Over the past weeks, a surge in slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese subversion has repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.

The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today’s empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins… especially not the USA.

Every day we read that secret lists of millions of Chinese communist party members have infiltrated western national governments or that espionage honey pots have targeted anti-Trump politicans in California, or that Chinese military are conducting operations in Canada, or that China intentionally created COVID-19 and deployed it around the world to subvert the western liberal order.

In all cases, the stories pumped out by mainstream media rags reek of 1) Five Eyes propaganda psy-op techniques, and often unverified accusations, while 2) deflecting from the actually verifiable British Intelligence tentacles caught repeatedly shaping world events, regime change, infiltration, assassination and conspiracies for over a century including the push to overthrow Trump under a color revolution.

Among the most destructive of these conspiracies orchestrated by British Intelligence during the past century was the artificial creation of the Cold War which destroyed the hopes for a multipolar world of win-win collaboration guided by a U.S.-China-Russia alliance as envisioned by FDR and Henry Wallace.

When reviewing how this perversion of history was manufactured, it is important to hold firmly in mind the parallels to the current anti-China/anti-Russian operations now underway.

Cold War Battle Lines are Drawn

Historians widely acknowledge that the actual catalyst for the Cold War occurred not on March 5, 1946, but rather on September 5, 1945. It was at this moment that a 26-year-old cipher clerk left the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with a list of code names for supposed spies planted within the British, Canadian and American governments controlled by the Kremlin. In total this young defector took telegram notes attributed to his boss Colonel Zabotin and 108 other strategic documents that supposedly proved the existence of this Soviet conspiracy to the world for the first time.

The young clerk’s name was Igor Gouzenko, and the scandal that emerged from his defection not only created one of the greatest abuses of civil liberties in Canadian history, but a sham trial based on little more than hearsay and conjecture. In fact, when the six microfilms of evidence were finally declassified in 1985, not a single document turned out be worthy of the name (more to be said on that below).

The outcome of the Gouzenko Affair resulted in the collapse of all U.S.-Canada-Russia alliances that had been fostered during fires of anti-fascist combat of WWII.

Voices like Henry Wallace (former Vice-President under FDR) watched the collapse of potential amidst the anti-Communist hysteria and sounded the alarm loudly saying: “Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

In “Soviet Mission Asia,” Wallace revealed the true agenda for the conspiracy that would infiltrate nation states of the west and orchestrate the next 75 years of history saying: “Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.”

This fight against those actual top-down controllers of fascism whom Wallace had bravely put into the spotlight would sadly not prove successful. Between 1945 and the collapse of Wallace’s Progressive Party USA presidential bid in 1948, those strongest anti-Cold War voices both in the USA and in Canada were promptly labelled “Russian agents” and saw their reputations, careers and freedoms destroyed under the CIA-FBI managed spectre of the Red Scare and later McCarthyism. In Canada, Wallace’s Progressive Party co-thinkers took the form of the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) then led by Member of Parliament Fred Rose, LPP leader Tim Buck and LPP National Organizer Sam Carr- all three would represent the anti-Cold War fight to save FDR’s vision in Canada and all of whom would figure prominently in the story of Igor Gouzenko.

The Gouzenko Hoax Kicks Off

When Prime Minister King heard those claims made by Gouzenko, he knew that it threatened the post war hopes for global reconstruction and for this reason was very hesitant to make the unverifiable claims public for many months or even offer the defector sanctuary for that matter.

After the story was eventually strategically leaked to American media, anti-communist hysteria skyrocketed forcing King to establish the Gouzenko Espionage Royal Commission on February 5, 1946 under Privy Council Order 411. Earlier Privy Council Order 6444 had already been passed extending the War Measures Act beyond the end of the war and permitting for detention incommunicado, psychological torture and removing Habeus Corpus of all those who would be accused of espionage.

By February 15, 1946 the first 15 targets were arrested and held for weeks in isolation in Ottawa’s Rockliffe Military Barracks without access to family or legal counsel. All those arrested without charge suffered weeks of psychological torture, sleep deprivation and were put on suicide watch with no communication with anyone but inquisitors from the Royal Commission. Both Judges who presided over the show trial were rewarded with Orders of Canada and were made Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the affair.

With a complete disregard for any notion of civil liberties (Canada still had no Bill of Rights), lead counsel E.K. Williams blatantly argued for the creation of the Royal Commission “because it need not be bound by the ordinary rules of evidence if it considers it desirable to disregard them. It need not permit counsel to appear for those to be interrogated by or before it”.

During the show trial, none of the defendants were allowed to see any evidence being used against them and everyone involved including RCMP officers were threatened with 5 years imprisonment for speaking about the trial publicly. The only person who could speak and write boundlessly to the media was the figure of Igor Gouzenko himself. Whenever appearing on TV or in court, Gouzenko who was to charge over $1000 for some interviews and received generous book deals, and government pensions for life, always appeared masked in a paper bag on his head. Even though this cipher clerk never actually met any of the figures standing trial, his testimony against them was treated like gold.

By June 27, 1946 the Royal Commission released its final 733 page report which, along with Gouzenko’s own books, became the sole unquestionable gospel used and re-used by journalists, politicians and historians for the next decades as proof of the vast Russian plot to undermine western values and steal atomic secrets. There was in fact nowhere else to go for a very long time if a researcher wished to figure out what actually occurred.

As it so happened, all trial records were either destroyed or “lost” in the days after the commission disbanded, and if people wanted to look at the actual evidence they would have to wait 40 years when it was finally declassified.

The result of the trials?

By the end of the whole sordid affair, 10 of the 26 arrested were convicted and imprisoned for anywhere from 3-7 years. While these convictions are themselves often cited as “proof” that the Gouzenko evidence must have been valid, on closer inspection we find that this is merely the effect of a game of smoke and mirrors.

It must first be noted that of the 10 found guilty, not one indictment or conviction of espionage was found. Instead, five defendants were found guilty of assisting in the acquisition of fake passports during the 1930s which were used by Canadian volunteers to fight with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist coup while the other five were convicted of violating Canada’s Official Secrets Act during WWII entirely on Gouzenko’s testimony. The other 16 targets were released without ever having been charged of a crime. The two leaders of the supposed spy ring that received the longest sentences were Labor Progressive Party leaders Fred Rose and Sam Carr who had been the loudest advocates of FDR’s international New Deal and the exposure of the financial sponsors of fascism that aimed at world empire (more to be said on this in an upcoming report).

When the Gouzenko evidence was finally declassified in 1985, Canadian journalist William Reuben wrote a fascinating analysis called “The Documents that Weren’t There” where he noted the absence of anything one could reasonably call “evidence” among the thousands of items.

After spending weeks investigating the six reels of declassified microfilm, Reuben found only what could be described as “a hodgepodge, reminiscent of one of Professor Irwin Corey’s double talk monologues”.

Listing the vast array of telephone directories from 1943, RCMP profiles, lists of travel expense vouchers and passport applications, Reuben asked:

“What is one to make of this jumble? With no indication as to when any of the exhibits were obtained by the RCMP, how they related to espionage or any wrongdoing and for the most part, no indication of when they were placed in evidence at the hearings it is impossible to determine their significance, authenticity or relationship to other evidence.”

In short, not a single piece of actual evidence could be found.

Additionally when reviewing the 8 handwritten telegrams of Russian notes outlining the spy code names and instructions from the Kremlin which Gouzenko originally took from his embassy in 1945, no forensic evidence was ever attempted to match the handwriting with Colonel Zubatov to whom it was attributed and who always denied the accusation.

Reuben goes further to ask where are the 108 secret documents that Gouzenko famously stole and upon which the entire case against the accused spies was based? These documents were not part of the declassified microfilms, and so he noted: “as with the eight telegrams, there is no physical evidence to prove that the originals existed or came from the Soviet Embassy”.

He also asked the valid question why it was only on March 2, 1946 (six months after Gouzenko’s defection) that any mention was made of the 108 documents?

Could the lack of evidence and the long gap in time be related to Gouzenko’s five and a half month stay at Ottawa’s Camp X spy compound under the control of Sir William Stephenson before his defection was made public? Could those apparent 108 documents used by Gouzenko’s dodgy dossier have anything to do with the Camp X Laboratory which specialized in forging letters and other official documents?

If you find yourself thinking about the parallels of this story to the more recent case of the Brookings Institute’s Igor Danchenko who was found to be the “source” of the dodgy dossiers used to create RussiaGate by MI6’s Christopher Steele, Richard Dearlove and Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, then don’t be shocked. It means you are using your brain.

What was Camp X?

Camp X was the name given to the clandestine operations training center in the outskirts of Ottawa Canada on December 6, 1941.

It was created by the British Security Cooperation (BSC) headed by Sir William Stephenson- a spymaster who worked closely with Winston Churchill. BSC was created in New York in 1940 as a covert operation set up by the British Secret Service and MI6 to interface with American intelligence. Since the USA was still neutral in the war, Camp X was used to train the Special Operations Executive, as well as agents from FBI’s Division 5 and OSS in the arts of psychological warfare, assassination, espionage, counter-intelligence, forgeries and other forms of covert action.

The leadership cadre that was to survive the purge of OSS in October 1945 and go on to lead the new CIA when it was formed in 1947 were all trained in Camp X.

In his book Camp X: OSS, Intrepid and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, historian David Stafford notes that Gouzenko’s attempts to contact media and government offices on the night of September 5, 1945 were met with cold shoulders and even Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King himself wanted nothing to do with the man, writing in his diary: “if suicide took place let the city police take charge and secure whatever there was in the way of documents, but on no account for us to take the initiative.”

It was only due to the combined direct intervention of Stephenson and Norman Robertson (head of External Affairs and leading Rhodes Scholar) after an emergency meeting, that King was persuaded to give Gouzenko sanctuary. King had not even known about Camp X’s purpose at the time.

While King wished to defend FDR’s vision for a post-war world of cooperation with Russia, Stafford notes: “Stephenson vigorously opposed King’s view. Like SIS headquarters in London, BSC (British Security Cooperation) for most of the war had operated a counter espionage section to keep an eye on Communist subversion… he was convinced, even before the Gouzenko affair, that BSC could provide the nucleus of a post-war intelligence organization in the Western Hemisphere. The cipher clerk’s defection provided him a golden opportunity”. (1)

Canadian Journalist Ian Adams had reported that Gouzenko’s “defection came at a wonderful time when there was tremendous resistance from the scientists involved in developing the atomic bomb. They wanted to see an open book on the development of nuclear power with everybody collaborating so that it wouldn’t become the ungodly arms race that it did become and is today. So if Gouzenko hadn’t fallen into the western intelligence services’ lap, they would have had to invent somebody like him.”

A Final Word on the Real Infiltration of Western Governments

As Henry Wallace and FDR understood all too well, the real subversive threat to world peace was not the Soviet Union, or China… but rather the supranational financial-intelligence-military architecture that represented the globally extended British Empire that had orchestrated the dismemberment of Russia during the Crimean War, the USA during the Civil War and China during two Opium Wars. This was and is the enemy of the Labour Progressive Party of Canada that took the form of the Fabian Society CCF run by 6 Rhodes Scholars and it was this Rhodes Scholar/Round Table agency that was resisted by Canadian nationalists O.D. Skelton and Ernest Lapointe, and which fully took over Canada’s foreign ministry with their deaths in 1941.

This story was told in my Origins of the Deep State in North America.

This same hive of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians increasingly took control of American foreign policy with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the ouster of Wallace and the rise of the new Anglo-American Special Relationship manufactured by Churchill, Stephenson and their lackies in the USA. This is the beast that infiltrated and undermined labor unions across the Five Eyes during the Cold War and ensured that pesky patriots like Paul Robeson, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others who resisted, would not be long for this world.

This is the structure whose hands have shown themselves time and again behind the dodgy dossiers that started the Iraq War, to the false intelligence used to justify wars in Libya, and Syria. It is the same structure which has been caught managing the regime change in the USA since 2016 with its assets cooking up dodgy dossiers accusing Russia of putting their puppet into the White House, to orchestrating mass vote fraud in the elections of 2020.

This is the same operation which has always aimed at dismembering the USA, Russia, China and every other nation state who may at any time utilize the power of their sovereignty to declare political and economic independence from this supranational parasite and choose to work together to establish a world of win-win cooperation rather than tolerate a new technocratic feudal dark age.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Note

(1) Stephenson immediately flew two of his top SIS officials in from the BSC HQ in New York to manage the Gouzenko affair for the next 8 months: Peter Dwyer (head of counter-espionage for BSC) and Jean-Paul Evans. Evans is an interesting figure whose SIS successor was none other than triple agent Kim Philby who replaced him when he left his post as British liaison to the FBI and CIA in 1949. Evans himself went onto work with leading Round Table controller and soon Governor General Vincent Massey in the creation of a new system of promoting the arts in Canada pouring millions of dollars into modernist/abstract art, music and drama under the Canada Council which grew out of the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission for the Arts in Canada. This body founded in 1957 took over the reins of control from the CIA and Rockefeller Foundations who had formerly enjoyed a near monopoly sponsoring such things as part of the post-WWII cultural war against communism. Stafford notes that “the man who impressed Ottawa with his love of the arts had also played an important part in the history of Anglo-Canadian secret intelligence.”

At best, this view of hers is a put mildly dubious claim, which is likely false. Of course, Bash didn’t bother to challenge Duckworth. For Duckworth and Bash, a debate on removing George Washington monuments is fair game, as they peddle unchallenged misinformation against Russia. The neocon leaning Cheney has no problem with the latter situation.

Within the US mass media and body politic, this kind of instance underscores the cancel culture, when it comes to not providing constructively critical pro-Russian commentary that’s not anti-American. The American based Twitter has come out in favor of combatting fake news. Its effort appears questionable, as evidenced in numerous instances which include foreign policy legal politico David Tafuri, not getting rebuked by Twitter, for falsely Tweeting as fact, the overly suspect Russian bounty claim.

For the purpose of improving US-Russian relations, the recent open letter in Politico shouldn’t be seen as a noticeable plus. Rather, it should be highlighted as another example of the limits within the US foreign policy establishment. Its opening runs counter to actually improving US-Russian relations: “We got into this open-eyed. Russia complicates, even thwarts, our actions, especially along its extended periphery in Europe and Asia. It has seized territory in Ukraine and Georgia. It challenges our role as a global leader and the world order we helped build. It interferes in our domestic policies to exacerbate divisions and tarnish our democratic reputation.”

In actuality, the claim of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election remains factually quite suspect, especially when compared to some other countries. The US government’s stances on the Golan Heights, Kosovo and northern Cyprus don’t make it a good authority to lecture Russia on matters like Crimea, North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Propaganda aside, it’s quite clear that the majority in Crimea, North Ossetia and Abkhazia prefer Russia over the countries seeking to control them. As for challenging, the current US administration seeks to thwart the mutually agreed Russo-German pipeline deal. This past May 12, James Jeffrey, the US special envoy for Syria, said it was his job to make that Mideast country “a quagmire for the Russians.”

Among seasoned Russia watching circles, it’s generally agreed that in the late 1980s (if not before) and for at least much of the 1990s (perhaps going into the early 2000s), pro-American sentiment in Russia was more evident than it is now. Russian President Vladimir Putin quickly consoled the US following 9/11, sharing Russian Intel and allowing for US military planes to fly over Russia en route to Afghanistan. Are we really supposed to believe that Russia is solely or mostly responsible for the breakdown in US-Russian relations?

As a viable option to the Politico run open letter and the other wonky tonk aspects prevalent in the US foreign policy establishment, I reference my articles of August 21, 2019, August 31, 2017 and March 17, 2016.

Last month, I received a visit from the FBI, which seems like it could very well be related to the release of a US State Department report dealing with (as described) “Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem“, which makes mention of several venues including the Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF). University of Ottawa Professor Paul Robinson (who I’ve previously commented on) has a critical overview of what’s claimed at his blog. At that piece, I pose a follow-up question, along with some comments.

I come from an anti-Communist upbringing which nevertheless opposed the 1950’s era methods utilized by Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. Regardless of political views, I hope there’s a strong across the board opposition to a nouveau McCarthyism. Relative to that desire, I’m reminded of the 2015 movie on Dalton Trumbo. The Yonkers Tribune was good enough to give me a platform, which among other things, addresses a crackpot conspiracy theory Tweet and Facebook post, pertaining to the SCF and yours truly.

Without completely checking, many, if not all of the SCF contributors, have established backgrounds prior to appearing at that venue. So, the suggestion that their views wouldn’t exist without the SCF is bunk. I’ve welcomed substantive follow ups to the content of my articles. To date, no one has asked me to stop appearing in the SCF.

I can hear the incredulous reader exclaim: Wait, what does “none of the above” mean?? It’s certainly going to be one of those three isn’t it??

It is often too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees and in the opinion-packed world of endless talking head commentaries, every leaf and branch is scrutinized by professional opinionators so closely that many forget that the entire forest is on fire. As I’ve written extensively here and here and here, the reality is that the western financial system is careening towards a crash much worse than anything the world saw in 1929, and the deep state trying to manage this wreck from above would love nothing more than to impose a fascist dictatorship onto a frightened population.

Trump, Sanders and Tulsi: Not Good Fascists

The only reason why so much effort has been expended on attempting to paint Trump, Sanders and Tulsi as “Russian agents” has been the simple fact that neither one of the three individuals would make very willing puppets who would play along with a fascist dictatorship in America under those foreseeable crisis conditions. For all their problems and differences, right wing neocons and left wing Malthusian technocrats despise Trump, Sanders and Tulsi for the crime that they are actual patriotic human beings who genuinely care about their nation. Unlike technocrats or neocons, actual human beings occupying political office may be inclined to spoil a good crisis in order to pass reforms that actually protect the people and revoke the power structures of the shadow government.

So I ask again: What if the oncoming crisis results in a 2020 choice of “none of the above”? What if there is no 2020 choice “offered” democratically to the American public at all? It isn’t like this sort of thing has never happened in American history.

In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.

The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932

1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.

This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.

In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.

The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.

In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.

Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

Who was General Butler?

Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).

By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:

“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”

In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.

The Wall Street Putsch is Launched

These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.

Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power (1).

Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.

Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.

Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly: “Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”

Butler Blows the Whistle

When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.

At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon  substantiated everything over the course of  a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.

Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.

When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”

Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.

The Aftermath of the Exposure

This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.

Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21^st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.

The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.

Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever.

So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

(1) The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”

Never mean what you say.
Never say what you mean.
Be sincere.

Belfrage, who died tragically in her mid-50s and whose McCarthy-era memoir, Un-American Activities, is still worth reading, was talking about teenage American girls. But she may as well have been discussing Democrats working themselves up into an entirely artificial lather over Attorney General William Barr’s veto of a recommended seven to nine-year prison sentence for alleged Russiagate mastermind Roger Stone.

The ever-righteous Adam Schiff declared that the AG is guilty of “a blatant abuse of power,” Elizabeth Warren says he “should resign or face impeachment,” while Hillary Clinton promptly accused his boss, Donald Trump, of “using the powers of the presidency like a tyrant.” Not to be outdone, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have both called for an investigation.

But what we know from Belfrage is that such words are not to be taken at face value. Schiff knows that the term “abuse of power” will raise eyebrows since he’s spent the last three years using his position on the House intelligence committee to drum up hysteria over nonexistent Russian collusion. But he figures that if he says it one more time, then maybe Barr will take notice. Warren is likewise aware that impeachment is a dead letter, but still hopes that the I-word’s magic is not entirely spent. Ditto Clinton, Pelosi, Schumer, and the rest of the impeachment chorus. They figure that if they raise another clamor, then maybe, just maybe, Barr will back off.

But since everyone knows it’s not going to happen, what’s it really about?

The answer has little do with a two-bit dirty trickster like Stone and everything to do with a goateed and balding federal prosecutor in Connecticut named John Durham. Durham is the guy whom Barr tapped last April to head up a second investigation into Russiagate – not collusion itself but how the investigation got started in the first place and why it dragged on so absurdly long. Previously, Durham was so highly regarded that he was entrusted with the most ultra-sensitive tasks. In 2002, he helped convict two retired FBI agents on charges of protecting a pair of notorious gangster informants named Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, helping them evade arrest and even murder a Tulsa businessman. In 2008, he headed up an investigation into the CIA’s destruction of torture videotapes, while in 2009 he took charge of an inquiry into CIA “enhanced interrogation” in general.

Leftists were not pleased with the latter two since neither resulted in a criminal charge. But as far as the establishment was concerned, Durham was above reproach. But then came the Russiagate investigation, and suddenly he was the opposite. Vanity Fair said the AG had gone “rogue” in appointing him to the job and suggested that he was “doing the partisan bidding of his boss.” Vox.com worried that “a hit job” was in the works and speculated that Durham was “trying to protect Trump politically and damage his political opponents.” The New Yorker accused him of entertaining “bizarre conspiracy theories” and quoted a disgruntled Russiagate investigator to the effect that the probe was “evocative of regimes in history that conduct purges for perceived disloyalty.”

Formerly a prosecutor’s prosecutor, he was now little better than a presidential hitman. But the real reason Democrats are up in arms over the Durham investigation is that they’re afraid it will undermine the one that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded last March. Mueller is the Ivy League twit who covered up Saudi involvement in 9/11 and testified on the eve of the 2003 Iraqi invasion that Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s posed an imminent threat. In July, he stammered and mumbled his way through testimony before the House intelligence committee and didn’t even seem familiar with his own findings. Still, while his report concluded there was no evidence in support of collusion, it said that Russia had carried out a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign in the 2016 election regardless, that “the Trump Campaign showed interest” in hacked emails that Russian intelligence allegedly fed to WikiLeaks, and that the Trump campaign had “multiple contacts” with individuals tied to the Russian government.

This was all Democrats needed to bash Trump and move ahead with impeachment. In their eyes, consequently, the Mueller report became the Gospels, the Qur’an, and maybe the Upanishads all rolled into one. That’s why, in the face of the latest threat from Barr and Durham, they’re girding themselves for battle in defense of the sacred text.

The fact that three of the four Roger Stone prosecutors who resigned in a huff over Barr’s veto were part of Mueller’s Russiagate team shows how the battle lines are being drawn. It’s Mueller versus Barr and Durham – maybe we should call them “Barrham”? – an investigation that ended ten months versus one that is still ongoing. The fact that no one knows what Durham will come up with is irrelevant. Since he works for Barr, his findings must be invalid and corrupt. He must therefore be stopped.

But since Democrat never mean what they say or say what they mean, they must dial up their outrage to show they’re really, truly sincere. One would never guess from such sturm und drang, meanwhile, that Stone is a two-bit hustler who tried to obstruct a House intelligence committee that Schiff had already turned into a three-ring circus of anti-Russian conspiracy-mongering; that not even Randy Credico, the New York radio host whose dog Stone threatened to kidnap if he spoke to the feds, took him seriously, or that seven to nine years behind bars for such a minor transgression is obviously over the top.

No, the republic is in danger, democracy is under threat, the rule of law must be preserved, and so on and so forth. When Durham at last comes out with his report, the outcry will start up all over again, louder than ever. But how much sound and fury can Americans take before realizing that it signifies nothing at all?

What makes this so sickening is not that these memorials are untrue, but rather that it is these same MSM/Hollywood forces that are the heirs to the fascist McCarthyite machine which Kirk Douglass and his close network of collaborators fought so courageously against during their lives.

Hollywood and the CIA Today

In recent decades, barring a few exceptions, Hollywood (just like much of the mainstream media) has become a branch of the CIA and broader military industrial complex. While fake news agencies as CNN spin false facts to the intellects of mushy-minded Americans, Hollywood prepares the fertile soil for those false seeds to grow by shaping the hearts and imagination in their victims through the important hypnotic power of storytelling. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Red Sparrow and Bitter Harvest are just a few of the most popular propaganda films which portray Russians as the nefarious villains of the earth and heroically elevate the CIA to patriotic heights.

Hacked emails from Sony pictures published on WikiLeaks provided a smoking gun when it was revealed that the Obama administration had courted Hollywood execs to the task of promoting films to “counter Russian narratives” and all of this in the midst of a renewed Cold War terror which has led to attacks on Chinese scholars in America and an attempted coup against a sitting U.S. President.

YET, just as Hollywood can serve as a force of great evil, Kirk Douglas and his small network of collaborators demonstrated that it could equally serve as a force of great good. This is because films exhibiting a spirit of honesty and courage can bypass the gatekeepers of intellect and strike at the inner being of the audience rendering a people, under certain circumstances better patriots of their nation and citizens of the world.

This brings us to the important question of “what truly made Kirk Douglas and his small but influential network of collaborators so important during such a dark period of World history during the peak of the Cold War?”

Ending the Blacklist: Douglas and Trumbo

The above quote from a CNN memorial cited Douglas’s efforts to end the Hollywood Blacklist. For those who are not aware, the blacklist was the name given to the “untouchables” of Hollywood. Those writers, directors and producers who courageously refused to cooperate with the fascist hearings of the House on Un-American Activities run under the dictatorial leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. By the end of the hearings, hundreds of careers were destroyed and examples were made of ten leading writers led by the great Dalton Trumbo- who were not only given prison sentences for defending the U.S. Constitution, but who became un-hirable for years after their release. Not only this, but anyone caught employing them were threatened with similar penalties.

In spite of that grim reality many of them continued to work under pseudonyms with Trumbo even winning two uncredited academy awards during the 1950s (Roman Holiday and the Brave One).

During this dark period, a network of brave film makers formed who worked very closely together for 20 years which centered around Trumbo, Kirk Douglas, David Miller, John Frankenheimer, Stanley Kramer, Burt Lancaster and producer Edward Lewis. Many of the films produced by these men not only carried stories which shook the foundations of the newly reorganized deep state, but also strove to awaken the moral sensibilities of Americans whose complacency had permitted the creation of a new Pax Americana abroad, and racist police state within.

Kirk Douglas responded to this early on by forming his own studio called Bryna Productions which created the anti-war classic Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960).

Paths of Glory told the true story of the unjust execution of several French soldiers who refused to obey a suicide mission during WW1 and provided a strong statement against irrational wars but also arbitrary political power run amok.

Set in 72 BC, Spartacus told the true story of a Thracian slave who led a two year freedom struggle against Rome and spoke directly to the civil rights movement in America and fight against imperialism more broadly.

What gave Spartacus its strategic potency to end the Blacklist was due to the fact that it was written by the leading untouchable “commie-lover” of America… Dalton Trumbo. Kirk Douglas’ last minute decision to use Trumbo’s real name was more of a risk than most people realize, and in later years, Douglas described this period:

“The choices were hard. The consequences were painful and very real. During the blacklist, I had friends who went into exile when no one would hire them; actors who committed suicide in despair … I was threatened that using a Blacklisted writer for Spartacus — my friend Dalton Trumbo — would mark me as a ‘Commie-lover’ and end my career. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I am so proud of my fellow actors who use their public influence to speak out against injustice. At 98 years old, I have learned one lesson from history: It very often repeats itself. I hope that Trumbo, a fine film, will remind all of us that the Blacklist was a terrible time in our country, but that we must learn from it so that it will never happen again.”

When the newly-elected president John Kennedy and his brother Robert crossed anti-Communist picket lines to first attend the film, and then endorsed it loudly, the foundations of the Blacklist were destroyed and the edifice of 15 years of terror came crashing down.

Kennedy’s Murder and Trumbo’s Revenge

Kennedy’s death in 1963 sent America into a spiral of despair, drugs and insanity. Films like Frankenheimber’s Manchurian Candidate (1962), and 7 Days in May (1964) attempted to shed light on the deep state takeover of America but it was too late. During the 1960s, Douglas, Ed Lewis, Trumbo and Frankenheimber continued to work closely together on films like Lonely are the Brave, Town without Pity, the Fixer, Last Sunset, Seconds, The Train, Devil’s Disciple, Johny Got His Gun, the Horsemen and more. Sadly, the cultural rot had set in too deeply and nothing came as close to the artistry of the dense 1957-1964 period of creative resistance.

One little known film stands out quite a bit however, and since so little is known of this small masterpiece, a word must be said now.

Ten years after Kennedy’s murder, Trumbo, Edward Lewis, David Miller, Mark Lane and Garry Horrowitz created a film which could be called “Trumbo’s last stand”. This film was called Executive Action (1973) and starred Kirk Douglas’ long-time collaborator Burt Lancaster as a leading coordinator of the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.  Edward Lewis, who had also produced Spartacus with Douglas earlier, spearheaded this film which tells the story of a cabal of oligarchs who arrange the murder of John Kennedy using three teams of professional mercenaries (former CIA men fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco). This incredibly well-researched storyline infused fiction with powerful facts and was based upon the work of Mark Lane- a close friend of the Kennedys, NY State Attorney, and civil rights activist (the only legislator to be arrested as a Freedom rider fighting segregation).

During a powerful dialogue between James Farrington (Lancaster) and the leader of the cabal Robert Foster (played by Robert Ryan), the gauntlet is dropped, as the true reason is given for the need to Kennedy in chilling detail: Global Depopulation.

Here Farrington is told by Foster:

“The real problem is this James. In two decades there will be seven billion human beings on this planet. Most of them brown, yellow or black. All of them hungry. All of them determined to love. They’ll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America… Hence, Vietnam. An all-out effort there will give us control of south Asia for decades to come. And with proper planning, we can reduce the population to 550 million by the end of the century. I know… I’ve seen the data.”

James: “We sound rather like Gods reading the Doomsday book don’t we?”

Foster: “Well, someone has to do it. Not only will the nations affected be better off. But the techniques developed there can be used to reduce our own excess population: blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, poverty prone whites, and so forth”.

Although the film was pulled from most American theaters, it still stands as one of the most direct and chilling refutations of the lone-gunman narrative and is also the only film this author is aware of which showcases the deeper neo-Malthusian agenda underlying the murder of Kennedy which feared the optimistic vision he had threatened to create as outlined in my previous paper “Remembering JFK’s Vision for the Future that Should Have Been”.

The oligarchs attempting to play God in today’s world, just as their predecessors who oversaw JFK’s murder know that hunger, war and disease are not the natural state of humanity, but simply means of checking population growth.

It is worth keeping in mind that those same media and Hollywood outlets mourning Douglas’ passing are the perpetrators of this Malthusian legacy, and are deathly afraid of a renewal of JFK’s legacy under a revived space program to establish permanent human colonies on the Moon and Mars as well as establish cooperative relations with Russia and China which provides humanity its last, best chance to end the oligarchy’s pandemic of wars, disease and hunger forever.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

I’m old enough to vividly recall Joe McCarthy’s demagogic smear of prominent and other figures, baselessly slandering them, ruining careers — using mass deception to further his political ambitions.

I watched some of the 1954 Army/McCarthy witch-hunt hearings on national television, a deplorable spectacle that helped bring him down.

Targeted enemies were falsely called “card-carrying communists,” others smeared as “loyalty risks,” including hundreds of actors, authors, directors, and others on the so-called Hollywood blacklist.

Notably, McCarthy accused General/Secretary of State/Defense George Marshall of being soft on communism, calling it part of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man (sic),” adding:

Decisions on his watch “aided the communist drive for world domination (sic),” implying Marshall was a traitor.

Separately he said: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency (sic) is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions (sic) of those who had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer – the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government (and the private sector) we can give.”

Mass communist witch-hunt hysteria characterized his early-mid 1950s Senate years, eventually falling from grace by way overstepping.

McCarthyism represents the worst of politicized character assassinations by baseless accusations, allegations, and publicized witch-hunt investigations.

Former Harvard Law School dean Ervin Griswold called McCarthy “judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.”

Russiagate and its spinoff Ukrainegate are McCarthyism’s modern-day versions. The former should have been called Hillarygate, the latter Adam Schiffgate or Schiff/Bidengate.

There’s plenty about Trump to criticize, just cause to impeach and remove him from office for high crimes of war and against humanity alone.

The same goes for most of his predecessors, notably Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidents — Bush/Cheney, Obama/Biden, and the current incumbent for real high crimes, not fake ones.

In dealings with Ukraine’s president and his other foreign counterparts, Trump acted largely the same as virtually all his predecessors in the modern era — other than his style.

The unredacted transcript of his conversation with Zelensky included no blackmail threat, no quid pro quo, no conspiracy. Schiff’s false accusations reinvented reality, an exposed liar never to be believed or trusted.

Trump may be right, claiming Schiff wrote the so-called “whistleblower” complaint, or perhaps collaborated in its preparation — what I call baseless character assassination, not legitimate whistleblowing about government wrongdoing, especially in high places.

The NYT reported that Schiff knew about the so-called “whistleblower” complaint weeks in advance. It’s based on hearsay, not direct knowledge of the Trump/Ukrainian president Zelensky’s phone conversation in question.

Was Schiff directly involved in the complaint’s preparation? GOP spokeswoman Elizabeth Harrington called him a “(d)isgraced liar,” his anti-Trump campaign a “total CON JOB,” adding:

“(P)eople should take CIA coup attempts very seriously!”

The late William Blum published a “master list” of successful and unsuccessful CIA attempts to topple foreign governments in the post-WW II era through 2014.

Scores of instances were listed worldwide, replacing Iran’s democratically elected government with US-installed fascist tyranny in 1953 the first successful coup with many more to follow.

Russiagate crumbled under the weight of its misinformation, disinformation, and Big Lies — despite the long ago debunked false accusation of Russian US election meddling refusing to die.

Schiffgate/Bidengate likely is heading for the same fate, enormous damage likely while it remains active.
Who’ll hold Schiff, Biden, Pelosi, other Dem co-conspirators, and their press agent media accountable for politicized mass deception/character assassination?

Notably, who’ll hold Joe Biden accountable for pressuring US-installed Ukrainian president Poroshenko to fire his regime’s prosecutor general Viktor Shokin — for investigating his son Hunter’s dubious involvement as a highly-paid figurehead board member of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, with ties to notorious Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky.

In a sworn statement ignored by US establishment media, Shorkin accused Biden of “directly manipulat(ing) the political leadership of Ukraine on false pretexts…”

Biden publicly admitted blackmailing Ukraine’s government in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations, saying:

“If the prosecutor general is not fired, you’re not getting the money” — referring to a US billion dollar loan guarantee for Kiev.

Biden added: “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time (sic).”

His blackmail threat got the probe of son Hunter’s involvement with Bursima’s dubious dealings dropped.

Trump’s team has lots of ammunition to turn allegations directed at him against his accusers and make them stick — enough perhaps to undermine Biden’s presidential aspirations and take down Schiff at the same time.

stephenlendman.org

Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity. Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid.

Putin later added that he knew “absolutely nothing” about Russian contacts with Trump campaign officials. “They can do what they want, looking for some sensation. But there are no sensations.”

Numerous U.S. intelligence agencies have said otherwise. Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, responded to Trump’s remarks by declaring: “The president was given clear and indisputable evidence that Russia interfered in the election.”

As we’ll see below, there isn’t too much of the “clear and indisputable” stuff. And this of course is the same James Clapper who made an admittedly false statement to Congress in March 2013, when he responded, “No, sir” and “not wittingly” to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans. Lies don’t usually come in any size larger than that.

Virtually every member of Congress who has publicly stated a position on the issue has criticized Russia for interfering in the 2016 American presidential election. And it would be very difficult to find a member of the mainstream media who has questioned this thesis.

What is the poor consumer of news to make of these gross contradictions? Here are some things to keep in mind:

How do we know that the tweets and advertisements “sent by Russians” -– those presented as attempts to sway the vote – were actually sent by Russians? The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), composed of National Security Agency and CIA veterans, recently declared that the CIA knows how to disguise the origin of emails and tweets. The Washington Post has as well reported that Twitter “makes it easy for users to hide their true identities.” [Washington Post, Oct. 10, 2017]

Russians! Russians! Russians!

Even if these communications were actually sent from Russia, how do we know that they came from the Russian government, and not from any of the other 144.3 million residents of Russia?

On top of all this is the complete absence of even the charge, much less with any supporting evidence, of Russian interference in the actual voting or counting of votes.

After his remark suggesting he believed Putin’s assertion that there had been no Russian meddling in the election, Trump – of course, as usual – attempted to backtrack and distance himself from his words after drawing criticism at home; while James Clapper declared: “The fact the president of the United States would take Putin at his word over that of the intelligence community is quite simply unconscionable.” [Reuters, Nov. 12, 2017]

Given Clapper’s large-size lie referred to above, can Trump be faulted for being skeptical of the intelligence community’s Holy Writ? Purposeful lies of the intelligence community during the first Cold War were legendary, many hailed as brilliant tactics when later revealed. The CIA, for example, had phony articles and editorials planted in foreign newspapers (real Fake News), made sex films of target subjects caught in flagrante delicto who had been lured to Agency safe houses by female agents, had Communist embassy personnel expelled because of phony CIA documents, and much more.

The Post recently published an article entitled “How did Russian trolls get into your Facebook feed? Silicon Valley made it easy.” In the midst of this “exposé,” The Post stated: “There’s no way to tell if you personally saw a Russian post or tweet.” [Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2017]

A Case or Not?

So… Do the Cold Warriors have a case to make or do they not? Or do they just want us to remember that the Russkis are bad? So it goes.

An organization in Czechoslovakia with the self-appointed name of European Values has produced a lengthy report entitled “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in the West: An Overview of RT’s Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact.” It includes a long list of people who have appeared on the Russian-owned TV station RT (formerly Russia Today), which can be seen in the U.S., the U.K. and other countries. Those who’ve been guests on RT are the “idiots” useful to Moscow. (The list is not complete. I’ve been on RT about five times, but I’m not listed. Where is my Idiot Badge?)

RT’s YouTube channel has more than two million followers and claims to be the “most-watched news network” on the video site. Its Facebook page has more than 4 million likes and followers. Can this explain why the powers-that-be forget about a thing called freedom-of-speech and treat the station like an enemy? The U.S. government recently forced RT America to register as a foreign agent and has cut off the station’s Congressional press credentials.

The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”

Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being “in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.”

So let’s see what other brilliance the New Cold War brings us… Ah yes, another headline in the Post(Nov. 18, 2017): “British alarm rising over possible Russian meddling in Brexit.” Of course, why else would the British people have voted to leave the European Union? But wait a moment, again, one of the British researchers behind the report “said that the accounts they analyzed – which claimed Russian as their language when they were set up but tweeted in English – posted a mixture of pro-‘leave’ and pro-‘remain’ messages regarding Brexit. Commentators have said that the goal may simply have been to sow discord and division in society.”

Was there ever a time when the Post would have been embarrassed to be so openly, amateurishly biased about Russia? Perhaps during the few years between the two Cold Wars.

In case you don’t remember how stupid Cold War Number One was…

• 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of other lists of “communists,” published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments.

• Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet, “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A.” This included information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean: ?Q: What would happen to my insurance?? A: It would go to the Communists.? Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?? A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.

• 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.

• As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: “Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new [communist] regime.” One person wrote to Kerr: “I am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the street as being ‘perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.’ Or what would you think of a physician who tells you to take ‘perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonsful of a remedy’?”

• Throughout the cold war, traffic in phony Lenin quotes was brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years. Here’s S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: “Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war. Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists. ?“First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.” This Lenin “quotation” had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in 1962. This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress and the United States Information Agency failed to find its origin.

• A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States. Here’s a small sample:? Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in 1953: “We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City.”? Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1964, interviewed in the American Legion Magazine: Interviewer: “I’ve been told that the communists are trying to flood our country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is that true?”? Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it’s true. There’s a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China… There’s no question that in that particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese. It should be apparent that if you could addict a population you would degrade a nation’s moral fiber.”? Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist, 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin – marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin – are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country. Several Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”? We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine America’s spirit was fluoridation of the water.

• Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions of his anti-communist thriller mysteries. Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in “One Lonely Night,” boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets. After a night of carnage, the triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. … They were Commies. … Pretty soon what’s left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won’t be worth mentioning and I’m glad because I had a part in the killing. God, but it was fun!”

• 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) because it was tainted with “atheism and communism,” and was “subversive” because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the U.S. Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship.” There was also opposition to UNESCO’s association with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.

• 1955: A U.S. Army 6-page pamphlet, “How to Spot a Communist,” informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and peace. Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for such give-away terms as “chauvinism,” “book-burning,” “colonialism,” “demagogy,” “witch hunt,” “reactionary,” “progressive,” and “exploitation.” Another “distinguishing mark” of “Communist language” was a “preference for long sentences.” After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.

• 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of my innocent youth) observed on the radio that the lack of interest in “big time” football at New York University, City College of New York, Chicago, and Harvard “is due to the widespread acceptance of Communism at the universities.”

• 1960: U.S. General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a first strike by the U.S.: “The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!” The response from one of those present was: “Well, you’d better make sure that they’re a man and a woman.”

• 1966: The Boys Club of America is of course wholesome and patriotic. Imagine their horror when they were confused with the Dubois Clubs. (W.E.B. Du Bois had been a very prominent civil rights activist.) When the Justice Department required the DuBois Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew what to do. They called up the Boys Club to announce that they would no longer contribute any money, or to threaten violence against them; and sure enough an explosion damaged the national headquarters of the youth group in San Francisco. Then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the Boys Club, declared: “This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity. The ‘DuBois Clubs’ are not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens.”

• 1966: “Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music, The Communist Master Music Plan,” by David A. Noebel, published by Christian Crusade Publications, (expanded version of 1965 pamphlet: “Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles”). Some chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare … Nature of Red Record Companies … Destructive Nature of Beatle Music … Communist Subversion of Folk Music … Folk Music and the Negro Revolution … Folk Music and the College Revolution

• 1968: William Calley, U.S. Army Lieutenant, charged with overseeing the massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai in 1968, said some years later: “In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to kill ideology carried by – I don’t know – pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of old people, men, women, children, babies.”

• 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth’s protective ozone layer was being damaged by synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. The manufacturers and users of CFCs were not happy. They made life difficult for the lead scientist. The president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of CFCs was “orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB.”

• 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra anti-communist John Birch Society: Five hours each day of lectures on communism, Americanism and “The Conspiracy”; campers learned that the Soviet government had created a famine and spread a virus to kill a large number of citizens and make the rest of them more manageable; the famine led starving adults to eat their children; communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children’s ears, piercing their eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists; the theme is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you can’t find a dictionary now that isn’t under communist influence; the communists are also taking over the Bibles.

• The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan – the so-called “yellow rain” – and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The “yellow rain,” it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.

• 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army, General John Crosby stated that the Army doesn’t care about soldiers’ social lives – “The basic purpose of the United States Army is to kill Russians,” he said.

• 1983: The U.S. invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban ambassador is damaged and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is written “AA,” symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division; beside it the message: “Eat shit, commie faggot.” … “I want to fuck communism out of this little island,” says a marine, “and fuck it right back to Moscow.”

• 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast, President Reagan spoke these words into the microphone: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia, forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” His words were picked up by at least two radio networks.

• 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked about the differences he saw between the U.S. and Russia, the President replied: “I’m no linguist, but I’ve been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” (The word is “svoboda.”)

• 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized Rambo-like American films as an expression of “anti-Russian phobia even more pathological than in the days of McCarthyism.” Russian filmmaker Stanislav Rostofsky claimed that on one visit to an American school “a young girl trembled with fury when she heard I was from the Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians.”

• 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety in the 1950s as an assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly of AIDS. Cohn, though homosexual, had denied that he was and had denounced such rumors as communist smears.

• 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow for “spying” and held in custody for two weeks, New York Mayor Edward Koch sent a group of 10 visiting Soviet students storming out of City Hall in fury. “The Soviet government is the pits,” said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from 10 to 18 years. One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared: “I don’t want to stay in this house. I want to go to the bus and go far away from this place. The mayor is very rude. We never had a worse welcome anywhere.” As matters turned out, it appeared that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his newsgathering.

• 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in Tiananmen Square in June, the U.S. news media was replete with reports that the governments of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their support of the Chinese leadership. Said the Wall Street Journal: “Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted the only countries in the world to approve the Chinese Communists’ slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square.” But it was all someone’s fabrication; no such support had been expressed by any of the three governments. At that time, as now, there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA which could manipulate major Western media in such a manner. [Sources for almost all of this section can be found in William Blum, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (2005), chapter 12; or the author can be queried at bblum6@aol.com].

NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of anti-communism were not those discussed above. The worst consequences, the ultra-criminal consequences, were the abominable death, destruction, and violation of human rights that we know under various names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.

consortiumnews.com

Humor is reason gone mad. (Groucho Marx)

Every now and again, we hear about a "new McCarthyism". Usually it's the alternative media like Truthdig or Consortium News or left-wing outlets because mainstream outlets are so sunk in Trumpophobia that they have forgotten what the expression means. It's not Trump who's the new McCarthy (Trumpism Is the New McCarthyism or Is Donald Trump The New Joe McCarthy?) it is they: Is Trump Putin’s Puppet?, Trump Is Making the Case That He’s Putin’s Puppet; calling other people Moscow puppets is precisely what McCarthy did. And today's Russhysteria has spread outside the USA: France to Probe Possible Russian Influence on Yellow Vest Riots; Why Putin Is Meddling in Britain’s Brexit Vote; Spain: 'Misinformation' on Catalonia referendum came from Russia. Endless torrents of delirium, nothing too absurd: Russia could freeze us to death!, Russian cricket agents, 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin? The Russophobes find Moscow's influence everywhere: children’s' cartoons, fishsticks, Pokemon. People who like to imagine that they're taken seriously suggest the Russians are threatened by our "quality".

But not so threatened, it appears, by our mental qualities.

Joseph McCarthy, making much of (and perhaps improving upon) his war record, was elected a US Senator in 1946. After three years in which he attracted little attention, he rose to national prominence with a speech in February 1950 in which he claimed to have a list of Communist Party members active in the US State Department. There is still debate today about the precise numbers he claimed and to what degree he was used by other actors. But he realised he was on to a good thing (he secured re-election in 1952) and kept "revealing" communists in the government and elsewhere. Televised hearings showed his vituperative and erratic nature; the Senate censured him in 1954 and he faded away. "McCarthyism" has become a doubleplusungood swearword so stripped of meaning that it can be shaped into mud to be thrown at Trump.

But – and a very big but – whatever McCarthy's motivation or cynicism, however unpleasant, shifty and unshaven he looked on TV, there was a reality behind what he was saying.

• ITEM. August 1945. Elizabeth Bentley approaches the FBI and eventually reveals the spying activities of the CPUSA.

• ITEM. September 1945. Igor Guzenko defects in Ottawa, revealing the extent of spying on its allies by the USSR. Thanks to his information Alan Nunn May, part of the British contribution to the atomic bomb project, is arrested March 1946. A number of Canadians are arrested – including the MP Fred Rose.

• ITEM. August 1948. Whittaker Chambers, a CPUSA member disgusted by the Hitler-Stalin pact, in testimony to HUAC, names Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official, as a CPUSA agent.

• ITEM. January 1950. Klaus Fuchs, an important player in the atomic bomb project, admits to spying for the USSR. His confession leads to Harry Gold (arrested May, 1950) which leads to David Greenglass (arrested June 1950), which leads to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (arrested in June and August 1950). The Manhattan Project was well infiltrated by Soviet agents.

• ITEM. February 1950. McCarthy's speech.

• ITEM. Beginning in summer 1951 with the defection of Burgess and Maclean and only ending with the discovery of the last member in 1979, the revelation of extensive penetration by the Soviets of British intelligence – the Cambridge Five – caused continuing investigations and suspicions which tied up the CIA and SIS for years.

In conclusion, whatever you think of the man himself, "McCarthyism" was based on reality: there was extensive Soviet penetration in the USA and elsewhere.

+ + +

And today? The equivalent of McCarthy's speech are the Clinton campaign's excuses for losing.

We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election. (Hillary Clinton, 19 October 2016.)

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered, quoted here.)

After the story had been happily re-typed by the complaisant media, the "intelligence community" weighed in with two fatuous "intelligence assessments":

ITEM. The DHS/FBI report of 29 December 2016 carried this stunning disclaimer:

This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.

ITEM. The DNI report of 6 January 2017 crazily devoted nearly half its space to a four-year old rant about RT. But the real clue that the report was nonsense was its equally stunning disclaimer:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

In other words, DHS told us to ignore its report and the one agency in the US intelligence structure that would actually know who hacked what refused to sign its name to it.

And not "all 17", only three. Then – the final nail – not really the three but only "hand-picked" people from them. Eventually, the NYT issued a correction. ("Correction" being presstitute-speak for "you caught us".)

The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community. (New York Times correction, 29 June 2017)

And that was the beginning of the story that has consumed so much effort, done so much damage, metastasised so far and continues today. No Elizabeth Bentley, no atomic spies, no Venona. Only 1) an excuse for losing, 2) "hand-picked" writers, 3) forced plea deals and 4) the pompous indictment of a Russian click bait farm.

The fons et origo of today's Russhysteria, I am convinced, was a conspiracy in the security organs to derail Trump's candidacy and when that failed, to overthrow him. Little by little that story is dribbling out:

Congressional testimony backs up former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s account that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was talking to high-level officials about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office.

One can only hope that the conspiracy will finally be so revealed and so proven and so obvious that even the consumers of CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, the NYT and the rest will understand what was really going on. Then, maybe, we can hope to edge away from the highly dangerous anti-Russia hysteria.

McCarthyism was based on reality, today's recurrence is not. A significant difference indeed.

+ + +

Lavrenti Beria is reputed to have said "give me the man, and I will give you the crime". And sleep depravation and teeth and blood on the floor delivered the confession. How little he understood his craft. Maria Butina, an innocent if naïve Russian girl who liked the Second Amendment, arrested, stuck in solitary, on suicide watch (sleep deprivation – Beria knew about that), innumerable charges, after months, makes a plea deal. Michael Flynn, innumerable charges, savings burnt up, makes a plea deal. Paul Manafort, early morning SWAT attack (Beria recognises that), innumerable charges, makes a plea deal. Cohen, Papadopoulos and so on. That's the American justice system – not Stalin's "beat, beat and beat again" – just innumerable charges, bankruptcy by lawyers' fees, endless interrogations, SWAT raids. Then the plea deal. Beria was an amateur.

So the Marx brothers are both wrong: the second time it's a much more dangerous tragedy and, when you actually see it in reality, reason gone mad isn't actually very funny.

Maria Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in solitary confinement in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion with Torshin and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. It is unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a “flight risk,” likely to try to flee the US and return home. It is to be presumed that she is being pressured to identify others involved in her alleged scheme to overthrow American democracy through NRA membership.

Indeed, in any event, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would consider the NRA to be a legitimate intelligence target. It only flexes its admitted powerful legislative muscles over issues relating to gun ownership, not regarding policy on Russia. In short, Butina and by extension Torshin appear to have done nothing wrong. Both are energetic advocates for their country and guns rights, which they appear to believe in, and Butina’s aggressive networking has broken no law except not registering, which in itself assumes that she is a Russian government agent, something that has not been demonstrated. To put the shoe on the other foot, will every American who now travels to Russia and engages in political conversations with local people be suspected of acting as an agent of the US government? Once you open the door, it swings both ways.

One might dismiss the entire Affair Butina as little more than a reflection of the anti-Russia hysteria that has been sweeping the United States since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, but that would be unfair to those remaining honest FBI agents who may have investigated Butina and Torshin and come up with what they believed to be a plausible case for an indictment. There were possibly suspicious money transfers as well as email intercepts that might be interpreted as incriminating.

But two important elements are clearly missing. The first is motive. Did the Kremlin seriously believe that it could get anything substantial out of having a gun totin’ attractive young Russian woman as a life member in the NRA? What did the presumed puppet masters in Moscow expect to obtain apart from the sorts of group photos including Butina that one gets while posing with politicians at the annual NRA convention? Sure, the photo might even evolve into a cup of coffee together, but what is the end game?

Second is the lack of any of the hallmarks of an intelligence operation, which is referred to in the business as tradecraft. Spies meet secretly or at least outside the public eye with prospective agents whereas Maria operated completely in the open and she made no effort to conceal her love for her country and her desire that Washington and Moscow normalize relations. Spies also communicate securely, which means that they use encrypted systems or various cut-outs, i.e. mis-directions, when maintaining contact with those who are running them. Again, Maria did none of that, which is why the FBI has her emails. Also spies work under what is referred to as an “operating directive” in CIA-speak where they have very specific information that they seek to obtain from their contacts. There is no indication that Maria Butina in any way sought classified information or intelligence that would relate either to the security of the United States or to America’s political system. And finally, Maria made no attempt to recruit anyone and turn them into an actual controlled Russian agent, which is what spies eventually seek to do.

It has come down to this: if you are a Russian and you are caught talking to anyone in any way influential, there is potentially hell to pay because the FBI will be watching you. You are automatically assumed to be part of a conspiracy. Once “evidence” is collected, you will be indicted and sent to prison, mostly to send a message to Moscow. It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union’s judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States.

It infests America like a malignant tumor, exceeding the worst of the post-WW I “Red Scare” and its repeat following WW II.

Beginning in 1938, House Un-American Activities Committee witch-hunt hearings into alleged disloyalty and subversive activities became headline news.

Starting in the late 1960s, more of the same followed by the renamed House Committee on Internal Security.

Notorious McCarthyism in the 1950s was a demagogic smear campaign against prominent figures, slandering them, ruining careers, even accusing General George Marshall of being “soft on communism.”

Notable Hollywood figures were blacklisted. McCarthyism was baseless slander, unscrupulous fear-mongering, and political lynchings.

Harvard Law School dean Ervin Griswold once called McCarthy “judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.”

Modern-day Russophobia includes a second Cold War, Russia under Vladimir Putin again considered the “evil empire,” relentless Washington and media Russian bashing, along with endless congressional and special counsel witch-hunt investigations suggesting the worst, revealing nothing.

Russia expert Stephen Cohen said “(w)e’re in the most dangerous confrontation with Russia since the Cuban missile crisis.”

He underestimated the threat. It’s much worse now than then. Jack Kennedy explained he “never had the slightest intention of” attacking or invading Cuba.”

Obama was no Jack Kennedy. Nor is Trump, his administration and Congress infested with neocons, Democrats as ruthlessly dangerous as Republicans.

The late political theorist Sheldon Wolin once called undemocratic Dems the “inauthentic opposition,” as infested with neoliberal Russophobic neocons as the Republican party.

Virtually everyone in Washington is part of the anti-Russia crowd, Bernie Sanders among them, a progressive in name only.

During his presidential campaign, he sounded like a modern-day Joe McCarthy, shamefully claiming “the evidence is overwhelming” that Russia “help(ed) elect the candidate of their choice, Mr. Trump, to undermine in a significant way American democracy.”

In a YouTube video, he repeated the Big Lie, saying “the US intelligence community has concluded that Russia played an active role in the 2016 election with the goals of electing Donald Trump as president.”

“The Trump campaign had repeated contacts with the senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

The phony “dossier” showed Russian agents able to “blackmail” the White House. Like most others in Congress, Sanders is a cold and hot warrior, a self-serving con man, supporting wealth, power and privilege like the rest of Washington’s political establishment, pretending otherwise.

Feelthebern.org states:

“Bernie supports enforcing economic sanctions and international pressure as an alternative to any direct military confrontation when dealing with Russia.”

“To temper Russian aggression, we must freeze Russian government assets all over the world, and encourage international corporations with huge investments in Russia to divest from that nation’s increasingly hostile political aims.”

“The United States must collaborate to create a unified stance with our international allies in order to effectively address Russian aggression.”

“(T)he United States should isolate Putin politically and economically…The entire world has got to stand up to Putin.”

Shocking stuff, exposing the real Bernie Sanders, not the persona he publicly displays!

Former CIA counterintelligence official/whistleblower John Kiriakou was invited to participate in a European Parliament panel – then removed at the last moment because panelist Winnie Wong, co-founder of People for Bernie, refused to appear with him, Kiriakou saying:

“(S)he didn’t want the appearance of Bernie Sanders appearing to endorse the Russian media.”

Kiriakou hosts a Sputnik News radio show called Loud & Clear, why she objected, supporting Sanders’ Russophobia.

Kiriakou remarked saying “American politics rear(ed) its ugly head in Brussels.” No problems arose when he appeared on another panel with Cuba’s EU ambassador.

It’s the “red scare all over again,” Kiriakou explained. Anything remotely connected to Russia is toxic. Failing to be Russophobic in Washington is a likely career-ender, much like what happens to Israeli critics.

Intense anti-Russian sentiment in America risks the unthinkable – possible catastrophic nuclear war, humanity’s survival at stake.

stephenlendman.org