuses to implement a totalitarian control system, or (3) any other narrative that cleaves the world into Team Good and Team Evil, then, well, you will shake your head in consternation that Eisenstein has taken leave of his senses. You will feel frustration, even rage, that I’m making any argument that does not include a full-throated denunciation of the bad guys. When you face pure evil, no response is valid except to fight it by any means necessary.

How simple things would be then. How easy to be the hero of the story.

The paramount goal in war is, of course, to defeat the opponent. The difference between war and games, sports, market competition, and, in normal times, politics, is that in the these latter arenas both sides hold something higher than winning; namely, the rules of the game. Football teams normally do not attempt to poison their opponents. The game itself is more sacred to them than winning it. In a functioning democracy in which all parties believe in a constitution or in a set of norms and values, there are certain taboos they will not violate for victory’s sake. Politics in the United States and many other countries is veering closer and closer to war—inevitable when each side sees the other as the embodiment of evil. Today in my country, both left and right are quite certain that the other side is a “threat to democracy itself.”

In that certainty, each becomes exactly what the other fears. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The old political elite and the Trumpian usurpers are locked in a vicious spiral. If either side stints in its all-out pursuit of power, curtailing its ruthlessness out of respect for democratic principles, the other side will exploit this as a weakness. Once one side dispenses with scruples, all sides must. When one team in a football match cheats, the other can win only if it cheats too.

When you are fighting evil, all means are justified. You might need to destroy democracy in order to save it, suppress free speech in order to preserve free speech, cancel elections in order to defend elections. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. It is no longer enough merely to defeat one’s opponents in an election; they must be imprisoned as well. The United States, Turkey, France, Brazil, and Romania have all prosecuted opposition politicians during the last year on specious charges, signalling a reversion to the historical mean.

In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?

Will Donald Trump throw the Ring of Power into the cracks of doom? Or has the Ring merely changed hands, even as technology further magnifies its powers (censorship, propaganda, surveillance, debanking)?

I’m sorry, but it isn’t looking good. To take one example, “antisemitism” (defined as any criticism of the state of Israel) has replaced “combating misinformation” as the pretext for violating freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures (surveillance) and the right to due process. The arrests of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil for “supporting Hamas” (i.e. opposing Israel’s slaughter, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza), and the pressure on universities to shut down student protests, set a chilling precedent.

Meanwhile, although Trump is, thank goodness, turning the country away from the warpath with Russia, he is not turning the country away from war’s path. War mentality suffuses the upper echelons of his administration. Instead of Russia, the warpath leads now to Iran and China.

War mentality always requires an enemy. If no enemy presents itself, war mentality creates one. The hero nation requires a villain. The winner requires a loser. If I expect you are seeking to profit at my expense, and treat you accordingly, then you will probably fulfil my expectation. See a world full of enemies, and legions of enemies will appear.

To be fair, Donald Trump is by no means an aberration in believing that everyone is trying to get the best deal. That’s a basic principle of classical economics, even of evolutionary biology, in which our genes program us to maximize reproductive self-interest. Those paradigms, however, are long obsolete. The discrete-and-separate self is a prism that reveals one wavelength of the rainbow of life, but obscures what we urgently need to recognize today.

Because the world is so much more than a collection of separate competing entities, but is interconnected and interdependent, policies that draw on us-versus-them thinking will inevitably harm “us” as well as “them.” War abroad brings tyranny at home. Domestic violence arises to mirror foreign violence. Environmental degradation engenders human illness. And any economic policy that ignores the interconnectedness of the modern economy will backfire on its creator.

Permit a brief digression into economics and Trump’s tariffs. There is actually some virtue in their conception. Carefully targeted tariffs, implemented at a pace that allows business to adapt to them, could contribute to positive goals: revitalizing local and bioregional economies, reversing the financialization of the national economy, and ending free trade’s global “race to the bottom” that pits workers around the world against each other. Unfortunately, Trump’s abrupt across-the-board tariffs are neither carefully targeted nor paced. They are likely to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses and impoverish millions of families, both in the U.S. and abroad. The tariffs will introduce acute dislocation in the short term and massive inefficiencies in the long term. There are further complexities here about which I will write separately; what’s relevant for present purposes is that the error in the tariff policy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of economic interdependence, a misunderstanding that occurs naturally to anyone locked into us-versus-them thinking.

From what I have observed through my friends and acquaintances on the “inside,” Trump’s team genuinely believe themselves to be upholding the rule of law, prosecuting their political opponents for real criminality, and defunding corrupt NGOs (that also happen to be run by their political opponents). Indeed, incumbent institutions are profuse with criminality. The agencies that Trump is destroying, like USAID, the NED, and the USIP, were instrumental in maintaining the neoliberal world order and applying the neoconservative program of full spectrum dominance. Trump’s team see themselves as reformers restoring honor and prosperity to the nation. “Drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again” are not cynical slogans.

Intoxicated with heady ideals, Team Trump cannot see that their program equally fits another description: seizing power.

Confronted with that assessment, some in Trump’s circle would probably agree with it. They might respond: “What choice do we have, faced with a ruthless and corrupt deep state?” Similarly, his opponents might, in a moment of honesty, admit that yes, they did weaponize the courts, the FBI, etc. against Trump and his allies, and engage in various kinds of cheating, but what choice did they have, when a neo-fascist movement was about to take over the country?

What both sides believe is that the other side lusts for power more than it values democracy. But for the game to function and not devolve into war, each side must believe the other holds the game itself (fair elections, the Constitution) more important than winning the game. If you are convinced the other side will cheat, you must cheat too.

No doubt many on each side believe these are temporary “extraordinary measures”; that when they have finally triumphed over the anti-democratic forces on the other side, they will cede power back to the people. That is never how it works. Each side believes, with good reason, that victory by the other side will be permanent. Thus, the escalating fight-to-the-death, the vicious spiral, the inevitable car crash.

What has alarmed me the most in my last decade of pleading for peace is not the actions and attitudes of politicians, but the infiltration of war mentality into the general public, the rising level of ambient hate. That is the energy that feeds the most psychopathic elements of the oligarchy. It is its lifeblood. It is its power source. It is how it rules—by turning their subjects against each other. (I say “it” [the oligarchy] and not “they” [the oligarchs], because the latter are puppets of system dynamics that are independent of the individuals who occupy their roles.) The key trick in its toolbox of psychopolitical legerdemain is to redirect the primal anger of the dispossessed toward a false target; essentially, to transmute anger into hate. Paradoxically, even when the elites themselves are the objects of the hate, the system that elevates them still flourishes. One elite can be switched out for another, new wine in an old skin.

In preparing this essay, I sought some personal stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts to illuminate and humanize the damage. A friend introduced me to some small farmers in a certain left-leaning back-to-the-land region. They were unwilling to speak with me. One of them, a queer person, expressed fear that they would be put in danger (I assume by my frothing transphobic MAGA audience). Another, who described herself as being on the autism spectrum, was concerned by my association with people who promote deranged theories that vaccines have a causal link to autism. I assured them that no harm would come to them, even if someone might read my essay who harbors fear and hatred toward queer people, since I had no reason to identify them by name or mention their gender identity when discussing the impact of funding freezes on regenerative farmers. As for the vaccine issue, well, OK, I do actually believe that the childhood vaccines are partly to blame for the explosion in autism and childhood chronic disease. But that is no reason to shame the autistic or other neurodivergent people. On the contrary: these people carry gifts that are crucial for the metamorphosis of our society.

But I digress. What was really going on here was that my associations and opinions on certain politicized topics marked me as a member of the opposing side, the bad side, the untouchable side. In a sense, it is “unsafe” to associate with me. I have cooties, you see, and anyone who associates with me might catch them. During the McCarthy era, merely to be seen in the company of a communist could devastate your career. To associate with Jews under Hitler was to risk imprisonment or worse yourself. For a Caucasian to be friendly with dark-skinned people in the Jim Crow era South was to risk ostracism or even lynching. It is scary, to associate with the socially unacceptable, because that status is contagious. The fact that my intention was to showcase some stories that might wake people up from Trump Adulation Syndrome (the mirror-image of Trump Derangement Syndrome), doubtless a worthy goal in the eyes of my correspondents, was insufficient to overcome the taboo of associating with a socially unacceptable person.

This widening gulf within our society also tends to feed on itself. Once it gains enough momentum, it proceeds inexorably toward civil war or genocide. I have pleaded with the drivers of these vehicles for many years to steer in a different direction. Now I am done pleading. The drama will play itself out. Why am I done? A feeling of futility and weariness. Well, I guess I am not quite done—I’m writing about it right now. And I can already anticipate the hate I will generate by violating the narrative of both sides, my “failure to consider X,” my “white privilege blinding me to Y,” my “unwillingness to accept the reality of evil,” or that I have fallen for Trump, or wimped out and betrayed him, or am a cowardly fence-sitter, or indulging the luxury of both-sides-ism… It isn’t so much that I take personal offense at these accusations, but they are an alarming sign of the times. If I, a peace evangelist, am so easily cast into the ranks of the untouchable, what hope is there for understanding or reconciliation among society’s warring factions?

Yet I do not feel hopeless. Last week I consulted a wise man, one of my spiritual guides. I won’t reveal his name, so as not to infect him with my cooties. I’ll just say he is of African descent, and a high initiate in south and west African wisdom lineages as well as the Western hermetic tradition. His fixed me with a penetrating, kind gaze, and told me that my adrenal and blood sugar issues are because my public work has made me a projection figure. The attacks land on my body, he said. I asked him what can I do when society seems to have gone mad. He said, “Wait.”

That injunction, “Wait,” is not a call to passivity. It is to recognize when it is time to act, and when action is futile or counterproductive. It is to recognize as well that there are powers operating in the world far beyond our own. And it is to accept that certain dramas must play out to their conclusion before a new act can begin. Now is perhaps not the time, at least for me, to urge warring parties to reconcile. The urging falls on deaf ears. Each side sees the peace proponent as a traitor to the cause, since to humanize the other side or acknowledge that it too has a sincere worldview based on its own set of experiences, dampens war fever. Hate is a necessary tool of war—and of politics too, when politics becomes war.

What is futile quickly becomes exhausting, Maybe only when the warring parties have exhausted themselves too, with the drama of us-versus-them, might a new drama, of forgiveness, remorse, and reconciliation, unfold.

That is a heartbreaking proposition, because the human cost is enormous. The kind of violence suffered in places like Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the DRC, Iraq, Yemen, Uganda, Cambodia, or Vietnam has long spared my homeland, but we are not immune. Something primal and terrifying lurks behind civilization’s thin veneer. It does not take much for murderous impulses to erupt. They bubble already in social media. We are not a different species from the perpetrators of past or current genocides. I am not saying it is certain to happen in my country, but it is far from certain not to happen.

In a sense it has long been underway in covert form. How many millions have died or suffered interminably from incarceration, violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, addiction, depression, and chronic disease? Through long and tortuous pathways, all of these originate in the same root cause as overt war and genocide. They source from the reduction of human beings to something less than sacred. Yet all of them proceed under a facade of normalcy. That facade will drop over the next three years.

The disintegration of normalcy is ultimately a good thing. When the dust clears, we will stand amid the wreckage of our prison, full of new questions.

Then we may see that cleaving the world into us and them, and the blame diagnostic that accompanies that cleavage, has failed. We will see that war has failed to bring peace, hate has failed to bring justice, domination has failed to bring security, and control has failed to bring freedom. Those failures of purpose will mirror a deeper failure, a failure of understanding. The ways we made sense of the world will no longer make sense. Will we have the fortitude to abide in bewilderment long enough for new understanding to grow? Or will we jump fearfully into a new variation on an old story, substituting a new set of villains for the old, a new us and a new them, to enact the same drama once more?

How Big Pharma Weaves Its Web

I never set out to be an advocate. I wasn’t a doctor, scientist, or policy expert. I was just a regular person who, like so many, blindly trusted that our healthcare system was designed to protect us.

But life has a way of pulling us into the arena when we least expect it.

After the tragic and unexpected loss of my husband Woody to the antidepressant Zoloft he was prescribed for insomnia, I was thrust into a world I never imagined—one where medicine wasn’t solely about healing, but deeply entangled in a system that prioritizes profit over safety, buries harms, and keeps the public in the dark.

For over two decades, I’ve had a front-row seat to how this system truly operates—not the illusion of rigorous oversight we see in medical journals or glossy pharmaceutical ads, but the reality of how industry influence is woven into every stage.

I’ve met with regulators, testified before the FDA and Congress, filed a wrongful death and failure-to-warn lawsuit against Pfizer, and earned a seat on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee as a consumer representative.

I’ve also spoken at and participated in global conferences like Selling Sickness, Too Much Medicine, and the Harms in Medicine meeting in Erice, Italy—where some of the world’s leading experts acknowledge what few in mainstream medicine dare to say:

Our healthcare system isn’t about health—it’s about business.

And in this business, harm isn’t an accident. It’s built into the system.

The more I uncovered, the more I realized:

We aren’t just patients. We are customers.

And we are all trapped in Big Pharma’s spiderweb of influence.

The Spiderweb of Influence

The more I learned, the more I saw just how deeply embedded the pharmaceutical industry is—not just in drug development and marketing but in every corner of our healthcare system.

That’s why I created the Big Pharma Spider Web of Influence—to visually map out how the system is designed not to prioritize health but to sell sickness while minimizing, downplaying, or outright hiding harms.

From clinical trial design to regulatory approval, from direct-to-consumer advertising to medical education, from controlling medical journals to silencing dissenting voices, the industry has built an intricate and self-reinforcing web—one that traps doctors, patients, and even regulators in a cycle of pharmaceutical dependence.

How the Web Works

• Clinical trials are often designed, funded, and controlled by the very companies that stand to profit. They manipulate data to exaggerate benefits and obscure risks, ensuring that negative results are buried, spun, or never published at all.
• Regulatory agencies like the FDA are deeply entangled with the industry they’re supposed to oversee. More than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from industry-paid user fees, and a revolving door ensures that many key decision-makers come from—and later return to—pharmaceutical companies.
• Medical journals depend on pharmaceutical funding through advertising, reprint sales, and industry-sponsored studies—severely limiting independent scrutiny of drug safety. Many studies are ghostwritten or crafted by paid “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) who serve as pharma’s trusted messengers.
• Doctors receive education through industry-funded programs, learning “best practices” based on treatment guidelines crafted by the very system that profits from overprescription.
• Patient advocacy groups, once independent grassroots organizations, have been co-opted by industry money, ensuring that the loudest voices often serve pharma’s interests rather than patients’ needs. I call them “astroturf” patient groups—they look like real grassroots organizations, but they’re anything but.
• Screenings and guidelines continuously expand the definitions of disease, turning more people into lifelong customers.

This isn’t about one bad actor or isolated corruption—it’s a systemic issue. The entire structure is designed to push more drugs onto the market, medicalize normal human experiences, and only acknowledge harm when it becomes too big to ignore.

It’s a brilliant business model—but a catastrophic public health strategy.

“To Sell to Everyone:” The Business Model of Medicine

If this sounds like a conspiracy, consider the bold admission made by Henry Gadsden, former CEO of Merck, in a 1976 interview with Fortune Magazine:

“The problem we have had is limiting the potential of drugs to sick people. We could be more like Wrigley’s Gum…it has long been my dream to make drugs for healthy people. To sell to everyone.”

– Former Merck CEO Henry Gadsden

Let that sink in.

This wasn’t about curing disease—it was about expanding markets. Gadsden’s vision wasn’t just to treat illness, but to medicalize everyday life—creating a cradle-to-grave model where every person, healthy or sick, became a customer for life. Just like selling a variety of gum—something for everyone. Juicy Fruit, Big Red, Doublemint, Spearmint, and so on.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Today, we live in a system where:

• Everyday emotions—sadness, worry, shyness—are rebranded as medical conditions requiring treatment.
• Preventive medicine often means lifelong prescriptions, not lifestyle changes.
• Drugs are marketed to the “worried well”, turning normal human experiences into diagnoses.

This isn’t just theory—it’s well documented. In Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels expose how pharmaceutical companies create diseases, expand diagnostic criteria, and convince the public that normal life experiences require medical intervention.

The goal?

Make medication the default—not the last resort.

Harms Are Always an Afterthought

Harms from medication are not rare, nor are they unexpected. 

But in this system, they are treated as acceptable collateral damage—something to be dealt with only after the damage is done, after lives are lost or forever changed.

I’ve sat in FDA Advisory Committee meetings, reviewing new drug applications, and have seen firsthand how safety concerns are often dismissed in favor of “innovation” or “unmet medical need.”

I’ve heard industry representatives and advisory committee members argue that safety signals can be addressed post-market, meaning after a drug is already in circulation and causing harm or a required REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program upon approval.

But by the time post-market safety issues are acknowledged, it’s often too late.

We’ve seen this play out over and over:

• Opioids—marketed as “non-addictive” and pushed aggressively onto patients, leading to an epidemic of addiction and death.
• SSRIs and antidepressants—long linked to increased risks of suicide and violence, particularly in young people, yet downplayed or dismissed for decades. Other hidden harms include withdrawal syndromes and Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), conditions that many patients were never warned about.
• Antipsychotics—widely prescribed for off-label use, leading to severe metabolic and neurological side effects.
• Covid-19 vaccines—an experimental mRNA platform rushed to market, mandated, and imposed on society despite limited long-term safety data and growing concerns over harms.

Every time, the pattern is the same:

The industry sells the benefits while downplaying the risks—until those risks become too big to ignore.

By then, the drug is a blockbuster, billions have been made, and the system moves on to the next new “breakthrough.”

More Than Degrees: The Truth of Lived Experience

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this fight is that real-world experience matters just as much as credentials.

Over the years, I’ve been invited to speak at medical schools, PhD programs, and universities, thanks to brave academics willing to challenge the narrative. I share my journey as an accidental advocate—someone who didn’t have a medical degree but discovered America’s broken drug system the hard way.

But let’s be honest—the medical world is driven by credentials. Or, as I like to say, the alphabet soup.

At conferences, attendees wear name tags listing their titles—MD, PhD, JD, MPH. It’s a quick way to size someone up, to assess credibility before even speaking. And I’ve seen it happen: people glance at my name tag, see no impressive letters after my name, and walk right by.

Years ago, I was speaking at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference and noticed my badge read: Kim Witczak, BA.

I was horrified. Was that really necessary? Did my name tag need to remind everyone that I only had a BA?

Later, I was telling the story to a doctor friend, and he laughed.

“Next time, tell them BA stands for Bad Ass.”

And he was right.

Because real expertise doesn’t always come from an advanced degree—it comes from lived experience, from asking the right questions, from refusing to accept the status quo.

The Counterargument: But Don’t We Need Experts?

Of course, some will argue that only experts with MDs and PhDs should be trusted to shape healthcare policy.

But that assumes that the system they operate in is free from bias, conflicts of interest, or financial incentives.

The reality is that many of those with the most letters after their names are also the ones benefiting from pharma funding—whether through consulting fees, research grants, or advisory roles.

Meanwhile, patients and their families—the ones living with the consequences—are too often ignored.

That needs to change.

Asking Better Questions: Reclaiming Our Power

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: no one is coming to save us. The institutions meant to protect us are too entangled in the web to act with true independence.

My late husband, Woody, used to say: “Follow the money.” And when you do, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Pharmaceutical profits—not patient well-being—drive the system. That’s why the only way to create real change is through awareness, transparency, and fundamentally shifting how we think about medicine and health.

That starts with asking better questions:

• Who funded this research?
• Does this person or institution have financial ties, intellectual bias, or self-interest that could impact their recommendations?
• Who benefits from this treatment?
• What aren’t we being told?
• What are the long-term consequences of this drug or intervention?
• Are there safer, non-drug alternatives being ignored because they aren’t profitable?

But asking the right questions isn’t enough.

We have to stop outsourcing our health to a system built on financial incentives and guided by corporate interests.

We must demand full transparency, challenge the status quo, and recognize that sometimes the best medicine isn’t a pill but a deeper understanding of what our bodies truly need.

Because once you see the web, you can’t unsee it.

And once you recognize how deeply medicine has been shaped by profit, you’ll realize the most important question isn’t just “What can I take?”—it’s “Who benefits if I do?”

Final Thoughts: Tearing Down the Web

I never wanted to be in this fight, but once you see the web, you can’t unsee it. That’s why I continue to speak out, to challenge the system, and to push for real accountability.

Because the stakes aren’t theoretical. They’re deeply personal.

For me, this fight began over two decades ago with Woody. But for countless others, it begins the moment they or someone they love is caught in the web—trusting a system that was never truly designed to protect them.

It’s time to tear down the web.

And it starts with seeing it for what it really is.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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  Kim Witczak

  Leading global drug safety advocate, Consumer Rep on FDA Advisory Committee, and speaker with over 25 years professional experience in advertising and marketing communications.

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Jeffrey Sachs asks the EU Parliament to open their eyes

Few can match Professor Sachs’ bonafides with regard to academic appointments, advisory roles to the most influential bodies of power and breadth of understanding of geopolitics and economics as it pertains to “sustainable development”. He is (very briefly):

• Former Harvard professor of Economics and director of the Harvard Institute for International Development

• A Columbia University Professor and director of its Center for Sustainable Development

• Recipient of numerous awards including being named among Time’s “100 most influential people” twice, recipient of the Padma Bushan, India’s third highest civilian award

• Author and/or co-author of dozens of books on the topics of economics, global inequality, American foreign policy

Beyond that, Sachs has held advisory roles to foreign governments on all major continents as well as UN Secretaries General, the W.H.O. and the World Bank. He is, in other words, extremely well connected and influential academically, politically and socially.

The question is, should you trust him?

The answer is, no. In this environment of misinformation peddled by sources on all sides of topics, trust in anyone cannot be justified, least of all on the basis of stature granted by institutions which in turn cannot be trusted to defend the interests of the 99%. Sachs himself admitted that “we don't speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now”.

Sachs has been an advocate for the disastrous WHO biosecurity agenda which would have secured a commitment from nation signatories to continue with gain-of-function research, the development of countermeasures (i.e. mRNA “vaccines”) and the implementation of tighter liability shields for damage resulting from their use.

As the chair of The Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission, he was a fierce critic of the lab-leak theory, blaming such notions on right-wing ideologues who sought to push the world into conflict using arguments that were not supported by biology and chronology.

He subsequently altered his position after appointing Peter Daszak, the notorious director of EcoHealth Alliance, to head a task force investigating SARS-COV2 origins, only to learn that his Columbia University colleague was not being transparent for obvious conflicts of interest. He has since publicly opined that lab-leak is a viable hypothesis and, in doing so, impugned the integrity of public health officials like Anthony Fauci.

Has he had a reckoning? Is he playing both sides? Who knows? At the very least he has demonstrated the wisdom of being able to change his mind and admit that he was wrong. That certainly counts for something in today’s world.

As long as we do not seek to place trust in an individual, it doesn’t matter. But we can, however, endeavor to get better at trusting our own discernment as we assess what is being offered without having to guess at the hidden motivations of the person who is doing the offering.

Here is my general approach. I ask myself:

• Is the person’s central message worthwhile and helpful? (Is there a good reason to listen closely in the first place)

• Do they present a cohesive and logical argument?

• Are they demanding that you trust them because they are an appointed authority or are they asking you to use your own logic and sensibility?

• What proof do they offer to support their thesis?

I invite you to approach Sachs’s speech to the EU Parliament on March 3 that way. Here is his commentary, in full. A Warning: If you absolutely cannot live without a “I stand with Ukraine” banner in your front yard, DON’T LISTEN TO IT:

To Summarize:

• The war in Ukraine will come to an end and that is a good thing for the Ukrainians and for Europeans

• The fear that Russia’s incursion into Crimea and the Donbass regions of Ukraine is an indication that Putin has his eyes on Brussels next is an absurd idea promulgated by war-mongering propagandists in America and Europe

• Anyone who concludes that Russia’s move to annex these areas was an act of pure aggression and not a desperate attempt to keep NATO off of her borders has no grasp of the historical events that led to this conflict

• Sachs reminds the audience that he knows all the players on all sides of this issue, but rather than demanding we genuflect to his opinion he encourages us to examine the historical record which clearly demonstrates that NATO, under US direction, has a 30 year history of violating agreements in order to provoke an inevitable Russian response.

• The EU should regard Russia as a vital and natural trading partner, not as an existential threat. Antagonizing their giant neighbor to the East serves only American Imperialism and not anyone else.

So by my standards, Jeffrey Sachs hit it out of the park.

Moreover, Sachs was frank and did not limit his critique of American foreign policy to the Russian issue. Sachs reminded the world that the wars in the Middle East were Netanyahu’s wars, not anyone else’s. He cited NATO Commander General Wesley Clark’s surprise when he learned, on September 20, 2001, that the United States had already committed to starting seven wars in the Middle East, years before any kind of 9/11 investigation had been conducted.

Obviously, these plans were hatched years before the events of 9/11 and can be traced to a white paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” written in 1996 by American Neo-cons for then (and present) Israeli PM Netanyahu.

He explained America’s foreign policy to the EU parliament like he was speaking to an auditorium of undergraduate students, because, sadly, that is what was necessary. Here are some of his best eye-openers:

• The American political system is a system of image; it's a system of media manipulation every day

• The U.S. has done the most to extinguish peace under President Joe Biden because he was not compos mentis for at least the last two years of his Presidency

• Being an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but being a friend is fatal (attributed to Henry Kissinger)

• Any place without an American military base is an enemy

• Neutrality is the the dirtiest word in the US political lexicon because “at least if you're an enemy we know you're an enemy. If you are neutral you're subversive because then you're really against us because you're not telling us—you're pretending to be neutral”

• With regard to the Middle East: “US completely handed over foreign policy 30 years ago to Netanyahu. The Israel Lobby dominates American politics. Have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It's very dangerous”

• Netanyahu is a war criminal, properly indicted by the ICC (International Criminal Court)

• “By the way if anyone would like to discuss how the US blew up Nordstream,

  I'd be happy to talk about that”

Some will complain that all this has been obvious. I would agree. However it hasn’t been obvious to many who sat among Sachs’ influential audience. And Sachs is not a host of a popular podcast speaking to his subscribers. He is a respected voice on the international stage addressing the European political leadership’s failure to formulate any kind of foreign policy. He was politely chastising the leadership of 400 million people to their faces.

I didn’t know who Jeffrey Sachs was four years ago. I was (and still am) unaware of many things. I was, however, aware of NATO’s inexorable march eastward despite the requests, turned demands, turned ultimatums from Russian leadership to relent. This is why I have been flabbergasted by the left leaning intellectuals in this country who paint anyone who asserts that both sides share the blame around the war in Ukraine as “Putin apologists” or spineless cowards for not coming to the defense of the Ukrainian people.

Why has this been lost on the “well-informed”? Who are they listening to?

With regard to the Middle East, Sachs never directly implicates Israel in the events of 9/11 but clearly has no reservations about acknowledging the plain fact that Israeli leadership under Netanyahu had the most to gain by those horrific events. Stating the obvious has sadly never been so dangerous as it is now.

The overwhelming evidence proves that three skyscrapers could not have been leveled in a matter of seconds by two plane collisions. Those events were planned and executed by unknown entities who not only had open access to the guts of those secure buildings but also to highly energetic explosives and, most importantly, the power to steer all major media outlets towards a single explanation. By doing so they got them to undermine their fundamental mission to use skepticism and rigor to hold authority in check.

Though President Trump has responded to the growing demand for a reinvestigation of the events of 9/11, we must ask, why has it taken so long? On what grounds are we to trust what we are now told two decades later? Who would be against transparency? How powerful would they have to be to be able to suppress a movement that has been demanding it for over two decades?

We may never discover who the real perpetrators were, but it is clear that at least one entity, the Israeli messaging platform Odigo, had foreknowledge of the events of that day. Here is the 2001 article from Haaretz which reported that Odigo themselves admitted that someone on their staff notified at least two of its users to stay away from the World Trade Center Complex that morning.

And then there were the group of five young men working for a moving company called Urban Moving Systems. Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari were spotted in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, just after 8am on 9/11 where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers.

The so-called “Dancing Israelis” were detained, interrogated and eventually sent back to Israel. Very little can be confirmed about these young men. Did they have foreknowledge of the event as well? Did one have $4,700 dollars stuffed in his sock? Did another fail an FBI polygraph test? Did they all appear on Israeli TV months later claiming to be Mossad intelligence agents? We simply cannot confirm any of these things, however one point cannot be contested. They were celebrating. Why?

Could Professor Sachs be the next advocate for a 9/11 Reinvestigation?

There is a bedrock of Russian public opinion on how the war in the Ukraine should end. 

There is also a bedrock of American public opinion on whether President Donald Trump is to be believed when he speaks of ending the war under the new American “Golden Dome” of peace with Russia. 

Between this rock and this hard place, there are the politics and the business of enlarging power and making money. According to Trump in his March 4 speech to Congress, he aims at “building the most powerful military of the future. As a first step, I am asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defence shield to protect our homeland — all made in the U.S.A.”  

For “most powerful military of the future”, Trump means new hypersonic weapons for a first strike against Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. For his “golden dome”, Trump means first-strike capacity without fear of retaliation — without mutually assured destruction by the Russians and Chinese.  The word for this isn’t peace – it’s a new US arms race.

In the recent statement by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s long time business friend and now US Commerce Secretary, Trump’s strategy for ending the current war on the Ukrainian battlefield means a cash dividend payable on a ceasefire at the frozen line of contact; this peace with Russia means business with Russia. “The President,” said Lutnick, “is going to figure out what are the tools he can use on Russia, and what are the tools he can use on Ukraine.  Like any great mediator, he’s going to beat both sides down, to get them to the table…We’ve given three hundred billion dollars to the Ukraine. Is it difficult to see what side we’re on?  Gimme a break…Let’s go force Russia into a reasonable peace deal…Enough already.”  

Between the rock, the hard place, and the Golden Dome, there is plenty of hopeful, wishful thinking. This is understandable, especially at this time of Lent. It’s also religious faith. The Roman Catholic bishops of Europe have just issued their Lenten proclamation that “as Christians prepare to embark on the journey of Lent, a time of repentance and conversion leading to Easter, the feast of hope and new life, we continue to entrust Ukraine and Europe to our Lord Jesus Christ, through the intercession of Mary, the Queen of Peace.”

Because the bishops are as unconfident of Mary’s mediation and Christ’s intervention, as they are of Trump’s,  they say they are still for holy war against “Russia the aggressor”, and for British and French guns to enforce it. “Amid deepening geopolitical complexities and the unpredictability of actions taken by some members of the international community,” the bishops say, meaning the US and Trump, “we call on the European Union and its Member States to remain united in their commitment to supporting Ukraine and its people. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law… A comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine can only be achieved through negotiations. Any credible and sincere dialogue effort should be supported by continued strong transatlantic and global solidarity and it must involve the victim of the aggression: Ukraine. We firmly reject any attempts to distort the reality of this aggression. In order to be sustainable and just, a future peace accord must fully respect international law and be underpinned by effective security guarantees to prevent the conflict from re-erupting.”

Under their mitres, when the bishops are saying complexity, unpredictability, and distortion of reality, they are thinking Trump.

Reviving the crusade against the Russian infidels is also what the regimes of the UK and Europe want. But the public belief in this crusade is waning, especially in the UK, creating another rock-and-hard- place squeeze for Prime Minister Keir Starmer; his military, intelligence and other Deep State institutions; the City business lobby; and the British media. 

The Russian response is as sceptical of Trump as it is of the combination of Europe’s rulers and their bishops. 

In nationwide polling in the second half of January, the Levada Centre of Moscow reported the high level of support for President Vladimir Putin, is qualified by the conviction of the  majority of voters that the end of the war terms must not (repeat not) concede the return of the four new regions – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye. “Although there is talk of Russia’s interest in rare metals and other resources in the depths these provinces, in some industrial enterprises, etc., [public opinion is] not about the material side. Russian society is showing what Lenin called the’ national pride of the Great Russians’. The level of solidarity is very high…What would the majority want? They are for peace, but their peace plan is that it stops at the point when they can feel victory.”  

Listen to the new podcast here.

By the end of February, Trump’s first month in office, Russian public support for the Army has reached the 80% peak expressed at the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SVO) in March 2022. Public confidence that the SVO is progressing successfully has now hit a peak of 72%.   

At the same time, Russian support for end-of-war negotiations between Russia and the US is high. According to Levada’s poll of February 20-26, “the most preferred conditions for concluding a peace agreement for respondents are: the exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war – 92%;  ensuring the rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine – 83%; protecting the status of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine – 79%;  establishing a friendly Russian government in Ukraine – 73%;  lifting Western sanctions against Russia – 71%; demilitarization of Ukraine and , reducing its army – 70%; an immediate ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine – 69%.”  

Wariness towards Trump and the Americans is the watchword of Russian policymakers. Dmitry Rogozin, the senator for Zaporozhye and commander of a combat unit at the front, is urging  scepticism towards press announcements that the US is halting deliveries of new weapons to the Ukraine, and stopping intelligence-sharing with the Ukrainian General Staff.

Source: https://t.me/rogozin_do/6804   
Rogozin’s scepticism has been corroborated by the Central Intelligence Agency Director, John Ratcliffe: “"I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause I think will go away. I think we'll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that's there, but to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward.”

In today’s hour-long podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we discuss the Special Inspector General’s (SIG) recent report to Congress, revealing that the total spent and sent by the US for military, other security and infrastructure assistance to the Ukraine is only $83.4 billion; that’s just a quarter fraction of the $350 billion figure Trump, Lutnick and other US officials have been publicizing. Most of this money, the SIG report also reveals, is for replenishment of weapons stocks taken out of the Army and other Pentagon stocks and sent to the battlefield; and for equipping and operating US military forces in eastern Europe, outside the Ukraine.

Read the accounting details here.

Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Finally, as discussed in the podcast, here is the evidence from dozens of US opinion polls that Trump’s claims about American voter support are false. In his speech to Congress, the President said “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. In fact, it’s an astonishing record: 27-point swing, the most ever.”   

The week before, the White House Press Office published the headline claim of “massive support for President Trump and his agenda”. In point of fact, the poll revealed that on the question of whether the country is moving in the right direction or not, despite the improvement on the positive side since the end of the Biden Administration, the majority of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction, 48% to 42%.  Black Americans were significantly more pessimistic; 59% said the wrong direction.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/

Source: https://harvardharrispoll.com/

A closer look at the February 19-20 panel interview poll cited by the White House also reveals strong voters majorities opposed to Trump’s line on negotiating peace with Russia. One of the reasons, the poll identifies, is that most Americans still believe Russia is expansionist and will move into other countries unless restrained by US forces.   

Source: https://harvardharrispoll.com/

Compilations of this and 36 other national polls by Realclearpolitics.com, reporting as recently as March 2, reveal that since the Inauguration, public disapproval of Trump’s performance has been growing, and approval shrinking until this week there is just 1.3% between them. The Harvard Harris poll cited by the White House was the second most favourable to Trump of all 37 polls reporting.

Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/

When the direction of the country, right or wrong, was questioned by the pollsters, the average of the poll results as of March 2 was a negative spread of 9%; that’s to say, 51.4% believe the country under Trump is going in the wrong direction, while 41.4% believe it is going in the right direction.

Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/

Trump’s negative job approval rating after his first month in office contrasts with Biden’s positive job approval for his first seven months. President Barack Obama’s job approval remained positive for the first 18 months of his term. “We’ve done more in two weeks than Obama and Biden!” Trump said in February.  The majority of US voters don’t believe him.

Click to listen to the discussion.  

The great unspoken fact of the 1930s was that the world was drifting to war, a trend that nobody knew how to stop.

The great unspoken fact of the 2020s is that the global economy is in the process of inflecting from growth into contraction, and, again, this is a process that no-one can halt, still less put into reverse.

Logically, countries, groups and individuals must strive to work out how to fare best in an economy that has become a less-than-zero-sum game. Their relative success or failure in this endeavour will be a function of how much they know about it, and how early they are in gaining that knowledge.

What do they know?

This leads to a question that often arises here, which is that of how far ‘the powers that be’ are aware of this.

It seems logical to assume that somebody, somewhere, must have figured this out. Getting to the facts of the situation isn’t exactly rocket-science. All that’s really required is the kind of cool objectivity that rejects consensus wishful-thinking, and repudiates, as unrealistic, the orthodox notion that we can be assured of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’.

With global economic inflexion understood, the issue becomes one of competitive advantage.

Seen strategically, America is in the midst of a gigantic economic gambit, the bet being that extreme fiscal stimulus can re-shore and expand important industries to a point of critical mass before the burden of soaring public debt either cripples the dollar or, more probably, calls time on super-gigantic stimulus.

Nobody can imagine that the current trajectory of US government borrowing is sustainable. But an important strategic advantage can be seized if lenders – and overseas lenders in particular – are willing to fund what is, essentially, a competitive, national-advantage economic agenda

There is, by the way, nothing wrong with pursuing national economic advantage – it’s what governments do.

The counter-gambit is that the BRICS+ countries are trying to build a competing economic bloc strong enough to defend its member countries from the aggressive economic strategy of the United States.

These are examples of move and counter-move in the wholly new context of involuntary economic de-growth.

To a significant extent, countries outside these completing blocs have to decide where their own best interests lie.

The energy key

It should be beyond obvious that energy is critical to these issues. Our reliance on fossil fuels has created two juxtaposed vulnerabilities.

The first is that we may inflict irreparable climatic and ecological damage to the Earth’s environment, and this will have economic as well as human consequences.

The second is that the diminishing economic value of oil, natural gas and coal is putting economic growth into reverse.

Anyone clever enough to figure out the realities of economic inflexion must also be smart enough to realise that renewable energy sources can’t provide a complete, like-for-like replacement for the energy value hitherto sourced from oil, natural gas and coal. Renewables expansion is simply too materials-intensive for this to happen, and the requisite raw materials can only be obtained through the agency of legacy fossil fuel energy.

To anyone who has reached this conclusion, the deceleration of energy transition – and the corresponding slowing of the move from ICE to battery-powered vehicles – will have come as no surprise at all.

This isn’t to say that renewables (and their transport ancillaries) don’t have important roles to play in the economic future. The manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, grids, power-storage systems and EVs are important industries, certainly in terms of employment, though improbably in terms of profit. If we’re going to build these things anyway, it’s better that the building of them takes place at home rather than overseas.

But it’s one thing to try to corner as much energy-transition activity as you can, and quite another to believe that renewables are capable of taking over from fossil fuels in an economy that carries on growing.

Crisis management, or the art of pretend-and-extend

To a significant extent, politics is a matter of crisis management, something in which participants are successful if the eventuation of crisis can be pushed out far enough into the future that it doesn’t happen on their watch.

This explains much of the apparent madness now visible in global economic and financial affairs.

Various instances illustrate these processes.

In the United Kingdom, a large and rising proportion of home-buyers are now taking out mortgages whose terms extend beyond the borrowers’ dates of retirement. This may seem both irrational and dangerous, but it’s part of a financial mechanism dictated by political choice. There’s no divine diktat which says that a country must push the prices of homes out of the reach of most of its own citizens, but policies which would deflate the property price bubble haven’t attracted sufficient political support to become feasible.

It seems safe to conclude that somebody in the corridors of power must know that Britain has become a post-growth, credit-dependent economy. Over the past twenty years, and with everything stated at constant 2023 values, the government has borrowed £2.1tn, roughly half of which has been backstopped by the net-of-QT money-creation of the central bank. Private borrowers have been more cautious, but have nevertheless increased their debts by close to £800bn. All of this is reinforced by rapid credit expansion in the NBFI or “shadow banking” sector.

The result of all this credit-bingeing and money-creation is an economy that’s only £625bn, or 30%, bigger now than it was in 2003, and most of that “growth” is itself the cosmetic effect of spending borrowed money.

The immediate need is to walk a tight-rope between interest rates that are high enough to prop up the currency, but low enough not to burst the real estate bubble. Assurances of ‘growth’ are pure PR-exercises in an economy that can’t, nowadays, house its population, bring down colossal health-care waiting lists, or stop polluting its rivers and seas with untreated sewage.

In short, the British authorities are playing extend-and-pretend.

But they shouldn’t be taken too hardly to task for that, for two main reasons. First, many other countries, arguably most of them, are doing exactly the same thing.

Second, there are no good alternatives to ‘extend-and-pretend’.

Likewise, the United States reported real-terms growth of $675bn last year, but the government had to run a $2.4tn fiscal deficit to enable this to happen, and is now adding public debt at the rate of $1tn every hundred days. Nobody in his or her right mind could contend that this is sustainable, but America has the advantage of a currency that’s the least-dirty shirt in the global laundry-basket.

China, meanwhile, is trying to manage the implosion of a gigantic real-estate Ponzi scheme, but nobody could imagine that this event came unexpectedly, out-of-the-blue. Like Britain, China’s total borrowing over the past twenty years has far exceeded reported growth, in this instance in the ratio of 4.4:1, with the difference that private entities, rather than the state itself, have undertaken most (almost four-fifths) of this borrowing.

Japan is persisting with monetary policies which have halved the dollar value of the yen since the inception of “Abenomics” back in 2012.

In short, much of what looks like madness – British mortgages, US Federal debt, Chinese real-estate, and the monetary policies of the Bank of Japan – turns out to be exercises in ‘extend and pretend’.

Getting to the real

Those of us who want to work out how things are really unfolding are perfectly capable of doing so. Stripping out credit-effect distortion from reported GDP brings us to a calculation of underlying or ‘clean’ economic output (C-GDP) which correlates remarkably closely to the quantities of primary energy used in the economy.

The further deduction of surging ECoEs – the Energy Costs of Energy – provides a calculation of prosperity which is a pretty good fit with what’s been experienced in recent times.

On the latter calculation, the World was 28% more prosperous in 2023 than it was in 2003, but population numbers increased by 26% between those same years.

We can, if we so wish, make corresponding calculations about the future. As ECoEs carry on rising, and as renewables prove incapable of providing a complete replacement for the energy value hitherto sourced from fossil fuels, aggregate material prosperity will fall, gradually in the balance of the 2020s but much more rapidly in the 2030s.

In comparison with 2023, the world’s average person is likely to be only about 7% poorer by 2030, but fully 25% worse off by 2040.

At the same time, the real costs of energy-intensive necessities will carry on rising, applying leveraged compression to the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services.

Where the financial corollaries of these material economic trends are concerned, we can assume that ‘extend-and-pretend’ will remain the only game in town, meaning that debt and quasi-debt will carry on rising – and the spending of this credit will carry on being presented as “growth” – until the credibility of money has been destroyed.

The strategic aim isn’t to side-step this process, but to ensure that your currency doesn’t win this ‘race to the bottom’.

The rate at which credit will rise will force the authorities back onto the path of QE, ZIRP and NIRP, because there’s no other way of maintaining the fiction that the economy is capable of servicing these soaring debts.

We can, on these same lines, work out which sectors will face the most severe compression, and figure out which countries and which currencies are leading the race to the bottom.

We can do all of these things and, if we so wish, we can share our findings.

But we can’t expect any of this to make us popular.

The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea; and several months after that the Islamic State captured the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and declared it the capital of a new caliphate. In three separate conflicts, an enemy or rival power of the United States was seen to have successfully used not just military might but also social media messaging campaigns designed to confuse and demoralize its enemies—a combination known as “hybrid warfare.” These conflicts convinced U.S. and NATO security officials that the power of social media to shape public perceptions had evolved to the point where it could decide the outcome of modern wars—outcomes that might be counter to those the United States wanted. They concluded that the state had to acquire the means to take control over digital communications so that they could present reality as they wanted it to be, and prevent reality from becoming anything else.

Technically, hybrid warfare refers to an approach that combines military and non-military means—overt and covert operations mixed with cyberwarfare and influence operations—to both confuse and weaken a target while avoiding direct, full-scale conventional war. In practice, it is notoriously vague. “The term now covers every type of discernible Russian activity, from propaganda to conventional warfare, and most that exists in between,” wrote Russia analyst Michael Kofman in March 2016.

Over the past decade, Russia has indeed repeatedly employed tactics associated with hybrid warfare, including a push to target Western audiences with messaging on channels like RT and Sputnik News and with cyber operations such as the use of “troll” accounts. But this was not new even in 2014, and it was something the United States, as well as every other major power, engaged in as well. As early as 2011, the United States was building its own “troll armies” online by developing software to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

“If you torture hybrid warfare long enough, it will tell you anything,” Kofman had admonished, which is precisely what began happening a few months later when Trump critics popularized the idea that a hidden Russian hand was the puppeteer of political developments inside the United States.

The leading voice promoting that claim was a former FBI officer and counterterrorism analyst named Clint Watts. In an article from August 2016, “How Russia Dominates Your Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too),” Watts and his co-author, Andrew Weisburd, described how Russia had revived its Cold War-era “Active Measures” campaign, using propaganda and disinformation to influence foreign audiences. As a result, according to the article, Trump voters and Russian propagandists were promoting the same stories on social media that were intended to make America look weak and incompetent. The authors made the extraordinary claim that the “melding of Russian-friendly accounts and Trumpkins has been going on for some time.” If that was true, it meant that anyone expressing support for Donald Trump might be an agent of the Russian government, whether or not the person intended to play that role. It meant that the people they called “Trumpkins,” who made up half the country, were attacking America from within. It meant that politics was now war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.

Watts made his name as a counterterrorism analyst by studying the social media strategies used by ISIS, but with articles like this, he became the media’s go-to expert on Russian trolls and Kremlin disinformation campaigns. It seems he also had powerful backers.

In his book The Assault on Intelligence, retired CIA chief Michael Hayden called Watts “the one man, who more than any other was trying to ring the alarm more than two years before the 2016 elections.”

Hayden credited Watts in his book with teaching him the power of social media: “Watts pointed out to me that Twitter makes falsehoods seem more believable through sheer repetition and volume. He labeled it a kind of ‘computational propaganda.’ Twitter in turn drives mainstream media.”

A false story algorithmically amplified by Twitter and disseminated by the media—it’s no coincidence that this perfectly describes the “bullshit” spread on Twitter about Russian influence operations: In 2017, it was Watts who came up with the idea for the Hamilton 68 dashboard and helped spearhead the initiative.

facebookII. Trump’s Election: “It’s Facebook’s Fault”

No one thought Trump was a normal politician. Being an ogre, Trump horrified millions of Americans who felt a personal betrayal in the possibility that he would occupy the same office held by George Washington and Abe Lincoln. Trump also threatened the business interests of the most powerful sectors of society. It was the latter offense, rather than his putative racism or flagrant un-presidentialness, that sent the ruling class into a state of apoplexy.

Given his focus in office on lowering the corporate tax rate, it’s easy to forget that Republican officials and the party’s donor class saw Trump as a dangerous radical who threatened their business ties with China, their access to cheap imported labor, and the lucrative business of constant war. But, indeed, that is how they saw him, as reflected in the unprecedented response to Trump’s candidacy recorded by The Wall Street Journal in September 2016: “No chief executive at the nation’s 100 largest companies had donated to Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign through August, a sharp reversal from 2012, when nearly a third of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies supported GOP nominee Mitt Romney.”

The phenomenon was not unique to Trump. Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist candidate in 2016, was also seen as a dangerous threat by the ruling class. But whereas the Democrats successfully sabotaged Sanders, Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, which meant that he had to be dealt with by other means.

Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”

Trump had used sites like Twitter to bypass his party’s elites and connect directly with his supporters. Therefore, to cripple the new president and ensure that no one like him could ever come to power again, the intel agencies had to break the independence of the social media platforms. Conveniently, it was the same lesson that many intelligence and defense officials had drawn from the ISIS and Russian campaigns of 2014—namely, that social media was too powerful to be left outside of state control—only applied to domestic politics, which meant the agencies would now have help from politicians who stood to benefit from the effort.

Immediately after the election, Hillary Clinton started blaming Facebook for her loss. Until this point, Facebook and Twitter had tried to remain above the political fray, fearful of jeopardizing potential profits by alienating either party. But now a profound change occurred, as the operation behind the Clinton campaign reoriented itself not simply to reform the social media platforms, but to conquer them. The lesson they took from Trump’s victory was that Facebook and Twitter—more than Michigan and Florida—were the critical battlegrounds where political contests were won or lost. “Many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is,” Clinton’s chief digital strategist Teddy Goff told Politico the week after the election, referring to Facebook’s alleged role in boosting Russian disinformation that helped Trump. “Both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit…this is one of the things we would like to take on post-election,” Goff said.

The press repeated that message so often that it gave the political strategy the appearance of objective validity:

“Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook”; New York Magazine, Nov. 9, 2016.

“Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence”; The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016.

“Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”; The Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.

“Disinformation, Not Fake News, Got Trump Elected, and It Is Not Stopping”; The Intercept, Dec. 6, 2016.

And on it went in countless articles that dominated the news cycle for the next two years.

At first, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the charge that fake news posted on his platform had influenced the outcome of the election as “pretty crazy.” But Zuckerberg faced an intense pressure campaign in which every sector of the American ruling class, including his own employees, blamed him for putting a Putin agent in the White House, effectively accusing him of high treason. The final straw came a few weeks after the election when Obama himself “publicly denounced the spread of fake news on Facebook.” Two days later, Zuckerberg folded: “Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments.”

The false yet foundational claim that Russia hacked the 2016 election provided a justification—just like the claims about weapons of mass destruction that triggered the Iraq War—to plunge America into a wartime state of exception. With the normal rules of constitutional democracy suspended, a coterie of party operatives and security officials then installed a vast, largely invisible new architecture of social control on the backend of the internet’s biggest platforms.

Though there was never a public order given, the U.S. government began enforcing martial law online.

Adam Maida

dataIII. Why Do We Need All This Data About People?

The American doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare famously calls for “winning hearts and minds.” The idea is that victory against insurgent groups depends on gaining the support of the local population, which cannot be accomplished by brute force alone. In places like Vietnam and Iraq, support was secured through a combination of nation-building and appealing to locals by providing them with goods they were presumed to value: money and jobs, for instance, or stability.

Because cultural values vary and what is prized by an Afghan villager may appear worthless to a Swedish accountant, successful counterinsurgents must learn what makes the native population tick. To win over a mind, first you have to get inside it to understand its wants and fears. When that fails, there is another approach in the modern military arsenal to take its place: counterterrorism. Where counterinsurgency tries to win local support, counterterrorism tries to hunt down and kill designated enemies.

Despite the apparent tension in their contrasting approaches, the two strategies have often been used in tandem. Both rely on extensive surveillance networks to gather intelligence on their targets, whether that is figuring out where to dig wells or locating terrorists in order to kill them. But the counterinsurgent in particular imagines that if he can learn enough about a population, it will be possible to reengineer its society. Obtaining answers is just a matter of using the right resources: a combination of surveillance tools and social scientific methods, the joint output of which feeds into all-powerful centralized databases that are believed to contain the totality of the war.

I have observed, reflecting on my experiences as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, how, “data analytics tools at the fingertips of anyone with access to an operations center or situa­tion room seemed to promise the imminent convergence of map and territory,” but ended up becoming a trap as “U.S. forces could measure thousands of different things that we couldn’t understand.” We tried to cover for that deficit by acquiring even more data. If only we could gather enough information and harmonize it with the correct algorithms, we believed, the database would divine the future.

Not only is that framework foundational in modern American counterinsurgency doctrine, but also it was part of the original impetus for building the internet. The Pentagon built the proto-internet known as ARPANET in 1969 because it needed a decentralized communications infrastructure that could survive nuclear war—but that was not the only goal. The internet, writes Yasha Levine in his history of the subject, Surveillance Valley, was also “an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.”

In the days of the internet “freedom agenda,” the popular mythology of Silicon Valley depicted it as a laboratory of freaks, self-starters, free thinkers, and libertarian tinkerers who just wanted to make cool things without the government slowing them down. The alternative history, outlined in Levine’s book, highlights that the internet “always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.” There is truth in both versions, but after 2001 the distinction disappeared.

As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, at the start of the war on terror “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism.”

In Afghanistan, the military had to employ costly drones and “Human Terrain Teams” staffed with adventurous academics to survey the local population and extract their relevant sociological data. But with Americans spending hours a day voluntarily feeding their every thought directly into data monopolies connected to the defense sector, it must have seemed trivially easy for anyone with control of the databases to manipulate the sentiments of the population at home.

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon began funding the development of a host of tools for detecting and countering terrorist messaging on social media. Some were part of a broader “memetic warfare” initiative inside the military that included proposals to weaponize memes to “defeat an enemy ideology and win over the masses of undecided noncombatants.” But most of the programs, launched in response to the rise of ISIS and the jihadist group’s adept use of social media, focused on scaling up automated means of detecting and censoring terrorist messaging online. Those efforts culminated in January 2016 with the State Department’s announcement that it would be opening the aforementioned Global Engagement Center, headed by Michael Lumpkin. Just a few months later, President Obama put the GEC in charge of the new war against disinformation. On the same day that the GEC was announced, Obama and “various high-ranking members of the national security establishment met with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Internet powerhouses to discuss how the United States can fight ISIS messaging via social media.”

In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power inside the United States. Weapons created to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda were turned against Americans who entertained incorrect thoughts about the president or vaccine boosters or gender pronouns or the war in Ukraine.

Former State Department official Mike Benz, who now runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online that bills itself as a digital free-speech watchdog, describes how a company called Graphika, which is “essentially a U.S. Department of Defense-funded censorship consortium” that was created to fight terrorists, was repurposed to censor political speech in America. The company, “initially funded to help do social media counterinsurgency work effectively in conflict zones for the U.S. military,” was then “redeployed domestically both on Covid censorship and political censorship,” Benz told an interviewer. “Graphika was deployed to monitor social media discourse about Covid and Covid origins, Covid conspiracies, or Covid sorts of issues.”

The fight against ISIS morphed into the fight against Trump and “Russian collusion,” which morphed into the fight against disinformation. But those were just branding changes; the underlying technological infrastructure and ruling-class philosophy, which claimed the right to remake the world based on a religious sense of expertise, remained unchanged. The human art of politics, which would have required real negotiation and compromise with Trump supporters, was abandoned in favor of a specious science of top-down social engineering that aimed to produce a totally administered society.

For the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of dealing with the natives.

internetIV. The Internet: From Darling to Demon

Once upon a time, the internet was going to save the world. The first dot-com boom in the 1990s popularized the idea of the internet as a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy. The Clinton administration’s 1997 “A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” put forth the vision: “The Internet is a medium that has tremendous potential for promoting individual freedom and individual empowerment” and “[t]herefore, where possible, the individual should be left in control of the way in which he or she uses this medium.” The smart people in the West mocked the naive efforts in other parts of the world to control the flow of information. In 2000, President Clinton scoffed that China’s internet crackdown was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The hype continued through the Bush administration, when internet companies were seen as crucial partners in the state’s mass surveillance program and its plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.

But the hype really went into overdrive when President Obama was elected through a “big data”-driven campaign that prioritized social media outreach. There appeared to be a genuine philosophical alignment between Obama’s political style as the “Hope” and ”Change” president whose guiding principle in foreign policy was “Don’t do dumb shit” and the internet search company whose original motto was “Do no evil.” There were also deep personal ties connecting the two powers, with 252 cases over the course of Obama’s presidency of people moving between jobs at the White House and Google. From 2009 to 2015, White House and Google employees were meeting, on average, more than once a week.

As Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the government’s “Internet freedom” agenda, which aimed to “promote online communications as a tool for opening up closed societies.” In a speech from 2010, Clinton issued a warning about the spread of digital censorship in authoritarian regimes: “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said. “And beyond this partition, viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day.”

It is a supreme irony that the very people who a decade ago led the freedom agenda for other countries have since pushed the United States to implement one of the largest and most powerful censorship machines in existence under the guise of fighting disinformation.

Or perhaps irony is not the right word to capture the difference between the freedom-loving Clinton of a decade ago and the pro-censorship activist of today, but it gets at what appears to be the about-face done by a class of people who were public standard-bearers for radically different ideas barely 10 years earlier. These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. That’s how to bridge the gap between the Hillary Clinton of 2013 and the Clinton of 2023: Both see the internet as an immensely powerful tool for driving political processes and effecting regime change.

Which is why, in the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal—because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn’t. As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

In his book Who Owns the Future?, tech pioneer Jaron Lanier writes, “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultra-secret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.” Because digital economies produce ever-greater concentrations of data and power, the inevitable happened: The tech companies got too powerful.

What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.

They chose option B.

Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump—a candidate every bit as loathsome to the highly educated elites in Silicon Valley as he was to the highly educated elites in New York and D.C.—provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.

russiagateV. Russiagate! Russiagate! Russiagate!

If one imagines that the American ruling class faced a problem—Donald Trump appeared to threaten their institutional survival—then the Russia investigation didn’t just provide the means to unite the various branches of that class, in and out of government, against a common foe. It also gave them the ultimate form of leverage over the most powerful non-aligned sector of society: the tech industry. The coordination necessary to carry out the Russian collusion frame-up was the vehicle, fusing (1) the political goals of the Democratic Party, (2) the institutional agenda of the intelligence and security agencies, and (3) the narrative power and moral fervor of the media with (4) the tech companies’ surveillance architecture.

The secret FISA warrant that allowed U.S. security agencies to begin spying on the Trump campaign was based on the Steele dossier, a partisan hatchet job paid for by Hillary Clinton’s team that consisted of provably false reports alleging a working relationship between Donald Trump and the Russian government. While a powerful short-term weapon against Trump, the dossier was also obvious bullshit, which suggested it might eventually become a liability.

Disinformation solved that problem while placing a nuclear-grade weapon in the arsenal of the anti-Trump resistance. In the beginning, disinformation had been only one among a half-dozen talking points coming from the anti-Trump camp. It won out over the others because it was capable of explaining anything and everything yet simultaneously remained so ambiguous it could not be disproved. Defensively, it provided a means to attack and discredit anyone who questioned the dossier or the larger claim that Trump colluded with Russia.

All the old McCarthyite tricks were new again. The Washington Post aggressively trumpeted the claim that disinformation swung the 2016 election, a crusade that began within days of Trump’s victory, with the article “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” (The lead expert quoted in the article: Clint Watts.)

A steady flow of leaks from intelligence officials to national security reporters had already established the false narrative that there was credible evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. When Trump won in spite of those reports, the senior officials responsible for spreading them, most notably CIA chief John Brennan, doubled down on their claims. Two weeks before Trump took office, the Obama administration released a declassified version of an intelligence community assessment, known as an ICA, on “Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections,” which asserted that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The ICA was presented as the objective, nonpolitical consensus reached by multiple intelligence agencies. In the Columbia Journalism Review, Jeff Gerth writes that the assessment received “massive, and largely uncritical coverage” in the press. But, in fact, the ICA was just the opposite: a selectively curated political document that deliberately omitted contrary evidence to create the impression that the collusion narrative was not a widely disputed rumor, but an objective fact.

A classified report by the House Intelligence Committee on the creation of the ICA detailed just how unusual and nakedly political it was. “It wasn’t 17 agencies, and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” a senior intelligence official who read a draft version of the House report told the journalist Paul Sperry. “It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan handpicked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.” An Obama appointee, Brennan had broken with precedent by weighing in on politics while serving as CIA director. That set the stage for his post-government career as an MSNBC analyst and “resistance” figure who made headlines by accusing Trump of treason.

Mike Pompeo, who succeeded Brennan at the CIA, said that as the agency’s director, he learned that “senior analysts who had been working on Russia for nearly their entire careers were made bystanders” when the ICA was being written. According to Sperry, Brennan “excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a ‘wild card.’” (Brennan was also the one who overrode the objections of other agencies to include the Steele dossier as part of the official assessment.)

Despite its irregularities, the ICA worked as intended: Trump began his presidency under a cloud of suspicion that he was never able to dispel. Just as Schumer promised, the intelligence officials wasted no time in taking their revenge.

And not only revenge, but also forward-planning action. The claim that Russia hacked the 2016 vote allowed federal agencies to implement the new public-private censorship machinery under the pretext of ensuring “election integrity.” People who expressed true and constitutionally protected opinions about the 2016 election (and later about issues like COVID-19 and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) were labeled un-American, racists, conspiracists, and stooges of Vladimir Putin and systematically removed from the digital public square to prevent their ideas from spreading disinformation. By an extremely conservative estimate based on public reporting, there have been tens of millions of such cases of censorship since Trump’s election.

And here’s the climax of this particular entry: On Jan. 6, 2017—the same day that Brennan’s ICA report lent institutional backing to the false claim that Putin helped Trump—Jeh Johnson, the outgoing Obama-appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference, he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” The move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS. It was a coup that Johnson had been attempting to pull off since the summer of 2016, but that, as he explained in a later speech, was blocked by local stakeholders who told him “that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.” So Johnson found a work-around by unilaterally rushing the measure through in his last days in office.

It’s clear now why Johnson was in such a rush: Within a few years, all of the claims used to justify the extraordinary federal seizure of the country’s electoral system would fall apart. In July 2019 the Mueller report concluded that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government—the same conclusion reached by the inspector general’s report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, released later that year. Finally, on Jan. 9, 2023, The Washington Post quietly published an addendum in its cybersecurity newsletter about New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics study. Its conclusion: “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters.”

But by then it didn’t matter. In the final two weeks of the Obama administration, the new counter-disinformation apparatus scored one of its most significant victories: the power to directly oversee federal elections that would have profound consequences for the 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden.

wotVI. Why the Post-9/11 “War on Terror” Never Ended

Clint Watts, who headed up the Hamilton 68 initiative, and Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, CIA chief, and NSA director who championed Watts, are both veterans of the U.S. counterterrorism establishment. Hayden ranks among the most senior intelligence officers the United States has ever produced and was a principal architect of the post-9/11 mass surveillance system. Indeed, an astounding percentage of the key figures in the counter-disinformation complex cut their teeth in the worlds of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare.

Michael Lumpkin, who headed the GEC, the State Department agency that served as the first command center in the war against disinformation, is a former Navy SEAL with a counterterrorism background. The GEC itself grew out of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications before being repurposed to fight disinformation.

Twitter had the chance to stop the Hamilton 68 hoax before it got out of hand, yet chose not to. Why? The answer can be seen in the emails sent by a Twitter executive named Emily Horne, who advised against calling out the scam. Twitter had a smoking gun showing that the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the neoliberal think tank behind the Hamilton 68 initiative, was guilty of exactly the charge it made against others: peddling disinformation that inflamed domestic political divisions and undermined the legitimacy of democratic institutions. But that had to be weighed against other factors, Horne suggested, such as the need to stay on the good side of a powerful organization. “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” she wrote in February 2018.

The ASD was lucky to have someone like Horne on the inside of Twitter. Then again, maybe it wasn’t luck. Horne had previously worked at the State Department, handling the “digital media and think tank outreach” portfolio. According to her LinkedIn, she “worked closely with foreign policy reporters covering [ISIS] … and executed communications plans relating to Counter-[ISIS] Coalition activities.” Put another way, she had a background in counterterrorism operations similar to Watts’ but with more of an emphasis on spinning the press and civil society groups. From there she became the director for strategic communications for Obama’s National Security Council, only leaving to join Twitter in June 2017. Sharpen the focus on that timeline, and here’s what it shows: Horne joined Twitter one month before the launch of ASD, just in time to advocate for protecting a group run by the kind of power brokers who held the keys to her professional future.

It is no coincidence that the war against disinformation began at the very moment the Global War on Terror (GWOT) finally appeared to be coming to an end. Over two decades, the GWOT fulfilled President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the rise of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence.” It evolved into a self-interested, self-justifying industry that employed thousands of people in and out of government who operated without clear oversight or strategic utility. It might have been possible for the U.S. security establishment to declare victory and move from a permanent war footing to a peacetime posture, but as one former White House national security official explained to me, that was unlikely. “If you work in counterterrorism,” the former official said, “there’s no incentive to ever say that you’re winning, kicking their ass, and they’re a bunch of losers. It’s all about hyping a threat.” He described “huge incentives to inflate the threat” that have been internalized in the culture of the U.S. defense establishment and are “of a nature that they don’t require one to be particularly craven or intellectually dishonest.”

“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.”

The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level.

In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush promised to drain the swamps of radicalism in the Middle East. Only by making the region safe for democracy, Bush said, could he ensure that it would stop producing violent jihadists like Osama bin Laden.

Today, to keep America safe, it is no longer enough to invade the Middle East and bring its people democracy. According to the Biden White House and the army of disinformation experts, the threat is now coming from within. A network of right-wing domestic extremists, QAnon fanatics, and white nationalists is supported by a far larger population of some 70 million Trump voters whose political sympathies amount to a fifth column within the United States. But how did these people get radicalized into accepting the bitter and destructive white jihad of Trumpist ideology? Through the internet, of course, where the tech companies, by refusing to “do more” to combat the scourge of hate speech and fake news, allowed toxic disinformation to poison users’ minds.

After 9/11, the threat of terrorism was used to justify measures like the Patriot Act that suspended constitutional rights and placed millions of Americans under a shadow of mass surveillance. Those policies were once controversial but have come to be accepted as the natural prerogatives of state power. As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed, George W. Bush’s “‘with-us-or-with-the-terrorists’ directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.”

The war on terror was a dismal failure that ended with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. It also became deeply unpopular with the public. Why, then, would Americans choose to empower the leaders and sages of that war to be the stewards of an even more expansive war against disinformation? It is possible to venture a guess: Americans did not choose them. Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.

domestic_extremistsVII. The Rise of “Domestic Extremists”

A few weeks after Trump supporters rioted in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier wrote an article for The New York Times advocating for the United States to wage a “comprehensive counterinsurgency program” against its own citizens.

Counterinsurgency, as Grenier would know, is not a limited, surgical operation but a broad effort conducted across an entire society that inevitably involves collateral destruction. Targeting only the most violent extremists who attacked law enforcement officers at the Capitol would not be enough to defeat the insurgency. Victory would require winning the hearts and minds of the natives—in this case, the Christian dead-enders and rural populists radicalized by their grievances into embracing the Bin Laden-like cult of MAGA. Lucky for the government, there is a cadre of experts who are available to deal with this difficult problem: people like Grenier, who now works as a consultant in the private-sector counterterrorism industry, where he has been employed since leaving the CIA.

Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.” Watts is a career veteran of military and government service who seems to share the belief, common among his colleagues, that once the internet entered its populist stage and threatened entrenched hierarchies, it became a grave danger to civilization. But this was a fearful response, informed by beliefs widely, and no doubt sincerely, shared in the Beltway that mistook an equally sincere populist backlash termed “the revolt of the public” by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri for an act of war. The standard Watts and others introduced, which quickly became the elite consensus, treats tweets and memes—the primary weapons of disinformation—as acts of war.

Using the hazy category of disinformation allowed security experts to conflate racist memes with mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and with violent protests like the one that took place at the Capitol. It was a rubric for catastrophizing speech and maintaining a permanent state of fear and emergency. And it received the full backing of the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and President Biden, all of whom, notes Glenn Greenwald, have declared that “the gravest menace to American national security” is not Russia, ISIS, China, Iran, or North Korea, but “‘domestic extremists’ in general—and far-right white supremacist groups in particular.”

The Biden administration has steadily expanded domestic terrorism and counter-extremism programs. In February 2021, DHS officials announced that they had received additional funding to boost department-wide efforts at “preventing domestic terrorism,” including an initiative to counter the spread of disinformation online, which uses an approach seemingly borrowed from the Soviet handbook, called “attitudinal inoculation.”

Adam Maida

ngoVIII. The NGO Borg

In November 2018, Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy published a study titled “The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis.” The scope of the paper is comprehensive, but its authors are especially focused on the centrality of philanthropically funded nonprofit organizations and their relationship to the media. The Shorenstein Center is a key node in the complex the paper describes, giving the authors’ observations an insider’s perspective.

“In this landscape analysis, it became apparent that a number of key advocates swooping in to save journalism are not corporations or platforms or the U.S. government, but rather foundations and philanthropists who fear the loss of a free press and the underpinning of a healthy society. ... With none of the authoritative players—the government and platforms who push the content—stepping up to solve the problem quickly enough, the onus has fallen on a collective effort by newsrooms, universities, and foundations to flag what is authentic and what is not.”

To save journalism, to save democracy itself, Americans should count on the foundations and philanthropists—people like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Open Society Foundations’ George Soros, and internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party fundraiser Reid Hoffman. In other words, Americans were being asked to rely on private billionaires who were pumping billions of dollars into civic organizations—through which they would influence the American political process.

There is no reason to question the motivations of the staffers at these NGOs, most of whom were no doubt perfectly sincere in the conviction that their work was restoring the “underpinning of a healthy society.” But certain observations can be made about the nature of that work. First, it placed them in a position below the billionaire philanthropists but above hundreds of millions of Americans whom they would guide and instruct as a new information clerisy by separating truth from falsehood, as wheat from chaff. Second, this mandate, and the enormous funding behind it, opened up thousands of new jobs for information regulators at a moment when traditional journalism was collapsing. Third, the first two points placed the immediate self-interest of the NGO staffers perfectly in line with the imperatives of the American ruling party and security state. In effect, a concept taken from the worlds of espionage and warfare—disinformation—was seeded into academic and nonprofit spaces, where it ballooned into a pseudoscience that was used as an instrument of partisan warfare.

Virtually overnight, the “whole of society” national mobilization to defeat disinformation that Obama initiated led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators.

The modern “fact-checking” industry, for instance, which impersonates a well-established scientific field, is in reality a nakedly partisan cadre of compliance officers for the Democratic Party. Its leading organization, the International Fact-Checking Network, was established in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a central hub in the counter-disinformation complex.

Everywhere one looks now, there is a disinformation expert. They are found at every major media publication, in every branch of government, and in academic departments, crowding each other out on cable news programs, and of course staffing the NGOs. There is enough money coming from the counter-disinformation mobilization to both fund new organizations and convince established ones like the Anti-Defamation League to parrot the new slogans and get in on the action.

How is it that so many people could suddenly become experts in a field—“disinformation”—that not 1 in 10,000 of them could have defined in 2014? Because expertise in disinformation involves ideological orientation, not technical knowledge. For proof, look no further than the arc traced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who pivoted from being failed podcast hosts to joining the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Such initiatives flourished in the years after Trump and Brexit.

But it went beyond celebrities. According to former State Department official Mike Benz, “To create a ‘whole of society’ consensus on the censorship of political opinions online that were ‘casting doubt’ ahead of the 2020 election, DHS organized ‘disinformation’ conferences to bring together tech companies, civil society groups, and news media to all build consensus—with DHS prodding (which is meaningful: many partners receive government funds through grants or contracts, or fear government regulatory or retaliatory threats)—on expanding social media censorship policies.”

A DHS memo, first made public by journalist Lee Fang, describes a DHS official’s comment “during an internal strategy discussion, that the agency should use third-party nonprofits as a “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

It is not unusual that a government agency would want to work with private corporations and civil society groups, but in this case the result was to break the independence of organizations that should have been critically investigating the government’s efforts. The institutions that claim to act as watchdogs on government power rented themselves out as vehicles for manufacturing consensus.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the fields that have been most aggressive in cheerleading the war against disinformation and calling for greater censorship—counterterrorism, journalism, epidemiology—share a public record of spectacular failure in recent years. The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA diehards that the 2020 election was legitimate, or prevent the public from inquiring into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they tried desperately to do.

But they succeeded in galvanizing a wildly lucrative whole-of-society effort, providing thousands of new careers and a renewed mandate of heaven to the institutionalists who saw populism as the end of civilization.

covidIX. COVID-19

By 2020, the counter-disinformation machine had grown into one of the most powerful forces in American society. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dumped jet fuel into its engine. In addition to fighting foreign threats and deterring domestic extremists, censoring “deadly disinformation” became an urgent need. To take just one example, Google’s censorship, which applied to its subsidiary sites like YouTube, called for “removing information that is problematic” and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”—a category that at different points in the constantly evolving narrative would have included wearing masks, implementing travel bans, saying that the virus is highly contagious, and suggesting it might have come from a laboratory.

President Biden publicly accused social media companies of “killing people” by not censoring enough vaccine disinformation. Using its new powers and direct channels inside the tech companies, the White House began sending lists of people it wanted banned, such as journalist Alex Berenson. Berenson was kicked off Twitter after tweeting that mRNA vaccines don’t “stop infection. Or transmission.” As it turned out, that was a true statement. The health authorities at the time were either misinformed or lying about the vaccines’ ability to prevent the spread of the virus. In fact, despite claims from the health authorities and political officials, the people in charge of the vaccine knew this all along. In the record of a meeting in December 2020, Food and Drug Administration adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.”

Dystopian in principle, the response to the pandemic was also totalitarian in practice. In the United States, the DHS produced a video in 2021 encouraging “children to report their own family members to Facebook for ‘disinformation’ if they challenge US government narratives on Covid-19.”

“Due to both the pandemic and the disinformation about the election, there are increasing numbers of what extremism experts call ‘vulnerable individuals’ who could be radicalized,” warned Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Reduction, on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riots.

Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and capo di tutti capi of the global expert class, saw the pandemic as an opportunity to implement a “Great Reset” that could advance the cause of planetary information control: “The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”

exceptionX. Hunter’s Laptops: The Exception to the Rule

The laptops are real. The FBI has known this since 2019, when it first took possession of them. When the New York Post attempted to report on them, dozens of the most senior national security officials in the United States lied to the public, claiming the laptops were likely part of a Russian “disinformation” plot. Twitter, Facebook, and Google, operating as fully integrated branches of the state security infrastructure, carried out the government’s censorship orders based on that lie. The press swallowed the lie and cheered on the censorship.

The story of the laptops has been framed as many things, but the most fundamental truth about it is that it was the successful culmination of the yearslong effort to create a shadow regulatory bureaucracy built specifically to prevent a repeat of Trump’s 2016 victory.

It may be impossible to know exactly what effect the ban on reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptops had on the 2020 vote, but the story was clearly seen as threatening enough to warrant an openly authoritarian attack on the independence of the press. The damage to the country’s underlying social fabric, in which paranoia and conspiracy have been normalized, is incalculable. As recently as February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the scandal as the “half-fake laptop story” and as “an embarrassment,” months after even the Bidens had been forced to acknowledge that the story is authentic.

While the laptop is the best-known case of the ruling party’s intervention in the Trump-Biden race, its brazenness was an exception. The vast majority of the interference in the election was invisible to the public and took place through censorship mechanisms carried out under the auspices of “election integrity.” The legal framework for this had been put in place shortly after Trump took office, when the outgoing DHS chief Jeh Johnson passed an 11th-hour rule—over the vehement objections of local stakeholders—declaring election systems to be critical national infrastructure, thereby placing them under the supervision of the agency. Many observers had expected that the act would be repealed by Johnson’s successor, Trump-appointed John Kelly, but curiously it was left in place.

In 2018, Congress created a new agency inside of the DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that was tasked with defending America’s infrastructure—now including its election systems—from foreign attacks. In 2019, the DHS added another agency, the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch, which was focused on countering foreign disinformation. As if by design, the two roles merged. Russian hacking and other malign foreign-information attacks were said to threaten U.S. elections. But, of course, none of the officials in charge of these departments could say with certainty whether a particular claim was foreign disinformation, simply wrong, or merely inconvenient. Nina Jankowicz, the pick to lead the DHS’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, lamented the problem in her book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict. “What makes this information war so difficult to win,” she wrote, “is not just the online tools that amplify and target its messages or the adversary that is sending them; it’s the fact that those messages are often unwittingly delivered not by trolls or bots, but by authentic local voices.”

The latitude inherent in the concept of disinformation enabled the claim that preventing electoral sabotage required censoring Americans’ political views, lest an idea be shared in public that was originally planted by foreign agents.

In January 2021, CISA “transitioned its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM [ed. note: an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation],” according to an August 2022 report from the DHS’s Office of Inspector General. After the pretense of fighting a foreign threat fell away, what was left was the core mission to enforce a narrative monopoly over truth.

The new domestic-focused task force was staffed by 15 employees dedicated to finding “all types of disinformation”—but specifically that which related to “elections and critical infrastructure”—and being “responsive to current events,” a euphemism for promoting the official line of divisive issues, as was the case with the “COVID-19 Disinformation Toolkit” released to “raise awareness related to the pandemic.”

Kept a secret from the public, the switch was “plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents,” according to Mike Benz. “DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.”

Just like that, without any public announcements or black helicopters flying in formation to herald the change, America had its own ministry of truth.

Together they operated an industrial-scale censorship machine in which the government and NGOs sent tickets to the tech companies that flagged objectionable content they wanted scrubbed. That structure allowed the DHS to outsource its work to the Election Integrity Project (EIP), a consortium of four groups: the Stanford Internet Observatory; private anti-disinformation company Graphika (which had formerly been employed by the Defense Department against groups like ISIS in the war on terror); Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public; and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. Founded in 2020 in partnership with the DHS, the EIP served as the government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger,” according to congressional testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger, who notes that the EIP claims it classified more than 20 million unique “misinformation incidents” between Aug. 15 and Dec. 12, 2020. As EIP head Alex Stamos explained, this was a work-around for the problem that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations.”

Looking at the censorship figures that the DHS’s own partners reported for the 2020 election cycle in their internal audits, the Foundation for Freedom Online summarized the scope of the censorship campaign in seven bullet points:

• 22 million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
• 859 million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
• 120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
• 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation,” often in real-time;
• <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
• Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
• Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes, an effort DHS partners openly plotted and bragged that tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

onepartyXI. The New One-Party State

In February 2021, a long article in Time magazine by journalist Molly Ball celebrated the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” Biden’s victory, wrote Ball, was the result of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” that drew together “a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election” in an “extraordinary shadow effort.” Among the many accomplishments of the heroic conspirators, Ball notes, they “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” It is an incredible article, like an entry from the crime blotter that somehow got slipped into the society pages, a paean to the saviors of democracy that describes in detail how they dismembered it.

Not so long ago, talk of a “deep state” was enough to mark a person as a dangerous conspiracy theorist to be summarily flagged for monitoring and censorship. But language and attitudes evolve, and today the term has been cheekily reappropriated by supporters of the deep state. For instance, a new book, American Resistance, by neoliberal national security analyst David Rothkopf, is subtitled The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation.

The deep state refers to the power wielded by unelected government functionaries and their paragovernmental adjuncts who have administrative power to override the official, legal procedures of a government. But a ruling class describes a social group whose members are bound together by something deeper than institutional position: their shared values and instincts. While the term is often used loosely and sometimes as a pejorative rather than a descriptive label, in fact the American ruling class can be simply and straightforwardly defined.

Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written, it is made up of people who belong to a “homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta.” America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.

Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.

Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”

Historian Angelo Codevilla, who popularized the concept of an American “ruling class” in a 2010 essay and then became its primary chronicler, saw the new, national aristocracy as an outgrowth of the opaque power acquired by the U.S. security agencies. “The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated,” he wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations.

What do the members of the ruling class believe? They believe, I argue, “in informational and management solutions to existential problems” and in their “own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures.” As a class, their highest principle is that they alone can wield power. If any other group were to rule, all progress and hope would be lost, and the dark forces of fascism and barbarism would at once sweep back over the earth. While technically an opposition party is still permitted to exist in the United States, the last time it attempted to govern nationally, it was subjected to a yearslong coup. In effect, any challenge to the authority of the ruling party, which represents the interests of the ruling class, is depicted as an existential threat to civilization.

An admirably direct articulation of this outlook was provided recently by famous atheist Sam Harris. Throughout the 2010s, Harris’ higher-level rationalism made him a star on YouTube, where thousands of videos showcased him “owning” and “pwning” religious opponents in debates. Then Trump arrived. Harris, like so many others who saw in the former president a threat to all that was good in the world, abandoned his principled commitment to the truth and became a defender of propaganda.

In a podcast appearance last year, Harris acknowledged the politically motivated censorship of reporting related to Hunter Biden’s laptops and admitted “a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump.” But, echoing Ball, he declared this a good thing.

“I don’t care what’s in the Hunter Biden laptop. … Hunter Biden could have had corpses of children in his basement, and I would not have cared,” Harris told his interviewers. He could overlook the murdered children because an even greater danger lurked in the possibility of Trump’s reelection, which Harris compared to “an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.”

With an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, even the most principled rationalists might end up asking for safety over truth. But an asteroid has been falling toward Earth every week for years now. The pattern in these cases is that the ruling class justifies taking liberties with the law to save the planet but ends up violating the Constitution to hide the truth and protect itself.

censorshipXII. The End of Censorship

The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs—information that had to be pried from the security state—and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.

But the system reflected in those disclosures may well be on its way out. It is already possible to see how the kind of mass censorship practiced by the EIP, which requires considerable human labor and leaves behind plenty of evidence, could be replaced by artificial intelligence programs that use the information about targets accumulated in behavioral surveillance dossiers to manage their perceptions. The ultimate goal would be to recalibrate people’s experiences online through subtle manipulations of what they see in their search results and on their feed. The aim of such a scenario might be to prevent censor-worthy material from being produced in the first place.

In fact, that sounds rather similar to what Google is already doing in Germany, where the company recently unveiled a new campaign to expand its “prebunking” initiative “that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation,” according to the Associated Press. The announcement closely followed Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ appearance on a German podcast, during which he called for using artificial intelligence to combat “conspiracy theories” and “political polarization.” Meta has its own prebunking program. In a statement to the website Just The News, Mike Benz called prebunking “a form of narrative censorship integrated into social media algorithms to stop citizens from forming specific social and political belief systems” and compared it to the “pre-crime” featured in dystopian science-fiction movie Minority Report.

Meanwhile, the military is developing weaponized AI technology to dominate the information space. According to USASpending.gov, an official government website, the two largest contracts related to disinformation came from the Department of Defense to fund technologies for automatically detecting and defending against large-scale disinformation attacks. The first, for $11.9 million, was awarded in June 2020 to PAR Government Systems Corporation, a defense contractor in upstate New York. The second, issued in July 2020 for $10.9 million, went to a company called SRI International.

SRI International was originally connected to Stanford University before splitting off in the 1970s, a relevant detail considering that the Stanford Internet Observatory, an institution still directly connected to the school, led 2020’s EIP, which might well have been the largest mass censorship event in world history—a capstone of sorts to the record of pre-AI censorship.

Then there is the work going on at the National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds research in universities and private institutions. The NSF has its own program called the Convergence Accelerator Track F, which is helping to incubate a dozen automated disinformation-detection technologies explicitly designed to monitor issues like “vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism.”

“One of the most disturbing aspects” of the program, according to Benz, “is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad.”

In March, the NSF’s chief information officer, Dorothy Aronson, announced that the agency was “building a set of use cases” to explore how it could employ ChatGPT, the AI language model capable of a reasonable simulation of human speech, to further automate the production and dissemination of state propaganda.

The first great battles of the information war are over. They were waged by a class of journalists, retired generals, spies, Democratic Party bosses, party apparatchiks, and counterterrorism experts against the remnant of the American people who refused to submit to their authority.

Future battles fought through AI technologies will be harder to see.

democracyXIII. After Democracy

Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”

So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.

If you work in the “disinformation” or “misinformation” fields for the government or in the private sector, and are interested in discussing your experiences, you can contact me securely at [email protected] or on Twitter @jacob__siegel. Source confidentiality is guaranteed.

Jacob Siegel is a Tablet contributing editor. He is writing a book for Henry Holt about the rise of the Information State that will be published in 2025. He co-hosts the Manifesto! podcast with the novelist Phil Klay.

First published on Substack

I propose a new sociopolitical model that I call Voluntary Democracy. You may reasonably ask how I became arrogant enough to even contemplate doing such a thing.

I am no one or everyone, depending on your perspective. I am a very average bloke with some limited life experience, a modicum of knowledge, and sufficient interest to talk and write about the topic we are about to discuss.

I do not profess to have all the answers or even know what most of the questions are. I am just about as flaky as it is possible for a man to be and am undeserving of your trust which is among the reasons I ask you not to place any in me.

I am merely proposing an idea. My only hope is that you consider it. If I’m lucky perhaps you will question it and, if I’m very fortunate, start expanding on it.

We are going discuss some of the problems with representative democracy which is the political model of state preferred by most people I will refer to a statists. I’ll call this model simply the state.

I was born and live in the the state called the United Kingdom (UK). Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be ruled by a king or his government, but that is the nature of the state. It’s not a choice to be a subject of the state. Though statists claim it is.

Therefore, I will use the current alleged constitutional monarchy, the claimed basis for the UK state, as my test case.

What Democracy Is and What It Is Not

Democracy is a political system first formally established in ancient Greece by Cleisthenes (c. 570–500 BCE). Cleisthenes introduced “sortition”—which is the random selection of citizens drawn by lot. Under his reforms, the Boule (executive) proposed legislation, and the Ecclesia (legislature) would then debate the proposed statute laws and vote on their enactment.

The citizen members of the Boule and the Ecclesia were selected by sortition. Once their work was done, the Boule and the Ecclesia were disbanded. The people would return to their everyday lives. The next time the Boule and the Ecclesia were needed, sortition would again be used and a different group of people selected.

Sortition was also used to form juries, whose citizen members sat in the Dikasteria (courts). The jury in the Dikasteria represented the highest law in the land. Any Dikasteria could overturn the enactments of the Ecclesia. This political system enabled the people to create legislation (statute law) as well as law derived from precedent (case law).

Crucially, Cleisthenes empowered the Dikasteria (the law courts) to overrule (annul) any law that was found to be unjust in a jury-led trial. There were no judges. Magistrates were merely administrators for the court. If the defendant was found guilty, both the judgement (ruling) and the nature of the punishment (sentence) were decided by the citizen jurors.

If the full application of the law (including legislation) did not serve justice, the jury could annul it. The defendant may have technically contravened the law but could still be found not guilty if the jury believed the defendant had acted honourably, without any intent to cause harm or loss (mens rea).

In such a circumstance, it was the law, not the accused, that would be found at fault. Any flawed legislation would be wiped from the statute scrolls and the Boule and the Ecclesia would have to amend or abolish it in light of the Dikasteria’s ruling.

The word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power). Literally translated, it means “people power.” Cleisthenes proposed a governance system whereby the people were sovereign by virtue of exercising the rule of law through jury-led trials. This, and only this, is “democracy” and it has nothing to do with voting or electing anyone.

So-called “representative democracy” is not democracy. In representative democracies the people are permitted to select representatives who make all decisions for them for the next few years. During their rule, the representatives enforce their collective will upon the people.

Representative democracy is based upon the people handing all their decision making power over to a tiny clique of privileged rulers. It is the antithesis of democracy.

We are allowed to elect the legislature, which we call Parliament (Ecclesia). The dominant faction, usually formed from the most popular mob—chosen by those who bothered to vote—then forms the executive. We call this the government (Boule).

Depending on how dominant the ruling mob is—determined by their relative number of parliamentary seats—the executive (Boule or government) can either easily compel the legislature (Ecclesia) to adopt its desired policies (legislation) or engage in some horsetrading with their “opposition” to amend their legislation (policy diktat) prior to its almost inevitable adoption. “Opposition” is a misleading term because the people who actually rule control both the government and the so-called opposition.

The current British government, despite only securing votes from a small minority of the population, enjoys a massive parliamentary majority. The government (Boule) can “whip” its own representative members of Parliament (MP’s) to push through pretty much any policy it likes without bothering to consult anybody.

In the UK’s representative democracy, while statists think they are electing people who will represent their views and prioritise addressing their concerns, Parliament declares itself sovereign over all of the people. Statists actually select their own rulers—of sorts.

Parliament’s claim to sovereignty is false. The British have a codified, written constitution that makes the people sovereign. That doesn’t matter, however, to government as long as the population continues to assume Parliament’s claim is valid.

The advantage of “representative democracy,” from the perspective of the oligarchs who actually rule, is that it allows them to rule in perpetuity. Through lobbying, political party and campaign funding, government partnerships, corruption, coercion and orders issued to puppet MP’s, the vast bulk of parliamentarians represent only oligarchs’ views and prioritise oligarchs’ concerns. Oligarchs aren’t overly concerned about who wins elections.

In the UK’s representative democracy the courts (Dikestaria) are led by the Judiciary. As a Common Law jurisdiction, juries in the UK can still technically “annul” legislation. The judiciary “instructs” juries but never informs them they can annul. Consequently, British juries remain oblivious of their own rights and powers. The judiciary really doesn’t like jury trials in any event, and is working with the government to do away with them if they can.

The state supposedly operates on the comically misnamed separation of powers model. Everyone who lives and works in the UK knows this is total bunk.

The three branches of government comprise of the executive (government or Boule) and the legislature (Parliament or Ecclesia) which together form a single, oligarch controlled rule-making institution. The third branch, the judiciary (courts or Dikesteria), forces the people to comply with the rules and punishes those who don’t. It rarely, if ever, rules against the oligarchs’ rule-making institution and is completely divorced from anything the rest of us might consider justice. The only people who don’t have to obey dictatorial rule are the oligarchs who are above all the rules they impose on everyone else, often because they can buy themselves out of having to comply with any.

This, then, is the state.

Introducing Voluntary Democracy

The problem with “representative democracies” is that they always resolve in kakistocracies ruled by oligarchs. In other words, dictatorships. The people are merely given the illusion of choice through anointment ceremonies called elections where they are invited to crown the next gaggle of kakistocrats who will rule them on behalf of the oligarchs.

I suggest the solution to this is Voluntary Democracy.

Voluntary democracy wouldn’t necessitate reinventing the wheel. The three branches of governance would remain and the process of proposing, enacting, and ruling on legislation would continue.

The executive would be replaced with a body formed of citizens who would be randomly selected by sortition from the whole population and would serve on a temporary or perhaps issue by issue basis. We could call this the Boule or something else. How about “voluntary-executive” perhaps? Let’s use “the Volexec.”

The legislature would be a larger body—selected and serving in the same way—who would then deliberate on and enact legislation proposed by the executive. Again, we could stick with Ecclesia, but let’s use “the Volegis.”

The biggest procedural difference in a voluntary democracy, other than the selection process, would be the abolition of bench trials. All justice would be dispensed by jurors in jury led trials and judges would be replaced by conveners whose only role would be to facilitate proceedings.

The most important difference would be that all juries would be sovereign. Juries and only juries would represent the supreme rule of law in the whole jurisdiction and their only concern would be to ensure justice was served. We shall call these voluntary Dikasteria “the Volcourts.”

Through jury-led trials, these sortition selected groups of citizens—jurors— sitting in Volcourts across the land, would have the united and annexed power to annul any and all legislation and set case precedents wherever they deemed it necessary. In the event of annulment, the Volexec and the Volegis would need to either amend or abolish the faulty legislation accordingly.

There would be no government and no resultant state in a voluntary democracy. Voluntary societies would be jurisdictions without rulers, not jurisdictions without rules. Nor would voluntary democracy necessitate the existence of nations, though people could form them voluntarily and call themselves whatever they liked. Therefore, as we proceed to Part 2 and move away from the UK based example to broader considerations, I won’t reference the concept of nations but rather use “jurisdictions.”

Voluntary democratic jurisdiction won’t be perfect and they won’t solve all our problems. Nonetheless, I think they could resolve many of the injustices we currently suffer. Not least of all by effectively removing oligarchs’ political power.

To realise the promise of a voluntary democracy we would all need to work through a major philosophical shift. Our fundamental belief and value systems would need to change. For example, obedience would no longer be a virtue but rather a failing. Initially, individuals would have to start by learning to think differently. Ultimately, if we wanted to operate voluntary democracies at the macro scale, all of us would need to develop and adopt a new political philosophy. Statists, who form the majority, all currently share essentially one political philosophy so there is no reason why voluntaryists couldn’t do the same and become the majority themselves. We’ll expand on this in Part 3.

So I hope some will be sufficiently intrigued to read Part 2. If not, thanks for voluntarily reading this article.

Please consider supporting my work. I really need your help if I am going to continue to provide the research and analysis that you value on a full-time basis. You can support my work for less than the price of a cup of coffee via my donor page or alternative become a paid subscriber to my Substack. I extend my gratitude to my editor, who has provided invaluable contributions to my articles since October 2021 (but who, for personal reasons, prefers to remain anonymous).

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Voluntary Democracy – Part 3 Voluntary Democracy – Part 2 Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 1 Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 2

Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability

[First published by Middle East Eye]

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp

The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.

The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.

Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.

Psychotic logic

According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.

By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.

In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.

An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.

A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.

The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.

Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.

This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.

Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.

'Consciousness warfare'

Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.

That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.

Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.

Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.

They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.

The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.

But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.

The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.

And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.

And that is exactly what they did.

Red herrings

Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.

Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.

Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.

These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.

Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.

The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.

Mass graves

Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.

These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.

Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.

Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.

Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.

For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.

Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."

In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.

They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.

Trajectory to genocide

The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.

Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.

He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.

But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.

The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.

Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.

Mad Max vision

Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.

Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.

It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.

Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.

Where does this lead?

Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.

Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.

It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”

The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.

This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.

Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

Cover story

The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.

They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.

Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.

So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.

They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.

This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.

No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.

The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.

Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.

Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.

Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.

The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

by John Helmer, Moscow
[@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.

No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.

About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents” issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.

The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”

In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning. Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London. A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.

But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war,  this hasn’t happened.

The new book, _Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the world_is the lone voice to explain for the time being at least; it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.

For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.

In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.  

The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.  

For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story; and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.

Begin at Minute 31:00. Source: [https://gradio.substack.com/](https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-jeremy-c35)

For the introduction to this broadcast, access to the 20-year Gorilla Radio archive, and Chris Cook’s blog, click here and here.

[*] It is usually believed that what Edmund Burke (_right_) said was: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” As a warning against inaction or apathy, it’s salutary, if not quite right. But Burke didn’t say this. Instead, what he wrote was the line quoted in the lead. He then elaborated on how the moral duty of good men should be exercised in action. “It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth,that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Read Burke’s essay in [full](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2173/2173-h/2173-h.htm).

by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025

On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.

She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.

You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.

Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.

In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.

There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.

As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.

In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.

Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.

It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.

This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.

Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.

In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.

Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.

The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.

Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.

Which is what an election is.

It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.

But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.

Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.

I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.

However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.

That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.

I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.

I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.

Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)

Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.

The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.

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In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

There is a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate, that the crumbling pillars of society represent mere happenstance rather than design. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.

The Cost of Seeing

Like the red pill in The Matrix, recognizing patterns changes everything. Many choose comfortable illusions over uncomfortable truths. As Hannah Arendt observed, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”

For the professional class – academics, journalists, corporate managers – acknowledging these patterns means confronting their own complicity. Their success, their status, their sense of self – all are built on supporting rather than questioning power structures.

The accidentalist mindset offers refuge from this self-examination. Better to dismiss than face one’s role in the machinery.

The Death of Coincidence

It requires impressive mental gymnastics to believe that those with power – who achieved it through careful planning and coordination – suddenly stop planning and coordinating once they obtain it. That they abandon the very tools that brought them success. That they become, somehow, passive observers of their own decline.

When confronted with evidence of coordination – be it documented government censorship, institutional narrative control, or coordinated media campaigns – the accidentalist draws an arbitrary line. “Well, that’s different,” they say. “That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just…” And here they trail off, unable to articulate why some coordinated actions by the powerful count as conspiracies while others are merely business as usual.

The Weaponization of Skepticism and Manufacturing Outcasts

The term “conspiracy theory” itself reveals institutional manipulation. The CIA’s 1967 dispatch (Document 1035-960) explicitly directed media assets to use this label to discredit Warren Commission critics. They transformed skepticism into pathology – making the very act of questioning power seem delusional.

This weaponization of language worked brilliantly. Today, pattern recognition itself becomes suspect. In 2022, the New York Times published perhaps the most revealing example of institutional arrogance – an essay warning citizens against “doing their own research,” suggesting they weren’t competent to question expert conclusions. The message was clear: leave the thinking to us. Trust the experts. Stay in your lane.

That this patronizing directive came from a publication with its own history of spreading misinformation speaks volumes. The accidentalist, naturally, sees no problem with experts telling people not to think for themselves. They miss the deeper implication: when institutions actively discourage independent investigation, they reveal their fear of informed scrutiny.

The pattern is unmistakable: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them. The accidentalist never asks why questioning power triggers such coordinated attacks.

Today’s Denials, Tomorrow’s Headlines

Consider a revealing moment: In 2021, several of my friends eagerly recommended Dopesick, (“I think you would especially like this”), condemning the Sacklers’ manipulation of medicine for profit. Yet these same friends mocked me for questioning pharmaceutical companies today – despite their status as the most heavily criminally fined industry in human history. Those who recognized similar patterns were labeled ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘threats to public health.’ Scientists suggesting lab origins became ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The pattern repeats: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them.

Let’s examine three cases where “conspiracy theories” transformed into acknowledged history:

• The Sugar Deception: In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to blame heart disease on fat instead of sugar. These industry-funded studies shaped dietary guidelines for decades, creating a massive public health crisis through “low-fat” but sugar-laden foods. The accidentalist views this as an isolated historical incident rather than a template for corporate manipulation of science.

• The Tobacco Playbook: For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence linking smoking to cancer while funding research to create doubt. Their infamous internal memo stated, “Doubt is our product.” The accidentalist sees this as a unique case rather than recognizing the same tactics in current corporate practices.

• The Vioxx Cover-up: Merck concealed evidence that their blockbuster drug caused heart attacks, leading to an estimated 60,000 deaths. Internal documents revealed executives strategizing to “neutralize” critics. The accidentalist treats this as an aberration rather than standard operating procedure.

The Pattern Repeats

Consider the timing: A 342-page Patriot Act appeared weeks after 9/11. Operation Lock Step described pandemic measures in 2010. Event 201 simulated responses in October 2019 – the same day as the Wuhan Military Games. Months later, these exact measures were implemented globally. What are the odds?

The patterns of control repeat at every scale:

• Globally: WHO/WEF coordination
• Nationally: Regulatory capture
• Corporate: Internal suppression of dissent
• Local: Community pressure to conform

Power’s fingerprints are everywhere. Once you see them, they can’t be unseen.

The Corporate Convergence

Here’s where the accidentalist worldview truly fails: These weren’t separate conspiracies but a single system perfecting its methods. The tobacco giants that knowingly addicted millions didn’t disappear – they bought food companies (RJR Nabisco) and continued manipulating public health. Those same food conglomerates now merge with pharmaceutical corporations (Monsanto/Bayer), putting the same scientists who engineered addictive cigarettes and processed foods in charge of our medicine.

These corporations don’t just share ownership – they share methods. The same tactics used to addict smokers were applied to processed foods. The same research manipulation that hid tobacco dangers now obscures pharmaceutical risks. The same media control that sold cigarettes as healthy now promotes untested medical interventions.

The Reality Merchants

Consider the current media response to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s nomination as HHS Secretary. The coordinated messaging is impossible to miss – talking heads across networks uniformly label him a “conspiracy theorist” and “danger to public health,” never addressing his actual positions. These are the same voices that championed destructive pandemic policies, now attempting to discredit someone who questioned their wisdom.

Or examine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – a Stanford professor whose expertise was unquestioned until he challenged lockdown policies. Despite eventual vindication, the institutional response was swift: coordinated media attacks, academic ostracism, and algorithmic suppression. The pattern is clear: expertise is respected only when it aligns with institutional interests.

Engineering Compliance

The template begins with manufactured scarcity and enforced dependency. But understanding the mechanics of fiat systems is just the beginning. The real revelation is recognizing how this architecture extends beyond money into every domain of human existence.

Covid-19 didn’t create new systems of control – it revealed existing ones. The infrastructure for rights suspension, narrative enforcement, and dissent silencing was already in place. The “Great Reset” wasn’t conceived in 2020. The surveillance architecture wasn’t built overnight. The ability to coordinate global policy, control information flow, and reshape human behavior wasn’t developed in response to a crisis – it was waiting for one.

Moreover, the selective enforcement of truth reveals power’s preferences. Regardless of what one thinks about Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook statements, his $900 million fine stands in stark contrast to the total impunity enjoyed by the New York Times and other media outlets whose WMD lies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. This reveals how power protects its own while punishing outsiders, even when institutional lies cause far greater harm.

The Psychology of Disbelief

“That can’t be true” becomes the mind’s defense mechanism against pattern recognition. This isn’t natural skepticism – it’s programmed rejection (as detailed in “How the Information Factory Evolved”). The larger the pattern, the stronger the denial. They’ve weaponized skepticism against itself, creating a population that reflexively defends authority while attacking any challenge to it.

We’re watching the early stages of converging control systems, with clear signs of what’s coming:

• Digital IDs linked to health records
• CBDCs enabling programmable money
• Social credit systems disguised as ESG metrics
• Surveillance capitalism merging with state control
• Artificial scarcity through controlled supply chains

These aren’t predictions – they’re systems actively being built and tested across the globe, from China’s social credit system to Nigeria’s CBDC rollout.

Understanding the Impossible

“But how could they pull this off without anyone knowing?” the accidentalist asks. The answer is simple: compartmentalization. Like the Manhattan Project, most people in global institutions are unaware of the larger plan they’re working on. Even in tech companies, the Gmail team has no idea what YouTube’s content moderators or Google Earth’s mapping division are doing. Each department serves its function without seeing the whole. Professionals across academia, corporate America, and media unknowingly serve a broader agenda, often believing they’re working for noble causes.

The truth isn’t hidden – it’s protected by its own audacity. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” This explains why major revelations often hide in plain sight: the scale of coordinated deception exceeds what most people can psychologically accept as possible.

Breaking the Spell

The ultimate revelation isn’t how powerful they are – it’s how fragile their control really is. Their greatest strength – total integration – is also their greatest weakness. Complex systems have more failure points. The more systems are interconnected, the more a disruption in one area can cascade through the whole.

The solution isn’t fighting their systems directly – it’s building parallel structures that make them irrelevant:

• Local food systems over global supply chains
• Peer-to-peer networks over controlled platforms
• Direct exchange over surveillance currency
• Natural immunity over subscription immunity
• Real communities over virtual spaces

The Choice

The question isn’t whether power conspires – it’s why we’re so resistant to seeing it. What comfort do we find in believing in accidents? What fear do we harbor of seeing design?

Perhaps it’s simpler to believe in chaos than to confront order. Perhaps it’s easier to dismiss than to engage. Perhaps the accidentalist position isn’t about truth at all – it’s about maintaining the comfort of ignorance in a world that increasingly demands awareness.

Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn’t.

The awakening isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we choose. And that choice, multiplied across millions of individuals, will determine whether humanity enters a new dark age or experiences its greatest renaissance.

The question isn’t whether you see it. The question is: what will you do once you can’t unsee it?

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Author

Joshua Stylman has been an entrepreneur and investor for over 30 years. For two decades, he focused on building and growing companies in the digital economy, co-founding and successfully exiting three businesses while investing in and mentoring dozens of technology startups. In 2014, seeking to create a meaningful impact in his local community, Stylman founded Threes Brewing, a craft brewery and hospitality company that became a beloved NYC institution. He served as CEO until 2022, stepping down after receiving backlash for speaking out against the city's vaccine mandates. Today, Stylman lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and children, where he balances family life with various business ventures and community

Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. There is a reason for the word ‘decision’ being a part of our language. Not accidentally, the term derives from the Latin for ‘cut;’ in other words, when we decide something, we make a volitional ‘cut’ of sorts in the sequence of events, or in the reasoning concerning such events, that precede the decision – a concrete reminder that human beings are not equipped with an algorithmic device that enables them to know with absolute certainty what course of action to pursue. Every decision, therefore, represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and by implication, that more information and more comprehension could lead to a different decision.

Philosophers have known this for centuries, even if their philosophies sometimes give the opposite impression. Nietzsche – who was himself a thinker of provisionality, as evinced in his exhortation, to overcome the ‘spirit of revenge’ against time’s irreversible passage – did Socrates an injustice when he used his name as shorthand for the excessive rationalism of Western culture. Rather than ‘Socratism,’ he should have used the term ‘Platonism,’ provided he meant the reception of Plato’s work, and not the Greek master’s work ‘itself’ – even if, unavoidably, the latter is ‘itself’ only available to us after centuries of translations.

After all, anyone who has read Plato’s texts carefully – even in translation – and not only through the eyes of his countless commentators, soon recognises the distance that separates what may be called the two ‘faces’ of Plato. There is the metaphysical, idealist Plato, and there is the ‘poetically reflective’ Plato whose writings (perhaps unexpectedly) reveal what one might call his nuanced awareness of the ineradicable provisionality of even the ostensibly strictest distinctions. It is difficult to say which one of these has given rise to a never-ending series of ‘footnotes’ among Western philosophers since his time, according to Alfred N. Whitehead, who noted of Plato’s writings that the ‘wealth of general ideas scattered through them’ comprise a ‘an inexhaustible mine of suggestion,’ but I would opt for the second one.

In the Phaedrus Plato shows that he knew, for instance, that a “pharmakon” is both poison and remedy, that language is simultaneously a rhetorical instrument of persuasion and the arena where struggles for truth are enacted; both the soil where poetic powers germinate and metaphysical armour for the protection of mortal bodies. Poets and dithyrambic music do not belong in the ideal republic, according to him, but paradoxically the poet in Plato is harnessed for the sensorily evocative linguistic embodiment of the epistemic inferiority of the senses, as the myth of the cave in the Republic demonstrates, accompanied by his simultaneous claim that the truth represented by the sun shining outside the cave transcends the perspectival limitations of the senses.

Do these paradoxes not reflect Plato’s awareness of the provisionality of his metaphysical bulwark against human uncertainty and finitude, embodied in the supratemporal, archetypal Forms, in which all existing things participate, however imperfectly?

The clearest indication that Plato knew about the ineradicably provisional status of human life lies in his depiction of his teacher, Socrates, who did not write anything himself, as the archetypal philosopher of provisionality – unambiguously captured in Socrates’s famous ‘docta ignorantia’ (learned ignorance), that the only thing humans know with certainty is ‘how little they know.’ Despite these signs in Plato’s work, that he was quite conscious of the limitations to human knowledge (further demonstrated in his notion of the paradoxical, errant causality of the Khôra in his Timaeus, which simultaneously is and is not in space), what the philosophical tradition has sought to emphasise is Plato’s own strenuous attempt, in his metaphysical doctrine of the archetypal Forms, to provide supra-sensible protection against the inescapable erosion of human knowledge by time – for this is what is ultimately indexed in an awareness of provisionality.

These considerations – which could be extended significantly – make a mockery of the idea that there is a fail-safe research methodology (with its accompanying methods), that would guarantee the time-resistant validity of human knowledge, instead of acknowledging that, despite our very best efforts at securing precise, unassailable knowledge, it is nonetheless always already infected with the eroding germ of time. This is the sobering insight gained from one of Jacques Derrida’s most exemplary poststructuralist essays in Writing and Difference, namely ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences,’ where (following Claude Lévi-Strauss) he distinguishes between the image of the ‘bricoleur’ (tinkerer, handyman, Jack-of-all-trades) and the ‘engineer.’

The former avails him – or herself of any tool or material at hand to construct or ‘fix’ things in order to restore them to working condition, while the engineer insists on fail-safe instruments and working materials to guarantee exactitude of measurement and time-resistant functioning of the products of their design and work. Needless to stress, these two types function as metaphors for distinct ways of approaching the world around us – some people think like the ‘engineer;’ others like the ‘bricoleur.’

Contrary to the standard reading of this essay by Derrida (where this is but one of the stages of his complex argument), which erroneously attributes to him a kind of postmodernist privileging of the bricoleur over the engineer, he states explicitly that humans are in no position to choose between these two paradigmatic figures of knowledge – inescapably we have to choose both. What does this mean? Simply that while we have the epistemic duty to emulate the engineer, we also have to face the sobering thought that, our best efforts at constructing unassailable knowledge notwithstanding, our knowledge systems – even in its most ‘tried and tested’ form, namely the sciences – cannot evade the ruinous effects of time, or history.

This is amply demonstrated with regard to the history of physics in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), although Kuhn’s thesis, articulated in the book, has many rationalistic detractors, who cannot bear the thought of science being equally subject to temporal constraints as any other form of human knowledge.

Such champions of epistemic absolutism need only remind themselves of the exemplarily Socratic admission of the leader of one of the two teams at CERN’s Giant Hadron Collider that worked on the attempt to confirm the ‘existence’ of the ‘Higgs boson’ (or so-called ‘God-particle’) – an Italian woman physicist named Fabiola Gianotti – that the confirmation of its ‘probable’ existence, far from representing the summation of ‘complete’ knowledge in the realm of physics, merely means that the work of understanding the physical universe is only beginning. Socrates all over again, and from a natural scientist.

How is this possible? What she was referring to is the fact that physicists now face the daunting prospect of probing the nature of dark energy and dark matter which, they claim, together comprise the largest part of the physical universe, and of which physics knows hardly anything except its percentile extent. And who knows how many revisions will be made regarding the ‘standard model’ of physics in the course of unravelling the structure, nature, and functioning of these two ‘dark’ entities – if they can be called ‘entities’ at all? Another confirmation of the provisionality of human knowledge.

This, incidentally, is also related to Jacques Lacan’s notorious (but understandable) claim that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac,’ by which he evidently meant that we are deluded into believing that human knowledge systems are far more enduringly unassailable than they actually are – a Lacanian claim that resonates with the insights of the redoubtable English novelist, John Fowles, in his novel, The Magus.

Returning to Plato’s oft-ignored wisdom concerning provisionality, it is not difficult to establish a connection between him and Lacan, who was a very thorough reader of Plato, for instance of the latter’s Symposium – perhaps the most important of his dialogues on love. Just as Plato shows with admirable insight that, what makes one into a lover – and indirectly also a philosopher – is the fact that the beloved, insofar as she or he remains a beloved, instead of a possessed, always has to be ‘just out of reach’ of the lover. We are lovers, or philosophers, to the extent that we ‘desire’ our beloved, or in the case of the philosopher (and the same goes for the scientist), knowledge, neither of which we could ever totally ‘possess.’

What this suggests, of course, is that the lover or philosopher never quite reaches fulfillment of their desire – should you ‘attain’ the desired beloved, or knowledge, your desire would evaporate, because there would be no need for it any longer. Desire is a function of absence or lack. This makes a lot of sense – provisionally, at least.

If human beings were to be able, at last – which, by and large, they are not – to accept and embrace their own finitude and temporality, they would realise that all things human in the domain of culture and the arts, science, and even philosophy, are provisional, in the strict sense of being subject to revision, ‘correction,’ modification, or amplification. Many of the difficulties faced by people in the world today derive from their futile, hubristic attempt, to be ‘engineers’ in the sense of perfecting knowledge through science and technology, ignoring Derrida’s counsel, that we are also, finally, mere bricoleurs, or tinkerers, jacks of all trades.

Hardly ever before in human history has the futility of believing that one can overcome the ineluctable limitations on human endeavours been more amply demonstrated than during the past five years. What the international cabal of neo-fascists at the World Economic Forum (a misnomer if ever there was one) had regarded as a foregone conclusion, namely, to ‘condition’ people into accepting the proto-totalitarian regime they tried to impose through Covid lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and eventually by mandating, as far as possible, the deadly Covid pseudo-vaccines, has turned out, in retrospect, to have been merely provisional.

This is no reason for complacency on our part, however, as most of the awake tribe know. Their implicit belief in their quasi-divine powers guarantees that they will try again.

[This post is loosely based on my essay, published in 1998 in the Afrikaans Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, Fragmente, and titled ‘Filosofie van Voorlopigheid.’]

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
Bert Olivier
Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is October 9th and we’re having Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff talk about what’s going on in the Middle East. Richard and Michael, let me show you an article that shows the spending of the United States on the conflict in the Middle East helping Israel. It’s almost $22.76 billion. And in this graph, you’re witnessing that in 2024, if you look at this graph, it’s $17.9 billion. And directly to Israel and the rest would be the conflicts that the United States went to the Red Sea to help Israel and other operations in that region. And here is what Matt Miller said to the press when he was asked about this helping, this aid that goes to Israel.

SAID ARIKAT: Taxpayers paid for almost $23 billion in the last year alone – that’s almost $3000 for each and every Israeli. So we have absolutely no leverage, no pressure – you cannot tell them do this or not do this?

MATT MILLER: So, we made very clear to the government of Israel what we believe are the best outcomes along a number of different vectors in the region. But as you’ve heard me say before, they are ultimately a sovereign country and have to make their own decisions.

SAID ARIKAT: Yes, but I understand a sovereign country that received from American taxpayers $22 billion dollars.

MATT MILLER: Well first of all, that number is not correct, it conflates a number of different things. It’s not correct. I don’t have the exact number, but I know the number you are referring to.

MATT LEE: So what does the U.S. government think that it has given Israel since October 7th?

MATT MILLER: So we give them $3.3 billion a year and there was additional money that was appropriated in the supplemental. The reason it’s hard to answer that question definitively is…

MATT LEE: Like you don’t want to. That’s why it’s hard to answer.

MATT MILLER: No, there are different ways of looking at it.

MATT LEE: I know there are. I’ve been through all of this.

MATT MILLER: There’s money that is appropriated, there is money that is allocated and then not actually delivered for years to come.

MATT LEE: Look, there are private educational organizations that have come up with estimates. This building, at least, which is in charge of arms transfers – at least, many of them – hasn’t seen fit to come up with an update since July of last year.

MATT MILLER: Yeah, I just don’t have the update, I’m just telling you that number, you can look at that number and see how it conflates a number of things, including direct U.S. military spending to combat the Houthis attacking international shipping, which is included in that number, which is obviously not either.

MATT LEE: It can’t be that difficult to separate what has been given to them post- October 7th in terms of things that were not approved before then under the MOU. Stuff that went to them specifically for the Gaza operation, and now Lebanon.

MATT MILLER: So it depends how you look at it – is it the amount that’s been allocated to them, is it the amount that’s been delivered to them, is it the amount that is gonna be delivered …

MATT LEE: I’ll take any of them now.

MATT MILLER: No, but that’s the point is when you ask the question it’s a difficult one – I don’t have the numbers here at my fingertips, obviously. I’m just pointing out that the number that Said referred to …

MATT LEE: Someone’s got to have the number some place?

SAID ARIKAT: The numbers were Brown University’s numbers, not mine. But, you know, it doesn’t matter what the actual figure is, we give them a lot of money, we give them a great deal of leverage, you know, we give them obviously a great deal of political coverage in the U.N. and many other places and so on. And to suggest that this huge and lengthy partnership really does not exact any kind of leverage with the Israelis – don’t you question that?

MATT MILLER: That’s not what I said. The thing that I said is that we’re a sovereign country with our interests, they’re a sovereign country with their interests.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Richard, he’s saying that he doesn’t answer the question. He says that Israel is a sovereign country. What’s your answer to that question?

RICHARD WOLFF: Iraq was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Afghanistan was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. Vietnam was a sovereign country when the United States invaded it. It didn’t give a damn whether that was a sovereign country or not. It didn’t respect its sovereignty for one second.

It just – as part of the war in Ukraine – seized $300 billion worth of Russian gold. Its sovereignty meant absolutely nothing. Come on. The answer to talk about sovereignty is a transparent fakery, as is all the mumbo jumbo about how to estimate the numbers. The question was about leverage, if you provide a lot of money.

The question was clear and it had nothing to do with quarrels about estimating the amount of money. This is a government that wants the freedom to do in the Middle East what it has always done, namely operate a colonial regime without telling the people of the United States anything other than fairy tales about respect for different religions, and the importance of Jerusalem, and other nonsense that future spokespersons at the State Department will no doubt repeat in the same mumbo jumbo style of Mr. Miller that we just saw.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, if Israel were a sovereign country, it would no longer be an American ally because the whole war that the United States is fighting, not only in the Near East, but also in Ukraine, is a war against sovereignty. That’s what this whole world war between the U.S. and NATO countries against the global majority – China, Russia and other BRICS countries – it’s a war to make a unipolar U.S. control to prevent the whole rest of the world being sovereign.

So the whole issue of sovereignty is silly – and obviously if you look at where the armaments of Israel are coming from – quite apart from money. These are American bombs being dropped on Gaza and on Lebanon. These are American ships that are supporting it. It is American money that’s also supporting it. And that doesn’t even account for the Israel bonds by non-governmental authorities. So the whole idea of sovereignty is irrelevant. You can look at this war against sovereignty, and especially against sovereignty – as Richard just mentioned – of Iraq and Libya, to use Israel as an American satellite to prevent the Near East from becoming sovereign, in control, not only of its own oil, but in control of the export money that it makes from this oil.

RICHARD WOLFF: Also, just an additional word. The United Nations allows Palestine to have a seat – I don’t remember exactly what the status is – but they have a seat to participate in at least some degree, and at least a large part of the world would assign “sovereignty” to the Palestinians based on all of the historic notions of what sovereignty entails. Clearly the United States does not respect the sovereignty of the Palestinians. So, once again, this use of the notion of sovereignty is extraordinarily selective. My goodness!

I mean, for me, the most impressive thing about the little clip you showed us was the fact that we live in a society where a collection of, what I assume to be, perfectly reasonable intelligent journalists sit there and ask such questions and don’t quarrel about the absurd refusal to answer. And they don’t quarrel about the absurd invocation of sovereignty. But they allow the conversation to absorb many minutes of quarreling about the details of the statistics.

Both Michael and I are economists. We work with statistics all the time. If you do, you know that they are loosely constructed numbers that have a million qualifications about them. And that if you don’t know the details of how they are gathered and how they are assembled and how they are edited, you really can do virtually anything with them.

You know, there’s an old statement among statisticians: “The statistics don’t lie, but the statisticians surely do.” Because they pick and choose which ones to gather, which ones to assimilate, which ones to edit.

This is childish manipulation, and the thing that most impresses me is that the journalists, they are complicit with this mumbo jumbo theatric. And they oughtn’t to be. They ought to have a bit more of a spine, a bit more of that part of the journalistic tradition which says, “ask the hard questions that these politicians are trained to evade and avoid.”

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s talking about the sovereignty of journalism. And I think we talked before about what John Kerry said at the World Economic Forum. He said, “Our first amendment stands as a major block to our ability to be able to hammer disinformation out of existence.”

Sovereignty for journalism is what WikiLeaks did, which is why its leader was imprisoned for so many years. We don’t have sovereignty of the Press anymore than nations have sovereignty, and you could look at the whole part of the American Cold War attempt to prevent other nations from having political sovereignty as the attempt to make sure that the U.S. has unique unipolar sole sovereignty over the narrative. Is the Middle East War, the Israeli War, all about the captives that were made October 7th, a year ago? I think there are now a few dozen. Or is it about the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Not a word about the Palestinians captive in Israeli jails.

Again, the narrative is all from a very strange perspective. It’s like the famous Hiroshige painting, a big tree in the foreground and the city far away in the background, the little tree in the foreground has priority over everything else. That’s the news that we get from the Near East, Ukraine and the rest of the world. Not sovereignty.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, can I ask a question? The main question right now in terms of what’s going on in the Middle East is the way that Netanyahu is behaving right now. And when you look at his behavior, what is Israel’s endgame under Netanyahu? How can we define that?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I must say with all regret and sadness, I will tell you what I have concluded watching all of this over the last, particularly this last, year. And I conclude by referring to a saying that has been raised by Israeli leaders, at least as far back as David Ben-Gurion.

And that is to say that the whole story can be summed up by saying that “the Jewish people, a people without land, were finally given a land without people.”

That’s a quote, I didn’t make that up. That’s a quotation repeated many times: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, from the river to the sea, a people without land – i.e. Jewish people – were given a land without people. Notice the little move there, the move at the end to suggest that people were given something that no other people already had, even though everybody who’s taken five minutes to look at the history of that part of the world knows that it has been densely populated for thousands of years by a whole host of people.

So the reality was, it wasn’t empty. It’s a little bit like what I discovered when I was just beginning as a college teacher and I had occasion to talk about the early period of the American economy, when we were still a colony.

And I discovered that a significant percentage of my students understood the Europeans who came here to have discovered a land without people, which they then proceeded to inhabit, moving from the East Coast across, until they finally reached the Pacific Ocean in the West.

When I reminded them, well, it wasn’t empty, then yes, they remembered from their western movies that there were these “savages” who were around somewhere, but who became quickly disposed of.

Well, if you know the history, it took centuries before you could herd those native people that you didn’t kill into the reservations they still occupy in significant numbers across the United States. Okay, the Israeli story seems to me to be summarized and carried forward by Mr. Netanyahu as exactly what I said. They want to establish that the area we now call Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are a land that had no people and is therefore now to be settled by a growing Jewish population. And the job of the Palestinians is to choose one of the following three options: leave or die.

Those are the options, and the Israelis become the agents of leaving or dying, and they’re trying both. And they’ll rely on either one of them to solve the problem, to fulfill the idea that it is a land without people that can now be settled by the people who don’t have enough land.

By the way, this notion of “land hunger” is a replication of what the Nazis called Lebensraum: room to live. The Nazis moved east in Europe to get it; the Israelis move west to get it. But that’s what this has become, and it will take a radical change of the mentality of the Israelis to change it.

Last point: when you’re an aggressor, and you’re also a settler-colonialism, which is what this is, nothing is more common than justify what you are doing on the grounds that you must do it, because the savages – that’s the people that are already there – are intent on doing that to you. And it doesn’t matter whether they are or not, you must tell that story because it justifies what you are doing. And I’ll illustrate it with a story, and excuse me if I told you this story before, but near where the University of Massachusetts is located is a town called Deerfield, Massachusetts. And it has an old part, which is the colonial houses that were built there back in the 17th and 18th century. And they have redone these houses to look in the way that they did in Colonial America. So it’s become a tourist attraction. It’s known as “Old Deerfield.”

And if you go there, as I have done, and you walk through the old village, and you look at the reconstructed housing, you will notice in front of each of them a plaque. And if you read the plaque, which tourists do, it says things like, here was the Jones family or the Smith family, and they came in 1702 and blah, blah, blah, and then on the night of the 14th of April, the savages attacked them. And I remember the first time I saw this. I said to myself, without thinking much, “what a remarkable thing – the Europeans come from thousands of miles away, they take the land, they take the coast, they fish the water, they attack the local people, they push them off the land. And they refer to them as the savages. What an amazing move! It’s the Europeans who were savage, who had the guns to be savage with. But you need to call them savages because what you are doing is so savage, it has to be justified as self-defense against savages. And so you call the other what you are. In psychology, this is so common, it’s called projection. And every psychological practitioner knows about it and tries to treat it.

But in our political discussion of Israel and the Palestinians, we all pretend we know nothing about any of that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard has just explained is what really was meant by a land without a people. What are people? They are humans. And the Israeli leadership, again and again, has said that the Palestinians are not human: they are sub-humans.That is exactly what the Ukrainians are saying about the Slavic people. The Slavic people are not humans; the Islamic populations are not human. In both cases, they are called sub-human and a different species. And this kind of thinking goes way back to the United States at the late 19th century. The U.S. leaders thought of America as creating a new civilization. And that new civilization, somehow in the 1930s they began to absorb Nazism. And it was as if the new countries with their ethnicity were evolutionary, biological, new species. And the Americans were a new species.

The Israelis are claiming to be a new species, exterminating the sub-humans, so that there won’t be inter-marriage, like there was between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago. That treatment is exactly what was the feeling in the United States that I experienced in the 1960s. The Catholic Church sent me to New Mexico to discuss how to raise up the Indian tribes. There was an official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who began talking about the “Indian problem.” And I jumped up and said to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “the Indian problem is the problem that they are Indians.” And that’s how the Israelis and the Ukrainians think about everybody who’s not them. When we’re talking about a political group of settlers – or in America, of Empire builders – claiming to be a new species, cleaning out the biology of these inferior races. This is Nazism. And that’s really what the fight is all about.

That’s why we’re now in a civilizational fight between the NATO-U.S.-West and its allies of like-thinking people who treat their adversaries as sub-humans. Or, as Biden says, it’s Democracy against Autocracy. The Autocracy are considered to be sub-humans, a different civilization, and all this somehow has genetically become a new species. And what the rest of civilization – the global majority – is trying to say, is “No, we’re all humans.” Americans have said, like I said, “No, you’re not humans.” That’s basically the position in this Cold War II.

RICHARD WOLFF: You see it also in this very sad tendency: I cringe when I watch a video clip of the President of the United States, in this case, Mr. Biden, referring to the leader of the People’s Republic of China as a thug. What are you doing? What kind of childish behavior is this? Mr. Putin doesn’t refer to Mr. Biden as a thug. He doesn’t do that. One doesn’t do. You don’t see too many leaders, even in private – let alone in a public interview – doing such things. What is this demonization of the – here we go – it’s “they’re all savages?”

So if you disagree with the United States, if your idea of a European security architecture, which is what they’re actually trying to figure out, how are we going to be secure each in our national boundary without threatening one another? That’s what they mean by a “security architecture.”

How are we going to work that out? Russia has to feel secure. Ukraine has to feel secure. They have to be able to function. Okay, that’s a problem. We will have disagreements. We won’t see it the same way. We’ll have to make some compromise. But, suddenly: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are the good and the noble and the vanilla, and they are the terrible evil empire.’ What is this? This is not just a quibble about words. Behind these words lies what Michael was just talking about. This notion that, really, this is a war of good against evil and in the name of the good, you can do what?

Palestinians who know something about the Christian Bible like to remind us about all the times in the Old Testament especially, when there are all these discussions about God telling people to slay this group and kill all of them and murder the children and … whoa. There you have already the beginnings of a justification.

Yes, yes, I know the Bible is full of other contradictory sentiments about loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek and all the rest of it. But if you cherry pick, you can become the exponent of “I’m good, they’re evil, I am called to get rid of them” – literally. There’s a quote from an Israeli defense force person in the press recently explaining to a reporter how good he feels when he’s asked about bombing mosques and hospitals. He looks at the guy and he says, “But we’re winning, we’re winning.” Wow. He’s winning. He’s not asking what he’s winning – he’s just winning.

And that’s the struggle of good and evil when you think like that. In the name of that stuff, we have 5,000 years of slaughter and we’ll have more if we don’t outgrow it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, here comes the question that how we can -with the situation that you’re having in Ukraine together with what’s going on right now in the Middle East and in my opinion, if Donald Trump wins, we’re going to have a big fight between the United States and China.

How can we make peace affordable for each and every player in this political arena or national political arena? Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: The only way to solve the problem in Ukraine is by war. You can’t have peace without war.

Some people say that war doesn’t settle problems, but sometimes the only way of settling a problem such as the U.S. and NATO and Ukraine trying to attack Russia is by war. And that’s why you mentioned the costs of this war before, at the beginning.

I think that the whole idea of what’s happening in the Ukraine is the American planners said, “Look at what really broke the Soviet Union’s power – it was the war in Afghanistan. It drained Russia. They had to spend all of their economic surplus on the military and send their population to fight in Afghanistan. Finally, this created such austerity and poverty and impoverishment that the leaders of the Soviet Union themselves decided it didn’t work.” They somehow expect that if the war in Ukraine is supposed to go on as long as it can, not to be settled, but just to continue to drain Russia until its economic surplus is spent on fighting the war and the population says, I guess, what the Russians were saying in the 1980s: “We want to have blue jeans like the Americans have. We want a consumer society and we can’t because it’s a military society.”

So the American idea in Ukraine is to spend as much as it takes from our side to keep the war going as long as possible and outspend Russia until the discontent in Russia reaches a degree where you can bring in a new Russian Yeltsin [unclear]. Well, Putin is also strategizing and said, well, he is not in any hurry to just march in and end the war quickly in Ukraine by marching to the deeper and beyond. He’s willing to go slow because there’s something that he says that is beyond the short-term cost of the military budget.

And that is the longer the war in Ukraine takes, the more it’s breaking up Europe. You’ve seen the last three German elections where the anti-war parties beat the Christian Democrats and the social Democrats. You’ve seen last week’s election in Austria. Again, the anti-war party won and as we noted before, the anti-war parties today are on the right, not the left. But we’re seeing the idea of the real costs both from the American vantage point and the global majority’s (the BRICS) vantage point- the cost is going to be how is all of this going to end up? What is the structure of the world economy to be? And the fight in Israel and Ukraine is just a sideline, a particular chapter, venue, in this much broader war. And the real way of looking at the cost is, “Who is going to support what countries?” Will the cost of the Ukraine war essentially, as Putin believes, end up dividing Europe, breaking up the European Union and paving the way for – in 30 years, I think Putin said – for there to finally be a restoration of the German and the European linkage with Russia and the global majority by which time in his hope, the whole world will be under a unipolar rule of law. That’s how to think of the costs that we’re undertaking now and what the war is all about.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, let me come at this from a slightly different perspective that might be of interest to folks. Capitalism as a system has built into its structure an imperative to grow. Every capitalist understands that unless they can expand their business and thereby get their hands on bigger profits, they run the risk of being competed out of existence by somebody who can and will do that. And so they all have to grow. And we know that this has become internalized by the political leaders of all capitalist countries.

I’ll use the example that they teach in elementary school: If an economy is like a pie, and different people and different groups have different pieces, if you grow the pie, everybody’s piece can get bigger and we will all be happy.

If you don’t grow the pie, then a growth in some requires a diminution in the others and then we will be at each other’s throats. Very old idea, been around for centuries.

And in capitalism, that idea, together with the way capitalism works, means that countries with employers and employees and enterprises that produce and compete in markets have a drive to grow. That’s why it’s a national emergency if the statistics show the GDP isn’t growing fast enough. Oh my god, alarm, alarm.

Okay, now let’s stop and take a step back. For ecological reasons and climate change reasons, we now know we’ve got to stop growing – it’s threatening our survival. The people of the world have already figured it out because the birth rate of our planet is now zero. We’re not growing anymore. The United States, Asia. Only in Africa is there a net positive birth rate, and it’s shrinking there too. Okay, now we have a problem that a long-repressed part of the world, the global south, wants to have its standard of living be where it should have been two centuries ago. They’re not waiting anymore. So they are demanding a bigger piece of the pie. This, of course, threatens the United States because it can’t grow the way it wants to because it now has a serious competitor. China and the BRICS is already a richer entity than the United States and the G7. Okay, here’s then a solution. We question – don’t everybody yell – we question capitalism. Why don’t we change to a system that doesn’t have a built-in imperative to grow, because it’s killing us? It’s killing us ecologically, but it’s also killing us because the genuine and deserved demand of the global south for a place in the sun to raise their families, have an education, be decently cared for, medically and so on, is not going to be stopped – with or without a world war. All right, so let’s accommodate: Give them a bigger piece and rearrange – in the way that socialists have always advocated – to a much less unequal distribution of the resources of the world. That way we can stop growing, thereby meet our ecological danger and do away with the competition that threatens a war between a rising standard of living in the global south and a resharing that the rest of us here in the global north will have to undergo. But we do so because it saves our planet, and it saves us from war, and that’s worth it.

That’s a plan, but it requires the taboo be broken. Employer-employee is not the only way to organize the production and distribution of goods and services. It’s the capitalist way. It was what we got when we got rid of the lords and serfs, and masters and slaves – we replaced it with employers and employees. But we can do better than that and we are at a point where we have to. And so the issue of a socialism beyond capitalism comes right back on the agenda. It never really left, it just needs a little goosing from those of us who see it to make it become, again, what we’re all talking about and struggling to figure out how to achieve.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard described is occurring on a number of planes. He talks about the drive of capitalism is to grow. Well, that’s certainly the dynamic of industrial capitalism, but somehow that hasn’t been the drive of the United States recently. Richard, how do you grow by out competing your rivals? You cut costs, you make things cheaper, or less expensively, and better. But the United States has been losing its race. It’s true. Last month the US GDP is going to grow and next month it’s going to really grow because the hurricanes hit South Carolina and now they’re going to hit Florida. That’s going to be a big jump in GDP. It’s not going to increase America’s dominance or competitiveness.

The American idea of growing today – I think certainly the neo-con idea, the Democratic and Republican idea – isn’t the kind of growth Richard is talking about capitalism. It’s a purely exploitative growth: America can only grow by arranging the international economic order in a way that siphons off the real growth in other countries – China, Russia, the global south – and taking their economic surplus and transferring it to itself.

This is not a growth of part of the production sector of the economy. It’s a growth of the circulation sector of the economy. Marx drew those two distinctions – production, circulation, which is part of the distribution. The American growth has been parasitic. The NATO-U.S. unity is like a parasite on the body of the global majority and they call that growth for the United States in Europe, but it’s parasitism. All of that, as Richard just said, we’re facing the overhead of global warming. How do you prevent it? Well, China has taken the lead according to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in cutting way back carbon emissions, way back coal, and by taking the lead and creating solar power and atomic power. The U.S. position is to oppose the importation of Chinese solar panels because that’s not their philosophy. The oil lobbyists are now backing both political parties in the United States to make sure that any agreements – like the Paris Agreement that America signed – will not be followed in practice.

You have the United States and Europe pushing the growth and pollution. You have the green party in Germany saying that coal is the fuel of the future. It’s coal and cutting down the forests. It’s not oil, it’s not gas, it’s not power. It’s simply that. And you achieve this global fix-up by war.

Somehow the anti-war party is supposed to be a key precondition catalyst for all of this environmental change. You’re having this bizarre conflation of ideas in the U.S.- NATO, as opposed to the rest of the world, just as Richard has pointed out.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, do you want to add something?

RICHARD WOLFF: No, no.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Right now, Michael, in your opinion, when it comes to the Biden administration, it seems that they’re trying to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. But in your opinion, why are they not successful? Why are they not successful in their attempts to put pressure on Netanyahu?

Last time we talked here, you said that the United States is running the show. Richard, I want you to comment on this as well. I had some sort of division between the analysts like you and Richard and other analysts. Some of you are believing that the United States is running the show in the Middle East and the other ones are thinking that the Israeli lobby in the United States is running the show. Who’s running the show with these endless wars?

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think we talked last week about this very topic. Netanyahu is doing just what the United States wants. The dream of Netanyahu is the same dream of the US neo-cons: war with Iran. Because if you can conquer Iran, then you just close up everything between Israel and Iran. You take up Syria, Iraq; you move down into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. You take over the whole Near East.

Obviously, Netanyahu is doing what the United States wants, because the United States is giving it the bombs every week to drop, giving it the money every month so that it can continue.

So what we’re seeing is a good cop-bad cop pretending. The United States doesn’t want to be blamed by the whole-world abhorrence for what is happening in Israel. So it pretends to say, “That’s not us; we want to be the good guys; we told him to be gentle when he dropped his bombs and not kill anybody.” But he’s killing people. And we keep giving him bombs and telling him to be gentle with it. Well, what can we do? We don’t have control – he’s a “sovereign country” as you played at the beginning. So all of this is just a charade.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I would argue very similarly. I don’t see this great struggle between the two as anything more than poorly staged theater that is not. Yeah, maybe for some people around the world, it’ll be convenient to believe that they can hold on. But I would look at it in a long-term strategic way, as follows: For many, many years now – for basically the post World War two period – this has worked very well, this alliance between the United States and Israel, for them. It has allowed Israel to go from a poor, largely agricultural backwater to an important modern economic power; to grow its population far beyond what it could have internally by itself. And it has allowed the United States to have – right in the middle of the Middle East – its own special agent dependent on it, loyal to it. I don’t want to go over all of the murky ways that Israel played strange intermediation roles when it came to the survival of apartheid in South Africa; when it came to the funding of the Iran Contras Central America. The hands of Israeli operatives are present in many of those – they were a loyal service. They operate a very good intelligence system in the Middle East, as the killings of Nasrallah and others have shown us. They’re probably better than what the United States could do, so that’s a service they can provide, that the United States either couldn’t or doesn’t want to be caught doing. So it’s all the Israelis who get the bad rep.

But here’s perhaps the most important: The Israeli economy is dead, it’s finished. It will take a long, long time to recover from what it is doing. An enormous portion of its adult manpower is busy in the military. They’re not working at their factories or their offices, or anywhere else.

Large numbers of people have left the country – that’s not reported on, but I know it to be the case – etc, etc. That Israel is going to be dependent on help from the United States economically, enormously, in the years ahead. So the United States has a proven, reliable agent who will need them in the future, and is therefore not in a position to deny the United States anything that it suggests it wants. I don’t see the United States having no leverage, as that journalist did.

The United States has plenty of leverage, and the reason it’s not using the leverage is there’s no reason to. Or let me put it differently: Where they’re using the leverage, we don’t know about it. Because they don’t want us to, and the Israelis dare not reveal the leverage if the Americans don’t want it, for all the reasons I’ve just given.

If there were no Israel, the United States would look for an alternative agent in the Middle East. And whoever you might imagine could play that role, they’ve decided that such an agent, if there is one, would be less reliable, less pliable, that you would operate less leverage than the one you have.

Does the AIPAC and the other domestic supporters of Israel inside the United States have influence? Sure they do. Professor Mearsheimer and his colleagues have demonstrated that for many years with countless studies. But I don’t think that would be enough, anywhere near enough, to explain what’s going on.

This is an alliance which has served the interests of those who run Israel and those who run the United States. And that’s why they preserve it. It’s not to have nothing to do with leverage. They have leverage. That’s why they preserve it. And the only thing holding back the Israelis, when they disagree with the United States, is the fact that they know that that leverage is there. They’re not going to take that chance. The biggest problem for the Israelis is the very large portion of Jews in the United States who do not support Netanyahu, who do not support the policies now.

And the way they handle that is to focus their foreign policy, not on the Jews in the United States, who are in the main, unreachable by that. But instead to go after the fundamentalist Christians, to build up the idea that Jesus is coming back, and that in order for him to come back, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, has to be in the hands of the Jews. The Bible says that somewhere. They fasten on that. And so that’s where the Israeli government has its film festivals and its exchanges and its tourism. I mean, that’s all dead. They’ve not earned any money on tourism for the last year, and none is likely to have happened. But those are Christians that are going over there hosted by the Jews in a very careful campaign, so that they get the support they need for Mr. Biden to do what he wants to do.

This is an agreed plan by both of them to maximize the freedom they have to do what they are doing. And the people who want to drive a wedge between the two of them, unless you have something very powerful, that’s not going to happen. There’s too much that pulls them together. You’re certainly not going to shame them by saying that “Mr. Biden doesn’t want you to invade…” and you invade it anyway. As Michael correctly says, this is a theater. This is a theater – that is how they manage the deal that they have.
It is like a good cop-bad cop deal, or any kind of deal where the two sides include in their deal the pretense they both contribute to, that that deal isn’t going on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I agree with what Richard said.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, recently we had finally – just to finalize this session – recently we had Emmanuel Macron finally saying something against war. And he said that we have to control the arms and aid going to Israel in order to put some sort of pressure on Netanyahu. And after that Netanyahu responded to him, “Shame on you” and “How you can say that,” and all of that.

How do you see the situation in the European Union changing toward Israel, or we are still having the same old policy toward Israel and its attitude?

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, let me speak a little bit to Emmanuel Macron and I’ll quote the American filmmaker Michael Moore who last night when asked about the election made the following sentence: “Donald Trump is toast.” That was Michael Moore’s statement. He did correctly predict that Trump would win in 2016, so people should be careful before they dismiss what Michael Moore has to say. I make no prediction so I’m not doing that. Mr. Macaroon, as my French family refers to him, as President Macaroon. He is, in other words, a cookie.

He is toast – there is no question – he is political toast. He was never a serious politician. He proved that before he became president and just in case anyone missed it, he proved it again while he was president. He had the distinction of being a sitting president when earlier this year the national elections in France, divided among the three major parties, and his party – the party of the sitting president – came in third out of three. That’s his achievement. Goodbye, Mr. Macron. But he is desperate. Everything he does is guided by the last minute desperation of someone who has no base. He is hated by the old conservatives. He is hated by the socialist party of which he was once both a member and a minister. The man was minister of education, if I’m remembering correctly, in the last socialist government.

He’s hated by all of them because he is such a flip-flopper, finger-in-the-wind to see which way the politics wind is blowing. So now he has his last desperate effort. He’s going to appeal largely to the people on the political right – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of reasons – and the people that are on the left – who are against Israel’s position for a whole host of different reasons – and try somehow to attract them. But they already hate him. They do not trust him. There is no reason. I would like to remind you that less than a year ago Mr. Macron was the leading European politician advocating for European troops to land in Ukraine and fight alongside the Ukrainians against the Russians, prompting Mr. Putin to make one of his statements, that “if other leaders in the West were thinking along these lines, he wanted to make it crystal clear that this would be an attack on Russia which Russia would respond to with any and all means at its disposal.” You’d have to be dead not to understand what he was saying. Now, this man wants to stop killing people in the Middle East. It’s not serious, and to the chagrin, not just of Mr. Macron, but of all French people, no one is taking him seriously.

And in that he was helped, because Mr. Netanyahu not only chastised him for saying these things, but went on to say – and I didn’t make this up, I’m virtually quoting Mr. Netanyahu – that “on the side of Israel is civilization, and on the other side is barbarism.” Well that’s our conversation a few minutes ago. There we have it again: “Savages and the good people.” And Mr. Macron – in the mind of Mr. Netanyahu – just crossed over the bridge from the good guys to the bad guys, and next we’ll be hearing him referred to as “a thug.”

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What can I add to that? Richard’s described the situation perfectly. All I can do is paraphrase and that’s not much of a discussion.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much for being with us today, both of you, and hope we can keep these talks and great pleasure as always talking with both of you. See you soon. Thank you.

RICHARD WOLFF: Thank you. Same here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Bye bye.

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it's unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from at least three different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.

AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.

Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)

Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply makes up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent "beheaded babies".

AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a "pattern of excessive force" by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.

That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP's preferred characterisation of the group's reference to a pattern not of "excessive force" but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

AP makes sure to give Israel's pretext for why it is committing war crimes: "Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy."

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But it forgets yet again to mention why that "militancy" exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.

AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel's occupying soldiers, including "militantly".

Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as "terrorism", but that's not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.

It's also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by "Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem".

As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.

Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is "sensitive" to Israel's perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.

Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a "plausible genocide", according to the World Court – which means it's entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.

It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel's war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.

UPDATE:

Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this atrocity on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn't been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.

The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.

And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is "another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

“Have you no sense of decency?”

The recent Congressional hearings leading to a bloodbath of university presidents brings back memories from my teen-age years in the 1950s when everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV broadcast of the McCarthy hearings. And the student revolts incited by vicious college presidents trying to stifle academic freedom when it opposes foreign unjust wars awakens memories of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the campus clampdowns confronting police violence.

I was the junior member of the “Columbia three” alongside Seymour Melman and my mentor Terence McCarthy (both of whom taught at Columbia’s Seeley Mudd School of Industrial Engineering; my job was mainly to handle publicity and publication). At the end of that decade, students occupied my office and all others at the New School’s graduate faculty in New York City – very peacefully, without disturbing any of my books and papers.
Only the epithets have changed.

The invective “Communist” has been replaced by “anti-Semite,” and the renewal of police violence on campus has not yet led to a Kent State-style rifle barrage against protesters. But the common denominators are all here once again. A concerted effort has been organized to condemn and even to punish today’s nationwide student uprisings against the genocide occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. Just as the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed to end the careers of progressive actors, directors, professors and State Department officials unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-Shek or sympathetic to the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1975, today’s version aims at ending what remains of academic freedom in the United States.

The epithet of “communism” from 75 years ago has been updated to “anti-Semitism.” Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin has been replaced by Elise Stefanik, House Republican from upstate New York, and Senator “Scoop” Jackson upgraded to President Joe Biden. Harvard University President Claudine Gay (now forced to resign), former University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill (also given the boot), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth were called upon to abase themselves by promising to accuse peace advocates critical of U.S. foreign policy of anti-Semitism.

The most recent victim was Columbia’s president Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, a cosmopolitan opportunist with trilateral citizenship who enforced neoliberal economic policy as a high-ranking official at the IMF (where she was no stranger to the violence of “IMF riots”) and the World Bank, and who brought her lawyers along to help her acquiesce in the Congressional Committee’s demands. She did that and more, all on her own. Despite being told not to by the faculty and student affairs committees, she called in the police to arrest peaceful demonstrators.

This radical trespass of police violence against peaceful demonstrators (the police themselves attested to their peacefulness) triggered sympathetic revolts throughout the United States, met with even more violent police responses at Emory College in Atlanta and California State Polytechnic, where cell phone videos were quickly posted on various media platforms.

Just as intellectual freedom and free speech were attacked by HUAC 75 years ago, academic freedom is now under attack at these universities. The police have trespassed onto school grounds to accuse students themselves of trespassing, with violence reminiscent of the demonstrations that peaked in May 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot Kent State students singing and speaking out against America’s war in Vietnam.

Today’s demonstrations are in opposition to the Biden-Netanyahu genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The more underlying crisis can be boiled down to the insistence by Benjamin Netanyahu that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic. That is the “enabling slur” of today’s assault on academic freedom.

By “Israel,” Biden and Netanyahu mean specifically the right-wing Likud Party and its theocratic supporters aiming to create “a land without a [non-Jewish] people.” They assert that Jews owe their loyalty not to their current nationality (or humanity) but to Israel and its policy of driving the Gaza Strip’s millions of Palestinians into the sea by bombing them out of their homes, hospitals and refugee camps.

The implication is that to support the International Court of Justice’s accusations that Israel is plausibly committing genocide is an anti-Semitic act. Supporting the UN resolutions vetoed by the United States is anti-Semitic.

The claim is that Israel is defending itself and that protesting the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank frightens Jewish students. But research by students at Columbia’s School of Journalism found that the complaints cited by the New York Times and other pro-Israeli media were made by non-students trying to spread the story that Israel’s violence was in self-defense.

The student violence has been by Israeli nationals. Columbia has a student-exchange program with Israel for students who finish their compulsory training with the Israeli Defense Forces. It was some of these exchange students who attacked pro-Gaza demonstrators, spraying them with Skunk, a foul-smelling indelible Israeli army chemical weapon that marks demonstrators for subsequent arrest, torture or assassination. The only students endangered were the victims of this attack. Columbia under Shafik did nothing to protect or help the victims.
The hearings to which she submitted speak for themselves. Columbia’s president Shafik was able to avoid the first attack on universities not sufficiently pro-Likud by having meetings outside of the country. Yet she showed herself willing to submit to the same brow-beating that had led her two fellow presidents to be fired, hoping that her lawyers had prompted her to submit in a way that would be acceptable to the committee.

I found the most demagogic attack to be that of Republican Congressman Rick Allen from Georgia, asking Dr. Shafik whether she was familiar with the passage in Genesis 12.3. As he explained” “It was a covenant that God made with Abraham. And that covenant was real clear. … ‘If you bless Israel, I will bless you. If you curse Israel, I will curse you.’ … Do you consider that to be a serious issue? I mean, do you want Columbia University to be cursed by [God of the Bible](http://1 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=syPELLKpABI 2 https://stefanik.house.gov/2024/4/icymi-stefanik-secures-columbia-university-president-s-commitment-to-remove-antisemitic-professor-from-leadership-role 3 Nicholas Fandos, Stephanie Saul and Sharon Otterman, “Columbia’s President Tells Congress That Action Is Needed Against Antisemitism,” The New York Times, April 17, 2024., and “Columbia President Grilled During Congressional Hearing on Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal, April 18, 2024. https://jewishjournal.com/news/united-states/370521/columbia-president-grilled-during-congressional-hearing-on-campus-antisemitism/#:~:text=Columbia%20President%20Grilled%20During%20Congressional%20Hearing%20on%20Campus%20Antisemitism 4 Miranda Nazzaro. “Netanyahu condemns ‘antisemitic mobs’ on US college campuses,” The Hill, April 24, 2024.)?”

Shafik smiled and was friendly all the way through this bible thumping, and replied meekly, “Definitely not.”
She might have warded off this browbeating question by saying, “Your question is bizarre. This is 2024, and America is not a theocracy. And the Israel of the early 1st century BC was not Netanyahu’s Israel of today.” She accepted all the accusations that Allen and his fellow Congressional inquisitors threw at her.

Her main nemesis was Elise Stefanik, Chair of the House Republican Conference, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, and the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Congresswoman Stefanik: You were asked were there any anti-Jewish protests and you said ‘No’.

President Shafik: So the protest was not labeled as an anti-Jewish protest. It was labeled as an anti-Israeli government. But antisemitic incidents happened or antisemitic things were said. So I just wanted to finish.
Congresswoman Stefanik: And you are aware that in that bill, that got 377 Members out of 435 Members of Congress, condemns ‘from the river to the sea’ as antisemitic?

Dr. Shafik: Yes, I am aware of that.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you don’t believe ‘from the river to the sea’ is antisemitic?

Dr. Shafik: We have already issued a statement to our community saying that language is hurtful and we would prefer not to hear it on our campus.

What an appropriate response to Stefanik’s browbeating might have been?

Shafik could have said, “The reason why students are protesting is against the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, and most of the United Nations agree. I’m proud of them for taking a moral stand that most of the world supports but is under attack here in this room.”
Instead, Shafik seemed more willing than the leaders of Harvard or Penn to condemn and potentially discipline students and faculty for using the term “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She could have said that it is absurd to say that this is a call to eliminate Israel’s Jewish population, but is a call to give Palestinians freedom instead of being treated as Untermenschen.

Asked explicitly whether calls for genocide violate Columbia’s code of conduct, Dr. Shafik answered in the affirmative — “Yes, it does.” So did the other Columbia leaders who accompanied her at the hearing. They did not say that this is not at all what the protests are about. Neither Shafik nor any other of the university officials say, “Our university is proud of our students taking an active political and social role in protesting the idea of ethnic cleansing and outright murder of families simply to grab the land that they live on. Standing up for that moral principle is what education is all about, and what civilization’s all about.”

The one highlight that I remember from the McCarthy hearings was the reply by Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s Special Council, on June 9, 1954 to Republican Senator Joe McCarthy’s charge that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist front organization. “Until this moment, senator,” Welch replied, “I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

The audience broke into wild applause. Welch’s put-down has echoed for the past 70 years in the minds of those who were watching television then (as I was, at age 15). A similar answer by any of the three other college presidents would have shown Stefanik to be the vulgarian that she is. But none ventured to stand up against the abasement.

The Congressional attack accusing opponents of genocide in Gaza as anti-Semites supporting genocide against the Jews is bipartisan. Already in December, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) helped cause Harvard and Penn’s presidents to be fired for their stumbling over her red-baiting. She repeated her question to Shafik on April 17: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Columbia’s code of conduct?” Bonamici asked the four new Columbia witnesses. All responded: “Yes.”

That was the moment when they should have said that the students were not calling for genocide of the Jews, but seeking to mobilize opposition to genocide being committed by the Likud government against the Palestinians with President Biden’s full support.

During a break in the proceedings Rep. Stefanik told the press that “the witnesses were overheard discussing how well they thought their testimony was going for Columbia.” This arrogance is eerily reminiscent to the previous three university presidents who believed when walking out of the hearing that their testimony was acceptable. “Columbia is in for a reckoning of accountability. If it takes a member of Congress to force a university president to fire a pro-terrorist, antisemitic faculty chair, then Columbia University leadership is failing Jewish students and its academic mission,” added Stefanik. “No amount of overlawyered, overprepped, and over-consulted testimony is going to cover up for failure to act.”

Shafik could have pointedly corrected the implications by the House inquisitors that it was Jewish students who needed protection. The reality was just the opposite: The danger was from the Israeli IDF students who attacked the demonstrators with military Skunk, with no punishment by Columbia.

Despite being told not to by the faculty and student groups (which Shafik was officially bound to consult), she called in the police, who arrested 107 students, tied their hands behind their backs and kept them that way for many hours as punishment while charging them for trespassing on Columbia’s property. Shafik then suspended them from classes.

The clash between two kinds of Judaism: Zionist vs. assimilationist

A good number of these protestors being criticized were Jewish. Netanyahu and AIPAC have claimed – correctly, it seems – that the greatest danger to their current genocidal policies comes from the traditionally liberal Jewish middle-class population. Progressive Jewish groups have joined the uprisings at Columbia and other universities.
Early Zionism arose in late 19th-century Europe as a response to the violent pogroms killing Jews in Ukrainian cities such as Odessa and other Central European cities that were the center of anti-Semitism. Zionism promised to create a safe refuge. It made sense at a time when Jews were fleeing their countries to save their lives in countries that accepted them. They were the “Gazans” of their day.

After World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism became passé. Most Jews in the United States and other countries were being assimilated and becoming prosperous, most successfully in the United States. The past century has seen this success enable them to assimilate, while retaining the moral standard that ethnic and religious discrimination such as that which their forbears had suffered is wrong in principle.

Jewish activists were in the forefront of fighting for civil liberties, most visibly against anti-Black prejudice and violence in the 1960s and ‘70s, and against the Vietnam War. Many of my Jewish school friends in the 1950s bought Israel bonds, but thought of Israel as a socialist country and thought of volunteering to work on a kibbutz in the summer. There was no thought of antagonism, and I heard no mention of the Palestinian population when the phrase “a people without a land in a land without a people” was spoken.

But Zionism’s leaders have remained obsessed with the old antagonisms in the wake of Nazism’s murders of so many Jews. In many ways they have turned Nazism inside out, fearing a renewed attack from non-Jews. Driving the Arabs out of Israel and making it an apartheid state was just the opposite of what assimilationist Jews aimed at.

The moral stance of progressive Jews, and the ideal that Jews, blacks and members of all other religions and races should be treated equally, is the opposite of Israeli Zionism. In the hands of Netanyahu’s Likud Party and the influx of right-wing supporters, Zionism asserts a claim to set Jewish people apart from the rest of their national population, and even from the rest of the world, as we are seeing today.

Claiming to speak for all Jews, living and dead, Netanyahu asserts that to criticize his genocide and the Palestinian holocaust, the nakba, is anti-Semitic. This is the position of Stefanik and her fellow committee members. It is an assertion that Jews owe their first allegiance to Israel, and hence to its ethnic cleansing and mass murder since last October. President Biden also has labeled the student demonstrations “antisemitic protests.”

This claim in the circumstances of Israel’s ongoing genocide is causing more anti-Semitism than anyone since Hitler. If people throughout the world come to adopt Netanyahu’s and his cabinet’s definition of anti-Semitism, how many, being repulsed by Israel’s actions, will say, “If that is the case, then indeed I guess I’m anti-Semitic.”

Netanyahu’s slander against Judaism and what civilization should stand for

Netanyahu characterized the U.S. protests in an extremist speech on April 24 attacking American academic freedom.

What’s happening in America’s college campuses is horrific. Antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities. They call for the annihilation of Israel, they attack Jewish students, they attack Jewish faculty. This is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. We see this exponential rise of antisemitism throughout America and throughout Western societies as Israel tries to defend itself against genocidal terrorists, genocidal terrorists who hide behind civilians.

It’s unconscionable, it has to be stopped, it has to be condemned and condemned unequivocally. But that’s not what happened. The response of several university presidents was shameful. Now, fortunately, state, local, federal officials, many of them have responded differently but there has to be more. More has to be done.

This is a call to make American universities into arms of a police state, imposing policies dictated by Israel’s settler state. That call is being funded by a circular flow: Congress gives enormous subsidies to Israel, which recycles some of this money back into the election campaigns of politicians willing to serve their donors. It is the same policy that Ukraine uses when it employs U.S. “aid” by setting up well-funded lobbying organizations to back client politicians.

What kind of student and academic protest expressions could oppose the Gaza and West Bank genocide without explicitly threatening Jewish students? How about “Palestinians are human being too!” That is not aggressive. To make it more ecumenical, one could add “And so are the Russians, despite what Ukrainian neo-Nazis say.”
I can understand why Israelis feel threatened by Palestinians. They know how many they have killed and brutalized to grab their land, killing just to “free” the land for themselves. They must think “If the Palestinians are like us, they must want to kill us, because of what we have done to them and there can never be a two-state solution and we can never live together, because this land was given to us by God.”

Netanyahu fanned the flames after his April 24 speech by raising today’s conflict to the level of a fight for civilization: “What is important now is for all of us, all of us who are interested and cherish our values and our civilization, to stand up together and to say enough is enough.”

Is what Israel is doing, and what the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most of the Global Majority oppose, really “our civilization”? Ethnic cleansing, genocide and treating the Palestinian population as conquered and to be expelled as subhumans is an assault on the most basic principles of civilization.

Peaceful students defending that universal concept of civilization are called terrorists and anti-Semites – by the terrorist Israeli Prime Minister. He is following the tactics of Joseph Goebbels: The way to mobilize a population to fight the enemy is to depict yourself as under attack. That was the Nazi public relations strategy, and it is the PR strategy of Israel today – and of many in the American Congress, in AIPAC and many related institutions that proclaim a morally offensive idea of civilization as the ethnic supremacy of a group sanctioned by God.

The real focus of the protests is the U.S. policy that is backing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide supported by last week’s foreign “aid.” It is also a protest against the corruption of Congressional politicians raising money from lobbyists representing foreign interests over those of the United States. Last week’s “aid” bill also backed Ukraine, that other country presently engaged in ethnic cleansing, where House members waved Ukrainian flags, not those of the United States. Shortly before that, one Congressman wore his Israeli army uniform into Congress to advertise his priorities.

Zionism has gone far beyond Judaism. I’ve read that there are nine Christian Zionists for every Jewish Zionist. It is as if both groups are calling for the End Time to arrive, while insisting that support for the United Nations and the International Court of Justice condemning Israel for genocide is anti-Semitic.

What CAN the students at Columbia ask for:

Students at Columbia and other universities have called for universities to disinvest in Israeli stocks, and also those of U.S. arms makers exporting to Israel. Given the fact that universities have become business organizations, I don’t think that this is the most practical demand at present. Most important, it doesn’t go to the heart of the principles at work.

What really is the big public relations issue is the unconditional U.S. backing for Israel come what may, with “anti-Semitism” the current propaganda epithet to characterize those who oppose genocide and brutal land grabbing.

They should insist on a public announcement by Columbia (and also Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were equally obsequious to Rep. Stefanik) that they recognize that it is not anti-Semitic to condemn genocide, support the United Nations and denounce the U.S. veto.

They should insist that Columbia and the other universities making a sacrosanct promise not to call police onto academic grounds over issues of free speech.

They should insist that the president be fired for her one-sided support of Israeli violence against her students. In that demand they are in agreement with Rep. Stefanik’s principle of protecting students, and that Dr. Shafik must go.

But there is one class of major offenders that should be held up for contempt: the donors who try to attack academic freedom by using their money to influence university policy and turn universities away from the role in supporting academic freedom and free speech. The students should insist that university administrators – the unpleasant opportunists standing above the faculty and students – must not only refuse such pressure but should join in publicly expressing shock over such covert political influence.

The problem is that American universities have become like Congress in basing their policy on attracting contributions from their donors. That is the academic equivalent of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Numerous Zionist funders have threatened to withdraw their contributions to Harvard, Columbia and other schools not following Netanyahu’s demands to clamp down on opponents of genocide and defenders of the United Nations. These funders are the enemies of the students at such universities, and both students and faculty should insist on their removal. Just as Dr. Shafik’s International Monetary Fund fell subject to its economists’ protest that there must be “No more Argentinas,” perhaps the Columbia students could chant “No More Shafiks.”

Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay

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.

*Source

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