By Jonathan COOK

Back in the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents risked being locked up – but not, officially at least, on the grounds that they had committed a political crime. In the Soviet regime’s imagination, treason and mental illness were often two sides of the same coin.

Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia of the phenomenon:

The KGB [the Soviet secret police] routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing public trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.

The weaponization of mental illness by the Soviet Union against internal critics has been described as “punitive psychiatry.”

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian human rights activist who spent many years confined to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, wrote “A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters,” together with a Ukrainian psychiatrist, Semyon Gluzman. The pair observed: “The Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of dissent … as a psychiatric problem.”

The medicalization of dissent was not unique to the Soviet Union, of course. It is a feature of authoritarian and repressive states. An ideological consensus is cultivated in the population by portraying opponents as traitors whose behavior is proof of a mental disturbance or insanity.

Publicizing dissent, and the reasons for it, through criminal trials risks dangerously challenging dominant social assumptions inculcated by propaganda. Instead, the dissenter can quietly be detained for his or her own good without their political ideology getting an airing.

Medicalizing dissent

This is why the growing trend in the West’s supposedly free and open societies towards conflating dissent with treason – and medicalizing its causes – should concern us. It is likely to be a barometer of how authoritarian our liberal democracies are rapidly becoming.

This has not happened overnight. It has been a gradual process that accelerated with the trauma for liberals of discovering that the political system they so revered was capable of spawning a president like Donald Trump. How could the most evolved of the Western democracies – which had defeated the evil Soviet empire ideologically, economically, and militarily – end up electing such a wretch for a leader?

Trump supporters attend a rally in Washington before marching on the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. John Minchillo | AP

The proper conclusion to draw was that Trump was a symptom of an entirely dysfunctional, corrupt Western political system – one with which liberals had closely identified even when it was being led by the right. (U.S. politics had thrown up plenty of other clearly lamentable presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but none exhibited the same degree of vulgarity and vanity that so troubled liberals.)

It should have been a moment for the scales to fall from their eyes. But that would have meant questioning everything liberals held dearest. So Instead they found other reasons to explain the rise of President Trump.

He had to be treated as an aberration, not the exemplar of a system that had long served people very much like Trump: whether it was the billionaire-owned media, the moneyed donors that had captured both political parties, or the corporate lobbies that deprived the public of proper health care and channeled public wealth into endless, devastating wars that enriched a narrow elite.

It’s disturbing how many people are peddling the idea that Nato is a ‘defensive alliance’. It *claims* to be defensive. Actually, Nato is a central pillar of the highly lucrative war industries. This may help clarify: https://t.co/SL2MA1ASMh

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 26, 2022

What was needed urgently was a theory that would leave the status quo – and its claim to moral superiority – untouched.

The neatest candidate, for those committed to liberalism – or its modern incarnation as neoliberalism – was the idea that Western democracies had become so open, free, fair, and honest that they had developed an inherent vulnerability – an Achilles’ heel – that could be easily exploited by malicious actors. According to this reasoning, liberal democracy was uniquely susceptible to sabotage.

Fake news ‘threat’

From 2016 onwards, the corporate media was awash with warnings that Trump was the product of dangerous new trends: populism, fake news, Russian disinformation, and online bots. These quickly became shorthand for the same supposed phenomenon.

Paradoxically, these “threats” derived from the rapid technological development of unique forms of popular engagement and more democratic media. Social media leveled the media playing field for the very first time, challenging the traditional top-down model in which state and corporate media – the latter owned and controlled by a fabulously wealthy elite – reserved for themselves an exclusive right to decide what counted as news and how news events should be interpreted and assessed.

There was indeed a problem with fake news on social media, even if it paled in comparison to the much more influential and damaging fake news on corporate media. But the real cause of the proliferation of fake news and wild conspiracies on these platforms could not be genuinely addressed by the corporate elites running our societies – and for good reason.

What it makes me think is: this guy, Alastair Campbell, who helped destroy Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, in a ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign that looked just like this but for real, should be in the dock at the Hague for war crimes https://t.co/7CaRwbeSPQ

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 13, 2022

Fake news, like genuine news, thrives in the more democratic environment of social media only because political and media elites have kept so much real information – information that might make them look less virtuous – under wraps. It is the tight secrecy of Western democracies that has encouraged such variety of news and views, informed and uninformed alike, to proliferate.

Social media “conspiracy theories” are not evidence of how a section of the public has fallen under the malign influence of “Russian disinformation.” Rather they are a sign of how a growing number of Westerners have become so deeply distrustful of their elites and what they are concealing that they are ready to believe almost anything about their depravity, however incredible.

‘Russiagate’ born

There were two other, self-interested reasons for the billionaires and the journalists who work for them to vilify users of social media, painting them as either victims of, or colluders in, “Russian disinformation.”

First, social media made it possible for the first time to illuminate the inherent weaknesses of the traditional media’s reporting and analyses. Users could highlight what was being ignored or misrepresented, and the glaring double standards at play. Voices that had been disregarded or actively silenced suddenly had visibility.

My latest: If we seek peace, we need the western media held to account for its mindless jingoism, exaggerations, credulity, double standards and deceptions. But who is going to act as a watchdog on the supposed watchdog of the Fourth Estate? https://t.co/RrDGDCstq3

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 4, 2022

And second, those offering a mode of critical thinking that has always been impermissible in the corporate media were positioned to question the foundations of the political and economic systems on which the billionaires – and those they employed – depended for their power and privilege.

The foundations of a political system with which liberals deeply identified were being shaken. As a result, a whole industry sprang up to insulate them from the terrifying thought that maybe Trump both personified, and represented a reaction to, something already unwholesome about the United States and its values.

My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism’s perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020

And so “Russiagate” was born: the idea that Trump’s electoral success had occurred – could only have occurred – because the U.S. system had been sabotaged from outside and within. Trump must have colluded with the Kremlin to subvert U.S. democracy.

Despite years of investigations, no evidence was ever adduced to support that claim, but nonetheless, it soon had a vise-like hold on the imagination of U.S. liberals.

The subtext was that only those with feeble minds, or perverse and treasonous ideological impulses, could fail to understand that the liberal candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, was far better.

‘Basket of deplorables’

But Trump also provided the perfect opportunity for liberals to start subtly medicalizing their opponents – whether on the left or right. Trump’s narcissism, bordering on personality disorder, was hard to ignore. Those who supported him were therefore readily discredited as a “basket of deplorables” – Clinton’s infamous term for them. (Clinton’s language offered a subliminal message that they were “basket cases” too).

Of course, support for Trump was not the only symptom of the breakdown of the liberal – and neoliberal – order. That consensus was also challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders. He was supposedly a product of fake news and Russian disinformation too. His supporters were dismissed as “Bernie Bros”: a doubly false characterization that they were overwhelmingly male and peddlers of toxic masculinity.

Over in the U.K., similar processes were underway. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was disappeared from view (first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, then in Belmarsh high-security prison) for revealing war crimes committed by the West’s military-industrial complex – or, as liberals preferred to call it, the “defense industry.”

Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, April 11, 2019. Victoria Jones | PA via AP

The liberal Guardian exemplified the shift from at first vilifying Assange as a rapist (also, an evidence-free accusation) to portraying him as mentally disturbed: its journalists led the way in spreading fake news that he abused his cat and smeared feces over the walls of what amounted to his cell in the embassy.

The British and U.S. security services knew that by the time they engineered Assange’s seizure from the embassy in 2019, he would fit perfectly the image of the crazed dissident the Guardian had so meticulously crafted. Three months earlier, the CIA had gotten embassy staff to confiscate Assange’s shaving equipment. He was carried out, bearded, disheveled, and pale from lack of sunlight, looking like a mad hermit from Monty Python’s “Life Of Brian.” Or a “demented looking gnome,” as long-time Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore called him.

The actual U.S. charge against Assange, largely overlooked in all the messaging from liberal media like The Guardian, was the true insanity. He was accused of “espionage” for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes – even though he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, had done none of his work in the U.S., and had not participated in any act, even had he been a U.S. citizen working in the U.S., that could realistically be characterized as spying.

My latest: It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Julian Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states – the US and UK – that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want concealed https://t.co/M7WTKq0ZXf

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 17, 2021

Digital gulag

It didn’t end there. Britain had its own version of Bernie Sanders, a left-wing insurgency candidate. But unlike Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn won the contest to become Labour Party leader, riding a wave of support from party members that shocked and incensed the Blairite centrists that had long controlled the party. Naturally, Corbyn’s success also infuriated the corporate media.

He was initially portrayed as a traitor. But soon liberal media like The Guardian were focusing on an entirely concocted charge that Corbyn was either a confirmed antisemite or wilfully indulged a strong antisemitic tendency within the party.

My latest: Corbyn’s election to lead the Labour party didn’t overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019

These confected allegations rarely operated at the political level. The subtext once again was that an enemy of the neoliberal order was unhinged, a man in the grip of irrational prejudice and demons he was incapable of slaying.

Corbyn’s supporters weren’t literally being wheeled off to the psychiatrist’s couch – not quite – but the implication was clear: those who voted or campaigned for him, like those who stood by Assange and his right not to be jailed for telling the truth, were a menace to wider society. They needed to be silenced, put in a digital gulag – enforced through algorithmic changes – as a first stage of containment.

They were to be treated as one would deal with a dangerous illness, rather than a popular movement driven by a political ideology or political grievances.

In an initial move to cure society, Trump was hounded off social media platforms even while he was president. Meanwhile, damaging stories that might question the virtue of his liberal challenger, Joe Biden, in the 2020 election were erased from public consciousness through coordination by the traditional and new corporate media.

But the question remained: was digital containment enough?

Pandemic debates

One of the advantages of having power – especially when it is power over narratives – is that the perception of any real-world event can be shaped in ways that serve the interests of power.

That meant that the arrival at the tail end of the Trump presidency of a global pandemic – a cataclysmic moment with biblical overtones – could be used as yet another lens for liberals to interpret the world, and in terms that posited anyone like them as virtuous and everyone else as dangerous or mentally unsound.

The reality was that COVID offered an ideal opportunity to question some of the most cherished tenets of a neoliberal orthodoxy that had had absolute dominion over Westerners’ lives for more than four decades.

• Was the planet primarily an economic asset to be endlessly exploited?
• Did the individual have more inherent value than the collective?
• Should the value of relationships, and virtue, be measured chiefly in economic terms?
• Ought public health to be at the mercy of profit-driven corporations, from pharmaceutical to food companies?

My latest: The response of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to the coronavirus crisis has shed a troubling light on the twisted priorities long cultivated in our societies https://t.co/YNDYawpBbY

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 17, 2020

None of these questions – pivotal as they are to our survival as a species – came to the fore during the pandemic, the moment when they had the most obvious relevance and topicality. The corporate media made sure to steer the national debate away from questions so incompatible with a world designed by and for billionaires.

Instead, the problem was quickly reduced to a simpler one: Why were a minority of the population not getting themselves or their children vaccinated? What could be done to deal with this irresponsible section of the population?

Almost immediately this became the obsessive focus of media and popular attention. Proof of vaccination became the only legitimate marker to distinguish between the virtuous and disease-free (the clean), and the selfish and disease-carriers (the unclean).

From the outset, there were lots of problems with this distinction. Scientific evidence, even if it was publicly downplayed, indicated that those who had already caught COVID enjoyed a natural immunity that offered stronger protection than that from vaccination. (Notably, until COVID, natural immunity had always been considered the gold standard of immunity.)

The vaccines, it quickly became clear too, had very short-lived efficacy. They offered personal protection against more severe illness, but they did little to stop the communal spread of the disease, as Omicron’s current rampage through heavily vaccinated populations should underscore.

It could not be stated publicly at the time, but virtue was not the main reason to take the vaccine. Selfishness was.

Fortunately for the health of our public conversation, if nothing else, the arrival of Omicron shattered the liberal consensus that passports and social shunning, if not enforced isolation, were the solutions to what were until then being dismissively labeled the “anti-vaxxers” – those depraved individuals who had failed to take three or more shots of the vaccine, whatever their reasons.

Ukraine survey

It would be a grave mistake to imagine that we are anywhere near the end of this trajectory, just because Trump is gone (for now) and the COVID pandemic looks nearly over.

The framework for our current “debates” has been fixed by the billionaires and the liberals who are their willing accomplices. Political arguments have been subsumed by liberal claims to mental clarity and moral superiority. The implication is that the mentally infirm, those susceptible to the influence campaigns of the enemy, need to be dealt with to stop liberal democracy from being subverted.

As an example of the way this is starting to play out in more overtly Soviet-style terms, consider this recent thread on social media by a New York academic who has quickly gained half a million followers on Twitter by pandering to liberals still in shock at Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

Caroline Orr Bueno is described as “a behavioral scientist who researches social media manipulation, online information warfare, and far-right extremism” – ascribing almost all of it, predictably, to “Russian disinformation.”

In a recent interview, she observed that she had “moderated” her tone on Twitter as her influence has grown:

Because right now so much of what is wrong on the internet is super divisive. It’s hype, and I find that to be not helpful and not productive, and it doesn’t really lead to anywhere good. So I try not to contribute to that cycle.”

Contradicting herself moments later in the same interview, Orr Bueno notes of her critics:

I get a lot of attempts to discredit me or my work through various disinformation campaigns, often emanating from people and organizations with direct links to the Russian government.”

So what comes next can presumably be discounted as “Russian disinformation.”

Orr Bueno highlights a survey whose methodology is itself troubling. A poll of Canadians on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine breaks down the responses on the basis not only of age and gender but whether the respondent has been vaccinated or not. This is now a relevant category for assessing the public’s views, it seems.

The headline Orr Bueno wants to highlight as evidence of a mental infirmity among the unvaccinated is that 26% of them reportedly support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, compared to just 2% of those vaccinated with three shots.

You know how I keep talking about how anti-vaccine attitudes are really a proxy for underlying moral/ideological values? And how I kept warning that bad actors are using vaccines to shift attitudes around seemingly unrelated issues like foreign policy?

So, about that… https://t.co/VMWkNADnIA

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) March 21, 2022

Her conclusion, dressed up as academic analysis, is that the unvaccinated are either so incapable of rational and moral thought, or such willing dupes of Russia, that they are susceptible to obvious disinformation campaigns.

Skeptical posture

There is a very obvious problem with this analysis, as answers to many of the survey’s other questions demonstrate. We might assess one marker of sanity – or, at least, mental clarity – vis a vis Ukraine as an unwillingness to provoke a World War III between nuclear powers, especially if such a provocation is actually a way to avoid negotiations to achieve a ceasefire.

So how do unvaccinated and three-shot-vaccinated Canadians square up, based on that yardstick? According to the survey, more than three times as many of the highly vaccinated as the unvaccinated want their government to send Canadian fighter jets and troops to Ukraine. Just over half of all three-shot Canadians surveyed appeared ready to start a war with Russia over Ukraine.

It might be reasonable, using Orr Bueno’s approach, to assume that it is therefore the three-shot vaccinated rather than the unvaccinated who are mentally unsound. But I will resist that temptation.

What we need to do instead is consider the kind of influence peddling that might have led so many vaccinated Canadians to promote what looks like an insane policy.

If it is Russian disinformation to think there may be grounds for Russia to invade Ukraine – and taking a wild stab, I suspect some of the respondents may have regarded it as a justified response to NATO expansion – whose disinformation might have encouraged so many Canadians to conclude that joining a war against Russia is a good idea?

Protests outside of the White House call for NATO military action against Russia, March 6, 2022. Jose Luis Magana | AP

The correct inference here is not, as Orr Bueno concludes, that a minority with infirm minds is susceptible to Russian disinformation, but that there are two population groups that have differing attitudes towards established authority and, as a result, have been exposed to different kinds of information.

Those who have taken three shots of the vaccine are more likely to rely heavily for their information on traditional sources of authority. They are what I have called elsewhere “trusters.” They assume their leaders are well-meaning, if sometimes complacent or incompetent, and that they generally seek to act in the best interests of their societies and the world.  They consume “mainstream” media largely passively – the very media run by and for the benefit of Western oligarchs.

It is therefore hardly surprising that they were keen to take as many shots of vaccine as the government’s medical advisers told them to, and that many of them also believe it makes sense to launch a war against Russia when so many prominent corporate media journalists are telling them that is what is needed.

By contrast, the unvaccinated are more likely to be drawn from those who are suspicious of their governments and major corporations, as well as the structural forces shaping information on the West’s political processes. These “doubters” insist on maintaining a skeptical posture.

My latest: Power needs to be rid of Sanders, just as it earlier rid itself of Corbyn, because they are not chained to the current power paradigm. By refusing to serve the power-cult like most politicians, they threaten to shine a light on its true nature https://t.co/Um9t170547

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 25, 2020

Critical thinking

Were we to do more surveys on this basis, we could probably guess a range of other views likely to resonate with the three-shot vaccinated more than the unvaccinated:

• That Assange deserves to be locked up for life for revealing U.S. and U.K. war crimes;
• That social media should be tightly controlled either by governments or by the billionaires of Silicon Valley;
• That the class concerns of the “far-left” are actually cover for a deep-seated antipathy towards Jews;
• And that NATO is a purely defensive organization trying to protect countries from Russian imperialism.

There is nothing in these views that suggests mental clarity or superiority; resistance to disinformation; independence of mind: or even basic critical thinking skills. These just reflect the consensus manufactured by a corporate media that services the interests of the billionaire class. All of these views are useful to those in power and help to maintain the status quo. Which is precisely why these views, rather than others, dominate.

What Orr Bueno and liberals like her are doing is subtly pathologizing those who dissent, just as the Soviet Union did more brashly. They are suggesting a mental infirmity among those who refuse to accept what the political and media class – and the billionaires behind them – declare is true.

The pathologization of dissent is not going away. It will intensify as neoliberalism faces crisis after crisis and social polarization grows. Those who claim to be liberals defending democracy will soon be only too ready to snuff it out.

mintpressnews.com

In recent years, many people have become accustomed to thinking about the term “deep state” as something that only applies to the United States. While it is certainly clear that a fifth column has become increasingly embedded across all levels of America’s military, intelligence, bureaucratic, corporate, media and academic influence- very few westerners have any clear idea how this same structure has expressed itself in the nations of Eurasia.

Most relevant for the topic of this present report, we can take as an example the vast western-leaning hive of vipers, oligarchs and liberal technocrats which rose to power under the direction of the CIA during the dark years of shock therapy of the 1990s. Of course, since taking over from Yeltsin in 1999, President Vladimir Putin has gone far to purging many of those treacherous agencies that looted Russia during Perestroika, regaining control of vital institutions, bringing Russia’s military, scientific and intelligence powers back into national hands.

Speaking of this battle on December 9, 2021 at the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, Putin stated:

“In the early 2000s, I’ve cleaned all of them out, but in mid-1990s, we had Central Intelligence Agency employees as advisors and even official employees of the government of the Russian Federation, as we learned later… There were American specialists sitting at our nuclear weapons complex sites, they went to work there, from morning to late night – they had a table and an American flag. They lived there and worked there. They did not need any fine instruments to interfere in our life, because they had control over everything already.”

Putin went on to describe the new CIA-run strategy of asymmetrical warfare utilizing foreign NGOs and rabble-rousing proxies (see: Navalny) within the vast “civil society” apparatus embedded within his nation:

“As soon as Russia started claiming its interests, started to raise its sovereignty, economy and armed forces’ capability, new instruments of influence on our internal political life became needed, including rather fine instruments via various organizations, funded from abroad.”

Of course while these operations have lit many weaker nations on fire in earlier days, the color revolutionary techniques used by the CIA-funded NED, or Open Society Foundations have resulted in very limited successes in Russia where saner heads have cut off many of these operations of funding while illegalizing Soros’ entire organization in 2015 declaring them to be “threats to state security”. Although Russia was 25 years behind schedule on this matter, banning Soros put them into the special club of nations that got their acts together led by China who had the wits to ban Soros in 1989, illegalizing his Open Society operations and arresting its agents (including CPC General Secretary and Soros agent extraordinaire Zhao Ziyang).

After recapturing key strategic interests from private clutches during his early years in power, Putin established a new set of ultimatums that he expected the liberal technocrats and oligarchs to adhere to: play by the rules set out by him or face the consequences. Some went to jail, and many went to London for sanctuary (often buying mansions with their ill-begotten gains in an area that came to be known as “Moscow on the Thames”). Still others stayed behind to play by the rules. Perhaps some did adapt to this new reality, but other forces continued to act as a fifth column- often keeping their claws firmly sunk into the levers of finance in Russia’s IMF-influenced central banking architecture and local regional power centers.

It was to these fifth columnists that Putin addressed his remarks on March 15 of this year saying:

“Yes, of course they [the West] will bet on the so-called Fifth Column. Our national traitors. On those who earn money here, with us, but live there. And they live not even in the geographical sense of the word but according to their thoughts. According to their slavish consciousness… many of these people, by their very nature, are mentally located exactly there, and not here. Not with our people. Not with Russia. This is, in their opinion, a sign of belonging to a higher caste, to a higher race. Such people are ready to sell their own mothers if only they were allowed to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste… They do not understand at all that if they are needed by this so-called “higher caste”, then they are needed only as expendable material in order to use them to inflict maximum damage on our people.”

The myopic habit of looking only at the USA or European fifth columnists undermining the sovereignty of nation states over the past decades while ignoring Eurasia, has caused many well-meaning people to presume falsely that nations like Russia or China can be treated as monolithic institutions with either a “good” or “bad” label attached to them. Such oversimplifications unfortunately result in minds susceptible to much misinformation, which there is no shortage to be found amidst our age of psychological warfare operations, media spin and narrative reframing.

Ignorance of the battle currently being waged between genuine nationalists surrounding Putin vs this other western-directed fifth column will ensure fatal errors in judgement and a misdiagnosis of our current crisis. Even worse, vital opportunities for broader policy solutions requisite to empower sovereign nation states will be lost and with this loss, any capacity to engage in proper combat with an emerging totalitarian world order will be destroyed.

Chubais Jumps Ship

One of the most blatant examples of leading Fifth Columnists who “sell their own mothers to sit in the hallway of this very highest caste” has been the figure of Anatoly Chubais who has recently announced his departure from Russia (hopefully permanently) in order to seek safer terrain in Turkey. In this leap into safer sanctuary, Chubais has abandoned his role as ‘Special Representative for Relations with International Organizations to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals’ at the UN.

Chubais played one of the most destructive roles of any living politician while working with the CIA-run Yeltsin government as a “Soros-young reformer” alongside Yegor Gaidar and other western tools who were recruited by the west to run the sacking and disintegration of Russia during the 1990s. Acting as Deputy Prime Minister for Economic and Financial Policy between 1992-96, Chubais oversaw the privatization of all strategic sectors of the Russian economy alongside Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, a coterie of sociopathic oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsy, Platon Lebedev and Boris Berezovsky (many of whom formed Chubais’ ‘Group of 7’ in 1996).

Chubais and Geidar pioneered the infamous “voucher system” which underpinned the multi-phased looting operation dubbed Operation Hammer by Bush Sr’s CIA starting in 1991. William Engdahl rigorously documented this dense period of privatizations which saw over 15,000 firms privatized between 1992-1994. New oligarchs like Berezovsky were able to use these vouchers purchased from starving Russians, to buy the oil giant Sibnet (worth $3 billion) for only $100 million and Khodorkovsky bought 78% of the shares in Yukos (a $5 billion value) for only $310 million. Soros himself bragged that he dropped over two billion dollars into Russia during this looting period.

Chubais had been an early founder of Perestroika clubs in St. Petersburg alongside such figures as Yegor Gaidar (future Prime Minister), Vladimir Kogan (future St Petersburg Bank President) and Alexei Kudrin (future Finance Minister). Upon Gaidar’s death in 2009, Chubais spearheaded the creation of the Gaidar Forum which was designed to take place one week prior to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos and served as a coordinating body of the deep state between the Schwabian technocrats and their Russian soulmates.

In 2013, Putin said of Chubais and his CIA handlers:

“We learned today that officers of the United States’ CIA operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais. But it is even funnier that upon returning to the U.S., they were prosecuted for violating their country’s laws and illegally enriching themselves in the course of privatization in the Russian Federation.”

Despite Putin having clearly identified Chubais as a CIA asset, evidence of something very powerful protecting the financier was seen as he not only avoided being purged as so many others during Putin’s tenure, but even regained a large degree of influence as chairman of the executive board of the state-run technology company Rusnano from 2008 until 2020. During this time, Chubais also found himself serving as advisory council member of JP Morgan Chase, and the leading force behind decarbonization schemes in Russia driven by green alternative energy boondoggles which serve as a major component of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

During his 12 year tenure, Chubais used Rusnano as an instrument to fund and seed windmill and solar power development, provided $400 million to Hevek Solar (Russia’s biggest solar energy company) and created a $520 million Wind Energy Development Fund.

Although Chubais’ offices at Rusnano were raided the day following the arrest of Russian finance minister (and fellow swamp creature Alexei Ulyokaev on November 16, 2021), his protectors ensured that while his days at the company would come to an end, he would avoid arrest, and go onto new destructive endeavors. What was his next assignment?

By the end of December 2021, it was announced that Chubais was made Russian Presidential envoy to the United Nations to coordinate Sustainable Development Goals. In this position, Chubais had shamelessly called for adapting Russia’s economy to the UN’s climate market and fully submitting to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank saying on January 8, 2022:

“I am convinced that the Russian climate market will be extremely attractive for international investment. So it is necessary to facilitate the access of Russian entrepreneurs to receive funding from abroad for alternate projects. To do this, it is necessary to achieve harmonization of the basic rules of the Russian Market being created in this area with leading international organizations- the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development”.

Not only has Chubais spearheaded the “greening of Russian energy” according to the Great Reset Agenda (which unites the two-fold manufactured crises of climate change and covid-19 into one package), but Chubais also used Rusnano to fund the growth of a foreign directed pharmaceutical complex within the heart of Russia. One major scandal emerged recently as Russian pharmaceutical giant and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Nanolek received billions of rubles from Rusnano in 2020 and 2021 enriching the husband-wife duo of Tatyana Golikova and Viktor Khristenko (whose son is a major shareholder in the company).

While much can be said about other fifth columnists still embedded within Russia’s civil service and private sector, the smell of new purges is certainly in the air.

A Sea Change Now Underway

Powerful western forces representing the “higher castes” have severed ties with Russia and with those lost ties goes lost protection for many figures who have slept soundly at night despite their treacherous hearts. The World Economic Forum broke off ties on March 8  along with a multitude of foreign WEF partner corporations like Goldman Sachs, Deutschebank, Amazon, Visa, Paypal, Mastercard, Apple, IBM, Unilever, and Pepsico (to name a few).

Moves are quickly being made to empower nationalist forces to take increased control over Russia’s economy led by Sergey Glaziev’s new project to create a China-EAEU alternative financial/monetary system with increased national controls over finance and long-term planning. Gaining control of the financial sector which has long been under the strong influence of western oligarchical interests is vital if Russia is going to be able to not only weather the coming storm but come out of it with the economic sovereignty and power to build those large-scale projects needed for Putin’s aspirations for a Far Eastern and Arctic civilizational growth paradigm.

Although Chubais only represents but one large rat who has chosen this current moment to jump ship, others will certainly follow, and perhaps a new fear of god might awaken in the hearts of others who chose this moment of crisis to walk a more noble path as patriots of Russia as the world enters a new more multipolar future.

I think it is here fitting to end with a few remarks by President Putin who stated “the Russian people will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges”.

We all know that the western media’s Ukraine coverage has been highly charged, playing on western feelings of sympathy for (some) underdog ‘victims’, and directing feelings towards a moral outrage that insists – even demands – retribution and punishment for the perceived perpetrators.

David Brooks in the New York Times elevates this feeling of guilt to higher planes:

“The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind [and has] reminded us not only what it looks like to believe in democracy, the liberal order and national honour; but also to act bravely on behalf of these things. They’ve reminded us how the setbacks [may] have caused us to doubt and be passive about the gospel of democracy. But despite all our failings, the gospel is still glowingly true”.

Ukraine may be many things … but a ‘gospel of democracy’?

Every serious crisis, of course, is also an opportunity for mythopoesis – especially at a time of anomie, when a dispirited less than half of a society believes that their country is not invested in them and “that the economic and political systems (and the people who run them), are stacked against [them] – no matter what you do”.

The Anglo-American Establishment has proved adept at intuiting: that owing to such anomie and erosion of our ‘sacred canopy’, a ‘noble lie’ can be used to give a rules-based order a last gasp. Its’ inherent power can be harnessed to generate the outrage as casus belli for global liberalism. After all, what better unifying force than the ‘grand American project’ of war to energise one’s desire for a reappropriated national significance.

The West has taken dominance of the ‘information space’ to new heights: consolidating the media; tightening its hold on information; marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain; and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement, or of “Putinism”. Freedom of online thought is disallowed; selective broadcast perspectives are removed or allowed (for example, pro neo-Nazi sympathies and politically-charged violence against Russians and Russia); and a monopoly over truth is established. So that when caught in falsehoods, any errant intrusion simply is algorithmically ‘disappeared’.

There is no doubt that the West has refined this mode of battle-scape to the highest degree, but its very success also diffuses its own pathogens throughout the western capillaries. Once set in motion, it possesses all the addictive power of online gaming. Write the script for a new scenario; direct its production; and then stage it on video. Many may disbelieve the resulting piece, but there is nothing for them to do, except to watch it in mute, frustrated silence. Game over. You have ‘won’.

Except you don’t. This game generates its own momentum. There is always another, at hand, to trump the last player’s taunt at Putin; to hail the victim’s new act of selfless bravery; to speculate about yet more foul deeds planned against him. And so the demand for retribution and punishment is invested with unstoppable momentum. The logic to its structure makes it almost impossible for any political leader to stand against the swelling tide.

That’s where we are: Three realities that are so severed from each other that they do not touch at any point. There is the reality of PsyOps that bears almost no resemblance to the reality of the military situation on the ground. Indeed, they manifest as polar inversions of each other: A heroic resistance versus a failing, demoralised and hobbled Russian army. Whereas the reality is that “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”.

Then there is the clashing realities of a Europe and U.S. conjoined in ‘an economic, moral enterprise of social power and fighting morale’ (albeit at certain self-sacrifice/self-flagellation to themselves) to punish Russia. And the other reality that a ‘world at war’ – whether kinetic or financial – will be a disaster for Europe (and America).

War is inflationary. War is contractionary (and inflationary too). Everything – oil, gas, metals – the lot – are going up vertically, and the whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side. But this situation clearly is less disastrous for a super food and commodity supplier like Russia.

The third set of severed realities are, on the one hand, the contextless, exclusive focus on the Ukraine events, which effaces this moment of global political and economic inflection, and – on the other – the elephant-in-the room which is the Russia-China mega project to force a withdrawal and containment of the entire ‘rules-based’ hegemonic order.

There are other severed realities out there (such as the one about Russia isolated and shunned versus the reality that much of the planet does not support U.S. and European punitive sanctions) – but never mind that.

The point here is not just what happens when these realities collide, but what happens when one or other ‘reality’ that already holds a hyper emotional, moralising charge is forced into full consciousness as having been WRONG?

This is the pathogen inherent in taking the battle-scape of information dominance to an extreme: It begs the question: in what way will emotions turn if all the hype falls flat, and the ‘bad guy’ wins the game? Will people turn against their present leaderships, or opt to double-down, demanding more ‘war’ as instincts rebel against any the realisation of failure inflicted upon settled quasi-religious convictions? The outcome to this psychic dilemma may determine whether we are heading to escalation and extended war, or not.

U.S. intelligence officials claimed on Tuesday that Putin is ‘desperate’ to end the conflict over Ukraine, with some privately suggesting he could even set off a tactical nuclear weapon in a Ukrainian city to get the job done. Fuelled by his disappointments, Putin could resort to using a small nuke: “You know, Russian doctrine holds that you escalate to de-escalate, and so I think the risk would rise, according to the doctrine,” CIA Director, and former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Burns said.

There it is … the next stage of escalation. This now is being attributed to Putin, but the point is that it has been put ‘out there’ very publicly by the CIA. Is this ground preparation? An escalation to this level is likely not on the cards, so long, and only so long, as the option of sticking Russia into a Ukrainian quagmire remains firmly on the cards. If the PsyOps narrative – on which so much hangs – doesn’t stand up to the ground reality, the public will demand answers. Why were they led up “the Primrose Path”?  The setback to the ‘sacred canopy’ would be immense.

Biological labs have been found in Ukraine that reportedly have a U.S. connection: When asked about them, Victoria Nuland surprisingly admitted their existence, but said “she’s worried Russia might get them and that she’s 100% sure if there is a biological attack – it’s Russia”. On Thursday, the UK media led with the headline, “Putin plotting chemical weapons attack in Ukraine”. Plainly, the fear factor is being ramped to sustain a long-term insurgency/quagmire strategy for Russia in western Ukraine. It is, as David Brooks hinted, the last gasp in the defence of the liberal world order.

Can all this hype – small nukes, bio and chemical weapons – really take us to war? James Carden, in his piece says it can – and has. He quotes one instance:

“In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, “there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers” and became “the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault.”

“Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion. “How else,” he asked, “[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too had immersed themselves in the bloodbath? Surely this is the immediate, tangible expression of a general disposition toward war in the world.”

Against the prospect that Putin may achieve his aims, short of general war, how might Europe and America react? They might react very differently.

Firstly, we must recall that one object of this ‘war fever’ always was to bind Europe to the U.S., and into NATO, and to prevent Russia-China co-opting Europe into the Great Asian Heartland economic integration project – thus leaving the U.S. as an isolated maritime ‘island’, strategically speaking.

The hardcore Neo-cons have had positive results: Nordstream 2 is cancelled – leaving Europe without a cheap secure source of energy. From the outset, the European project was conceived as a marriage of Russian resources to European manufacturing capacity. This option is now over. The EU has fully bound itself into the ‘fever’, and into U.S. sphere. And it has erected an ‘iron curtain’ against Russia (and by extension China). It has ‘sanctioned itself’ into a high-cost energy and commodity paradigm and made itself a captive market for the U.S. energy majors and American technology.

The EU has been fond of imagining itself as a liberal imperium. But that surely is gone now. Its’ Davos-style ‘re-set’, designed to steal a march on America, is defunct. The four key ‘transitions’ on which Brussels was depending to lift its reach from the national-level, to the global supra-national level, are defunct: Global ‘green pass’ health regulations, Climate, automation and monetary regulatory frameworks – for one reason or another – have failed and are off the agenda.

The EU was counting on these transitions as the peg to print a huge amount of money. They need it in order to liquefy an over-indebted system. Absent this peg, they are mulling a (highly inflationary) slush fund (ostensibly for defence and Russian energy substitution), financed by euro-bonds. (It will be interesting to see whether the so-called ‘frugal four’ EU states buy into this ploy for mutualised debt).

Yet inflation – already high and accelerating – is at the root of the crisis Brussels is facing. There is little to be done about this in light of the sanctions which the EU has enacted on Russia – with prices of everything going up vertically. And as for the other lacuna, there’s no way Europe can find 200 billion cubic meters of gas anywhere else to replace Russia, be it in Algeria, Qatar or Turkmenistan – not to mention the EU’s lack of necessary LNG terminals.

Europeans face a bleak future of soaring prices and economic contraction. For now, they can offer little political dissent to the controlling élites. The frameworks for genuine (as opposed to token) opposition in Europe, largely have been dismantled in the zeal of Brussels to suppress ‘populism’. EU citizens will bear the prospect in sullen anger (until the pain becomes unbearable).

‘Populism’ in the U.S. however, is not dead. Some 30 GOP Congressmen have opted to retire at the coming midterms. We may well witness an upsurge in the American populist sentiment in November. The point here, is that American populism traditionally is fiscally conservative. And it seems that Wall Street is shifting in that direction too: i.e. they may be getting ready to ditch Biden, and to support more fiscal rigour.

This potentially is huge. This week the Federal Reserve head said that whilst a part of the record U.S. inflation may be put down to Fed responsibility, Congress however was responsible too. This translates roughly as ‘stop the Big Spend, Biden!’. The Fed needs the space to raise interest rates. The head of Citibank spoke in a similar vein.

Will Wall Street swap horses (they backed Biden at the last election), and thus magnify the margin to the likely Republican majority in Congress? If so, with a big enough majority – anything may (politically) become possible. Republican conservatism traditionally (i.e. before the flirt with neo-con hawks) is highly cautious of foreign adventurism.

‘Whether it be BLM, Coronavirus, or now Ukraine, every single issue is talked about in apocalyptic terms and with gargantuan fear. But, as for all these frights:

“The deplorables are done”’. (paraphrased)

* Title borrowed from James Carden, writing in The Spectator.

In its triple strike of sanctions on Russia, the EU initially was not looking to collapse the Russian financial system. Far from it: Its first instinct was to find the means to continue purchasing its energy needs (made all there more vital by the state of the European gas reserves hovering close to zero). Purchases of energy, special metals, rare earths (all needed for high tech manufacture) and agricultural products were to be exempted. In short, at first brush, the sinews of the global financial system were intended to remain intact.

The main target rather, was to block the core to the Russian financial system’s ability to raise capital – supplemented by specific sanctions on Alrosa, a major player in the diamond market, and Sovcomflot, a tanker fleet operator.

Then, last Saturday morning (26 February) everything changed. It became a blitzkrieg: “We’re waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia. We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, said the French Finance Minister, Le Maire (words, he later said, he regretted).

That Saturday, the EU, the U.S. and some allies acted to freeze the Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held overseas. And certain Russian banks (in the end seven) were to be expelled from SWIFT financial messaging service. The intent was openly admitted in an U.S. unattributable briefing: It was to trigger a ‘bear raid’ (ie. an orchestrated mass selling) of the Rouble on the following Monday that would collapse the value of the currency.

The purpose to freezing the Central Bank’s reserves was two-fold: First, to prevent the Bank from supporting the Rouble. And secondly, to create a commercial bank liquidity scarcity inside Russia to feed into a concerted campaign over that weekend to scare Russians into believing that some domestic banks might fail – thus prompting a rush at the ATMs, and start a bank-run, in other words.

More than two decades ago, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt and devalued the Rouble, sparking a political crisis that culminated with Vladimir Putin replacing Boris Yeltsin. In 2014, there was a similar U.S. attempt to crash the Rouble through sanctions and by engineering (with Saudi Arabian help) a 41% drop in oil prices by January 2015.

Plainly, last Saturday morning when Ursula von der Leyen announced that ‘selected’ Russian banks would be expelled from SWIFT and the international financial messaging system; and spelled out the near unprecedented Russian Central Bank reserve freeze, we were witnessing the repeat of 1998. The collapse of the economy (as Le Maire said), a run on the domestic banks and the prospect of soaring inflation. This combination was expected to conflate into a political crisis – albeit one intended, this time, to see Putin replaced, vice Yeltsin – aka regime change in Russia, as a senior U.S. think-tanker proposed this week.

In the end, the Rouble fell, but it did not collapse. The Russian currency rather, after an initial drop, recovered about half its early fall. Russians did queue at their ATMs on Monday, but a full run on the retail banks did not materialise. It was ‘managed’ by Moscow.

What occurred on that Saturday which prompted the EU switch from moderate sanctions to become a full participant in a financial war à outrance on Russia is not clear: It may have resulted from intense U.S. pressure, or it came from within, as Germany seized an opportune alibi to put itself back on the path of militarisation for the third time in the past several decades: To re-configure Germany as a major military power, a forceful participant in global politics.

And that – very simply – could not have been possible without tacit U.S. encouragement.

Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes that the underlying shifts made manifest by von der Leyen on Saturday “herald a profound shift in European politics. It is tempting, but ultimately futile, to contextually place this shift as a reaction to the Russian decision to launch military operations in Ukraine. The pretext only provides the alibi, whilst the shift is anchored on power play and has a dynamic of its own”. He continues,

“Without doubt, the three developments — Germany’s decision to step up its militarisation [spending an additional euro100 billion]; the EU decision to finance arms supplies to Ukraine, and Germany’s historic decision to reverse its policy not to supply weapons to conflict zones — mark a radical departure in European politics since World War II. The thinking toward a military build-up, the need for Germany to be a “forceful” participant in global politics and the jettisoning of its guilt complex and get “combat ready” — all these by far predate the current situation around Ukraine”.

The von der Leyen intervention may have been opportunism, driven by a resurgence of SPD German ambition (and perhaps by her own animus towards Russia, stemming from her family connection to the SS German capture of Kiev), yet its consequences are likely profound.

Just to be clear, on one Saturday, von der Leyen pulled the switch to turn off principal parts to Global financial functioning: blocking interbank messaging, confiscating foreign exchange reserves and the cutting the sinews of trade. Ostensibly this ‘burning’ of global structures is being done (like the burning of villages in Vietnam) to ‘save’ the liberal Order.

However, this must be taken in tandem with Germany’s and the EU decision to supply weapons (to not just any old ‘conflict zone’) but specifically to forces fighting Russian troops in Ukraine. The ‘Kick Ass’ parts to those Ukrainian forces ‘resisting’ Russia are neo-Nazi forces with a long history of committing atrocities against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian peoples. Germany will be joining with the U.S. in training these Nazi elements in Poland. The CIA has been doing such since 2015. (So, as Russia tries to de-Nazify Ukraine, Germany and the EU are encouraging European volunteers to join in a U.S.-led effort to use Nazi elements to resist Russia, just as in the way Jihadists were trained to resist Russia in Syria).

What a paradox! Effectively von der Leyen is overseeing the building of an EU ‘Berlin Wall’ – albeit with its purpose inverted now – to separate the EU from Russia. And to complete the parallel, she even announced that Russia Today and Sputnik broadcasts would be banned across the EU. Europeans can be allowed only to hear authorised EU messaging – (however, a week into the Russian invasion, cracks are appearing in this tightly-controlled western narrative – “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”, warns a leading U.S. military analyst in the Daily Mail. Simply “[b]elieving Russia’s assault is going poorly may make us feel better but is at odds with the facts”, Roggio writes. “We cannot help Ukraine if we cannot be honest about its predicament”).

So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?

Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-pollical ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.

Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.

But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.

Whereas EU states had hoped to spare Russian energy shipments, they did not take account of the frenzy raised against Russia. The oil market has gone on strike, acting as if energy were already in the frame for Western sanctions: Oil tankers had already started to avoid Russian ports because of sanctions fears, and rates for oil tankers on Russian crude routes have exploded as much as nine-fold in the past few days. But now, amid growing fears of falling foul of complex restrictions in different jurisdictions, refiners and banks are balking at purchasing any Russian oil at all, traders and others involved in the market say. Market players fear too that measures that target oil exports directly could be imposed, should fighting in Ukraine intensify.

Commodity markets have been in turmoil since the Special Military Operation began. European natural gas jumped as much as 60% on Wednesday, as buyers, traders and shippers avoid Russian gas. A combination of sanctions and commercial decisions by shippers and insurers to steer clear has cut that contribution to global supplies sharply over the last week. A default cascade by western companies is perfectly possible. And Supply line disruption is inevitable.

Many will be affected by the commodity turmoil, but with Russia providing 25% of global wheat supplies, the 21% hike in wheat and 16% rise in corn prices since 1 January will represent a disaster for many states in the Middle East among others.

All this disruption to markets comes even before Moscow responds with its own countermeasures. They have been silent so far – but what if Moscow demands that future payments for energy are to be made in Yuan?

In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiralling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiralling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.

“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.

The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”

One recalls that old prediction from the Middle East, that western values would turn against the West itself, and ultimately devour it.

Law enforcement officials have begun a watch beat of sorts against the American Civil Liberties Union, whose support of justice reform has translated into more criminals roaming the streets as police officers lose their jobs.

A number of liberal activists, armed with the most altruistic intentions, of course, are busy remaking America into a liberal bastion of utopian thinking, where the Cultural Marxists have put down the stakes on their zany new world, which promises to go international. But if surging gun sales in the Golden State are any indication, the progressives are off to a disastrous start.

“I’ve always been anti-gun,” Debbie Mizrahie of Beverly Hills said, as quoted by Michael Shellenberger in the New York Post. “But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We’re living in fear.”

And it’s not difficult to understand why. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the nation experienced a 30 percent increase in murder in 2020, the biggest annual jump since the bureau began tracking crime statistics 60 years ago. That record comes attached with a footnote that the mainstream media is at tremendous pains to ignore: this year, of the 12 major U.S. cities that broke annual homicide records, every one of them – from Rochester, New York to Baton Rouge, Louisiana – are run by Democrats. Or more specifically, by organizations that wield tremendous power and influence over the Democratic Party.

The one obvious name that always surfaces when speaking about the ‘criminal reform’ initiatives well underway in liberal-run cities is the billionaire philanthropist, George Soros. As the Democratic Party’s most prolific benefactor, Soros has filled the campaign coffers of various District Attorney races. For example, last year, amid the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Kim Foxx, who went on to become the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is now at its highest rate in almost 30 years. In keeping in line with woke ideology, which blames the ‘oppressive white system’ for the behavior of felons, Foxx immediately began to defer many prosecutions while reducing bail and sentencing guidelines for hardened criminals.

As it turns out, however, Soros is in good company, particularly with the ACLU, which is also working overtime defending the worst elements of society, while depriving victims of their rights. For a long time, this watchdog group was doing all the watching, imposing its warped worldview on communities around the nation. That looks set to change, however, after a coalition of seven police unions from three states put together a website to track exactly what the ACLU has been up to.

Sponsored by the San José Police Officers Association, San Francisco Police Officers Association, Los Angeles Police Protective League, Seattle Police Officers Guild, San Diego Police Officers Association, Sacramento Police Officers Association and the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, ACLU Watch says it is “dedicated to fighting for victim’s rights, accountability for criminals, and exposing those that defend the indefensible.”

One of the ACLU’s pet projects involves bail payments, the site disclosed, which have been dramatically reduced in the name of ‘combatting racism and economic inequality.’ The initiative allows the convicted to put up just 10% of an already drastically reduced bond requirement, which has led to all of the predictably tragic consequences.

As just one example, James McClendon, 45, who police said had been in and out of jail dozens of times, was suspected in June of committing a double shooting that left a man dead and a woman injured in Atlanta. Yet the judge in his trial set bail at just $50,000, and McClendon was free to walk three weeks later.

“Most of the individuals were getting out within a couple of days and the bond was generally low,” Maj. William Ricker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On average, $28,000 was the general bond amount. Then, of course, you talk about being able to just pay 10%, that’s a significantly small amount for people to be back out on the streets.”

If bail reform doesn’t keep criminals on the street, then Proposition 47 certainly will, at least in California. Under the updated ruling, shoplifting charges on the theft of merchandise $950 or less was reduced from a felony to misdemeanor. Then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, together with the ACLU were supporters of the legislation.

“Prop. 47 reduces the barriers that many people with a low-level, non-violent felony conviction face to becoming stable and productive citizens, such as a lack of employment, housing and access to assistance programs and professional trades,” the ACLU wrote in support of the legislation back in 2014.

But it’s not just the thieves and murderers that the ACLU seems determined to defend, but kiddie flashers as well. Back in 2018, The Ohio House voted 80-0 for a bill that increases penalties for people who expose themselves to children. As Tier 1 sex offenders, such individuals are forbidden from living within 1,000 feet of a day care center or school. Such a rule seemed, somehow, incomprehensible to the New York-based watchdog.

“There is no evidence these policies and laws keep people safer or reduce recidivism,” said Gary Daniels of the ACLU of Ohio in written testimony. “Exiling sex offenders and making it more difficult to find housing and unemployment increase the chances they will commit another offense,” he said, as though employment has ever stopped perverts before.

Since the murder of George Floyd, these ‘crime reform’ endorsements by the ACLU, which negatively affects two groups of people – the victims of crime, and the police officers who were hired specifically to ‘preserve the peace’ – have been moving ahead full steam. Yet now, with the introduction of ACLU Watch, more people can better understand that a robust police presence is not the true source of America’s crime problem. By coddling criminals, the ACLU has helped to make U.S. neighborhoods infinitely more dangerous, something which more Americans need to understand.

Americans are facing a new type of crime wave that got its start in the mad liberal laboratory, where the utopian notion that going soft on criminals is going terribly awry. While threatening the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience with extinction, and making communities a living hell, the left needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently unwilling to wait for Black Friday discounts, roaming gangs of young men are descending on retail outlets and pharmacies in flash mobs, clearing out the store shelves in a matter of seconds as clerks look on helplessly.

$100k in handbags stolen at a Louis Vuitton store near Chicago! pic.twitter.com/jaElFgbkWO

— Asian Crime Report (@activeasian) November 19, 2021

In one pre-Thanksgiving raid, about 90 individuals stormed a Nordstrom outlet in Walnut Creek, situated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Members of the masked mob pepper-sprayed one employee, and assaulted another with a knife before making off with an estimated $100,000 in merchandise. Many of the looters made their getaway in some 25 vehicles parked out front.

Disturbingly, as this sort of mayhem unfolds in major cities across the country, liberals seem more preoccupied with determining how to define the criminal acts.

Lorenzo Boyd, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice & Community Policing at the University of New Haven, and a retired veteran police officer, is just one academic who seems more obsessed with semantics than digging to the root of the problem.

“Looting is a term that we typically use when people of color or urban dwellers are doing something,” Boyd remarked in an interview with ABC7 news channel. “We tend not to use that term for other people when they do the exact same thing.”

And by “other people” it is abundantly clear who Boyd is referencing.

It’s looting. Just like there were riots in Kenosha, not just protests. https://t.co/trvUHxsCHU pic.twitter.com/nmdUTg6IXT

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) November 23, 2021

Martin Reynolds, Co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, invited listeners to compare the current wave of flash mob thefts to the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, when many marginalized New Orleans residents, the majority of them Black, were labeled looters for stealing from local businesses.

“This seems like it’s an organized smash and grab robbery,” Reynold said, speaking about the current phenomenon of flash mobs. “This doesn’t seem like looting. We’re thinking of scenarios where first responders are completely overwhelmed. And folks, often may be on their own,” he said.

While both academics do make some valid points, there is a risk of liberals getting trapped in a game of semantics that eventually leads to social disaster. More on that in a moment. At the same time, the radical progressives wish to ignore the fact that the primary reason for these crimes happening at all is because they went soft on crime.

Back in 2014, the Democrats in California passed ballot initiative Proposition 47, which legislates that theft of less than $950 in merchandise is considered to be a nonviolent misdemeanor. In other words, such cases are rarely prosecuted. The repercussions of such stupidity should not have been hard to predict.

Prop. 47 led to a rise in the larceny theft rate of about 135 per 100,000 residents, an increase of close to 9 percent compared to the 2014 rate, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Police Chief David Swing, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, responded, saying that the PPIC’s conclusions “are consistent with what police chiefs across the state have seen since 2014.”

But for store owners in California and elsewhere, there is no need for special reports. The damage from the shortsighted legislation is abundantly clear.

“Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing just one of the myriad casualties of Prop 47.

Experts caution use of ‘looting’ in describing rash of Bay Area smash and grabs https://t.co/dQfftRG84T

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) November 23, 2021

Compounded with the problem of a legal system that is increasing willing to let criminals walk, a confab of writers, agitators and academics are more inclined to see the ‘poetic justice’ of young marauders clearing out stores in coordinated flash mobs.

Last year, during the street protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer called looting in the Windy City “reparation” for past crimes committed against Black people.

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats,” Ariel Atkins screamed at a rally outside the South Loop police station.

“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.”

But even before George Floyd had become a household name, self-described agitator Vickie Osterweil had penned a book entitled, ‘In Defense of Looting,’ provided an apology for the act of looting before it was cool.

Beginning by explaining that the word comes from the Hindi, lút, which means “goods” or “spoils,” Osterweil (who wrote the book under the name ‘Willie Osterweil,’ apparently at a different stage in life) goes on to argue that the idea of property in the United States is “derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country.”

Funny how many of the oppressed and downtrodden of the world are willing to be consoled by Gucci bags, Samsung televisions and Nike tennis shoes. But I digress.

Osterweil goes off on a massively contradictory spiel, somehow equating the theft of property with liberation from the “White man’s world.”

“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police; it gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected,” she says. “And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

How looting and stealing could help a person “imagine a world that could be” it is difficult to imagine, but the left must do better than merely coddling and apologizing for the criminals in their midst. More than just midterms are at stake.

On November 8, 2021, Twitter locked my account for a period of one day for responding to corporate media darling and Russiagate fanatic Keith Olbermann’s slanderous reply to journalist Wyatt Reed’s coverage of the Nicaraguan election. The flagged tweet simply restated Olbermann’s question, replacing “whore for a dictator” with “whoring for the American oligarchy.” Twitter demanded that I delete the tweet or send a time-consuming, lengthy appeal with no assurances as to if or when my sentence in “Twitter jail” would end. This prompted me to delete the tweet and wait for the 12-hour suspension to end. Keith Olbermann’s account went unscathed.

This isn’t Olbermann’s first go-round with censorship. Last July, Olbermann called progressive comedian and YouTube host Jimmy Dore a “feral succubus” and demanded Twitter “and other platforms” promptly ban him. Olbermann has justified censorship over the past several years as a necessary response to the thoroughly debunked allegation that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. He has publicly acknowledged his support for censorship as a righteous crusade to ban from platforms people who seek to “tear this country apart.”

Olbermann claims that his censorship crusade is exclusively directed at the right wing. Yet the sports analyst and corporate-media pundit is no friend to progressive or left-wing politics. The U.S. continues to lurch further to the right politically precisely because of elite-driven conspiracies such as Russiagate. Olbermann’s belief that “everything” about the Trump administration is connected to Russia has only further distracted from the progressive politics required to counter the destructive policies of the D.C. duopoly. Olbermann’s obsession with Russia is also racist in character, as evidenced by the admission that he feels immense shame living “with the stain of Russian heritage” in his family.

Hilary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016 unveiled a deepening crisis of legitimacy for the American Empire that the ruling elite has desperately tried to conceal. Liberal class elites such as Olbermann have embraced censorship under the guise of Russiagate. The consequences have been devastating. The Democratic Party and corporate media have fully backed Julian Assange’s extradition and a host of other measures that have tightened the grip of corporate power over the media. Independent journalists have been demonetized or removed from YouTube, shadow-banned from Twitter, and suppressed in the algorithm on Google and YouTube’s search engines.

Silencing independent media serves a militarist agenda. International media outlets critical of U.S. wars, such as RT and CGTN, have faced intensifying repression within the U.S. and its allied nations in the West. RT and CGTN have been forced to register with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Iran-based PressTV had its domain seized by the U.S. government in June 2021 after being removed from Facebook six months earlier. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have labeled all three outlets “state-affiliated media.” The BBC and CIA-linked outlets such as Radio Free Asia have yet to receive the same treatment.

The message is clear: media outlets from countries targeted as U.S. adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran are worthy of censorship while U.S. outlets promoting propaganda against said countries are safe for consumption. The same could be said about Nicaragua, a nation that has received countless attacks from the United States in the form of economic sanctions and information warfare. In the week prior to Twitter’s locking of my account, hundreds of Facebook users supportive of the popular FSLN government in Nicaragua were removed from the platform in the lead-up to the presidential election in that country. This includes Canadian physician Timothy Bood, whose account was suspended for commenting on U.S. interference in the Nicaraguan election. U.K.-based Morning Star journalist Steve Sweeney was detained for three days in Mexico on his way to observe the Nicaraguan elections.

Censorship is the last gasp of liberal class elites who find themselves rapidly losing grip over the political narrative. In the midst of growing economic inequality and endless war, the liberal class has chosen information warfare as its principal tool for maintaining the consent of the governed. Social media and streaming platforms are not public utilities and have thus been directed as weapons of information warfare against the people. Government agencies and military contractors have secured thousands of contracts with big tech corporations to increase their spying powers and influence over the media. It should come as no surprise that alternatives to the existing order have been marked as necessary for removal from public visibility as a means of self-preservation for a self-interested ruling elite.

While elements of the so-called “rightwing” have been caught in the web of censorship, it is clear that the Left is the principal target. Right-wing politics and pundits continue to enjoy growth while outlets such as MintPress News and Black Agenda Report struggle to expand audiences within a suffocating environment of censorship. Truthful, honest, and independent journalism and analysis is anathema to a social order that has little else to offer humanity but endless war and austerity. The last gasp of the liberal class seeking to protect this social order is the suppression of the truth — the first commitment of anyone who claims to stand for peace and justice.

mintpressnews.com

For the second consecutive year, Latin America has been established to be the most dangerous region for environmental activists. According to a recent annual report by Global Witness titled “Last Life on Defence”, 227 environmental activists and indigenous leaders were killed in 2020, with three out of every four killings occurring in Latin America.

Colombia once again led the statistics in the region with 65 environmental activists murdered, among them indigenous and afro-descent individuals, as well as small scale farmers. In Peru and Brazil, almost three quarters of the murders took place in the Amazon regions of the respective countries, indicating that indigenous populations remain in the crosshairs of attackers. Nicaragua’s increase in killings – from 5 in 2019 to 12 in 2020, made the country the most dangerous in the region per capita in terms of  environmental activists.

The report notes, “It may sound simplistic, but it’s a fact worth considering – the process of climate breakdown is violent, and it manifests not just in violence against the natural world, but against people as well.”

Over one third of the documented killings were linked to resource exploitation. This statistic is also reflected in the fact that indigenous activists accounted for over a third of fatalities, as the report notes, “despite only making up 5% of the world’s population.” The direct targeting of indigenous populations was noted in a 2012 report which stated, “All governments are chasing a dominant development paradigm in which today minorities and indigenous peoples don’t really have a place and that is a problem.”

For people not to have a place, dispossession is the outcome. The targeting of individual activists is the means through which to intimidate indigenous communities. Indigenous leaders remain a major target due to their presence, which stands as a main opposition to the exploitation of land and resources by governments and corporations.

In April this year, the Escazu Agreement came into force in Latin America. It is the first treaty in the region to deal with the environment and to offer protection for environmental activists. Notably, Chile, Costa Rica and Colombia have not signed the agreement, despite their initial involvement in the negotiation process which led to the agreement’s adoption in 2018.

The Escazu Agreement enshrines the provision of access to environmental information, public participation in the environmental decision-making processes, access to justice in environmental matters and the protection of human rights defenders in environmental matters.

Article 9 of the agreement calls upon the signatories “to prevent, investigate and punish attacks, threats or intimidation that human rights defenders in environmental matters may suffer while exercising the rights set out in the present agreement.”

However, the provisions set out in the agreement are in contradiction with the exploitative politics embraced in the region. Besides the fact that not all countries are on board – besides Chile, Costa Rica and Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru and Colombia have not ratified the agreement – the links between governments and multinational corporations take precedence, resulting in widespread impunity when it comes to the  political violence employed against both land and indigenous communities.

The Global Witness report calls out the culpability of business and governments in terms of violence, yet its recommendations testify to a recurring cycle that places responsibility to protect on the same entities which engage in exploitative business ventures against environment, activists and indigenous communities. The UN may be treated as distinct from governments, yet its composition brings together the same neoliberal practices which have destroyed land and people. With nothing to hold governments or the UN accountable, protection remains elusive when juxtaposed against the reassurance of neoliberal profit.

There is a growing broad consensus that the West is reaching its own event horizon or has perhaps already fallen into the abyss. This overwhelmingly diverse group of ideological camps, politicians and media pundits who want to avert disaster continue to sputter, searching for answers and doubling down on their own assuredness that the core of their value system is still right, it is merely being downtrodden by a parade of Postmodern freaks. But the real crisis is rooted in what made the West “great” in the first place, its belief in Individualism which is the backbone of the Liberalism that most of humanity lives under.

Complaining about the “degradation” of society gets louder with each year as the average Western man becomes more depressed, sexless, drug addicted, emasculated, jobless, debt ridden and utterly hopeless. The response to this steady decay over the decades following WWII has mostly been a lot of finger wagging. Those that want to save the West are very good at pointing out all the bad things that are happening, but their attempts to beg or guilt trip the next generation into holding on to traditions with no system of apologetics to explain them is completely futile.

The ultimate reason why Conservatives, Traditionalists (Western TradCons), Republicans, the Alt-Right, the Red Pill, Team Trump and so on continue to lose is that they firmly believe in the idea that the individual is sacred and that no government, and to a greater extent no one, should tell this blessed individual what to do. Yet this same group is eternally surprised that raising people in a system that can never tell them “no” turns society into spoiled narcissistic hedonistic adult children.

The Consumer Economy that we have all become used to is essentially a Hedonism machine. The “Free Market” adapts to our desires yet there is no mechanism in place to keep us in check when our desires are wrong. In fact we really always see meeting demand as a good thing, but perhaps some of our sinful animalistic desires are best left unfulfilled. There is no longer any arbiter to tell us not to do anything. Excluding some violent desires, everything that we want we can get with no thought to the future or how it affects society. The market meets our demands, but many of the things we want are from our own sloth and gluttony. The freakshow at your average Midwestern Wal-Mart is the perfect example of this tendency, where no one can tell us not to eat processed garbage, or be dressed publicly in sleepwear. Perhaps there are some economic penalties to becoming so obese that one cannot walk but the individual in his sanctity can never have the cheeseburger slapped out of his hand or be cast out from society for becoming, by choice, an abomination.

The sanctity of the Individual probably did create the great passionary leap that thrust the world into and through the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the European of old was too tied to the land, too bogged down by authority and too restrained by unquestioned traditions. This rise of the Sacred Individual did not happen by accident. Liberalism (the political system that puts the individual as the subject) was like the salt added to a bland European Feudal soup. Adding this salt of Individualism made the soup taste better and so we continued adding more and more salt, convinced that “more salt = tastes better’. The problem is that people do not seem to understand that when you are looking at a bowl filled with wet salt with no soup left it is time to stop adding it.

In our Postmodern world, with the feelings of the individual placed on the highest pedestal above all else the words “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” have been twisted from their original righteous intent, rejecting the invisible yoke of Medieval Europe, into the justification for all that is wrong with society. The average person sees their life as the only thing that matters, society, family, and anything else greater than them be damned.

“Liberty” means that no one can tell us what to do, no one can slap the junk food out of our mouths, make a boy “act like a man”, or in any way push us to something greater. The “Pursuit of Happiness” has become the temporary fulfillment of our hedonistic delights and an economy that meets our demands even those most vile and destructive. Furthermore, if we all pursue our individual happiness, without even a thought of something greater than ourselves then how can we expect to live in a society with a solid culture? We can naively blame weird people with strange hair colors for the ills of the West, but it is really unchecked Individualism and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness that are killing the West.

The very principles that made the West great are those that are nailing its coffin shut.

The broad spectrum of pro-Western political viewpoints mentioned above is stuck in a death cycle of clinging to its Liberalism constantly yet howling about the negative consequences of it. They cry about falling birthrates and the death of the family and yet generally advocate for living for yourself and building a career or not taking the risk on marriage after all “she could take half your stuff”. They want people to make sacrifices for their nation in spite of all of us being indoctrinated into a cult of Hedonism and “looking out for #1”. They want women to be feminine and men to be masculine, which are ideals to strive for that serve little purpose when you spend your adult life alone in your one-bedroom apartment, and when there is no means of enforcing any standard onto people in the first place. This group complains about the rampant narcissism in society but makes it clear that no one can tell anyone what to do. The “solution” to everything of adding more Liberalism is really the cause of our suffering.

No attempts to save culture, the family, traditional gender roles or anything else sane will work when we live by an insane premise, that society is made great via Individualism. Culture, patriotism, family, traditional gender roles, etc. are all concepts founded in the idea of contributing in or belonging to a group. Rampant “me culture” was the poison to society that all of our traditional religions fought to keep in check for the future of humanity, but since religion is now a personal choice they have essentially lost that war forever.

The Tea Party, Trump, Dennis Prager, the Evangelicals, the Catholics, the Red Pill, and every other possible organization that stands for the West will somehow have to accept that in order to live in the West they want they will have to paradoxically reject the origin of its recent greatness.

To the extent that the medieval peasant needed a shot of Individualism to rise from his meaningless cycle of existence, the Postmodern man needs a shot of the traditional values that kept the peasant working in the fields – productive, masculine, loyal, married with children and filled with ideas of something greater than himself perhaps worth sacrificing for. If the Right in the West does not answer the call to some level of Illiberalism, it will fade away into the night wrapped in a warm blanket of smug self-assuredness that the Individual is the Alpha and the Omega.

By Ben NORTON

No individual is more emblematic of the corruption, criminality, and moral rot at the heart of the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan than President Ashraf Ghani.

As the Taliban took over his country this August, advancing with the momentum of a bowling ball rolling down a steep hill, seizing many major cities without firing a single bullet, Ghani fled in disgrace.

The US-backed puppet leader allegedly made his escape with $169 million that he stole from the public coffers. Ghani reportedly crammed the cash into four cars and a helicopter, before flying to the United Arab Emirates, which granted him asylum on supposed “humanitarian” grounds.

The president’s corruption had been exposed before. It was known, for instance, that Ghani had brokered shady deals with his brother and US military-linked private companies, letting them tap into Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in mineral reserves. But his last-minute exit represented an entirely new level of treachery.

Ghani’s senior aides and officials promptly turned on him. His defense minister, General Bismillah Mohammadi, wrote on Twitter in disgust, “They tied our hands behind our backs and sold the homeland. Damn the rich man and his gang.”

While Ghani’s dramatic desertion stands out as a stark metaphor for the depravity of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan – and how it made a handful of people very, very rich – the rot goes much deeper. His rise to power was carefully managed by some of the most esteemed and well-heeled think tanks and academic institutions in the United States.

Indeed, Western governments and their stenographers in the corporate media enjoyed a veritable love affair with Ashraf Ghani. He was a poster boy for the exportation of neoliberalism to what had been Taliban territory, their very own Afghan Milton Friedman, a faithful disciple of Francis Fukuyama – who proudly blurbed Ghani’s book.

Washington was thrilled with Ghani’s reign in Afghanistan, because it had finally found a new way to implement Augusto Pinochet’s economic program, but without the PR cost of torturing and massacring droves of dissenters in stadiums. Of course, it was the foreign military occupation that replaced Pinochet’s death squads, concentration camps, and helicopter assassinations. But the distance between Ghani and his neocolonial protectors helped NATO market Afghanistan as a new model for capitalist democracy, one that could be exported to other parts of the Global South.

As South Asia’s version of the Chicago Boys, the US-educated Ghani believed deeply in the power of the free market. To advance his vision, he founded a Washington, DC-based think tank, the “Institute for State Effectiveness,” whose slogan was “Citizen-Centered Approaches to State and Market,” and which was expressly dedicated to proselytizing the wonders of capitalism.

Ghani clearly spelled out his dogmatic neoliberal worldview in an award-winning book rather comically titled “Fixing Failed States.” (The 265-page tome uses the word “market” a staggering 219 times.) It would be impossible to overstate the irony, then, of the state he personally presided over immediately failing mere days after a US military withdrawal.

The instantaneous and disastrous disintegration of the US puppet regime in Kabul sent Western governments and mainstream reporters into a frenzy. As they frantically looked for people to blame, Ghani stood out as a convenient scapegoat.

What went unsaid was that these same NATO member states and media outlets had for two decades lavished praise on Ghani, depicting him as a noble technocrat who was bravely fighting corruption. They had long been the Afghan president’s eager patrons, but threw him under the bus when he outlived his usefulness, finally acknowledging that Ghani was the treacherous crook he had always been.

The case is instructive, for Ashraf Ghani is a textbook example of the neoliberal elites whom the US empire hand picks, cultivates, and installs in power to serve its interests.

NATO’s 2016 Warsaw Summit, featuring (from left to right) UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, US President Barack Obama, President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, CEO of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

Ashraf Ghani, Made in USA

There is no point at which Ashraf Ghani ends and the United States begins; they are impossible to separate. Ghani was a political product proudly Made in USA.

Ghani was born into a wealthy and influential family in Afghanistan. His father had worked for the country’s monarchy and was well connected politically. But Ghani left his homeland for the West as a young man.

By the time of the US invasion in October 2001, Ghani had lived half of his life in the United States, where he established his career as an academic and imperial bureaucrat.

A US citizen until 2009, Ghani only decided to renounce his citizenship so that he could run for president of US-occupied Afghanistan.

A look at Ghani’s biography shows how he was gestated in a petri dish of elite US institutions.

The US cultivation of Ghani began when he was in high school in Oregon, where he graduated in 1967. From there, he went on to study at the American University in Beirut, where, as The New York Times put it, Ghani “enjoyed the Mediterranean beaches, went to dances and met” his Lebanese-American wife, Rula.

In 1977, Ghani moved back to the United States, where he would spend the next 24 years of his life. He completed a Masters degree and PhD at New York City’s elite Columbia University. His field? Anthropology – a discipline thoroughly infiltrated by US spy agencies and the Pentagon.

In the 1980s, Ghani immediately found jobs at top schools: the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. He also became a regular fixture on British state media, establishing himself as a leading commentator on the BBC’s intelligence agency-linked Dari and Pashto services. And in 1985, the US government gave Ghani its prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, to study Islamic schools in Pakistan.

By 1991, Ghani decided to leave academia to enter the world of international politics. He joined the main institution enforcing neoliberal orthodoxy around the globe: the World Bank. As political economist Michael Hudson has illustrated, this institution has served as a virtual arm of the US military.

Ghani worked at the World Bank for a decade, overseeing the implementation of devastating structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, and mass privatizations, primarily in the Global South, but also in the former Soviet Union.

After Ghani returned to Afghanistan in December 2001, he was quickly appointed finance minister of the US-created puppet government in Kabul. As finance minister until 2004, and eventually president from 2014 to 2021, he employed the machinations he had developed at the World Bank to impose the Washington Consensus on his homeland.

The regime Ghani helped the United States construct was so cartoonishly neoliberal that it established a position for a top official called the “CEO of Afghanistan.”

In the 2000s, with Washington’s support, Ghani gradually worked his way up the political totem pole. In 2005, he made a technocratic rite of passage and delivered a viral TED talk, promising to teach his audience “How to rebuild a broken state.”

The lecture provided a transparent glimpse into the mind of a World Bank-trained imperial bureaucrat. Ghani echoed the “end of history” argument of his mentor Fukuyama, insisting that capitalism had become the world’s unchallengeable form of social organization. The question was no longer what system a country wanted, he argued, but rather “which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation.”

In a barely intelligible dialect of neoliberalese, Ghani declared, “we have to rethink the notion of capital,” and invited viewers to discuss “how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building.”

That same year, Ghani delivered a speech at the European Ideas Network Conference, in his capacity as the new president of Kabul University, in which he further explained his vision for the world.

Praising the “center-right,” Ghani declared that imperialist institutions like NATO and the World Bank must be strengthened in order to defend “democracy and capitalism.” He insisted that the US military occupation of Afghanistan was a model that could be exported around the world, as “part of a global effort.”

In the talk, Ghani also reflected fondly on his time carrying out Washington’s neoliberal “shock therapy” in the former Soviet Union: “In the 1990s … Russia was ready to become democratic and capitalist and I think the rest of the world failed it. I had the privilege of working in Russia for five years during that time.”

Ghani was so proud of his work with the World Bank in Moscow that, in his official bio on the Afghan government’s website, he boasted of “working directly on the adjustment program of the Russian coal industry” – in other words, privatizing the Eurasian giant’s massive hydrocarbon reserves.

While Ghani flaunted his accomplishments in post-Soviet Russia, UNICEF published a report in 2001 that found that the decade of mass privatizations imposed on newly capitalist Russia caused a staggering 3.2 million excess deaths, reduced life expectancy by five years, and dragged 18 million children into abject poverty, with “high levels of child malnutrition.” The leading medical journal Lancet likewise found that the US-created economic program increased Russian adult male mortality rates by 12.8%, largely due to the staggering 56.3% male unemployment it unleashed.

Given this odious record, perhaps it is no surprise that Ghani left Afghanistan with skyrocketing rates of poverty and misery.

Scholar Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University and UNESCO chair on international water cooperation, noted that, during the 20 years of US-NATO military occupation, “The number of Afghans living in poverty has doubled, and the areas under poppy cultivation have tripled. More than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-third no electricity.”

What the US did with its $2.3Trillion in Afghanistan in 20yrs? The number of Afghans living in poverty has doubled, and the areas under poppy cultivation have tripled. More than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-third no electricity.

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) August 21, 2021

The free market medicine that President Ghani had shoved down Afghanistan’s throat was just as successful as the neoliberal shock therapy he and his World Bank colleagues had imposed on post-Soviet Russia.

But Ghani’s economic snake oil found an eager audience in the so-called international community. And by 2006, his global profile had reached such heights that he was considered a possible replacement for Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations.

Meanwhile, Ghani was being given large sums of money by NATO states and billionaire-backed foundations to set up a think tank whose name will forever be tinged with irony.

The ultimate failed state administrator advises elites on “fixing failed states”

In 2006, Ghani levereaged his experience implementing “pro-business” policies from post-Soviet Russia to his own homeland to co-found a think tank called the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE).

ISE markets itself in language that could have been lifted from an IMF brochure: “The roots of ISE’s work are in a World Bank program in the late 1990s which aimed to improve country strategies and program implementation. It focused on building coalitions for reform, implementing large-scale policies, and training the next generation of development professionals.”

The think tank’s slogan reads today as a parody of technocratic boilerplate: “Citizen-Centered Approaches to State and Market.”

In addition to its role in pushing neoliberal reforms on Afghanistan, the ISE has run similar programs in 21 countries, including East Timor, Haiti, Kenya, Kosovo, Nepal, Sudan, and Uganda. In these states, the think tank said it created a “framework for understanding state functions and the balance between governments, markets, and people.”

Legally based in Washington, the Institute for State Effectiveness is funded by a Who’s Who of think tank financiers: Western governments (Britain, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, and Denmark); elite international financial institutions (the World Bank and OECD); and Western intelligence-linked, billionaire-backed corporate foundations (the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations, Paul Singer Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York).

Ghani’s co-founder was free market enthusiast Clare Lockhart, a former investment banker and fellow World Bank veteran who went on to serve as a UN advisor for the NATO-created Afghan government and a member of the board of trustees of the CIA-backed Asia Foundation.

Ghani and Lockhart’s market-obsessed outlook was encapsulated in a partnership they formed in 2008 between their ISE and the fellow neoliberal think tank the Aspen Institute. Under the agreement, Ghani and Lockhart led Aspen’s “Market Building Initiative,” which they said “creates dialogue, frameworks, and active engagement to support countries in building legitimate market economies,” and “aims to put in place the value chains and underpinning credible institutions and infrastructure to allow citizens to participate in the benefits of a globalizing world.”

Anyone novelist seeking to satirize DC think tanks might have been criticized for being too on the nose if they wrote about such an Institute for State Effectiveness.

The cherry on top of the absurdity came in 2008, when Ghani and Lockhart detailed their technocratic worldview in a book entitled “Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.”

The first text that appears inside the front cover is a blurb from Ghani’s ideological guide, Francis Fukuyama, the pundit who infamously declared that, with the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc, the world had reached the “End of History,” and human society was perfected under the Washington-led capitalist liberal democratic order.

Following Fukuyama’s praise is a glowing endorsement from right-wing Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, author of the tract “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else” (spoiler: de Soto insists it is not imperialism). This Chicago Boy crafted the neoliberal shock therapy policies of Peru’s dictatorial Alberto Fujimori regime.

The third blurb in Ghani’s book was composed by the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Hormats, who insisted that the tome “provides a brilliantly crafted and extraordinarily valuable analysis.”

Blurbs in Ashraf Ghani’s 2008 book “Fixing Failed States”

“Fixing Failed States” makes for maddeningly boring reading, and essentially amounts to a 265-page-long reiteration of Ghani’s thesis: the solution to practically all of the world’s problems is capitalist markets, and the state exists to manage and protect those markets.

In a typically long-winded bromide, Ghani and Lockhart wrote, “The establishment of functioning markets has led to the victory of capitalism over its competitors as a model of economic organization by harnessing the creative and entrepreneurial energies of large numbers of people as stakeholders in the market economy.”

Readers of the neoliberal snoozer would have learned just as much by flipping through any World Bank pamphlet.

Besides employing some variation on the word “market” 219 times, the book features 159 uses of the words “invest,” “investment,” or “investor.” It is also stuffed with clumsy, robotically repeated passages like the following:

Embarking on these paths of transition has required efforts to overcome the perception that capitalism is necessarily exploitative and that the relationship between government and corporations is inherently confrontational. Successful governments have forged partnerships between the state and the market to create value for their citizens; these partnerships are both profitable financially and sustainable politically and socially.

Highlighting their ideological zealotry, Ghani and Lockhart even went so far as to assert an “incompatibility between capitalism and corruption.” Of course, Ghani would go on to prove just how absurd this statement was by selling off his country to US companies in which his family members had invested, furnishing them with exclusive access to Afghanistan’s mineral reserves, and then bolting to a Gulf monarchy with $169 million in stolen state funds.

But among the Beltway’s class of insular elites, the risible book was celebrated as a masterpiece. In 2010, “Fixing Failed States” earned Ghani and Lockhart a coveted 50th place in Foreign Policy’s list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. The esteemed magazine described their Institute for State Effectiveness as “the world’s most influential state-building think tank.”

Silicon Valley was smitten as well. Google invited the two to its New York office to outline the book’s conclusions.

Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani present “Fixing Failed States” at Google in 2008

NATO’s Atlantic Council cultivates Ghani

Typing away in their hermetic offices on DC’s K Street, bookish lanyard-wearing pundits helped to provide the political and intellectual justification for pressing ahead with the two-decade foreign military occupation of Afghanistan. The think tanks that employed them seemed to view the war as a neocolonial civilizing mission aimed at promoting democracy and enlightenment to a “backward” people.

It was in this insulated environment of politically connected US think tanks and universities, in his 24 years living in the United States from 1977 to 2001, where Ghani the politician was born.

The powerful Brookings Institution was enamored with him. Writing in the Washington Post in 2012, the liberal-interventionist director of the think tank’s foreign policy research, Michael E. O’Hanlon, lauded Ghani as an “economic wizard.”

But chief among the organizations that fueled Ghani’s rise was the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank in DC.

Ghani’s influences and sponsors were clearly evidenced by his official Twitter account, where the Afghan president followed just 16 profiles. Among them were NATO, its Munich Security Conference, and the Atlantic Council.

Ghani’s work with the think tank goes back nearly 20 years. In April 2009, Ghani did a fawning interview with Frederick Kempe, the president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. Kempe revealed that the two had been close friends and colleagues since 2003.

Ashraf Ghani with his close friend and ally, Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe, in 2015

“When I came to the Atlantic Council,” Kempe recalled, “we built an International Advisory Board, of sitting chairmen and CEOs of globally significant companies, and Cabinet members – former Cabinet members of some renown from key countries. At that point it wasn’t so much I was determined to have Afghanistan represented on the International Advisory Board, because not all countries in South Asia are. But I was determined to have Ashraf Ghani.”

Kempe disclosed that Ghani was not only a member of the International Advisory Board, but also part of an influential Atlantic Council working group called the Strategic Advisors Group. Joining Ghani on the committee were former senior Western government and military officials, as well as leaders of major US and European corporations.

As part of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group, Kempe claimed he and Ghani helped create the Barack Obama’s administration’s strategy for Afghanistan.

“It was in that guise that I first talked to Ashraf, and we talked about how the long-term goals weren’t really known. For all the resources we were putting into Afghanistan, the long-term goals weren’t obvious,” Kempe explained.

“At that point, we came up with the idea that there had to be a 10-year framework for Afghanistan. Little did we know that we were developing and implementing strategy – because it was always thought to be an implementing strategy. But, suddenly, we had an Obama plan, behind which to put this implementing strategy.”

Ghani published this strategy at the Atlantic Council in 2009, under the title “A Ten-Year Framework for Afghanistan: Executing the Obama Plan… and Beyond.”

In 2009, Ghani was also a candidate in Afghanistan’s presidential election. To help manage his campaign, Ghani hired the American political consultant James Carville, who was known for his role as a strategist in the Democratic presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.

At the time, the Financial Times described Ghani favorably as “the most westernised and technocratic of all the candidates standing in the Afghan elections.”

The Afghan people were not so enthusiastic. Ghani was ultimately crushed in the race, coming in a dismal fourth place, with less than 3% of the vote.

When Ghani’s friend Kempe invited him back for an interview that October, after the election, the Atlantic Council president insisted, “Some people would say you ran an unsuccessful campaign; I would say it was a successful campaign but you didn’t win.”

Kempe heaped praise on Ghani, calling him “one of the most capable public servants anywhere on the planet,” and “conceptually brilliant.”

Kampe also noted that Ghani’s talk “should be thought provoking for the Obama administration,” which was relying on the Atlantic Council to help craft its policies.

“You would have come here before the election as a dual passport-holding American and Afghan but one of the sacrifices you made to run for office was to give up your U.S. citizenship, so I’m horrified to hear that you’re here on a single entry U.S.-Afghan visa,” Kempe added. “So the Atlantic Council will go to work on that, but we certainly have to rectify that.”

Stay tuned for Dr. Ghani’s conversation on Afghanistan’s current & future affairs with @AtlanticCouncil later today: pic.twitter.com/xfQr5eR7BY

— Ashraf Ghani (@ashrafghani) May 30, 2014

Ghani continued working closely with the Atlantic Council in the years that followed, constantly doing interviews and events with Kempe, in which the think tank’s president stated, “In the interest of full disclosure, I must declare that Ashraf is a friend, a dear friend.”

Up until 2014, Ghani remained an active member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board, alongside numerous former heads of state, US imperial planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, neoliberal economic apostle Lawrence Summers, Lebanese-Saudi billionaire oligarch Bahaa Hariri, right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters, the Blackstone Group, and Lockheed Martin.

But that year, opportunity knocked and Ghani saw his ultimate ambition within reach. He was on the precipice of becoming president of Afghanistan, fulfilling the role elite US institutions had cultivated him for over decades.

Washington’s love affair with the “technocratic reformer”

Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban leader, Hamid Karzai, had initially showed himself to be a loyal Western puppet. By the end of his reign in 2014, however, Karzai had become a “harsh critic” of the US government, as the Washington Post put it, “an ally who became an adversary during the 12 years of his presidency.”

Karzai began to openly criticize US-NATO troops for killing tens of thousands of civilians. He was angry about how controlled he was, and sought to exert more independence, lamenting, “Afghans died in a war that’s not ours.”

Washington and Brussels had a problem. They had invested billions of dollars over a decade in creating a new government in their image in Afghanistan, but their chosen marionette was beginning to bridle at his strings.

From the perspective of NATO governments, Ashraf Ghani provided the perfect replacement for Karzai. He was the portrait of a loyal technocrat, and had only one small downside: Afghans hated him.

When he got less than 3% of the vote in the 2009 election, Ghani had run openly as the candidate of the Washington Consensus. He only had the support of a few elites in Kabul.

So when the 2014 presidential race rolled around, Ghani and his Western handlers took a different tack, dressing Ghani in traditional clothes and filling his speeches with nationalist rhetoric.

The New York Times insisted that he had finally found the sweet spot: “Technocrat to Afghan Populist, Ashraf Ghani Is Transformed.” The paper recounted how Ghani went from a “pro-Western intellectual” who conducted “small talk in a vernacular best described as technocratese (think phrases like ‘consultative processes’ and ‘cooperative frameworks’)” to a bad copy of “populists who cut deals with their enemies, win support from their rivals and appeal to Afghan national pride.”

The rebranding strategy did help get Ghani into second place, but he was still handily defeated in the first round of the 2014 election. His rival, Abdullah Abdullah, garnered 45% to Ghani’s 32%, with nearly 1 million more votes.

In the June run-off, however, the tables suddenly turned. The results were delayed, and when they were finalized three weeks later, they had Ghani up with a stunning 56.4% to Abdullah’s 43.6%.

Abdullah claimed that Ghani had stolen the election through widespread fraud. His accusations were far from baseless, as there was substantial evidence of systematic irregularities.

To settle the dispute, the Obama administration dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to Kabul to broker negotiations between Ghani and Abdullah.

Kerry’s mediation led to the creation of a national unity government in which President Ghani at least initially agreed to share power with Abdullah, who would occupy a newly created role, the name of which transparently reflected Washington’s neoliberal agenda: Chief Executive Officer, or CEO of Afghanistan.

US Secretary of State John Kerry negotiating with Afghanistan presidential candidates Abdullah Abdullah (left) and Ashraf Ghani (right) in July 2014

A report published that December by European Union electoral observers concluded that there had indeed been rampant fraud in the June election. More than 2 million votes, representing over one-quarter of the total cast, had come from polling stations with overt irregularities.

Whether or not Ghani actually won the run-off was nebulous. But he had managed to get over the finish line, and that was all that mattered. He was president now. And his imperial patrons in Washington were more than happy to sweep the scandal under the rug.

Official Washington lionizes Ghani in the face of fraud and failure

The apparent rigging of the 2014 election did little to tarnish Ashraf Ghani’s image in the Western media. The BBC characterized him with three terms – “reformer,” “technocrat,” and “incorruptible” – that would become the press corps’ favorite descriptions for a president who ultimately abandoned his country with $169 million and his proverbial tail between his legs.

In a puff piece that was emblematic of the media’s portrayal of Ghani, the New Yorker claimed he was “incorruptible,” hailing him as a “visionary technocrat who thinks twenty years ahead.”

In March 2015, Ghani flew to Washington for his moment of ultimate glory. The new Afghan president delivered a speech to a joint session of the US Congress. And he was celebrated as a hero who would unlock the magic of the free market to save Afghanistan once and for all.

Think tankers and their friends in the press could not get enough of Ghani. That August, the senior director of programs at the US government-funded regime-change organization Democracy International, Jed Ober, published an article in Foreign Policy that reflected the Beltway’s love affair with its man in Kabul.

When Ashraf Ghani was elected president of Afghanistan, many in the international community rejoiced. Surely a former World Bank official with a reputation as a reformer was the right man to fix Afghanistan’s most egregious problems and repair the country’s standing internationally. There was no better candidate to bring Afghanistan into a new age of good governance and begin to expand the rights and freedoms that have too often been denied many of the country’s citizens.

Unperturbed by the documented allegations of electoral fraud, the Atlantic Council honored Ghani in 2015 with its “distinguished international leadership award,” celebrating his putative “selfless and courageous commitment to democracy and human dignity.”

In March @Madeleine Albright presented @ashrafghani with his award. Full video: http://t.co/U1y3Q1xO44 #ACAwards pic.twitter.com/OHesh4S2jb

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) May 1, 2015

The Atlantic Council excitedly noted that Ghani “personally accepted the award, presented to him by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on March 25 in Washington before an audience of NATO leaders, ambassadors and generals.”

Albright, who once publicly defended the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by US-led sanctions, glorified Ghani as a “brilliant economist” and claimed “he has offered hope to the Afghan people, and to the world.”

The official Atlantic Council ceremony was later held in April, but Ghani was unable to attend, so his daughter Mariam received the award on his behalf.

Born and raised in the United States, Mariam Ghani is a New York City-based artist who perfectly embodies all the characteristics of a radlib hipster ensconced in a luxury Brooklyn loft apartment. Mariam’s personal Instagram account features a combination of minimalist art and pseudo-radical political expressions.

With elite status within the milieu of left-identified regime-change activists, Mariam Ghani participated in a 2017 panel discussion at New York University titled “Art & Refugees: Confronting Conflict with Visual Elements,” alongside the illustrator and dirty-war supporter Molly Crabapple. Crabapple is a fellow at the US State Department-funded New America Foundation, where she is sponsored by billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. She and Mariam Ghani also appeared together in a 2019 artist compilation.

At the 2015 Atlantic Council ceremony in Washington, as Mariam Ghani proudly accepted the militaristic NATO think tank’s top award for her father, she stood smiling alongside three fellow honorees: a top US general, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, and right-wing country singer Toby Keith, who made his name screeching out jingoist musical threats against Arabs and Muslims, pledging to “put a boot in your ass,” because “it’s the American way.”

Take a look back at DLA 2015 ft @TobyKeithMusic @PMBreedlove @ashrafghani & more. #ACawards https://t.co/0DzficUUlw pic.twitter.com/wQEOiJhVlU

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) May 3, 2016

The Atlantic Council’s marketing on behalf of President Ghani kicked into hyperdrive after the ceremony. In June 2015, the think tank published an article under its “New Atlanticist” blog titled, “IMF: Ghani has Shown Afghanistan is ‘Open for Business.’”

The International Monetary Fund’s top official in Afghanistan, Mission Chief Paul Ross, effused to the Atlantic Council that Ghani had “signaled to the world that Afghanistan is open for business and the new administration is determined to proceed with reforms.”

The bureaucrat declared that the IMF was “optimistic about the long term,” under Ghani’s leadership.

Ghani and his US puppet regime had a kind of revolving door with the Atlantic Council, in fact. His ambassador to the UAE, Javid Ahmad, simultaneously served as a senior fellow at the think tank. Ahmad exploited his sinecure there to place op-eds in major media outlets depicting his boss as a moderate reformer who aimed “to restore civil debate in Afghan politics.”

[OP-ED] The US should use its remaining influence in Afghanistan to voice support for noncriminal candidates in the coming elections, and back President Ghani’s efforts to restore civil debate in Afghan politics, writes @ahmadjavid.https://t.co/ra89Kdb5Vt

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) September 21, 2018

Foreign Policy had lent Ahmad space in its magazine to publish a barely disguised campaign ad for Ghani in June 2014. The article sang his praise as “a highly educated, pro-Western, intellectual alternative to Afghanistan’s age-old system of corruption and warlordism.”

At the time, Ahmad was a program coordinator for Asia at the Western government-funded cold war lobby group the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Foreign Policy’s editors apparently did not notice that Ahmad’s puff piece has passages that are almost a word-for-word copy of Ghani’s official bio.

(Top) Javid Ahmad’s puff piece for Ashraf Ghani in Foreign Policy; (Bottom) Ghani’s official government bio

These boastful claims have not exactly aged well.

The journalist hosting the softball interview was Kevin Baron, the executive editor of the weapons industry-backed website Defense One. Though the systemic corruption and ineffectual and abusive nature of the Afghan army was well-known, Baron offered no pushback.

At the event, Ghani paid homage to the think tank that had served as his personal propaganda mill for so long. Celebrating the Atlantic Council’s CEO, Fred Kempe, Ghani gushed, “You’ve been a great friend. I have great admiration for both your scholarship and your management.”

THREAD—Now at #NATOEngages: a talk with President of Afghanistan @ashrafghani, facilitated by Kevin Baron (@DefenseBaron) of @DefenseOne. Follow this thread for key quotes!

Watch live: https://t.co/n7epPuAVb5

Learn more: https://t.co/H0HiVYJuWr

Act: https://t.co/1A9tO1hkty

1/ pic.twitter.com/UdqEgMAsHP

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) July 12, 2018

The Atlantic Council’s love affair with Ghani continued right up until the ignominious end of his presidency.

Ghani was an honored guest at the Atlantic Council-backed, German government-sponsored Munich Security Conference (MSC) in 2019. There, the aristocratic Afghan president gave a speech that would make even the most cynical pseudo-populist blush, declaring, “Peace needs to be citizen-centered, not elite-centered.”

#MSC2019 news: @DamonMacWilson talked to @ashrafghani today to ask him about actors who should be involved to ensure a concrete solution to the conflict. https://t.co/9HHs5esBFN

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) February 15, 2019

The Atlantic Council hosted Ghani a final time in June 2020, at an event co-sponsored by the CIA-linked United States Institute of Peace and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Following praise from Kempe as a “leading voice for democracy, freedom, and inclusion,” former CIA Director David Petraeus lauded Ghani by emphasizing “what a privilege it was to work with [him] as the commander in Afghanistan.”

Hear from President @ashrafghani TODAY at 10am EST as he discusses Afghanistan’s vision for peace hosted by @ACSouthAsia and moderated by @USIP’s Stephen Hadley. #ACFrontPage #AfghanPeaceProcess

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) June 11, 2020

It was not until Ghani openly robbed and fled his country in disgrace in August 2021 that the Atlantic Council finally turned on him. After nearly two decades of promoting, cultivating, and lionizing him, the think tank ultimately acknowledged that he was a “villain in hiding.”

It was a dramatic turnabout by a think tank that knew Ghani better than perhaps any other institution in Washington. But it also echoed the desperate attempts at face-saving by many of the same elite US institutions that had shaped Ghani into the neoliberal economic hit man he was.

In Ghani’s infamous final days, Washington remained confident

The illusion that Ashraf Ghani was a technocratic genius continued right up until the end of his disastrous term.

This June 25, just weeks before his government collapsed, Ghani met with Joe Biden in the White House, where the US president reassured his Afghan counterpart of Washington’s steadfast support.

“We’re going to stick with you,” Biden reassured Ghani. “And we’re going to do our best to see to it you have the tools you need.”

A month later, on July 23, Biden reiterated to Ghani on a phone call that Washington would continue propping him up. But without thousands of NATO troops protecting his hollow regime, the Taliban was rapidly advancing – and it all came down in a matter of days, like a sand castle hit by a wave.

Ashraf Ghani meets with President Joe Biden in the White House on June 25, 2021

By August 15, Ghani had fled the country with sacks of stolen money. It was a surreal rebuttal to the narrative, repeated ad nauseam by the press, that Ghani was, as Reuters put it in 2019, “incorruptible and erudite.”

Elites in Washington couldn’t believe what was happening, denying what they were seeing right before their eyes.

Even the legendary progressive anti-corruption activist Ralph Nader was in denial, referring to Ghani in fond terms as an “incorruptible former U.S. citizen.”

The reckless Afghan surrender, by Biden, after 20 years of reckless destructive war, will mark Biden’s legacy forever.

— Ralph Nader (@RalphNader) August 20, 2021

Few figures encapsulated the moral and political rot of the 20-year US war on Afghanistan better than Ashraf Ghani. But his record should not be taken as an isolated example.

It was official Washington, its apparatus of think tanks, and its army of sycophantic reporters that made Ghani who he was. This was a fact he himself acknowledged in a June 2020 interview with the Atlantic Council, in which Ghani expressed his utmost gratitude to his patrons: “Let me first pay tribute to the American people, to the American administrations, and Congress of the United States, and particularly, the American taxpayer for the sacrifices in blood and treasure.”

thegrayzone.com