Amidst the storm of Orwellian misinformation shaping our current world, up has become down, white has become black and good has become evil.

Despite the fact that the evils of Nazism were defeated primarily by the sacrifices made by the Russians during WWII, it has increasingly become popular to assert the fallacy that the great war’s true villain was Stalin. And despite the fact that unreconstructed Nazis were absorbed into the Cold War Five Eyes-led intelligence machine giving rise to 2^nd and 3^rd generation Nazis in Ukraine today, we are repeatedly told that Ukraine is a temple of liberty and beacon of democracy upon whose territory we should risk lighting the world on nuclear fire to defend.

It is thus a breath of fresh air when uncomfortable truths are capable of breaking through the drunken illusion of Orwellian newspeak which has contaminated the current zeitgeist. One such truth to come to light has been the mainstream media’s recognition that the disastrous Hunter Biden laptop and all of its scandalous contents were always genuine. These revelations have forced Americans to confront the fact that the current U.S. President directly benefited by the systems of graft and corruption which he oversaw while viceroy of a Nazi-infested Ukraine during Obama’s reign.

Channel 4’s Nazi King Exposed

Another explosive revelation which has sent shockwaves through the western zeitgeist in recent days was featured in a documentary which aired on Britain’s Channel 4 called ‘Edward VIII: Britain’s Traitor King’.

This film, based upon a soon-to-be released book by historian Andrew Lownie, uses recently declassified reports from the Royal Archives to tell the story of Britain’s Nazi King Edward VIII who not only desired a Nazi victory in WWII, but actively worked towards said goal from the moment he was forced to abdicate the throne in 1936 (allegedly to marry an American divorcée Wallis Simpson) throughout the darkest days of the war itself.

As this documentary proves, teaching his young niece Elizabeth II how to do a proper ‘sieg heil’ wasn’t his only dance with Nazism.

While in exile in Portugal where the royal hob knobbed with Germany’s elite, the documentary cites diplomatic cables sent by Edward to German officials demanding that the Nazis relentlessly bomb England into submission in 1940 encouraging the deaths of millions of innocent civilians. The film also cites a little-known speech where Edward called for Britain’s surrender to the Nazis in 1939 which the BBC refused to air. Even after being sent to the Bahamas by imperial officials who had decided it more expedient to put down their Frankenstein monster than continue with their earlier plans for a fascist New World Order, the Nazi would-be king had cabled Hitler’s officials indicating his willingness to return to Europe when needed and retake his rightful seat on the throne as an Aryan king.

Beyond the Film: More Nazi Roots of the Windsors

Beyond the case of Edward VIII, there are many other embarrassing Nazi connections to the house of Windsor (formerly Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) which the film failed to mention, some of which implicate the late Prince Consort Philip Mountbatten (aka: Duke of Edinburgh) directly.

All of the Duke of Edinburgh’s three sisters were married to Nazi princes, and the husband of one of them (Sophie) became a Waffen SS officer with the rank of Oberführer (senior leader).

Philip’s sister Sophie’s husband, Prince Christopher of Hesse-Cassel, was chief of the Forschungsamt (Directorate of Scientific Research), a special intelligence operation run by Hermann Göring, and he was also Standartenführer (colonel) of the SS on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. Philip’s four brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking officials in the Nazi Party.

Philip himself maintained the family tradition, first having been educated under a Nazi curriculum centered on eugenics in the 1930s, and then going on to found the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) with fellow one-time Nazi Party member Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a lifelong eugenicist and Bilderberg Group founder, in 1961. Philip and Bernhard were joined by Sir Julian Huxley (then president of the Eugenics Society of Britain) as WWF co-founder. In an August 1988 interview with Deutsche Press Agentur, Prince Philip proclaimed his desire to return in the next life as a deadly virus to help “solve overpopulation”.

On this virulent concept of population reduction, it is worth reviewing the life’s work and words of one prominent vice-President of the WWF from 1978-1981 named Maurice Strong who served directly under Prince Philip (then acting WWF President). According to Justin Trudeau, Strong had co-founded the World Economic Forum alongside Klaus Schwab in 1971, chaired the UN Conference on Population of 1972 and its 1992 sequel in Rio de Janeiro while juggling a wide array of hats from World Bank President, Earth Charter author, UN Environmental Protection Agency founder and architect of Agenda 21 (recently renamed Agenda 2030).

In a May 1990 interview with WEST magazine, Strong discussed a meeting at Davos and mused: “What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Prince Philip exuded similarly cold misanthropic “musings” as he contemplated the human zoo asserting:

“You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world. Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.”

The Disturbing Case of Prince Charles

Although Philip died in 2021, his son and heir to the throne has taken his father’s mission of reducing the world population to heart, through his leadership of various conservationist organizations, and as patron of the now defunct Liverpool Care Pathway, which was revealed to have euthanized over 60,000 British citizens per year, without their consent, between 2001 and 2013.

During its 18 year reign, the LCP had pressured hundreds of healthcare providers to put millions of sick and elderly (and expensive) patients onto “End of Life” lists without their consent resulting in forced dehydration and morphine drips to accelerate deaths despite the fact that life-saving treatments were still available.

In June 2020, Prince Charles co-founded the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative along with his colleague Klaus Schwab in order to take advantage of the “existential two-fold crisis” of climate change and a pandemic to radically remodify global behavior and economic systems. Beyond the pretty words used by Davos billionaires to rally humanity to save the planet, the fact is that those “green” Build Back Better reforms which adhere to sustainable energy, carbon emission cuts and food reforms as witnessed in the EU Farm to Fork agenda would result in a scale of death that even the likes of a Hitler might blush.

The Nazi pedigree of the royal family and its loyal managers raises the question: Why has their continuation of Nazi eugenics doctrine in the form of the euthanasia and zero-growth movements not become more widely known? What type of world do we live in, that such startling facts could not be general knowledge?

The Privy Council System

I hope it is becoming increasingly clear that the British Empire and its aspirations for population control never ended with the cancellation of the Hitler project in 1945.

I hope it is also becoming clear that this empire was never the nation of Great Britain, its Parliament, or its people.

The true Empire has always been a financial oligarchy which is used by a vast network of power structures to advance the interests of the aristocracy of Europe; The current epicenter of power is the Anglo-Dutch monarchies (otherwise known as the Founts of All Honours). It is this power that controls the Bilderberg Group, its junior appendage the World Economic Forum, and steers American policy through the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (the American version of Chatham House) dubbed by Hillary Clinton as “the mothership”.

Chatham House is another name for the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) begun in 1919 by the leading Milnerites of the Round Table Movement who created the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in order to promote eugenics and world government under the League of Nations. The American branch was given its name to avoid allusions to the British terminology due to American mistrust of British intrigue. The Canadian and Australian Branches were begun in 1928 and run most typically by Oxford-trained agents since then. In the case of the USA, current CFR President Richard Haass graduated from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1978.

It was to leading Chatham House member Lord Lothian in 1937 that Hitler laid out his concept for the Anglo-German New World Order saying: “Germany, England, France, Italy, America and Scandinavia… should arrive at some agreement whereby they would prevent their nationals from assisting in the industrializing of countries such as China, and India. It is suicidal to promote the establishment in the agricultural countries of Asia of manufacturing industries.” (1)

Any number of technocrats pushing a “Build Back Better for the World” scheme or “Global Green New Deal” could have said the same thing.

Today, the Canadian Institute for International Affairs has been renamed the Canadian International Council (CIC). The CIC is Chaired by Oxford-trained regime change specialist Ben Rowswell who worked closely with Privy Councillor Chrystia Freeland in attempting to overthrow the government of Maduro in favor of WEF-puppet Juan Guaido which continues to this day.

A key pillar in the control over colonies of Anglo-Dutch influence remains the Privy Council system, which is centered in Britain, but has secondary branches in select Commonwealth countries. It is under the Privy Council’s influence that lower-level operatives are instituted in the form of deputy ministers, the Treasury Board, Select Committees, and other appointed officials in the Civil Service. Other key nodes in the public and private sector manage the interests of the Crown. All cabinet members of government are made Privy Councillors and all Privy Councillors are sworn to an oath of secrecy and allegiance to the Queen including oaths to keep secret those things spoken of in privy council meetings. (2)

Strange things for paragons of the “free and democratic rules-based order”.

As Channel 4’s documentary on the Nazi King should remind us, there are certain royal closets which can no longer contain the voluminous skeletons that certain powerful forces have wished be stuffed forever out of sight. Western civilization’s failure to reject Orwellian newspeak and other inversions of truth has resulted in an existential tension which will be resolved one way or the other. If that means the anti-human legacy of Hitler, Prince Philip, Edward VIII and other royal Nazis past and present push humanity into a new Dark Age or whether we break from our slumber and seek a new more dignified destiny remains to be seen.

Notes

(1) Transcription in Sir James R.M. Butler, Lord Lothian, Macmillan and Co., London, 1960, pp. 332)

(2) Since it is hard for normal people to wrap their minds around the fact that such a medieval institution such as this still exists in the modern world, here is a selection of the Oath of Allegiance that all privy councillors must take upon entering that office: “I, [name], do solemnly and sincerely swear that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada. I will in all things to be treated, debated and resolved in Privy Council, faithfully, honestly and truly declare my mind and my opinion. I shall keep secret all matters committed and revealed to me in this capacity, or that shall be secretly treated of in Council. Generally, in all things I shall do as a faithful and true servant ought to do for Her Majesty.”

Employment at the self-styled newspaper of record NYT requires a commitment to support imperial rampaging and corporate plunder.

It requires abandonment of support for peace, equity, justice and the rule of law.

It requires a willingness to demonize and otherwise misreport on US invented enemies.

It requires a commitment to fake news over truth and full disclosure, especially on major domestic and geopolitical issues.

The Times is to journalism as night is to day, as wrong is to right, as fakery is to truth-telling.

What’s indisputable shows up in daily fake news editions.

Claiming continued Russian attacks around Kiev and Chernigov on Wednesday after deescalation was discussed the previous day, the Times ignored what came out of Istanbul talks.

Russian delegates discussed a gradual deescalation around the above cities, not a ceasefire anywhere in Ukraine.

Russia’s general staff hasn’t yet announced “what the slowdown or de-escalation (around these cities) will mean exactly,” head of its negotiating delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, explained, adding:

No “ceasefire” was proposed.

Further, Russia will respond militarily to strikes on its forces anywhere in Ukraine.

Self-defense is a fundamental rule of law principle.

The Times ignored all of the above, defying reality instead, saying:

“Moscow (is) in no hurry to end its war (sic).”

Its “advance in those areas already stalled (sic).”

“Moscow’s announcement was less a concession than an acknowledgment of the shortcomings of its military operation (sic).”

“Ukrainian officials say that reports of cases of rape and sexual violence carried out by Russian soldiers against civilians continue to grow (sic).”

Russian forces “destroyed…civil infrastructure…libraries, shopping malls…(residential) houses…bridges (and) civilians (queued in) a bread line (sic).”

The Times cited a fake State Department “do not travel” advisory to Russia, falsely warning that US citizens may be detained because of their nationality (sic).”

Russian forces suffered “heavy losses and logistical issues (sic).”

They’re “unable to fight on more than one front (sic).”

All of the above rubbish turned truth on its head in typical NYT-style, gray lady lies of our times its standard fare.

Indeed a looming food crisis threatens increased hunger, malnutrition and starvation — because of US/Western sanctions war on Russia and what led to its special military operation — what the Times left unexplained.

Between them, Russia and Ukraine produce about a third of world wheat, 20% of its corn and up to 80% of its sunflower oil.

War in Ukraine and banning Russian imports caused energy, food and other prices to skyrocket.

A food insecurity crisis affects US/Western countries and many others, including Ukraine, of course.

The Times falsely accused Russia of bombing civilian ships in the Black Sea, adding:

Russia’s navy is “blocking access to Ukrainian ports to cut off exports of grains (sic).”

In Security Council remarks, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia debunked the above Big Lies, saying:

“Russian armed forces are posing no threat to the freedom of civilian navigations” — in the Black Sea or anywhere else.

According to bozo BoJo regime fake news:

“It is almost certain that the Russian offensive has failed in its objective to encircle Kiev (sic).”

The Times falsely accused Russia of “trying to starve the residents of Mariupol into surrender (sic).”

Its forces continue going all-out to protect the city’s residents from the scourge of remaining US/NATO supported Nazified Ukrainian forces embedded in their neighborhoods, holding them as human shields.

As part of its longstanding war of words on Vladimir Putin, the Times once again defied reality by falsely calling him a “tyrant (sic).”

Infamous for leaving no long ago debunked Big Lie behind, prostitute of the press Thomas Friedman consistently ignores US war on humanity at home and abroad while bashing its invented enemies with managed news misinformation and disinformation rubbish — humiliating himself at the same time.

He lied calling Vladimir Putin a “petro-dictator (sic).”

He perpetuated the global warming/climate change myth.

He called for harming Russia by cutting off its oil and gas exports.

He urged Americans to make sacrifices “to win the war against…Putin.”

“Put Putin over a barrel, he roared…What are we waiting for (sic).”

The above and lots more rubbish like it is standard fare in Times editions — at the expense of news fit to print.

According to WaPo fake news, “Russia (may) consider using (nukes) to escalate conflict (sic).”

A previous article explained its clear position on these weapons.

Nothing remotely suggests that its forces will use them in Ukraine — or at any time except in self-defense.

As explained by its armed forces chief General Valery Gerasimov:

“The country’s nuclear policy is purely defensive in nature.”

“Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons (only) in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it or its allies, and in cases of aggression against Russia using conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened.”

And conditions for their possible use is very limited and strictly regulated, he added.

According to WSJ editors — in light of what’s happening in Ukraine — hegemon USA’s bloated military budget isn’t bloated enough.

They urged lots more waste, fraud and abuse than already to counter invented threats. No real ones exist.

At a small fraction of what the US spends, Russia’s super-weapons are greatly superior to the best in the West.

Its hypersonic missiles used to destroy a western Ukrainian base cannot be defended against by US/NATO regimes.

Along with its tactical superiority, Russian super-weapons way outclass the best of US/NATO forces.

Its military is for defense — in stark contrast to alliance forever wars on invented enemies.

Russia didn’t want war in Ukraine.

It spent over seven years trying to resolve Kiev’s aggression on Donbass diplomatically.

It failed because hegemon USA wants perpetual war along its borders.

Left with no other option, Vladimir Putin authorized Russia’s special military operation to demilitarize and deNazify Ukraine — what couldn’t be accomplished another way.

stephenlendman.org

NATO is ensuring that Irish neutrality is a very close second to truth in the Ukrainian war’s casualty list.

Ireland has witnessed nothing like this level of ignorant jingoism since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared war on Germany, Austria and Hungary in summer, 1914 when Dublin’s thugs beat up German grocers and when Ireland’s barbarians blacklisted Kuno Meyer, the world’s leading Irish language scholar for being born German.

Although the horrors of the Somme, coupled with Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising, muffled Ireland’s war dogs somewhat, they spent the next 100 years plotting their comeback, even as Ireland’s pro-active neutrality policy propelled Éamon de Valera to the front of the League of Nations and Frank Aiken, his foreign minister, to be the United Nations’ most respected advocate for peace, neutrality and non-alignment.

The Second World War was, the Irish always believed, De Valera’s finest hour as he kept us out of a war where our only contribution would have been a massive increase in the Irish body bag count. Not that Ireland got away scot free. De Valera, in his 1940 St Patrick’s Day address, explained that Ireland was more effectively blockaded than any country in history and one in five of Ireland’s merchant marine force made the ultimate sacrifice. De Valera and Aiken forged Ireland’s neutrality into an indelibly proud Irish hallmark, as demonstrated in this 1974 television debate when legendary Irish spy-master Dan Bryan spelled out the case for maintaining Irish neutrality.

Fast forward to Dublin’s 2022 St Patrick’s Day parade and, in a total break from long-established protocol, Ukrainian flags, not Irish tricolours, lined Dublin’s main streets, and Ukrainians, in their national colours, led the parade, smug in the knowledge that the Irish government will allow 200,000 more of them enter Ireland, a country where only four of its Southern 26 counties have populations larger than 200,000.

Although this is vastly more than either France or the USA are opening their borders to, it is not nearly enough for Ukraine’s Clown President, who is demanding Ireland abandon its neutrality and invade Russia, something Ireland’s Clown Prime Minister feels might cross a red line. Britain’s Clown Prince Charles, meanwhile, the future King who wants to be a used tampon is, in the most remarkable lapse of diplomatic protocol, castigating Russia as he tours neutral Ireland, a country he and his entire family have the most despicable track record in.

Although all refugees, Ukrainians included, deserve help and support, they are incidental to this open door policy, which is pivotal to the Irish regime’s deliberate collusion in destroying the very essence of Irish neutrality and nationhood and no less a person than current Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin has said exactly that.

And, even more incredibly, all major Irish political parties fundamentally agree with him and all are agreed on snuggling up to NATO, with the largely U.S. funded Sinn Féin joining Ireland’s other political leprechauns in calling for the expulsion of Russia’s entire diplomatic staff over matters Sinn Féin patently know nothing about the secret pact which gives the RAF unfettered access to Irish skies on the ludicrous pretext of defending Irish neutrality against Russia, whose nearest military base is thousands of kilometers away.

And what of the Russian delegation? Their Orwell Road premises have been under constant attack by mobs led by far right government minister Josepha Madigan and a very well organized and funded crew of Ukrainian, Polish and Hungarian fascists, who must be delighted that the Irish police allowed them free reign to unleash their terror on a peaceful, diplomatic mission.

And that Ireland’s Catholic priests are defacing the Embassy’s walls and Catholic Church suppliers are ramming the Embassy with trucks and being blessed by other dubious priests for their terrorism, whilst older Irish citizens live in fear Ireland’s Ukrainian imports will take a leaf from Kiev’s playbook and throw yellow and blue paint over them for having watched Yuri Gagarin orbit the earth in 1961.

But it is not just lilly lived Irish priests who are at fault. Ever since the Iraqi war, when NATO’s armies embedded journalists into their ranks, Irish hacks from Mary Fitzgerald cavorting with leading ISIS commanders to Orla Guerin lighting candles in churches with Nazis in Mariupol, have been widely deployed not only to pretend that NATO’s war coverage is somehow neutral and balanced but that “brave” Irish women, like “brave” Irishman Lord Haw Haw and other “brave” Irish Nazi collaborators before them, are showing the ignorant Irish the folly of their long-held neutrality.

But why should Irish neutrality matter at all, as the the damning February 2022 Commission on the Defence Forces shows the Irish could hardly carry the day against Iceland or Malta, never mind Russia or some other heavyweight, not least because the Irish naval services spend their time ferrying illegal aliens to Italy to soften up the Irish to abandon their neutrality heritage for a mess of NATO pottage?

Though joining NATO and PESCO will allow the Irish Army’s top brass and their political sponsors hob nob with the great and the good, it will more importantly deepen and widen NATO’s soft war options by extending the shelf life of the Good Friday Peace Agreement, which disgraced politicians Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George Mitchell have been dining off for the last 24 years. Because this agreement’s pertinent international significance is that it allows its British and American architects pawn themselves off as peace-makers, not as the nation wreckers that they are, it is a valuable bauble, especially when coupled with the international standing joke of Ireland’s bloated NGO sector.

Then there is the strange case of Ireland’s Shannon Airport, which has been a major NATO hub for sending prisoners to be tortured and, in more recent years, as a stop-over refuelling and R&R hub for armed American troops heading off to pick up the white man’s burden in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

What is particularly noteworthy about those repeated American breaches of Irish neutrality is there is no need for them, as airports in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany or countless other NATO aligned countries would do equally well. However, making Shannon airport dependent upon servicing America’s war needs helps pull the greater Shannon airport area into the NATO orbit and that is its point. America abuses Shannon airport to subjugate Ireland’s economy.

Not only has NATO thoroughly penetrated Ireland’s military and political apparatus but she stands at the nerve centre of her economy. Most of Silicon Valley’s Fortune 500 companies have their European offices in Dublin and, to coin the old joke, Dublin’s rents keep doublin’ most years as a result. Not only do the workers these companies import pay over 50% of Ireland’s income taxes but NATO have impressed on Ireland, which has already surrendered its massive fisheries to her European “partners”, the need to radically cull its national herd and therefore to become even more dependent on these secretive companies and the retired NATO generals who sit on their boards.

Ireland, once synonymous with holy war, is being slowly ripped asunder forcing, as Zionist scholar Dr Rory Millers asserts at 12:23 in this instructive 2014 Tel Aviv talk, Jewish led sectarian alliances to square up against Ireland’s numerically insignificant but now very vulnerable Orthodox Christian communities, and Ireland’s Zionist apologists to defend themselves against Ireland’s Islamic war lords and NATO’s Antifa fifth columnists.

All these needlessly imported sectarian squabbles undermine Ireland’s home front, even as Ireland’s Foreign Minister chairs meetings of the UNSC to boost his CV while Ireland’s punch-drunk Prime Minister harrangues nuclear armed India that its neutrality is “unacceptable”, and Ireland’s UN Ambassador stupidly threatens to unleash further Irish hell on Afghanistan’s Taliban government to settle some grudges NATO still hold against the unfortunate survivors of NATO’s Afghan extermination campaign. Though these Irish jokers talk far too loudly and carry a tiny stick, the problem is that, as NATO controls their voice, their economy and their shillelaghs, what little remains of Ireland’s independence and neutrality will soon be sacrificed unless Ireland’s entire political apparatus is scrapped and time-honed and internationally honored values of neutrality, self awareness and self respect again become Ireland’s norm.

There is no Nazi presence in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion are merely excellent fighters, and Russian claims of denazifying the regime are cynical falsifications to justify aggression, according to the BBC.

In a sneaking way, one has to admire the aplomb of the British Broadcasting Corporation which promotes itself as one of the world’s “most trusted” news brands. While it smears and sneers at Russian news media as “state-owned” and “Kremlin propaganda machines”, the BBC is itself 100 percent state-owned and totally aligned with British government and NATO propaganda aims. That propaganda includes distortion and fabrication presented with the arrogant assertion of being independent news information.

Propaganda, old chap, is something that the Russians do. But not the British Bullshit Corporation. Oh no, heaven forbid, we’re British after all… fair play, objective, cricket, stiff-upper-lip, London Calling, fight them on the beaches, and so on, all the self-admiring epithets of a self-declared benign empire.

And so in a recent broadcast, the BBC’s ever-so smug Ros Atkins had the brass neck to assure viewers that there were no Nazis in Ukraine. He said it was a myth concocted by the Kremlin as a pretext for its military intervention in Ukraine. Atkins downplayed the Azov Battalion as having some far-right members who were negligible. He also claimed that the Azov Battalion was formed to defend Ukraine from Russia’s aggression that began in 2014. The BBC’s distortion of the 2014 coup in Kiev is astounding.

The BBC’s barefaced denial of Azov and others Nazi regiments in the Ukrainian military stands in jarring contrast to the well-documented facts. Images of torchlit processions honoring Stepan Bandera and others Ukrainian SS collaborators, images of Nazi flags, Nazi salutes, and Nazi insignia are abundant. Azov leaders like Andrey Biletsky and Olena Semenyaka openly pay homage to the Third Reich.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky may be Jewish and purportedly have relatives who died in the Holocaust. But he is owned by the Nazi brigades. His PR value as a Jewish face for the regime is a big asset (thanks CIA, MI6!). But it doesn’t change the fact that the Ukrainian military is a fascist force that waged a terror war against the Russian-speaking people of Southeast Ukraine for eight years since 2014 – killing 14,000 – until it was stopped by Russia’s intervention on February 24.

No wonder the BBC is covering for Azov when the British Ministry of Defense is training and arming their fighters, along with other NATO states.

In the same BBC broadcast, Atkins told viewers that the Russian army had bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital and the Mariupol theater resulting in civilian deaths. No evidence, no images of dead bodies. Just assumption of trust us, because, after all, “this is the BBC”.

Here the corporation goes from denial about the Azov and Nazis to actually promoting their propaganda lies. That’s because the BBC is employing and relying on Ukrainian journalists who are affiliated with far-right politics.

Civilians fleeing from Mariupol have testified to independent news organizations that the Azov fighters detonated both the hospital and the theater in a false-flag operation designed to smear Russia and to bolster NATO support for the Ukrainian regime.

What the BBC is doing here is echoed by U.S. media like CNN, NBC, and others. It is also a replay of how they reported on Syria where they accused the Syrian army and Russian allies of bombing civilians. The reality was that towns and cities like Aleppo were being held under siege by Western-backed mercenaries and their propagandists in the White Helmets who carried out false-flag atrocities. The BBC would tell viewers that the Syrian army and Russia were killing civilians when in reality the civilians were being liberated from a reign of terror. The same is happening with the Azov and other Nazis in Ukraine whom the BBC, CNN, etc., are whitewashing and promoting.

Ask yourself: why does the BBC no longer report from Syria? What about all those hysterical claims of war crimes against civilians when the Syrian army and Russia were liberating towns and cities? Why hasn’t the BBC followed up to interview Syrian civilians to find out how they feel about being liberated? The same BBC “journalists” are too busy spinning the next propaganda war for the British government and NATO in Ukraine.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the “Beeb” as it is affectionately known. It was founded by the British government as a propaganda service. Earlier names included the British Empire Service. Up until recently, members of staff were vetted by MI5, the British state intelligence service. They no doubt still are, only now even more hush-hush covertly. By law, every British household must buy a TV license (£159 per year) to support the financing of the BBC. Failure to do so results in criminal prosecution and even jail.

The Orwellian reality of the Beeb should make it the world’s “most busted” propaganda outlet. But then again that’s what is so Orwellian about the BBC. It still retains a wholesome image for many people around the world. Even when the whitewashing of Nazis in Ukraine is its latest star turn.

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.

Millions of Westerners raised to admire the ultimate spectacle of high-tech, robotic power, must have quickly suppressed their awe at the shock – this was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.

Rewind to April 2017: over video footage of Trump’s cruise missiles launching at targets in Syria in response to completely unproven claims that Syria had just used chemical weapons, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams felt a song coming on:

‘We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean – I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons” – and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight…’

TV and newspaper editors feel the same way. Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power.

In 1991, the ‘white heat’ of our robotic weaponry was ‘beautiful’ because it meant that ‘we’ were so sophisticated, so civilised, so compassionate, that only Saddam’s palaces and government buildings were being ‘surgically’ removed, not human beings. This was keyhole killing. The BBC’s national treasure, David Dimbleby, basked in the glory on live TV:

‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman?’ (Quoted, John Pilger, ‘Hidden Agendas’, Vintage, 1998, p.45)

Might makes right! This seemed real to Dimbleby, as it did to many people. In fact, it was fake news. Under the 88,500 tons of bombs that followed the launch of the air campaign on January 17, 1991, and the ground attack that followed, 150,000 Iraqi troops and 50,000 civilians were killed. Just 7 per cent of the ordnance consisted of so called ‘smart bombs’.

By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. A BBC media review explained:

‘A number of front pages feature a picture of a Ukrainian woman – a teacher named Helena – with blood on her face and bandages around her head after a block of flats was hit in a Russian airstrike.

‘“Her blood on his hands” says the Daily Mirror; the Sun chooses the same headline.’

‘Our’ wars are not greeted by such headlines, nor by BBC headlines of this kind:

‘In pictures: Destruction and fear as war hits Ukraine’

The fear and destruction ‘we’ cause are not ‘our’ focus.

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:

‘Wow! Radical change of policy at BBC News at Ten. It excitedly reports young women – the resistance – making improvised bombs against Russia’s advance. Presumably Palestinians resisting Israel can now expect similar celebratory coverage from BBC reporters’

A BBC video report was titled:

‘Ukraine conflict: The women making Molotov cocktails to defend their city’

Hard to believe, but the text beneath read:

‘The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke to a group of women who were making Molotov cocktails in the park.’

For the entire morning of March 2, the BBC home page featured a Ukrainian civilian throwing a lit Molotov cocktail. The adjacent headline:

‘Russian paratroopers and rockets attack Kharkiv – Ukraine’

In other words, civilians armed with homemade weapons were facing heavily-armed elite troops. Imagine the response if, in the first days of an invasion, the BBC had headlined a picture of a civilian in Baghdad or Kabul heroically resisting US-UK forces in the same way.

Another front-page BBC article asked:

‘Ukraine invasion: Are Russia’s attacks war crimes?’

The answer is ‘yes,’ of course – Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, of course, the idea that such an article might have appeared in the first week of that invasion is completely unthinkable.

Generating The Propaganda Schwerpunkt

On 27 February, the first 26 stories on the BBC’s home page were devoted to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The BBC website even typically features half a dozen stories on Ukraine at the top of its sports section.

On 28 February, the Guardian’s website led with the conflict, followed by 20 additional links to articles about the Ukraine crisis. A similar pattern is found in all ‘mainstream’ news media.

The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war – ‘I stand with Ukraine!’

Political analyst Ben Norton commented:

‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’

This is no small matter. Norton added:

‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’

Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:

‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’

Over half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids on Yemen are UK-supplied. UK-made equipment includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles, and cluster munitions. Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:

‘Researchers on the grounds have discovered weapons fragments that demonstrate the use of UK-made weapons in attacks on civilian targets.’

Despite the immensity of the catastrophe and Britain’s clear legal and moral responsibility, in 2017, the Independent reported:

‘More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.

‘A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.

‘The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.’

The Independent added:

‘At least 75 people are estimated to be killed or injured every day in the conflict, which has pushed the country to the brink of famine as 14 million people lack a stable access to food.’

On Twitter, Dr Robert Allan made the point that matters:

‘We as tax paying citizens and as a nation are directly responsible for our actions. Not the actions of others. Of course we can and should highlight crimes of nations and act appropriately and benevolently (the UK record here is horrific). 1st – us, NATO, our motives and actions.’

We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’

As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat.

Certainly, we at Media Lens welcome the idea that powerful state-corporate media should be prevented from promoting state violence. It is absurd that individuals are arrested and imprisoned for threatening or inciting violence, while journalists regularly call for massive, even genocidal, violence against whole countries with zero consequences (career advancement aside). But banning media promoting state violence means banning, not just Russian TV, but literally all US-UK broadcasters and newspapers.

Confirming the hypocrisy, The Intercept reported:

‘Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.’

In 2014, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote:

‘The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle.

‘But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.’

The report continued:

‘Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.’

Perhaps the hundreds of journalists who attacked Jeremy Corbyn for questioning the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural – which depicted a mixture of famous historical and identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish bankers – with the single word, ‘Why?’, would care to comment?

According to our ProQuest search, the Guardian has made no mention of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the last week – as it most certainly would have, if Ukraine were an Official Enemy of the West. ProQuest finds a grand total of three mentions of the Azov Battalion in the entire UK national press – two in passing, with a single substantial piece in the Daily Star – in the last seven days. ‘Impressive discipline’, as Noam Chomsky likes to say.

‘Russia Must Be Broken’

Britain and the US have been waging so much war, so ruthlessly, for so long, that Western journalists and commentators have lost all sense of proportion and restraint. Neil Mackay, former editor of the Sunday Herald (2015-2018), wrote in the Herald:

‘Russia must be broken, in the hope that by breaking the regime economically and rendering it a pariah state on the world’s stage, brave and decent Russian people will rise up and drag Putin from power.’

If nothing else, Mackay’s comment indicated just how little impact was made by the deaths of 500,000 children under five when the US and Britain saw to it that the Iraq economy was ‘broken’ by 13 years of genocidal sanctions.

For describing his comment as ‘obscene’, Mackay instantly blocked us on Twitter. His brutal demand reminded us of the comment made by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:

‘Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation… and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.’

We can enjoy the ‘shock and awe’ of that comment, if we have no sense at all that Serbian people are real human beings capable of suffering, love, loss and death exactly as profound as our own.

On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine told a caller, Bill, from Manchester:

‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’

Unlike his celebrated interviewer, Bill, clearly no fan of Putin, had retained his humanity:

‘Do you?! Do kids deserve to die, 18, 20 – called up, conscripted – who don’t understand it, who don’t grasp the issues?’

Vine’s sage reply:

‘That’s life! That’s the way it goes!’

We all know what would have happened to Vine if he had said anything remotely comparable of the US-UK forces that illegally invaded Iraq.

MSNBC commentator Clint Watts observed:

‘Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming’

The strangest thing is media commentators reflexively imagining that US-UK-NATO can lay any moral or legal claim to act as an ultra-violent World Police.

Professor Michael McFaul of Stanford University, also serving with the media’s 101^st Chairborne Division, appeared to be experiencing multiple wargasms when he tweeted:

‘More Stingers to Ukraine! More javelins! More drones!’

Two hours later:

‘More NLAWs [anti-tank missiles], Stingers (the best ones), and Javelins for Ukraine! Now!’

Echoing Mackay, McFaul raved (and later deleted):

‘There are no more “innocent” “neutral” Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!’

Courageous words indeed from his Ivy League office. Disturbing to note that McFaul was ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, widely considered to be a saint.

‘Shockingly Arrogant Meddling’ – The Missing History

So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions.

In February 2014, after three months of violent, US-aided protests, much of it involving neo-Nazi anti-government militias, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for Russia. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) provide some context:

‘On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State [Victoria] Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk — Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats” — should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.’

The BBC reported Nuland picking the new Ukrainian leader:

‘I think “Yats” is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.’

FAIR continues:

‘Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.’

We can read between the lines when Nuland described how the US had invested ‘over $5 billion’ to ‘ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine’.

In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:

‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’

Carpenter concluded:

‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.

‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’

Within days of the 2014 coup, troops loyal to Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of Ukraine. As Jonathan Steele, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, recently explained:

‘NATO’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans.’

The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:

‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’

Mearsheimer argues that Russia views the expansion of NATO to its border with Ukraine as ‘an existential threat’:

‘If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that.’

Mearsheimer adds:

‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:

‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’

Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The pattern persists today. When Fox News recently spoke about the Russia-Ukraine crisis with former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the key perpetrators of the illegal invasion-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, she nodded her head in solemn agreement when the presenter said:

‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.’

The cognitive dissonance required to engage in this discussion and pass it off as serious analysis is truly remarkable.

Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:

‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’

It is sobering to read the dissenting arguments above and recall Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s warning to MPs last week:

‘Let me be very clear – There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of Nato.’

The Independent reported that Starmer’s warning came ‘after leading left-wingers – including key shadow cabinet members during the Jeremy Corbyn-era key, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – were threatened with the removal of the whip if their names were not taken off a Stop the War letter that had accused the UK government of “aggressive posturing”, and said that Nato “should call a halt to its eastward expansion”’.

Starmer had previously waxed Churchillian on Twitter:

‘There will be dark days ahead. But Putin will learn the same lesson as Europe’s tyrants of the last century: that the resolve of the world is harder than he imagines and the desire for liberty burns stronger than ever. The light will prevail.’

Clearly, that liberty does not extend to elected Labour MPs criticising NATO.

In the Guardian, George Monbiot contributed to the witch-hunt, noting ominously that comments made by John Pilger ‘seemed to echo Putin’s speech the previous night’. By way of further evidence:

‘The BBC reports that Pilger’s claims have been widely shared by accounts spreading Russian propaganda.’

Remarkably, Monbiot offered no counter-arguments to ‘Pilger’s claims’, no facts, relying entirely on smear by association. This was not journalism; it was sinister, hit and run, McCarthy-style propaganda.

Earlier, Monbiot had tweeted acerbically:

‘Never let @johnpilger persuade you that he has a principled objection to occupation and invasion. He appears to be fine with them, as long as the aggressor is Russia, not Israel, the US or the UK.’

In fact, for years, Pilger reported – often secretly and at great risk – from the Soviet Union and its European satellites. A chapter of his book, ‘Heroes’, is devoted to his secret meetings with and support for Soviet dissidents (See: John Pilger, ‘Heroes’, Pan, 1987, pp.431-440). In his 1977 undercover film on Czechoslovakia, ‘A Faraway Country’, he described the country’s oppressors as ‘fascists’. He commented:

‘The people I interview in this film know they are taking great risks just by talking to me, but they insist on speaking out. Such is their courage and their commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia.’

Three days before Monbiot’s article was published in the Guardian, Pilger had tweeted of Ukraine:

‘The invasion of a sovereign state is lawless and wrong. A failure to understand the cynical forces that provoked the invasion of Ukraine insults the victims.’

Pilger is one of the most respected journalists of our time precisely because he has taken a principled and consistent stand against all forms of imperialism, including Soviet imperialism, Chinese imperialism (particularly its underpinning of Pol Pot), Indonesian imperialism (its invasion of East Timor), and so on.

Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?

Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.

Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.

To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad.

As Chomsky has frequently pointed out, it is easy to condemn the crimes of Official Enemies. But it is a basic ethical principle that, first and foremost, we should hold to account those governments for which we share direct political and moral responsibility. This is why we focus so intensively on the crimes of our own government and its leading allies.

We have condemned Putin’s war of aggression and supported demands for an immediate withdrawal. We are not remotely pro-Russian government – we revile Putin’s tyranny and state violence exactly as much as we revile the West’s tyrannical, imperial violence. We have repeatedly made clear that we oppose all war, killing and hate. Our guiding belief is that these horrors become less likely when journalism drops its double standards and challenges ‘our’ crimes in the same way it challenges ‘theirs’.

Chomsky explained:

‘Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.’

Our adding a tiny drop of criticism to the tsunami of Western global, billion-dollar-funded, 24/7 loathing of Putin achieves nothing beyond the outcome identified by Chomsky. If we have any hope of positively impacting the world, it lies in countering the illusions and violence of the government for which we are morally accountable.

But why speak up now, in particular? Shouldn’t we just shut up and ‘get on board’ in a time of crisis? No, because war is a time when propaganda messages are hammered home with great force: ‘We’re the Good Guys standing up for democracy.’ It is a vital time to examine and challenge these claims.

What critics dismiss as ‘Whataboutism’ is actually ‘Wearenobetterism’. If ‘we’ are no better, or if ‘we’ are actually worse, then where does that leave ‘our’ righteous moral outrage? Can ‘compassion’ rooted in deep hypocrisy be deeply felt?

Critics dismissing evidence of double standards as ‘whataboutery’, are promoting the view that ‘their’ crimes should be wholly condemned, but not those committed by ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ allies. The actions of Official Enemies are to be judged by a different standard than that by which we judge ourselves.

As we pointed out via Twitter:

Spot all the high-profile commentators who condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine…

…and who remain silent about or support:

* Invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq

* NATO’s destruction of Libya

* Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen

* Apartheid Israel’s crushing of Palestinians

The question has to be asked: Is the impassioned public response to another media bombardment of the type described by Howard Zinn at the top of this alert a manifestation of the power of human compassion, or is it a manifestation of power?

Are we witnessing genuine human concern, or the ability of global state-corporate interests to sell essentially the same story over and over again? The same bad guy: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin; the same Good Guys: US, UK, NATO and ‘our’ obedient clients; the same alleged noble cause: freedom, democracy, human rights; the same means: confrontation, violence, a flood of bombs and missiles (‘the best ones’). And the same results: control of whole countries, massively increased arms budgets, and control of natural resources.

Ultimately, we are being asked to believe that the state-corporate system that has illegally bombed, droned, invaded, occupied and sanctioned so many countries over the last few decades – a system that responds even to the threat of human extinction from climate change with ‘Blah, blah, blah!’ – is motivated by compassion for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. As Erich Fromm wrote:

‘To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.’ (Fromm, ‘The Art Of Being’, Continuum, 1992, p.19)

DE and DC

medialens.org

The financial system is clearly careening towards a point of dissolution.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the collapse itself has already happened and we simply have not yet felt the full brutal force of the shockwave accelerating toward us. This process is comparable to a tectonic snap deep in the crust under the ocean. The snap happens and a tsunami has begun. It will hit the beach front with devastating consequences and only by breaking the habit of living in the myopic “moment” might those on the beach have a chance to get to safer ground before it is too late.

The question isn’t “will the system collapse”, but rather when will the full tsunami hit?

Additionally, WHAT will be the operating system that is brought online to replace the chaos of supply chain meltdowns, hyperinflation, scarcity and violence that will ensue?

Two Systems Clash

Already we can clearly see two opposing patterns that have taken form, illustrated in the remarks recently made by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who said:

“I fear our world is creeping towards two different sets of economic, trade, financial, and technology rules, two divergent approaches in the development of artificial intelligence—and ultimately two different military and geo-political strategies. This is a recipe for trouble. It would be far less predictable and far more dangerous than the Cold War.”

Guterres is speaking of two divergent paradigms, so what are they?

On the one hand, there is the ideology that Guterres himself devoutly supports which has taken on the title in recent years of “The Davos Agenda”, or “The Great Reset”.

Guterres even went so far as to sign UN-WEF integration treaty in June 2020 uniting both globalist bodies into one Borg-like operating system, announcing: “The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.”

While the Great Reset professes to use the current pandemic to push through a complete overhaul of human society under a technocratic world government, the opposing system driven by those nations not invited to the recent “Global Democracy summit” and labelled “authoritarians” by Soros and the Davos clique wish to avoid being sacrificed.

Where one system is premised on a scientifically managed depopulation agenda from the top, the other system asserts the right of sovereign nations to continue as the only legitimate basis for international law and scientific progress to be the basis of economic ideology. The terms of the new system were recently re-emphasized throughout the 5000 word Russia-China Joint Statement on the terms of the New Era now emerging.

Putin himself recently laid out these terms stating: “Only sovereign states can effectively respond to the challenges of the times and the demands of the citizens. Accordingly, any effective international order should take into account the interests and capabilities of the state and proceed on that basis, and not try to prove that they should not exist. Furthermore, it is impossible to impose anything on anyone, be it the principles underlying the sociopolitical structure or values that someone, for their own reasons, has called “universal”. After all, it is clear that when a real crisis strikes, there is only one universal value left and that is human life, which each state decides for itself how best to protect based on its abilities, culture and traditions.”

What a breath of fresh air!

Compare that to Klaus Schwab’s infamous “you’ll own nothing and be happy”.

From where did the dystopic world order of the Davos Crowd emerge?

H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy

It might surprise you, but to answer that question, we will need to jump back nearly one century into the past and meet an ageing misanthropic social engineer named Herbert George Wells who wrote a 1928 opus called The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution calling for world government, and depopulation saying:

“The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.”

Wells was a member of an organization called The Fabian Society which itself was established in 1884 by a coterie of British eugenicists and Malthusians in order to promote a new social order designed to mold society into a new mechanized order run by a managerial elite of “social scientists” from above.

The choice of title “Fabian” was derived from the Roman general Fabius Maximus who was renowned for his strategy of defeating his enemies by superhuman patience and slow attrition. The Fabian philosophy was displayed in an infamous stained-glass piece of art featuring Fabian leaders George B. Shaw and Sidney Webb as blacksmiths hammering the world into their own secular image and featuring a shield of the Fabian logo of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Unlike the conventional “brute force” approach of conservative British imperialists who often opted for scorched earth methods of destroying their victims, the Fabians prided themselves on playing a more “peaceful”, subtle and deadly long game. Rather than push big wars which often had the effect of risking heavy losses on the oligarchy itself, the Fabians understood that it were better to promote slow attrition and infiltration using Jesuitical techniques of permeation. Historian Stephen O’Neil wrote of the Fabian Society’s guiding principle of Permeation theory:

“Despite their traditional political image, the Fabians, under the impetus of Sidney Webb, thought that they had a new and unique weapon in the policy of permeation. It was through the utilization of this tactic, according to Webb, that the Fabians, in the spirit of the Trojans and their legendary horse, would enter the ranks and minds of the politically influential by providing them with programs, ideas, opinion, and research heavily documented with statistics which could be conveniently drafted into public policy”. (1)

Throughout the 20^th century, the Fabian Society would penetrate all branches of government, military, academia, media and even private corporate boards around the world creating global systems of fifth columns operating within cells, hierarchically unified by a central command within the highest echelons of British Intelligence.

From below, plebs and laborers would be attracted by “words” promoted by Fabians like equality, social justice, and re-distribution of wealth utilizing Marxist terms while never realizing that those words were just a sweet illusion with no claim to reality.

Like Jesuitical and Masonic orders, many Fabians would never have a clue what the machine truly was that they were merely parts of. This is why the British Labor Party (aka: The Fabian Party of Britain) was so often occupied by well-intended members who never had a clue what the game was truly about. The official Fabian School that became an ideological control hub and recruiting grounds for next generation talent (paralleling the Rhodes/Milner Round Table’s Oxford University) was the London School of Economics.

In fact, over the 20^th century, these two oligarchical operations often interfaced closely, with the Fabian Lord Mackinder working with the Round Table’s Lord Milner to craft a strategy for North America in 1908 or the Canadian Fabian Society’s founding by five Rhodes Scholars in 1932.

George Bernard Shaw outlined the pro-eugenics Fabian philosophy clearly in 1934 when he said; “The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”(2)

One can hear this cold-hearted figure describing his views in his own words in the following short video:

HG Wells was equally explicit in many of his non-fiction writings saying in 1904: “The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” (3)

Sculpting our Dreams into Nightmares through Storytelling

It is no coincidence that both Shaw and Wells had spent the previous three decades innovating a new form of cultural warfare called “predictive programming”.

Whether it was in his science fiction stories of War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The World Set Free, The Island of Doctor Morrow or the Time Machine, Wells always infused trojan horses into his narratives that he knew would have lasting value on conditioning the broader zeitgeist.

These were simply: 1) human nature was intrinsically absurd, selfish and incapable of resolving the duty-freedom paradox in any believable manner, 2) science and technology would thus always be used towards selfish and destructive ends, 3) world government is the only salvation for humanity.

The only solution to such problems was that society had to be recast afresh according to a scientific priesthood which knew how to make the sorts of “hard” decisions that the dirty masses would never have the wits to make themselves. The theme of world government and collectivization of wealth under one central command were also themes advanced by Wells who wrote in 1940:

“Collectivisation means the handling of the common affairs of mankind by a common control responsible to the whole community. It means the suppression of go-as-you-please in social and economic affairs just as much as in international affairs. It means the frank abolition of profit-seeking and of every device by which human beings contrive to be parasitic on their fellow man. It is the practical realisation of the brotherhood of man through a common control”.

The Fabian Society propaganda organ The New Statesman wrote in 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.”

While genuine socialists who truly cared about labor rights in opposition to oligarchical forces generally didn’t get along well with fascists, the peculiar species of Fabian socialists were always united with the fascist cause and always strove to destroy genuine-labor movements in any nation which they were permeating. If only those fascists could be cured of their nationalism wrote Wells, then he would gladly champion the swastika saying in 1932: “I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis”

Eugenics and Fascism: Miracle Solutions to the Great Depression

While these words were spoken, the Anglo-American financier oligarchy which Wells served had been well on its way to establishing a global system of political economy designed to impose eugenics onto humanity through its support for Hitler. This new science of government (with its corporatist flavor in Italy) was pushed onto the world as the “economic miracle solution” to the horrors of the great depression of 1929-1932 (itself also the cause of a controlled disintegration of a financial bubble).

Despite the fact that the fascist project failed in 1933 (when a central bankers dictatorship was derailed by Franklin Roosevelt) and again when the Hitler Frankenstein monster stopped obeying London’s orders and had to be put down, the blueprint for a New World Order continued into the post-war age under the design of an open conspiracy.

With Wells’ 1946 death, other Fabians and social engineers continued his work during the Cold War (including designing the Cold War itself as a way to destroy the system of win-win cooperation and U.S.-Russia-China friendship envisioned by FDR).

Post-War Fascism: Making the Unthinkable Become Thinkable

One of the leading grand strategists during this dark period was Wells’ associate (and former Fabian Society member), Lord Bertrand Russell, who wrote in his 1952 The Impact of Science on Society:

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education’. Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema and the radio play an increasing part… it may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the state with money and equipment.”

“The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First that the influence of home is obstructive. Second that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Thirdly verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”

Russell’s dystopic vision was paralleled by his friend Sir Julian Huxley (founder of the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization) in 1946 who said:

“The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”

To what end would this “world political unity” be aimed? Several pages later, Huxley’s vision is laid out in all of its twisted detail:

“At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic, and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability and disease proneness, which already exist in the human species will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”

The Economic Recolonization of the World

While many think the post-war years to have been shaped primarily by a Cold War, the reality is that the Iron Curtin was always merely a cover to impose a complete infiltration and colonization of the minds of citizens across the Trans Atlantic community that had given so much to stop the rise of fascism. The focus was especially placed on the young “baby boomer” generation who would suffer the most intensive full spectrum conditioning of any generation in history.

While the population was driven into states of insanity throughout the age of constant nuclear terror, asymmetrical wars abroad and drug-sex-rock’n’roll counterculture revolutions domestically.

By the time of Bobby Kennedy’s murder, and ouster of de Gaulle, the stage had been set for a new phase of colonialization of western nation states via the floating of the U.S. dollar and the destruction of the gold-reserve system that had served as the bedrock of the post-1945 Bretton Woods system. As long as the exchange rates were fixed then economic warfare against nations via short term speculation (which had always been a tool of the City of London) would not be possible. Additionally, the stability afforded by fixed exchange rates permitted long-term thinking and planning requisite to build large scale infrastructure and other scientific projects that required the sort of patience and foresight that short term market-driven thinking never allowed.

Under this new age of post-1971 deregulation, humanity was further atomized around a new idea of “value” which was driven by the notion that individual desires unbounded by regulation “cause” creative change within supposedly self-regulating forces of the marketplace. The more the formula “greed=good” became embedded within the operating system of western states, the more the broader structures of those states were commandeered by private corporations and banks which increasingly merged and fused into each other during an age of Darwinian “survival of the fittest”. The more that these interconnected supranational entities merged, the more those levers of economic power were ripped away from sovereign nation states and into the hands of private finance beholden to forces antagonistic to humanity. During this process, the once productive sectors of the economy that gave vitality to nations were atrophied and outsourced abroad.

Normal rates of investment into the maintenance and improvement of capital-intensive infrastructure seized up and industrial sectors were shut down and moved to cheap labor sectors abroad which themselves became new zones of modern slave labor filling western consumerism with “cheap goods” from China and cheap resources stolen from the global south.

Where monetary growth had formerly been tied to the growth of industrial production, the post-1971 paradigm tied monetary growth to ever increasing rates of unpayable debt and speculative capital unbounded from the real world.

Two Faces of Evil: WEF and Inter-Alpha Group

During that same fateful year of 1971, two other ominous entities were created.

In January 1971, an entity was set up in Switzerland by a protégé of Henry Kissinger named Klaus Schwab titled “The World Economic Forum”. One prominent founding member was Maurice Strong, a Rockefeller connected Canadian elitist that had become a founding father of the modern environmental movement and co-architect of the Club of Rome. One of the initiatives that Strong had helped build in 1970 was the 1001 Nature Trust which was project devoted to raising capital for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature and the new environmental movement. One of the founders of the WWF? Sir Julian Huxley.

The other ominous entity formed in 1971 was the Rothschild Inter-Alpha Group of banks under the umbrella of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The stated intention of this Group would be found in the 1983 speech by Lord Jacob Rothschild: “two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate.”

What Lord Rothschild was referring to was the destruction of Glass-Steagall bank separation laws across the Trans Atlantic which had kept commercial banking, investment banking and insurance activities compartmentalized in separate worlds since WWII. In 1986, this destruction of the dividing walls in banking began with Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang followed soon thereafter by Canada’s destruction of the Four Pillars. Although it took another 14 years, the final nail was put into the Glass-Steagall coffin when Clinton destroyed the law as one of his last acts in office. After this point, derivative contracts that had only accounted for $2 trillion in 1991, and $80 trillion in 1999 soon ballooned to over $650 trillion when the housing market blew out in the USA in 2007.

The Economy Becomes A Bomb

What is important to hold in mind is that through this entire post 1971 process, capitalism itself was thus slowly turned into a time bomb which could do nothing but collapse. This means that it is fatally wrong to consider the abuses of globalization or the collapse now underway as errors, but rather as the intended consequence of the system’s design itself.

The western nation states had lost their economic sovereignty as they sold their futures for the price of cheap goods from abroad making them addicted to keeping poor nations poor and cheap labor cheap (developing, modernizing nations tend to result in qualified, high paid labor not becoming of a banana republic).

And so, humanity slipped ever more into an “end of history” cage that ultimately sought a new world order to replace the old order of nation states and democracies that had governed the previous couple of centuries. More centralized supranational control of nation states by the financier oligarchy occurred behind such “free trade” agreements as NAFTA, and Maastricht in the early 1990s.

This was of course the near unstoppable trend after the Soviet Union’s disintegration (and the replication of western globalization within the short period of the 1990s Shock Therapy of Russia). I say thankfully “near unstoppable” because something very special and unexpected happened to derail this blueprint in 2013.

A New Operating System Emerges

I am here referring to the moment that Xi Jinping made it known to the world that China would not continue as the cheap labor hub of the west indefinitely and instead a new program dubbed the “Belt and Road Initiative” was unveiled as the driving force of China’s foreign policy. Soon this program merged with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and won over 140 nations of the world to its operating system with branches stretching into the Arctic dubbed the Polar Silk Road. The multipolar system of Eurasia which had been slowly moving forward between 1999-2013 began to take on an accelerated rate of growth with new financial institutions, large scale infrastructure projects, and new diplomatic platforms built up along the way.

By 2015 both Russia and China had created their own alternatives to the U.S.-controlled SWIFT and in that same year Russia entered Syria in defense of the principle of national sovereignty.

Now Russia and China, both encircled by the U.S. military industrial complex, have released a powerful  joint statement establishing a manifesto for a new operating system that enshrines the principle of sovereign nation states, and activities that promote win-win cooperation and population growth as a bedrock of order.

So when Guterres wets his pants complaining about the danger of two opposing systems now emerging, or when Biden’s handlers promote democracy summits that exclude all the nations of the world who don’t want to be sacrificed on the alter of Gaia, you can be sure that it is because something compatible with human dignity has emerged.

Might the current freedom movements springing up across the trans Atlantic force a shift in the elements of the political class that have not lost their humanity to a World Economic Forum borg-like commitment to assimilate everything into a unipolar transhumanist priesthood? That remains to be seen.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

(1) The Origins and Development of the Fabian Society, 1884-1900, Stephen J. O’Neil Loyola University Chicago
(2) George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable and Co., 1934), p. 296
(3) H.G. Wells in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 10 (1904), p. 11

The panicked language of appeasement rarely adds anything of value to debates over foreign policy.

By Christopher MOTT

“Appeasement,” “Munich,” and the years of 1938-9 retain immense rhetorical power when invoked by political and media actors in the English-speaking world. In the media landscape, foreign policy pundits often insinuate that to negotiate with rivals is to risk repeating the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain, the pre-World War II British Prime Minister who is said to have “given away” a part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for “peace in our time.” Subsequent events cast the phrase into infamy.

Putting aside the fact that Chamberlain’s diplomacy had a fair amount of contemporaneous public support and served the sound strategic purpose of buying time for British rearmament to achieve a stronger position against Germany, the characterization of the British prime minister as a hapless dupe playing into Hitler’s hands in the naïve hope of avoiding inevitable conflict has lived on in the popular imagination ever since.

The specter of “appeasement” has most recently been invoked by those critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently confrontational in response to Russian actions in Ukraine. Senators Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst have led the charge in weaponizing the phrase, a continuation of a long bipartisan tradition. Influenced by the (now largely debunked) “Russiagate” scandal, Democratic politicians and affiliated journalists once hurled the same accusation at the Trump administration for its alleged failure to be sufficiently hawkish in Syria or Ukraine. A CNN contributor even referred to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki as a “surrender summit.”

Such commentary is baked into the foreign policy consensus in Washington and goes beyond the establishment’s hatred of Trump. In 2012, President Obama had to deflect criticism from electoral challenger Mitt Romney for allegedly having failed to take the Russian threat seriously enough. Obama also faced one of the most bizarre rounds of criticism for his willingness to negotiate with Iran, and was called “an appeaser like Neville Chamberlain” by a conservative commentator who then could not explain who Chamberlain even was or why the example was historically pertinent to Obama’s convening nuclear talks with Tehran.

Together, these bellicose accusations point to a greater culture of using and abusing Second World War analogies for every contemporary geopolitical problem. Be it comparing new rivals to the Axis Powers, invoking the threat of global total war, or casting all rivalries as existential and ideological zero-sum contests, the Second World War looms large in the imagination of the foreign policy commentariat in the North Atlantic. In a sense, this should not surprise. A majority of the world’s population lives in countries that benefited from Allied victory. The rapid expansion and subsequent brutality enacted by Germany, Japan, and Italy on much of the world was that of militant revisionist powers—countries seeking to upset the post-WWI order established by the Treaty of Versailles, the Washington Naval Treaty, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Perhaps more pertinently, most adults alive today grew up with elders who directly experienced and suffered during the war era and who, if willing to speak about it at all, had harrowing accounts of what those times were like. The fear that such a time of global strife could return is ever-present, as is the pride of personally knowing people who survived the crisis. I sympathize with this perspective, as someone partially descended from Japanese immigrants whose relatives fought on both sides of the Pacific Theater. My grandmother, then still a child, survived “Operation Meetinghouse,” the concentrated firebombing of Tokyo.

Largely regarded as the deadliest air raid in history, Operation Meetinghouse was estimated to have caused 100,000 deaths and rendered over a million people homeless. Its effectiveness can be attributed to the bombers’ low-level altitude, which increased accuracy, as well as the use of incendiary munitions to wreak maximum damage on the then-largely wooden city. Only in the later years of her life would my grandmother open up about the specific details of the night she lost half of her immediate relatives in a matter of hours; how she and some of her siblings, hating the smell of the densely packed crowds that filled air-raid shelters, had decided to go above ground rather than stay underground during the raid; how this impulsive decision had spared their lives when the civilian shelter was directly hit in the bombardment, killing everyone inside.

But her tragic odyssey had only just begun. She then had to navigate a post-apocalyptic Tokyo with her siblings—one of whom was sickly—in tow. People ran towards the river for relief from the ever-present flames, only to find the water filled with charred-black and withered bodies; napalm-based accelerants could not be doused with water alone, causing many who threw themselves into the water to nevertheless perish in flames. In the midst of this chaos, famine and disease soon descended upon the city, taking a further toll on the survivors. The post-raid casualties included additional relatives. The nightmare would last until the American occupation of Japan brought an end not just to the war and the militarist government that had caused it, but the supply shortages that reverberated as aftershocks in its wake.

This is just one particularly tragic example of many that illustrate the trans-generational impact of the Second World War, and it helps to explain the evocative power of the time period. But it also explains how distorting and misleading this invocation can be: The Second World War was not the only devastating conflict to occur in modern history, nor is it necessarily the one most germane to the present moment. As Westerners, we may feel connected to it more than most, but the world we inhabit today is not that of the late 1930s and early 1940s. By elevating the Second World War to a privileged place in the hierarchies of our historical analogies, we also ignore—in our indignant, sanctimonious moralism as victors—much of the conflict’s original complexity and moral ambiguity.

We brush aside the inconvenient context of colonialism, imperialism, and national humiliation and we ignore the prevailing geopolitical considerations of the period. Finland and Thailand, for instance, had legitimate reasons to become co-belligerents with the Axis due to preexisting territorial disputes with the Soviet Union and the British Empire, respectively. And Iran, a country effectively torn at the seams by both Moscow and London, suffered invasion and occupation despite its ostensible neutrality in the war. These countries and others could make a case complicating claims of the universal moral righteousness of the war. Many in India make the argument that Churchill was India’s Hitler given that the Bengal Famine was largely the result of British imperial policy, which killed millions. This was just one of many such events in almost two centuries of British misrule in South Asia, a context that makes the Hitler-admiring Japanese collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose look far more morally complicated than can first be assumed. Similar reasons explain the fact that popular opinion in America was against direct U.S. involvement in the war before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Historical analogies are always imperfect, of course. But the all-or-nothing approach of seeing everything through the lens of a single simplified and totalizing conflict is unhelpful. While it may explain certain aspects of the world since 1945, like the existence of the United Nations, its Security Council, and the decolonization of old European empires, it fails to shed light on our present moment. In fact, its routine usage by hawks suggests it is intended to sabotage nuanced discussion about complex geopolitical crises and foment more conflict.

Focusing on World War II has the effect of obscuring the fact that the formation of a “postwar era” order is not unique to our time. The Thirty Years’ War of the mid-17th Century would be the most proportionally devastating conflict Central Europe had faced to that time and led to the rise of the Westphalian state system, which, for a time, reduced the number of conflicts in Europe and sidelined sectarianism. The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars involved mass mobilization, the scouring of entire countries, and a global dimension. It would culminate in a “Concert of Europe,” which also served to temporarily reduce tensions between the previously warring great powers (even while exporting conflict abroad to European colonies). History is replete with cycles of geopolitical instability giving way to new orders, which then decay over time, leading to instability and an imperfect repeat of the process. Scholars from Sima Qian in ancient China to Ibn Khaldun in North Africa of the late Middle Ages have noticed similar cyclical patterns. These observations call into question the validity of an obsessive focus on a single specific era at the expense of all others.

With the fading of the “American Moment,” we are witnessing a rise in multi-polarity with more and more states able to wield power independently on the world stage. Perhaps, then, a sounder historical analogy and a better model to make sense of the dangers we face would be the First World War, not the Second. In the run-up to the Great War, it was Britain that was losing its previously unchallenged hegemonic position. As the balance of power changed, states seeking realignment created hair-trigger alliance systems—where a single peripheral conflict, like the “July Crisis” between Serbia and Austria-Hungary—could drag the entire planet into a world war.

As we see in the case of Ukraine—with much of the mainstream media joining the blob to falsely declare Kiev a “U.S. ally”—the temptation for major powers to make foolhardy proclamations in disputes peripheral to their core interests is everlasting. The reason foreign policy elites and North Atlantic societies in general fixate on the Second World War and its associated narratives of courage and resistance is that such arguments, made with a dose of moralism, serves the compulsion to war felt by many English-speaking elites.

If it is the goal of Western policymakers to avoid a catastrophic conflict with revisionist powers (in an era of nuclear weapons, to boot) and protect what remains of the post-1945 order, they would be wise to avoid over-expanding alliance networks that lock more countries into stark binaries in foreign policy. This is especially true when those countries, like Ukraine, are distant from the core interests of the United States (the key actor in NATO) and tangential to a stable balance of power among great powers.

It is not “appeasement” to recognize the facts on the ground and recalibrate to focus on dialogue during such disagreements. Rather, it is a simple acknowledgement that when multiple countries have competing interests, the issue is best resolved with each nation making a sober calculation of its respective national-security priorities. Diplomacy must come first. By allowing an obsession with the shadows of 1938-9 to blind us to our present reality, we risk the far-more-likely scenario of stumbling into something reminiscent of another July Crisis.

theamericanconservative.com

By  LOWKEY

Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by investigative journalist Matt Kennard to discuss how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has infiltrated foreign media in an attempt to export obedience to the United States government and promote Washington’s interests around the world.

In the late twentieth century, the CIA developed an infamous reputation, both inside and outside the United States, as scandal after scandal hit the agency. COINTELPRO quietly infiltrated and subverted all manner of domestic democratic movements, including the student movement, the civil rights campaign, the hippie movement and the Black Panthers. The Church Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), revealed to the public that the CIA had also infiltrated hundreds of the largest and most important domestic media outlets in order to shape public discussion. Meanwhile, abroad, the CIA had funded death squads in Central America and organized the overthrow of several foreign leaders.

The National Endowment for Democracy was the Reagan administration’s solution to the storm of negative publicity. Established in 1983 as a semi-private company, the NED’s job was to be the group to which the U.S. government outsourced its dirtiest work. This was done almost completely openly. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein proudly told The Washington Post.

The NED quickly went to work undermining the governments of Eastern Europe in the name of democracy and freedom of speech. Yet, as Kennard told Lowkey, once the Communist-era regimes fell, it actually expanded its scope to act as a worldwide force for projecting U.S. government interests everywhere.

In recent years, the NED has been funneling money to protest leaders in Hong Kong, carrying out dozens of operations against the government of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, attempting to overthrow the Cuban government, and has even organized rock concerts inside Venezuela in an effort to destabilize the country.

But Kennard’s latest research shows that the NED is also conducting influence operations in the United Kingdom. The agency is quietly funding British journalistic outlets and press organizations to the tune of $3.5 million. As Kennard told Lowkey today:

From our research, it is quite clear that democracy and freedom are not the priorities of the NED because we could not find even one grant given in any of the six U.S.-backed Gulf dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait). Not one pro-democracy group in those countries received an NED grant that we could find. So it is effectively about projecting American power rather than freedom and democracy.

A former reporter for The Financial Times, Kennard is now chief investigator at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism outlet concentrating on British foreign policy, military and state power. He is deeply concerned about his findings, and the presupposition that U.S. actions inside Britain are benevolent, telling Lowkey:

If even a tiny percentage of this came out about Russia it would be a massive scandal – that journalists and press freedom groups were being funded by Russia. But because it is the United States, it is assumed that this is OK. It is assumed that we [the U.K.] are a vassal of the U.S. and our discourse can be distorted by the U.S. and it is not a problem. And for me and anyone who cares about the principles of press freedom and journalism, that is not something we should accept.

Lowkey and Kennard also chatted about how British journalists and being fed stories by U.S. intelligence, the shady backgrounds of senior Conservative politicians like Rory Stewart and Boris Johnson, and the treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

mintpressnews.com

Britain’s Foreign Minister Liz Truss was given a cool reception in Moscow this week. The guarded attitude is understandable for Truss has shown no respect to Russia or any attempt at genuine diplomacy. Her boorish warmongering and arrogant conduct should have been dealt with by denying her entry to Russia.

Granted, in the world of diplomacy there are supposed to be always open doors and it is recommended that uttering the word “no” is forbidden. So, one could argue that the Russian government was obliged to receive Britain’s top diplomat this week.

Nevertheless, Liz Truss has shown herself to be spectacularly unbecoming as a diplomat. For weeks now, she has been ramping up belligerent rhetoric towards Russia, baselessly accusing it of planning to invade Ukraine. Her surname translates in the Russian language as “patsy” and she has certainly demonstrated such a dubious quality from her repeated indulgence of wanton Anglo-American propaganda. That propaganda has recklessly wound up tensions over Ukraine with Russia. The recklessness is inciting conflict and the danger of war in Europe. Arguably, Truss and her ilk should be prosecuted for incitement, not pandered to.

Not surprisingly then, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave his British counterpart a cold shoulder when she arrived in Moscow on Thursday. Lavrov said lecturing and threats to Russia of the kind that Truss has peddled for weeks are a dead-end street. Truss continued making provocative and ignorant statements while in Moscow, urging Russia to “de-escalate” and “choose the path of diplomacy or else face severe consequences”.

The embarrassing lack of preparation by the British minister was revealed when Lavrov at one point during their discussions asked Truss ironically if Britain recognized Russia’s sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh. They are located within the Russian Federation where there are military bases. Truss reportedly retorted: “The UK will never recognize Russia’s sovereignty over those regions.” Apparently, she mistook them for being in Ukraine.

This is not the first time that the British diplomat has come up short on basic knowledge when presuming to pontificate about subjects. Recently, while on a tour of Australia, Truss held forth about the medieval history of Kievan Rus declaring that “Ukrainians” have defended their territory from “invasions by the Mongols to the Tatars”, apparently not realizing that the 13th-century events were part of the one “Mongol-Tatar Yoke” imposed on several Slavic peoples.

Regrettably, Liz Truss is more adept at showboating than genuine diplomacy. She has a penchant for photo-ops rather than policy. When she was in Moscow this week, she was dressed all in black and wearing a traditional Russian fur hat. Commentators noted how the attire was not appropriate for the unseasonably mild weather and that the image-conscious Truss was trying to evoke memories of the formidable British leader Margaret Thatcher on her landmark visit to Moscow in 1987 during the Cold War.

Indeed there is open speculation in the British media that Truss has her eye on taking over as prime minister in the event of Boris Johnson being ousted from Downing Street over his scandal-ridden tenure. Before leaving for Russia, Truss made defiant comments about how she would be warning Moscow to “de-escalate”.

The contrast was salient with French President Emmanuel Macron’s earlier visit to Moscow on Monday. Macron said he had “rich and substantive” talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin over five hours. There were no high-handed ultimatums or spurious demands. There was instead an earnest effort to find a diplomatic resolution to the tensions between the US-led NATO bloc and Russia over Ukraine.

Part of the resolution involves a proper understanding of Russia’s strategic security concerns with regard to NATO’s historic, relentless expansion and, secondly, finding an urgent peaceful settlement of the eight-year Ukrainian civil war. At least Macron showed an understanding and respect for Russia’s perspective.

By contrast, Lavrov apparently had to explain to Truss why the Ukraine conflict continues because the NATO-backed Kiev regime refuses to implement its legally binding obligations to the 2015 Minsk Peace accords.

The stark conclusion is that Washington and London are not serious about dialogue with Moscow to find a diplomatic solution to all of these issues. American and British media claim that Washington and London are trying to “ease tensions”. The exact opposite is true. The Anglo-American axis has incited tensions and a sense of crisis that runs the risk of open war. This axis has greatly increased the supply of weapons and special forces to Ukraine, thus emboldening the Kiev regime to reject a peaceful path. The Americans and British have militarized Eastern Europe with unprecedented deployments of troops, warships and warplanes. While Truss was in Moscow, her nominal boss Boris Johnson was in the Polish capital Warsaw inspecting British troops that had just arrived to “defend” Poland and Eastern Europe from alleged Russian aggression.

Thus, it can be said that the current American and British officials are incapable or unwilling to engage in genuine diplomacy with Russia to find a peaceful resolution and a modus vivendi free of Cold War ideology. Liz Truss is more a propaganda operative and warmonger than a bona fide envoy committed to establishing understanding and improved relations.

Russia should not give such people an opportunity to insult with their provocative agenda. For such people, a closed door and Nyet are appropriate exceptions in diplomacy.