Month: September 2022

It seems the United States and NATO have decided that Europe should place an energy embargo on itself by going without Russian natural gas and oil in order to somehow damage the Russian economy and hamper its war effort. Since March, western corporate media has portrayed Russia’s military and economy as weak and on the verge of collapse in an act of collective denial and projection. Nevertheless, the same media has also been forced to acknowledge and try to spin Europe’s own looming energy crisis this winter.

In fact the energy crisis is already here, with the reduced natural gas flow to western Europe impacting people’s daily lives and their ability to earn a livelihood. With winter just three months away, citizens of Europe’s largest economy, Germany, and other countries are having their everyday lives cut short in the drive to conserve energy. All government buildings and public storefronts can have their lights on only from 4:00pm until 10:00pm, and this same time frame applies to storefronts in popular shopping areas across Germany. Residents have been advised not to warm their homes higher than 19 degrees Celsius (or about 66 degrees Fahrenheit). In its bid to cut energy consumption by 20 percent, the German government has encouraged public employees to wash their hands using cold water and to shower less, among other undignified recommendations. Despite all these sacrifices, households are being hit with energy bills that are already four times higher than last year’s and set to rise. German Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has said he does not expect the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to resume delivery of natural gas anytime soon. Russia says it was forced to close by pipeline because of western sanctions that made maintenance and repair work impossible. Germany will likely need to impose on its population further energy conservation policies while it tries to compensate for the shortfall with supplementary sources of energy including domestic coal production and expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) imported from the US.

Facing growing social unrest across western Europe, many political leaders understand they must act decisively to slow rising energy costs or else risk removal from office, or worse. An estimated 70,000 protesters took to the streets in the Czech Republic earlier this month. The large protests on September third were attended by both far-right groups and Communist parties. As one of the event’s organizers Jiri Havel told reporters, “The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn.” Germany has enacted some relief packages in hopes of staving off the all-but-inevitable recession. Three “economic aid” packages mean German citizens will see an extra $300 deposited in their accounts, retirees will also receive $300 and students, $200. But these meager one-time payments do nothing to address the sanctions and bad fiscal policy driving rampant inflation.

⚡️”Sanctions Against USA” trending in Germany. pic.twitter.com/4CK5S59n0G

— War Monitor (@WarfareReports) September 28, 2022

Companies managing the import and export of Russian energy commodities have been hurt as much as any industry. Nationalizing the companies in the energy sector is one action the German government is undertaking to prevent a full scale collapse. Russian corporations Rosneft and Gazprom both have natural resource industries in Germany which the German government has sought to take control of. Although taking control of these industries gives Germany more control, the refineries are still empty and in need of oil. After the CEO of Uniper SE claimed the gas giant was losing about $100 million a day, the German government nationalized the company to prevent its bankruptcy, which would have been devastating. Nationalizing the corporations that secure energy and natural resources for Germans may help temporarily, but the sanctions self-imposed barrier to Russian energy markets remains.

While the people of Germany, the Czech Republic and other European countries adjust to their grim new reality, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and other world leaders recently gathered in New York at the 77th General assembly of the United Nations. Scholz in his speech echoed others with his main priority being condemnation of Putin and Russia. The UN Assembly meeting reaffirmed that heads of state from the NATO countries like Scholz will continue supporting Ukraine at the expense of their own people at home. As Germany’s minister for foreign affairs Annalena Baerbock recently admitted in reference to Germany’s ongoing militarization and support for the Kiev regime, “it doesn’t matter what German voters think.”

Countries in the Balkans are seeking exemptions from sanctions so as to continue business with Russia to prevent their energy sectors from collapsing. Hungary has insisted against sanctions on energy, with prime minister Viktor Orbán warning that Europe had “shot itself in the lungs,” and has also resisted European rationing and sharing schemes, with the result that Hungary is itself now sanctioned by the EU for “corruption.” Poland recently demanded over $1 trillion in reparations from Germany for its aggression in World War II. The union seems to be deteriorating by the day. And with the holidays and freezing temperatures approaching, the recent protests in the Czech Republic may seem quaint compared to what is coming toward Europe.

Image: People hold banners before marching on the street during the protest in Kabul [Mohd Rasfan/AFP]

When the United States military pulled out of Afghanistan last August, the US also stole billions of dollars of its central bank reserves. Over $9 billion of Afghanistan’s (DAB) assets were frozen across the world, $7B of the funds in the US Federal Reserve.

A year later in August 2022, US special representative for Afghanistan Thomas West told the Wall Street Journal that the US has no intention of returning the funds to the Afghanistan Central Bank, where the Taliban could access them. “We do not have confidence that that institution has the safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly,” West explained. He pinned blame for the US decision on the Taliban’s alleged sheltering of an Al Qaeda leader, saying the case “reinforces deep concerns we have regarding diversion of funds to terrorist groups.”

On September 14th, the US Treasury and State Department released a joint statement announcing that the seized funds would be moved to the Switzerland Bank for International Settlements. There, disbursement of funds will be overseen by the “Board of Trustees of Afghanistan,” composed of “two highly qualified Afghan economic experts with relevant macroeconomic and monetary policy experience, a U.S. government representative, and a Swiss government representative.” The joint statement also makes the vague assertion that, “The Afghan Fund has the support of international partners committed to supporting sustainable monetary and macroeconomic stability in Afghanistan.”

President Biden said the $7B of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves held by the Federal Reserve should be used to compensate the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, based on lawsuits that had found that Al Qaeda and the Taliban owed them billions in damages. However, a federal magistrate judge blocked release of the funds to these families on several grounds. As a foreign sovereign entity, Afghanistan’s central bank was “entitled to immunity from jurisdiction and its property is entitled to immunity from execution.” The US government had also declined to formally recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, and since under the constitution courts are not able to decide on which governments are official or not, this should have precluded the previous decision ruling the funds could be released.

Certainly some of the families of 9/11 victims sought the $3.5B in this lawsuit, with one family’s lawyer fully endorsing collective punishment of Afghanistan’s people for not stopping the Taliban: “they bear responsibility for the condition they’re in.” But others belonging to “September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows” are demanding that all assets instead be returned to Afghanistan immediately, to prevent further harm to the Afghan people. As a spokesperson for the group recently told the Intercept, “There is not only a moral imperative in doing this, there is also a national security interest in doing this and preventing Afghanistan from sliding into total collapse.” In August 2022, a group of families sent a letter to Biden entitled, “9/11 Families Say: Afghan Central Bank Funds Belong to Afghans”. The letter explained that while some signatories did have lawsuits seeking damages, “no 9/11 family member joined these lawsuits to take money away from starving Afghans.”

They were not alone; in September 2021, the UN also urged the US to release the funds. Afghans marched on Kabul in December 2021 to demand the funds. That month, as the Organization of Islamic States (OIC) organized a fund to aid Afghanistan’s economy during this crisis, Pakistan’s foreign minister declared that despite the OIC’s help, “the economy can’t function and people can’t be helped without a banking system.” In April 2022, over 40 organizations including Muslim and Afghan interest groups, left-wing political parties, libertarian organizations, anti-war groups, human rights NGOs and think tanks addressed a letter to President Biden urging the release of Afghanistan’s funds and the end of what they call the “crisis of choice” in Afghanistan. 70 economists and experts wrote Janet Yellen in August 2022 with a similar request.

Video: Protesters in Kabul called for the release of Afghanistan’s frozen bank assets.#TOLOnews pic.twitter.com/DdbXttG2lk

— TOLOnews (@TOLOnews) December 21, 2021

In February 2022, The Intercept released an interview with a foreign policy aide who criticized Biden’s continued freeze of Afghanistan’s assets, despite warnings of the harm this was causing its people:

A senior Democratic foreign policy aide, who was granted anonymity to openly share his thoughts on the Biden administration’s actions, said the policy “effectively amounts to mass murder.” According to the aid, Biden “has had warnings from the UN Secretary General, the International Rescue Committee, and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.”

In a hearing with the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee, representatives from the International Rescue Committee and the International Crisis Group warned that no amount of humanitarian aid could compensate for Afghanistan’s inability to use its central bank reserves and resume normal financial operations. Democratic Senate members in attendance justified the continued withholding of these funds by invoking the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls.

Miliband replied that the Taliban is making considerable concessions on gender equality and is currently allowing Afghan women — whose salaries remain unpaid amid the ongoing asset freeze — to work and attend school.

Miliband then presented what he described as the prevailing question among Afghan women in his organization: “How on earth does the West think they are helping our prospects when we can’t feed our families?”

The Taliban– accused by the US government and Western propaganda outlets of being driven only by greed, of mismanaging funds and exploiting the population– meanwhile has offered to barter with Russia to exchange Afghan trade products for gasoline and diesel so that Afghanistan’s economy can continue to function. The Taliban has also acceded to US demands for a “third party” to monitor its management of the DAB funds upon return.

The US continued to withhold the stolen assets, needed for basic stability and the survival of Afghans, even after an earthquake in June that left over 1,000 dead and 3,000 injured. The country’s situation continues to deteriorate. The most recent Afghanistan Situation Report by ReliefWeb found that:

18.9 million people – nearly half of the population – are estimated to be acutely food insecure between June and November 2022
4.7 million children, pregnant and lactating women at risk of acute malnutrition in 2022; 3.9 million children are acutely malnourished
All 34 provinces are facing crisis or emergency levels of acute food insecurity

The report emphasizes that while the economic situation for most Afghan families continues to decline, the most adversely affected are the most vulnerable: households with people with disabilities and those led by women. While the US has pledged humanitarian aid, the assistance is far less than the funds being withheld, and the strings attached prevent Afghanistan from building its own independent economy. Restrictions on economic activity in Afghanistan also stem from renewed US economic sanctions on the Taliban, deterring companies that would otherwise want to do business with Afghanistan for fear of running afoul of sanctions.

The United States does not hesitate to use economic warfare in cruel and murderous ways against countries that resist US hegemony. This has been demonstrated by its 60-year bipartisan blockade of Cuba, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it prevented the import of syringes and other medical supplies for the Cuban population. This came while Cuba’s economy was forced to adjust with the loss of tourism due to COVID. Over a quarter of the world’s population lives under illegal, unilateral coercive measures imposed by the US, referred to as “sanctions.”

For the US, it is not enough simply to have veto power in international organizations with tremendous power over countries in need of aid such as the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. Washington also demands the right to weigh in on how an independent state should govern itself and use its central bank money. Biden seems to have appointed himself the conservator of Afghanistan. One is reminded of the media blitz over pop singer Britney Spears’ conservatorship, when documentaries, hashtags, and protests demanded that the singer be allowed to manage her own money rather than have her father maintain his legal authority over it, which they said he had used to restrict her freedom. If only the same level of rapt media attention were focused on Afghanistan’s fight for its financial independence, stolen by the US!

As the crisis in Afghanistan drags on, neither Biden nor Congress have taken any steps to stop their collective punishment of the people of Afghanistan. They have ignored many warnings, and cannot now claim ignorance of the situation or feign concern for the human rights of women and girls living under the Taliban. This theft can only be viewed as a deliberate act of terror and economic war upon the people of Afghanistan, who deserve nothing less than swift justice and immediate, full compensation.

Last May a remarkable column by Stephen Kinzer appeared in the Boston Globe. It was headlined: “Republicans Return To Their Roots As The Antiwar Party.”

More significantly, the subheading ran: “Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that.” It began:

“With Americans now engulfed in passion for Ukraine, it wasn’t surprising that President Biden proposed sending $33 billion worth of weaponry and other aid to Ukraine’s beleaguered military. Nor was it surprising that Congress raised the number to $40 billion, or that both the Senate and House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor. Hidden within that lopsided vote, though, was a shocker: Every single “no” vote – 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House – came from a Republican.

“Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that. This month’s votes in Washington signal a dramatic role reversal. Suddenly it is conservative Republicans who oppose US involvement in foreign wars.”

Strikingly not only did the “conservative” Democrats vote for the $40 billion that included more weapons of death and destruction for Joe Biden’s cruel proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian. All the “progressives” did so, including AOC and The Squad, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee and all the rest. It was a clean sweep.

Second, this was not a one-off event. There is another vote coming up in the next few weeks for another $13.7 billion for Ukraine with over $7 billion for weapons. What is the response of the 100 Democrats to this request by Biden? The answer came during the September 11 Week Of Action called for by Code Pink and the progressive Peace In Ukraine Coalition reported here as follows:

“In the nation’s capital CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, together with Colonel Ann Wright and other activists, kicked off the Week of Action, going door to door to the offices of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), …. While some members of the caucus call for much-needed diplomacy and raise concerns about the risk of nuclear war – either through a miscalculation or an intentional first strike – not one member of the nearly 100-member CPC will commit to voting against more weapons for Ukraine.” (Emphasis, jw)

This was also acknowledged in a very dispiriting interview by The GrayZone with prominent activists after the lobbying effort.

The pro-war mentality among the “progressive” Dem pols is not limited to Biden’s cruel proxy war to the last Ukrainian. It extends to a second proxy war now being ginned up in Taiwan. When Nancy Pelosi recently visited the island to stir up secessionist sentiment, not a single progressive Democrat in Congress made so much as a peep of protest. In fact Rep. Ro Khanna, Co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential campaign boosted it in rants on CNN and Twitter.

Both of these proxy wars bring the US into conflict with two other major global nuclear powers. If the progressive pols cannot be against military escalation in cases like this, it is hard to see that they have any claim to be for peace. And yet all too many activists in the progressive antiwar movement are loyal to them. In fact some peace organizations have gone so far as to endorse them for election in 2022, even after their vote for the $40 billion to Ukraine for example here!

Moreover this support for the proxy war in Ukraine shows up among rank and file Democrats as well. By every measure in a recent Ipsos poll taken after 6 months of war, support for intervention in Ukraine was higher among Democrats than among Republicans or Independents. IF the roots of this are partisan in nature, that is deeply disturbing because it means that Democrats will follow warhawks simply because they are Dems. Biden may be a case in point for such misplaced loyalty.

Let me end on a personal note. Working in peace organizations and coalitions, I find many activists who labor mightily for the cause of peace also maintain loyalty to the Democratic Party. And that loyalty extends especially to the “progressive” Democratic politicians. This is most disturbing because on the most important issues of war and peace, these peace activists get nothing in return. And since there is no price to pay for their hawkish votes, these politicians will simply ignore such activists. This is an abusive relationship and ought to be terminated forthwith.

The minimal policy of those who work for peace should be quite simple: no votes for politicians who vote to fund war in Ukraine – no matter the Party. Otherwise those who support war and US unipolarity will continue to ignore those who work for peace.

This article was originally published on Greanville Post.

John V. Walsh, until recently a Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, has written on issues of peace and health care for the San Francisco Chronicle, EastBayTimes/San Jose Mercury News, Asia Times, LA Progressive, Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, Consortium News, Scheerpost and others.

With the Referendums to Join Russia coming to an end in Ukraine, we found it necessary to go to the frontline city of Donetsk (capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic) and show the situation there.

Seek more information to educate yourself; watch reports from both sides. In this report, I show the voting, today, last day of voting, in the Donetsk People’s Republic controlled territory referendum to join Russia. Ukraine’s government has begun accusing Russia of coercing residents to vote; they are condemning them, calling them a ‘propaganda show’, but nevertheless the voting takes place in Russian-controlled territory of what is internationally recognized as Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, & Lugansk Regions (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics).

We are on the ground covering all 4 areas that are having the referendums so you can see for yourself and make an educated opinion. In this report, we show you some of the processes of the referendum in the Ukrainian port city of Berdyansk in the Zaporizhzhia region. As you most probably know there have been huge developments in the Russia – Ukraine war this week. Most recently, the NordStream pipeline was put out of service inedfinitely. [Sabotage is suspected by actors in te West}.

The West keeps supporting Ukraine with more and more weapons that seem to be antagonizing Russia. They continue to refuse to show the full story of what has been happening in Donbass for the last 8 years. The Russian President seems to have had enough and says Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons & any other means of mass destruction in case of a threat to territorial integrity and weapons of mass destruction are used on Russia. And he says “This is not a bluff”. The Russian Defense Minister Shoigu says “Russia is at war with the collective West,” and a Partial mobilization has been announced by Russia. The US has also privately warned Russia against using nuclear weapons.  Of course, as always, full English and Russian translated subtitles are provided.

This article was originally published in Greanville Post. You can support Patrick Lancaster’s work on Patreon.

The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think tanker titled “Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us“.

This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy. With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history.

“In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threat and call-up of reservists, it was reassuring for the leader of the free world to be unflinching,” writes the article’s author Kori Schake, who then adds, “Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in numerous other ways that Putin’s threats have constrained support for Ukraine.”

As though the possibility of nuclear war should not constrain US proxy warfare in that country. As though the crazy thing is not the US government’s insane nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, but its reluctance to go further.

“The gap between what the administration is claiming as their foreign policy objectives, and what it is actually willing to do, is a serious problem for American security, for Russia and beyond,” writes @KoriSchake. https://t.co/SX32lJKNgM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) September 26, 2022

Schake criticizes the fact that while Biden has been saying a PRC attack on Taiwan would mean a direct US hot war with China, the US military would need far more funding and far greater expansion to be able to win such a war, so it should definitely do those things instead of simply not rushing into World War Three.

“But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the United States could indeed defend Taiwan,” Schake writes. “The ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capability. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed that the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 is ‘acute,’ yet the defense budget is not geared to providing improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More broadly, the Biden administration isn’t funding an American military that can adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Department of Defense budget request, a measure of just how inadequate the Biden budget is.”

As Shchake discusses the urgent need to explode the US military budget in order to defend Taiwan, The New York Times neglects to inform us that Schake’s employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been caught accepting a small fortune from Taiwan’s de facto embassy while churning out materials urging the US government to go to greater lengths to arm Taiwan. In a 2013 article titled “The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute,” The Nation’s Eli Clifton reports that, thanks to a filing error by AEI, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office was found to have been one of the think tank’s top donors in 2009. Had that filing error not been made, we never would have learned this important information about AEI’s glaring conflict of interest in its Taiwan commentary.

AEI is one of the most prominent neoconservative think tanks in the United States, with extensive ties to Bush-era neocons like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Kristol and Kagan families, and has played a very active role in pushing for more war and militarism in US foreign policy. Dick Cheney sits on its board of trustees, and Mike Pompeo celebrated his one year anniversary as CIA director there.

ICYMI:
CIA Director Marks One-Year Anniversary in Public Address at American Enterprise Institutehttps://t.co/JAyPpDRBR5

— CIA (@CIA) January 27, 2018

Schake herself is as intimately interwoven with the military-industrial complex as anyone can possibly be without actually being a literal Raytheon munition. Her resume is a perfect illustration of the life of a revolving door swamp monster, from a stint at the Pentagon, to the university circuit, to the National Security Council, to the US Military Academy, to the State Department, to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, to the Hoover Institution, to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, to her current gig as director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her entire career is the story of a woman doing everything she can to help get more people killed in military mass slaughter, and being rewarded with wealth and prestige for doing so.

And now here she is being granted space in The New York Times, a news media outlet of unrivaled influence where enemies of US militarism and imperialism are consistently denied a platform, to tell us all that the Biden administration is endangering us not with its insanely reckless hawkishness, but by being too “cautious”.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being trained to freak out all the time about Russian propaganda, which barely exists in the west, even as we are hammered every day with extreme aggression by the immensely influential propaganda of the US-centralized empire. You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilization is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.

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Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.

As our consciousness has expanded it’s become unacceptable to be seen as an overt tyrant by the public, but that just meant the emergence of a sneakier form of tyranny. The age of the brute gave way to the age of the manipulative bitch. This manipulative bitch of an empire has been instigating and orchestrating violence at mass scale and then using its unrivaled narrative control machine to blame the violence on other powers. And its provocations are only getting more and more aggressive and more and more dangerous.

If humanity meets its end, it will come not at the hands of the overt monsters but the sly manipulators. The trajectory toward the horrifying global conflict we appear to be fast approaching was set by the manipulative bitch of the US-centralized empire.

If there’s one thing sly manipulators hate, it’s people who continuously highlight whenever they are being manipulative. That’s what drives the ongoing push to silence, censor and marginalize critics of empire. Julian Assange is in prison because he spotlighted the manipulative bitch.

Manipulators can only manipulate when their manipulations are invisible to their subjects. A grassroots push to bring public awareness to the empire’s manipulations would hamstring the empire. The empire knows this, hence the push to neutralize empire critics in myriad ways.

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Friendly reminder to the English-speaking world that Iran is none of your fucking business and any kind of intervention from your government literally always makes things worse.

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Remember, it’s crazy and conspiratorial to say the CIA likely is involved or will soon become involved in domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation. The sane position is to believe that the CIA never does anything, and its officers are all sitting in their Langley offices watching Netflix. The responsible, correct view is that the CIA’s extensively documented role in fomenting domestic uprisings around the world is strictly a thing of the past, and that the agency now receives billions and billions of dollars each year to do nothing whatsoever.

If you lived with someone who always steals things you’d suspect them anytime one of your valuables goes missing, but you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist if you think domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation might involve the CIA. We learned the CIA was literally plotting to assassinate Julian Assange five years ago and people still act like it’s crazy and outlandish to suggest that they’re doing evil things in the world currently.

If you don’t want people speculating about CIA involvement whenever there’s unrest in a nation the US government doesn’t like, you should be calling for the dismantling of the CIA. Otherwise you’re just supporting the CIA as it works to foment those kinds of uprisings and yelling at people who don’t like it.

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People don’t “serve” in the military, they work in the military. It’s a job. And if it’s a job with the US or any of its imperial member states, it is one of the most unethical jobs that anyone can possibly have.

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People who defend the US empire from criticism aren’t actually defending the empire, they’re defending their worldview. They’re staving off the flood of cognitive dissonance they’d experience if they saw that everything they believe about the world is a propaganda-induced lie.

That’s why so many of them say things like “Of course our government does bad things BUT-” and then make up some nonsensical gibberish like “you think Putin is an innocent little flower” or whatever. They don’t love the empire, they’re just flailing around protecting their worldview. Their arguments consistently lack robustness because they’re not invested in defending some globe-spanning power structure (people don’t usually do that unless they’re paid to), they’re just throwing up any walls they can that will protect their worldview.

Still, though. Imagine being such an embarrassing, sycophantic bootlicker that you’re emotionally incapable of handling the fact that there are a few fringe people on the internet who spend their time criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Imagine actually seeing that as a problem. There are actual people who sincerely see the existence of empire critics anywhere online as a problem that needs to be solved. How far gone do you have to be to live like that? How much bullshit must you have poured over your mind and heart for that to seem sensible?

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Most people get that you can’t win a nuclear war, but not enough people understand that you also can’t even remain fully in control in a nuclear standoff. There are too many small moving parts, too many things that can go wrong. Google “nuclear close calls” if you doubt this.

Our rulers are ushering us into a nuclear standoff of steadily increasing escalation, and they cannot, cannot, cannot control its outcome. They’re gambling everyone’s life hoping to win the prize of planetary domination, and their game is getting more dangerous by the day.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

Vladimir Putin has announced that referenda will be held in four regions of the eastern part of Ukraine whose populations will now vote on whether to join the Russian Federation, much like the Crimea referendum of 2014 which resulted in Russia’s annexation of that territory. Putin announced that 300,000 additional troops will be mobilized for the war to help facilitate this action, which is a major escalation in the conflict by any measure.

Putin also issued a stern nuclear warning that’s being hysterically spun by empire managers as a shocking and unprecedentedly bellicose threat, but if you read what he actually said it’s clear that he’s really reminding the west of the same principles of Mutually Assured Destruction that have been in place for generations, and isn’t expressing any position that western nuclear powers don’t also hold:

Nuclear blackmail was also launched. We are talking not only about the shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is encouraged by the West, which threatens a nuclear catastrophe, but also about the statements of some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction against Russia – nuclear weapons.

To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.

The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured, I emphasize this again, with all the means at our disposal. And those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the wind can also turn in their direction.

Text of Putin’s Speech on Ukraine https://t.co/UCAcolpARK pic.twitter.com/HKbkrHwJMj

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) September 21, 2022

So while this war is indeed insanely dangerous, it’s not because of any of the words coming out of Vladimir Putin’s mouth.

Westerners who are expressing shock and astonishment at Putin’s frank acknowledgement of what’s at stake in Russia’s increasingly direct confrontation with the US empire are really just admitting that they haven’t been paying attention. The risk of nuclear war is why sensible people have spent years calling for de-escalation and detente between the US and Russia while tensions have been steadily building since long before the invasion of Ukraine. Now there are western officials who say the world is actually at greater risk of nuclear war than it ever was during the last cold war.

A nuclear conflict could be sparked by either side making a calculated decision to use nuclear weapons (and you’re fooling yourself if you believe the US is any less trigger happy in that regard than Russia), but it can also be sparked by either side due to a mistake resulting from a technological malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding or miscalculation, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. The more things escalate, the more likely both such possibilities become.

And, clearly, things are escalating.

There’s Little More Washington Can Do To Convince China To Invade Taiwan
by Andrew Corbley#Taiwan #China #Biden https://t.co/ME5rog3Jd3 pic.twitter.com/dtRCrtTaiJ

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) September 20, 2022

And that’s just Russia; tensions are rapidly escalating between the US-centralized empire and China as well. In an article for Antiwar.com titled “There’s Little More Washington Can Do To Convince China To Invade Taiwan,” Andrew Corbley describes the frighteningly extensive provocations the US has been pouring into another massive geopolitical powderkeg just in the past few weeks.

“In the last 50 days, the executive and legislative branches in Washington have done more than in the last 50 years to convince China that America’s imperial policy is simply relentless, and must be met with force,” Corbley writes. “That’s not to say it’s by any means a given that the People’s Republic of China will invade its cross-straits neighbor of Taiwan, but that is to say that if strategic planners in Washington sat down and created a bulleted list of how to facilitate such an invasion, they would have probably gone through all the bullets by now.”

Corbley notes the incendiary visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi (which has since been followed by a deluge of additional US officials), President Biden’s repeated and increasingly explicit commitment to plunge the US into direct hot war with China if there’s an attack on Taiwan, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s insanely escalatory Taiwan Policy Act. When you look at the brazenness, ferocity and aggression of these provocations between two nations who logically should never go to war with each other, it really does look as though the empire is putting the pedal to the metal in acceleration toward global conflict.

On paper it looks completely irrational for the US empire to be ramping up aggressions against two powerful military and economic forces simultaneously, but it’s undeniable at this point that that is what’s happening. Clearly our rulers have some kind of strategy for how they’re going to see this through, though it remains to be seen whether that strategy is the desperate Hail Mary pass of a dying empire or a potentially highly effective plan using tools that aren’t currently visible to the public.

Either way, it looks like it’s probably a good time to relish human life on this planet while it’s here to be relished.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

I talk about narrative all the time partly because narrative control is the source and foundation of the power of the US-centralized empire. The ability to control the way people think, act and vote with mass-scale psychological manipulation allows our rulers to dominate us more pervasively than we could ever be dominated by brute totalitarian force, which is why so much energy goes into keeping the people from controlling their own narratives. That’s all the current mainstream panic about “disinformation” is, for example. If narrative control were fully decentralized, our rulers couldn’t rule.

But I also focus on narrative because its consequences are so much more far-reaching than that.

The fascinating thing about paying attention to the way narrative differs from reality is that it doesn’t just change your understanding of politics and power throughout the world: you start to notice that your whole life is dominated by narratives — not just about the world, but about you.

You start out getting curious if the narratives you’ve been fed about your country, your government, and global power dynamics are really true, and if you’re sincere you start taking that curiosity to questions about narratives you’ve come to believe about your own life. Narratives about what’s important, about what’s real, about what’s true, about what’s helpful. Narratives about how you are, narratives about who you are. Narratives that were put in your head by teachers, preachers, friends and family, and narratives you made up yourself long ago and kept believing.

You start getting curious about the way your own life has been shaped by believed narrative, and you start to discover a whole reality underneath the matrix of stories which buzzes around in your consciousness. A reality that could not possibly be more different from your stories about it.

You start to discover that your entire framework for perceiving the world is based on believed stories which are not ultimately true and are generally very unhelpful for moving through life in a harmonious way. Stories about others. Stories about life. And stories about yourself.

That last one is the real kicker. Because it turns out that underneath the narrative matrix, what you are is more different from your mental stories about what you are than you could possibly imagine. And these misperceptions of identity shape your entire experience of reality. You start to see that this finite, separate “me” character your entire mental world has revolved around your whole life has no more reality to it than a fictional character in a storybook. After that illusion becomes clarified, life is no longer dominated by narrative.

To be clear, narrative in and of itself is not the problem; narrative in and of itself is a useful tool. “I went to the store” is a narrative. “Those berries are poisonous” is a narrative. “One should look both ways before crossing the street” is a narrative. The problem isn’t narrative, the problem is that it dominates our experience instead of serving as a tool. The goal isn’t to eliminate narrative but to put it in its proper place as a useful tool rather than the writer, director and star of the entire show of life. The problem isn’t narrative but believed narrative, in the same way watching a horror movie causes no problems for you if you remain clear that it’s just a movie.

Look closer and you see through the stories about your nation, your government and your world. Look closer still and you see through your believed stories about life which lead you to think the way you think and act the way you act. Look even closer and you see through the stories about your actual fundamental nature.

The reason propaganda works is because human experience is so thoroughly dominated by mental stories that if you can control the dominant narratives, you can control humanity. The quest is not just to refute propaganda, but to cease having an experience that is dominated by narrative.

And of course all this is a narrative too. But it points to something real which can be clearly perceived in your own experience without narrative, in the same way you can see your hand in front of your face without having to tell any stories about it.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.” — Audre Lorde”

When you hear the word “feminism” a lot of different things might come to mind. Maybe you imagine suffragettes or think of women protesting in pink pussy hats. Or maybe you think of movements such as “Free the Nipple”.

Whatever you think of, it’s clear the word feminism leaves a bad taste in the mouth. What is suppose to be a revolutionary, radical ideology to free women from the chains of patriarchy has turned into a trend, a joke, and just a fun pastime.

Sexy feminist icon Gloria Steinem quickly became one of the misleaders of the movement. The goals remain completely bourgeois. Working class women need not apply.

Warmongers and war criminals, such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright have been hailed and praised as “feminists icons”.

Despite justifying the death of half a million Iraqi children, news channels focused on Albright being the first women to be secretary of state after her death.

That is liberal feminism. Liberal feminism promotes women to uphold the patriarchy instead of men. It aims to diversify, instead of abolish.

If the policies of Clinton and Albright are harming women, then why call them feminists? Why claim they stand for the liberation of women?

Because liberal feminism supports the neoliberal idea of individual success, it promotes women to step into corporate positions that causes them to step on other women. You can’t be a capitalist or politician without getting blood on your hands.

And “success” usually means integrating into the patriarchal, capitalist system, and participating in the exploitation of women.

Success for one women, doesn’t mean success for all women. But liberal feminism has conflated the concepts to the point where women rally for their own exploitation.

Instead of liberating women, liberal feminism manipulates them into thinking the title “girl boss” is empowering. It promotes the sex trade and pornography, industries that are the most harmful to women, as “liberating” because it’s their “choice” to participate in those industries.

Liberal feminism refuses to address the economic restrictions that influence these choices that women make. It fails to recognize that class heavily affects their decision.

It keeps us tied to patriarchy because it won’t confront the system that is keeping patriarchy in place: capitalism.

Liberal feminism pushes reactionary politics masquerading as liberation. It provides space for capitalism, racist ideology, and internalized misogyny.

Pornography and prostitution cannot be empowering because they are institutions that were built by the exploitation of women, and are maintained by exploiting women and children.

But, you might say, some women like sex work! Isn’t feminism suppose to be about giving women choices and allowing them to do whatever they want?

First, just because a few women like sex work, and claim it to be empowering, doesn’t change the reality for the majority of women in the industry.

Pornography is made for men, and most porn industries are run by men. And even if women became in charge, it still wouldn’t change the industry.

Study after study shows the connection between pornography and real life abuse.

Choice feminism, one of the sisters of liberal feminism, supports any and every choice women make. Who cares if she’s using Sri Lankan kids as slaves in her sweatshop? It’s her choice!

Michaele L Ferguson writes in Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics:

[Choice feminism] misleadingly suggests that since choices are individual, they have no social consequences; women are therefore relieved of responsibility for considering the broader implications of their decisions. […] Consequently, choice feminism is radically depoliticizing: it discourages us from forming judgments about the value of different choices, it discourages us from giving a public account for the choices we make, it shuts down critical discussion about which choices should be valued and which choices are mere illusions, it uncritically embraces consumerism, and most problematically for the future of feminism, it deters women from being active in politics […]

Besides the choice rhetoric, liberal feminists also focus on mundane, ridiculous issues. One such example is reclaiming the derogatory, misogynistic term “slut”.

Gail Dines summarizes the issue nicely:

There is no such concept as slut shaming because “slut” is a term invented by the patriarchy to shame and blame women’s sexuality. It is in and of itself a shaming term, so how does one shame an already shamed concept? Calling a woman a slut is an act of misogyny, not “Slut Shaming” because you are shaming her by using the term slut in the first place.

The lack of revolutionary rhetoric and appeal to the oppressive structure is what makes liberal feminism appealing to celebrities, CEOs, etc.

This type of feminism will never liberate women.

A real feminist movement should seek to abolish the current capitalist, misogynist, racist, order. Not uphold it.

Hopefully feminism will outlive neoliberalism and go back to its radical roots. When that happens, we will become one step closer to liberation.

Aisha is a pan-Africanist geopolitical analyst.

This article was originally published on Greanville Post via panAfricanML.

Remember Afghanistan? While the Taliban returned to power on the heels of a bewilderingly chaotic US withdrawal after 20 years of occupation, there was immense hand-wringing and a flurry of unpleasant, albeit mixed feelings, on TV and around American dinner tables. But the war lobbyists turned a VERY handsome profit. While they might have struggled with the news, the weight of history, the waste, the shame of defeat, as so many Americans did, they “struggled” all the way to the bank.

Maybe they even cried into their lobster: But it was the same delectable gourmet fare afforded them had the US instead succeeded in its Afghanistan mission (whatever that was).

It is never a matter of “winning” or “losing” to them – they win big in every scenario except peace.

The same is true for the Ukraine conflict, which war profiteers in the West (in contrast to everyday Ukrainians and Russians) might hope to prolong as much as they possibly can.

The Ukraine conflict is all the more delicious to them, because while war in Afghanistan saw actual deployment of US soldiers and even those who were yet to be born when that war was declared, the kind of meddling we’ve seen from the US in Ukraine has so far avoided the PR problem of American deaths and grieving American families.

“I am proud to announce our biggest tranche of security assistance [to Ukraine] to date: approximately $2.98 billion of weapons and equipment to be provided through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative,” US President Joe Biden proclaimed in August.

US taxpayers will supply six advanced surface-to-air missile systems, (NASAMS), dozens of counter-artillery radars, precision rocket systems, and more than 300,000 rounds of artillery and mortar ammunition and more, on top of everything else we’ve sent to prop up the Kiev government.

On August 29, a Wall Street Journal report explained that the US has reached “uncomfortably low” levels of 155mm howitzer ammunition, citing an unnamed defense official. After sending more than 800,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition to fighters in Ukraine, the US supply is “not at the level we would like to go into combat,” the official said.

Surprising no one, the Pentagon’s solution is to ask Congress for even more money. They need $500 million more to replace this “uncomfortably low” stockpile of ammunition.

“The Ukraine conflict is showing what it will take to keep the arsenal of democracy equal to the task,” Bloomberg’s Hal Brands wrote back in April, arguing that “greater investments in the defense industrial base and more aggressive purchasing and stockpiling of key munitions can help.”

Over the past six months, we’ve sent Stinger anti-air missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, 16 M142 high mobility artillery rocket systems (or HIMARS), VAMPIRE technical kits, and a mountain of small arms and ammunition to Ukraine. The too-often unspoken but central point of it all is to prolong the violence there.

Make no mistake: $40 billion in aid later, Kiev is not standing on its own feet. It fights entirely at the pleasure of the West and profits only the “defense” industry of the West. And the US war lobby is absolutely giddy about the carnage in Ukraine.

Were my loved ones blown to smithereens in Donbass – distinguishing a US-made bomb from a Russian bomb would be less important to me, I expect, than the fact of my grief and my desperation to see the conflict come to an end.

But as was the case for Afghanistan, the US war lobby would prefer that it go on forever; it is willing to sacrifice men and women on the altar of corporate greed, indefinitely. And if, as we see in Ukraine, they can get away with sacrificing foreign children and families, but not US service members, on that altar, then so much the better!

Full disclosure: this writer is a former member of the Center for Political Innovation and has appeared on Caleb Maupin’s YouTube channel.

The anti-imperialist think tank Center for Political Innovation (CPI) disbanded in August 2022 after an article published on Medium accused the organization’s leader, Caleb Maupin, of sexual misconduct with members and cult-like tactics. The revelations, compiled by one or more anonymous facilitators, included statements from former CPI members that detailed Maupin’s fetish and framed the accomplished journalist’s political project as little more than a ruse to gratify his sexual needs. The article delved into Maupin’s marital life, publishing his wife’s name and picture, a private person uninvolved in CPI activities. Most CPI members were left blindsided; confused and suspicious, many questioned the purpose of this explosive public statement that seemed tailored to neutralize the controversial anti-imperialist figure and his organization.

For his efforts over the years, Maupin–a communist author, political analyst, and reporter for Russia Today–has become a target of NATO and the US empire. He was featured on a list of “Speakers who promote narratives that are consonant with Russian propaganda” [translation] released by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation. As the conservative magazine The Federalist described it, the blacklist amounts to unprecedented censorship: “Given that the Ukrainian government is being subsidized with billions of American dollars, this censorship amounts to American taxpayers paying the Ukrainian government billions of dollars to blacklist American citizens for thought crimes.”

Alongside Caleb Maupin were the names of many other outspoken critics of NATO and US imperialism: CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern; former UN Weapons Inspector and opponent of the US invasion of Iraq Scott Ritter; Pulitzer-prize-winning independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks; and other prominent American and international dissidents. As Greenwald told Unherd in July 2022:

“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonize anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and NATO. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing any dissidents of spreading “Russian propaganda” or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”

Just two weeks before publication of the article that would end the Center for Political Innovation, Maupin and CPI hosted an anti-imperialist conference in Chicago. Maupin appeared on stage alongside a representative of the African People’s Socialist Party, whose organization headquarters had just undergone a McCarthyite raid by the FBI on flimsy allegations of receiving support and direction from a Russian intelligence officer. A viral video of the Chicago conference’s opening ceremony soon garnered the ire of Ukrainian & NATO propagandists on Twitter, and Newsweek reported disparagingly on the event and its unequivocal proclamations of solidarity with Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic, and the People’s Republic of China.

Some voices from establishment media and NGOs expressing outrage at the conference included: former director for European Affairs at the United States National Security Council Alexander Vindman, a liberal darling from the Russiagate hearings and avowed anti-Russia hawk; senior fellow at the Atlanticist think tank Center for European Policy Analysis Olga Lautman; and Foundation for Defense of Democracies and American Enterprise Institute staff writer Ivana Stradner, a proponent of psychological warfare against Russia. Other commentators who took umbrage were Thomas C. Theiner, who had published anti-Russian propaganda for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded Euromaidan Press during the 2014 coup in Ukraine; Jason Jay Smart, who boasts on his website about his specialty in helping “political parties or leaders come to power” in Eastern Europe and Latin America; Blake Herzinger, described by Foreign Policy as a “civilian Indo-Pacific defense policy specialist and US Navy Reserve officer;” and Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for the NED-funded Kyiv Post who has expressed solidarity with the neo-Nazi Azov battalion.

In terms of sexual misconduct, it should always be taken seriously. However, one should also evaluate and respond to claims of misconduct against groups or individuals opposed to the US establishment within the context of the imperialists’ vast resources and expertise in information warfare. They have proven time and again to use sexual blackmail, exaggerate allegations of sexual misconduct or assault, or fabricate and publicize heinous sex crimes in order to neutralize voices exposing and resisting imperialism. This article highlights some examples to illustrate the history of such operations.

From CIA “Love Traps” to Jeffrey Epstein

In a 2019 multi-part series published on MintPress News, investigative reporter Whitney Webb detailed the sordid evolution of sexual blackmail operations by US intelligence agencies. In the 1930s, these operations had been traced to organized crime and ultimately ensnared the FBI head J. Edgar Hoover in scandal when photographs leaked that showed him engaging in homosexual acts, then illegal. Some investigators believe that these images originated from the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA); others believe they came from mobsters. Regardless, the photos came into the possession of CIA officials, and may have served to blackmail Hoover into ignoring certain organized crime.

Webb documents how in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA operated “Love Traps” to ensnare foreign diplomats, paying prostitutes to proposition them and later filming the sexual acts with a concealed two-way mirror disguised as a painting. CIA agent-turned-rogue Frank Terpil told investigative journalist Jim Hougan that, “CIA-directed sexual blackmailing operations were intensive in Washington at about the time of the Watergate scandal.” Some of the operations reportedly used young boys.

Jeffrey Epstein, who was imprisoned for sex trafficking before his infamously mysterious death, is credibly believed to have been an Israeli intelligence asset. His closest associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who worked closely with Mossad. South African intelligence documents obtained by the Guardian in 2015 revealed that female Mossad agents were expected to use sex as a “weapon” and to employ prostitutes for sexual blackmail operations:

A section dealing with the operational practices of Israeli field intelligence officers says Mossad puts no pressure on female agents to use sex as a “weapon” but it is expected. It adds: “If sexual blackmail or entrapment is an integral part of the mission, however, Mossad often employs actual prostitutes.

Epstein’s victims have testified in court documents that he “‘maintained damaging files on many of the young female victims’ to prevent them from cooperating with police or in civil lawsuits against Epstein and his trafficking organization” as reported by The Daily Beast. Though there is no obvious record that Epstein blackmailed his elite connections, the 2019 book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales includes an interview with his purported Mossad handler who alleged that Epstein conducted blackmail operations. If true, Epstein’s parties and photo-ops with elites echo the sex parties that Hoover attended. In her investigation, Webb draws a clear through-line linking various sexual blackmail operations by intelligence agencies.

Muammar Gaddafi

In the months leading up to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, during NATO’s illegal war on Libya, Hillary Clinton’s team at the State Department began to circulate rumors that Gaddafi was supplying his forces with Viagra to use rape as a weapon of war. According to The Independent, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch investigated the rumors but were unable to find any substantiating evidence:

Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who was in Libya for three months after the start of the uprising, says that, “we have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped”. She stresses this does not prove that mass rape did not occur but there is no evidence to show that it did. Liesel Gerntholtz, head of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, which also investigated the charge of mass rape, said: “We have not been able to find evidence.”

The United Nations and Doctors Without Borders also disputed the allegation.

The Viagra claim seems to have been passed from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton, who then passed the idea along to Jake Sullivan. Al Jazeera also reported on the rumors. Susan Rice repeated the claim in a closed-door meeting at the UN. However, US military and intelligence officials disagreed with Rice’s assessment, telling NBC News that the available evidence did not support the claim.

Despite a general consensus among those investigating the Viagra rape claims that they lacked merit and were likely fabricated, the false story continued to be used to justify NATO’s destruction of Libya. Netflix’s propaganda series How to Become a Tyrant repeated the accusation as fact in their episode on Gaddafi to depict him as a cruel dictator and not a beloved leader who provided Libyans with free universal healthcare and education and carried out the Great Man-Made River Project, making water readily available throughout Libya.

Steele Dossier

While former President Trump is hardly an anti-imperialist or paragon of truth, nor without his own credible allegations of sexual abuse, as a threat to the status quo in Washington he has nevertheless become a target by the same deep state powers protecting the imperialist uni-party establishment. The recent FBI raid on Mar-A-Lago demonstrated the US regime’s willingness to pursue Trump in ways that once would have been unthinkable to the ruling class.

The low point of the perpetration of the Russiagate hoax was the fabricated Steele dossier, named for its author, British spy Christopher Steele. This heavily-publicized dossier included the salacious “pee tape” claim of evidence that Trump asked prostitutes to urinate in front of him. Used to humiliate the then-Presidential-candidate by implying he had a fetish most Americans would view as disgusting, the FBI also “relied substantially” on the dossier in the Mueller Report, which investigated Russian interference in the 2016 US election and any grounds for impeachment of President Trump. Claims by the lead investigator Igor Danchenko were key in the FBI obtaining FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants to “intrusively” electronically surveil Trump advisor Carter Page.

Danchenko has been indicted by Special Prosecutor John Durham for lying to the FBI during interviews on the dossier. His trial is currently slated for October 2022. Michael Sussman was a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign indicted for concealing his connections to the campaign when tipping off the FBI about Trump’s supposed Russian connections. In May, Sussman was found not guilty of lying to the FBI when they were unable to prove that his lies had “materially” affected their investigation. Despite the acquittal, Durham’s investigation revealed that the Clinton campaign had in fact financed the creation of the dossier.

Julian Assange

In her 2019 analysis of the sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange, Caitlin Johnstone quoted Democratic senator Chuck Schumer’s response to then-president-elect Trump’s denial of Russiagate claims: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange began just months after Wikileaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video, with Chelsea Manning was already in prison for leaking this and other materials to Assange. The two women whose experiences form the basis of the allegations first went to the police to inquire whether Assange could be compelled to take an HIV test, not to bring charges against him. One woman, SW, said that Assange had initiated sex with her while she was “half-asleep” and not wearing a condom, while the second woman, AA, believed that Assange had damaged his condom before using it.

The Swedish prosecution ordered Assange’s arrest and notified the press that he was suspected of rape before they had even interviewed AA and after SW left the police station mid-interview upon discovering her accusation would be used to arrest Assange. She stated in texts that she was “chocked [sic] when they arrested him”, that “it was the police who made up the charges” and that they were “keen to get their hands on him.” The charges were dropped 5 days later by a prosecutor, only to be reinstated days later.

The back and forth with Swedish authorities continued. Assange stayed in Sweden for five weeks after the allegations, leaving only after being told he was not wanted for questioning. While in the UK, Assange said he would return to Sweden to face questions with the assurance that he would not be extradited to the US and to face prosecution for his journalism, but no assurance was provided. Meanwhile, INTERPOL issued a Red Notice on Assange even though his case did not meet their stated criteria, while the CIA plotted his murder or kidnapping.

Even now, after Sweden dropped all charges against Assange, the sexual assault allegations continue to be used to justify his prosecution and denigrate his status as a political prisoner. In August 2022, a prestigious Australian paper The Age lied to its readers that Assange is exaggerating and sensationalizing the intelligence plots against him and that he “spent seven years at the [Ecuadorian] diplomatic residence in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault and rape.”

Psychological Warfare

Max Blumenthal, editor of anti-imperialist investigative news outlet The Grayzone, was not on the same Ukrainian blacklist as Caleb Maupin. But Kit Klarenburg has documented how The Grayzone has been targeted by British Intelligence. Molfar, an “open-source investigations company” funded by USAID and Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital Transformation, promoted a press release offering to reveal unsavory information about Blumenthal. Molfar also published personally identifiable information of Russian soldiers and other individuals that they view as enemies of Ukraine, even explicitly calling for vigilante murder. According to MorningStar, the press release alleged that he was being paid by Russia to spread disinformation about their Special Military Operation. Blumenthal responded, telling MorningStar, “This half-baked attempt at intimidating me for my factual journalism pales in comparison to the repression and violence meted out by the US-backed post-Maidan regime against the many Ukrainian journalists, politicians and human rights activists who have dissented against its corrupt and authoritarian rule.”

On a recent live stream discussing the assassination of Russian journalist Daria Dugin, who had been on another Ukranian list, Myrotvorets (explicitly a hitlist which updates its targets as “liquidated” after their deaths), Blumenthal noted that the attacks on dissenting journalists and public figures have become “as personal as possible.” He elaborated that he had viewed the Molfar dossier compiled on himself and observed it contained what Molfar believed to be his personal details as well as “doxes” (which may include names, addresses, phone numbers, and more) of his family members and even the employers of his family members. Blumenthal described the tactics as psychological warfare.

We will likely never know whether the document that targeted Maupin and disbanded CPI was the work of anti-Russian, pro-imperialist forces. What is clear is that psychological and informational attacks against anti-imperialists have become increasingly personal, dangerous, and intense. It is now more critical than ever for us to learn from and defend against the tactics used to silence and repress our allies so we can avoid being vulnerable to such attacks in the future.

In late February of 2022, following the launch of Russia’s special military operation, the European Union/NATO allies levied new economic sanctions against Russia that Joe Biden promised would devastate the country’s economy and “reduce the ruble to rubble.” Half a year later, it is now obvious to most of the world that the president’s prediction was incorrect. Russia has responded to the sanctions by positioning itself to create greater ties with fellow BRICS nations like India and China. Meanwhile, by foregoing cheap Russian gas and oil, countries across Europe from the UK to Germany face a winter of rising inflation, sky-high energy prices, and growing social unrest.

The EU might have learned this lesson the first time back in 2014, when it sanctioned Russia for recognizing the Crimean referendum, in which over 95% of voters elected to join the Russian Federation. Russia reciprocated in kind, imposing its own sanctions on foodstuffs from the European Union. Massive protests followed from farmers in countries like Poland, France, Spain, and Estonia, who were no longer able to sell their products on the large Russian market. These countries gradually found alternative markets in places like China and the United States to mitigate the negative impact to trade. But the present situation–with western sanctions and a “price cap” scheme roiling energy markets–is much more dire, since European industry up to now has relied on cheap Russian energy to remain competitive.

Like the sanctions the EU imposed on Russia in 2014 over Crimea, the eight or more sanctions packages levied against Russia in less than a year have utterly failed to disrupt Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. Even hawkish European leaders are beginning to understand the unintended consequences of the failed sanctions blitz as winter quickly approaches. In Estonia, twenty-eight businesses including oil and railroad companies, recently requested exemptions from sanctions so as to continue importing Russian oil. One loophole for buying sanctioned Russian oil or natural gas has been to buy it indirectly, either from China or India, and at a considerable markup. Gazprom announced that its natural gas exports to China increased by 63% in the first half of 2022. BRICS member India threatened to rescind its alliance with the United States if the latter insisted that India enforce the sanctions and stop buying and selling cheap Russian natural gas and oil. India’s defiance of the US and continued trade with Russia is a testament to the rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape toward multipolarity and the end of US hegemony.

While the United States continues to prop up the regime in Ukraine and protract the conflict with money and arms, while most European countries scramble to prepare for energy shortfalls amidst freezing temperatures, Russia and its allies have forged the path towards a new, fairer world order without the US dollar. The decline of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency has accelerated with the West’s reckless sanctions on Russia. As BRICS International Forum President Purnima Anand recently stated, “We have implemented the mechanism of mutual settlements in rubles and rupees, and there is no need for our countries to use the dollar in mutual settlements. And today a similar mechanism of mutual settlements in rubles and yuan is being developed by China.”

Similar support for de-dollarization of international trade was expressed by Iranian Minister of Planning and Budget Committee Mohsen Zanganeh. In June, Iran requested to join BRICS and cooperation in development. The five current BRICS countries account for over 41% of the world’s population. This percentage will of course increase with growing membership in the alliance; besides Iran, Argentina and Saudi Arabia have also declared interest in joining. Saudi Arabia has also openly mulled replacing the “petrodollar” with a “petroyuan,” as well as allowing for countries to trade in their own currencies. Economic ties between the BRICS nations have only increased since the latest sanctions war on Russia, and this overreaction from the United States and NATO may prove to be the disastrous misstep that finally ended dollar hegemony. Joe Biden and other Western leaders somehow believed that their economic sanctions would turn the ruble into rubble when in fact they turned the dollar into dust.

The sordid punishment for celebrity worship.

It looks like President Barack Obama can add Emmy winner to his resume. The former [and still very much in discreet service] puppet of the oligarchs won it for narrating a Netflix documentary on the importance of national parks around the globe in the fight against climate destruction.
Very interesting Obama didn’t mention what is happening to the parks in his hometown of Chicago to build his presidential library.
The library is being built on 19.3 acres of wooded public parkland in Jackson Park, a historic urban park on the National Register of Historic Places. To build it, one thousand trees would be cut down and migratory birds would be harmed. The environmental impact of the library would not be felt if it was built near a suggested location, Washington Park. When citizens attempted to raise these concerns at open town hall meetings, they were shut down.

Outside of his vanity project, Obama didn’t seem to make the viewers aware of his complicity in destroying the planet we inhabit. It was the former community organizer who approved drilling in the Arctic, showed little interest in his first term in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, bragged America had become the biggest producer of fossil fuels under his watch and who did nothing to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline. As protestors were being beaten for their opposition to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on indigenous land, Obama was approving two additional pipelines to Mexico.

Then, there is one of the greatest pollutants Obama unleashed upon the earth. One all his predecessors unleashed upon the world: war. Under Obama, the Pentagon continued to emit more greenhouse gases than entire nations. His uptick in drone strikes, imperialist interventions and $1 trillion “investment” in upgrading America’s nuclear arsenal harmed the environment of America and dozens of other nations. It’s disgraceful more environmentalists can’t make the connection that war is a destructive force to the stability and future of earth.

Giving Obama an Emmy is a joke. It’s no different than giving him a Nobel Peace Prize. In our culture, a war criminal can be seen as a symbol of peace and a man who destroys the planet can be seen as an environmental champion.

The Myth of Oprah, the Great

Among other dubious accomplishments, Oprah’s obsequious deference to the Holocaust entrepreneur Elie Wiesel, helped protect Israel from criticism for its treatment of Palestinians and a multitude of other crimes.

Rose McGowan might be one of the few moral human beings remaining in Hollywood.

I remember when she accused Oprah Winfrey of being “as fake as they come.” She slammed the billionaire for her past friendship with sexual predator, Harvey Weinstein.

I applaud her! Winfrey has been allowed to parade herself around the world as a “guru” and “inspirational figure.” She’s just another member of the oligarchy.

She’s helped rehab/massage the image of sexual predators such as Bill Clinton after he left the White House. Her media platform helped propel figures such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into seats of power. In the lead up to the Iraq War, she pushed it HARD. She regularly featured “experts” who warned America of the danger Saddam Hussein posed to the world.

During the Black Lives Matter protests, she regularly demeaned protestors. Saying of the activists, “But what I’m looking for is some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. This is what we want. This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it.’”

As to her affiliation with Weinstein, you can’t convince me she didn’t know he was a predator. Other Hollywood insiders have gone public claiming everyone knew about Weinstein’s abuse of women. As the producer Scott Rosenberg said when it came to Weinstein, “Everybody fucking knew!”

The oligarchy loves Winfrey. Why? Because she’s more than a billionaire. She’s a cult leader. Winfrey has gotten millions of women to blindly follow her while running cover for corporate power and sexual abuse. That’s dangerous. More should call her out as McGowan has done.

This article was originally published in the Greanville Post.

Business Insider news-report on the morning of September 7th headlined “Putin says Russia will restart Nord Stream 1 gas flows ‘tomorrow’ if it gets turbines, and blames sanctions for the shutdown” and opened with:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Gazprom could restart gas flows to Europe via the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline tomorrow, if it gets the turbines needed. He blamed Germany and Western sanctions for the indefinite halt in operations for the pipeline, according to media reports from his speech at the Eastern Economic Forum. At the same time, he said pressure from the US was behind the holdup in launching another pipeline, Nord Stream 2.

Putin was telling the EU’s leaders that what has been forcing gas-prices in Europe up 300% since Russia’s February 24th invasion of Ukraine isn’t Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (such as they allege) but instead the U.S.-EU-UK economic sanctions against Russia which have caused all U.S.-and-allied — including all EU — nations to terminate imports of fuels from Russia. He was saying that Russia will turn on the pipelines into the EU as soon as EU leaders turn off their sanctions that prohibit their businesses and consumers from buying it.

The ball is now in their court. Let’s see what they do with it. Have they been lying to allege that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused this 300% gas-price rise? If so, then Putin has said that the moment they stop lying and start to allow the gas to flow again from Russia, that gas will flow again from Russia and those prices will consequently plunge back down again.

If, however, they have been telling the truth (though it’s hard to see how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th could even possibly have forced up the prices in the EU of all fuels from Russia), then the ball will immediately be in Putin’s court, for him promptly to get the flows of Russian fuels into Europe restored to what they had been prior to the EU’s sanctions that were imposed in the wake of that invasion.

Because it’s hard to see how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th could even possibly have forced up the prices in the EU of all fuels from Russia, the headline here is based upon the very reasonable expectation: that the result of Putin’s September 7th challenge to the EU’s leaders will be that they are proven to have been lying when they have blamed these price-rises on him, instead of on themselves.

In other words: On September 7th, Putin laid down the gauntlet to EU leaders, regarding whom is to blame for Europe’s now-soaring energy-prices, and for the consequences thereof. That challenge to them tests whom has been telling the truth about this matter, and whom has been lying about it. It is that test, regardless of whether news-reports about his statement (other than this one), report it as testing whom the liars, and whom the truth-tellers, about this matter, have been. This is a big tree that is falling in the news-forest, and that tree is falling, regardless of whether or not (or the extent to which) it is being reported to the public. The test is a fact — an important fact — even if it won’t be reported (other than here). However, something else will be even more important: what the result of this test will turn out to be. And then the test for the news-media will be: will they report that result? Will they report the finding? Because there certainly will be a finding, from this test. And it certainly will be an important one.

This article was originally published in the Greanville Post.

On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.

“Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said. “It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

“Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.”

Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent half a year mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the actions of western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?

Because, as Chomsky notes, that is indeed the case. A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that “the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”

Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia’s reasons for the war), but that’s silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.

Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.

No-one listened to them and here we are.

Small compilation 🧵 of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 1, 2022

This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv’s sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin’s final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).

The US power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up cold war escalations. Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do.

Instead it knowingly chose the opposite course: continuing to float the possibility of formal NATO membership for Ukraine while pouring weapons into the nation and making it more and more of a de facto NATO member with closer and closer intimacy with the US war machine, and then either ordering, encouraging or tolerating Ukraine’s aggressive assault on Donbas separatists.

Why did the empire opt for provocation over peace? Congressman Adam Schiff gave a pretty good answer to that question in January of 2020 as the road to war was being paved: “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” If you relinquish the infantile idea that the US empire is helping its good friend Ukraine because it loves the Ukrainian people and wants them to have freedom and democracy, it’s not hard to see that the US sparked a convenient proxy war because it was in its geostrategic interests to do so, and because it wouldn’t be their lives and property getting laid to waste.

Brian Berletic put out a good video a few days ago about a Pentagon-funded 2019 Rand Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The US Army-commissioned paper details how the empire can use proxy warfare, economic warfare and other cold war tactics to push its longtime geopolitical foe to the brink without costing American lives or sparking a nuclear conflict. It mentions Ukraine hundreds of times, and it explicitly discusses the same economic warfare tactics we’re seeing today like sanctions and attacking Russia’s energy interests in Europe (the latter of which Berletic points out is also being used to bolster US dominance over its vassals in the EU).

The paper even explicitly advocates continuing to threaten NATO membership with Ukraine to draw out an aggressive response from Moscow, saying, “While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington’s pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”

President Biden has made calls for regime change in Moscow that can’t even really be called thinly disguised, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has openly said that the plan is to use this war to “weaken” Russia, which other US officials have told the press is indeed the policy. Comments from the Biden administration continually make it clear that the US alliance is buckling down to keep this war going for years to come, which would fit in nicely with Washington’s known track record of deliberately drawing Russia into military quagmires against US proxies in both Afghanistan and Syria.

So make no mistake, behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, the US-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict. It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of US interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states, and all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.

Which is why when it looked like peace was at risk of breaking out in the early days of the conflict, the empire sent in Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky that even if he is ready for the war to end, his partners to the west were not.

Russia and Ukraine agreed to a negotiated settlement to end the war in April, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to stop the peace deal.

The US and EU instead escalated the proxy war, as the Biden admin admitted, to try to “weaken” Moscowhttps://t.co/xsCvovq8Km

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 4, 2022

So as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fart-brained fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing. If China had backed a coup in Mexico and now had a loyal vassal in Mexico City who was letting Beijing distribute weapons along the US border while continually shelling English-speaking separatists in Baja California who are seeking US annexation, there’s no question that Washington would consider this a provocation and would respond accordingly. You can tell me that’s not true, but we’d both know you’re lying.

But as Chomsky said, the press are still spouting this “unprovoked” nonsense anyway.

“Russia is widely believed to have been taken aback by the West’s assertive and unified response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” reads a CNBC article published just minutes prior to this writing.

“The diplomatic visit underlines the importance of the Russian relationship for China, even in the face of international blow back against Moscow after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year,” reads a new report from CNN hot off the presses.

“It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country,” a source is quoted as saying in another CNN article published a few hours ago.

It is, as Chomsky observed, really freaky how hard they’ve been hitting us with this line every time the invasion of Ukraine is mentioned. It seems like every time it comes up they’re obligated to say it, like how Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.

In the mass media you’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. And you have to do it while saying the word “unprovoked” at every opportunity.

NATO chief admits that NATO allies have been training and arming Ukraine since 2014.

Something to remember whenever Western media refers to an “unprovoked” invasion. pic.twitter.com/SGHF46yayz

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) August 29, 2022

Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.

We’re all guilty of doing the things we knowingly choose to do. If I choose to provoke someone into doing something bad, then they’re guilty of choosing to do the bad thing, but I am also guilty of provoking them. I’m not saying anything new here; this is the plot behind any movie or show with a sneaky or manipulative villain, and it’s been a part of our storytelling since ancient times. Nobody has ever walked out of Shakespeare’s Othello thinking that maybe Iago was just an innocent bystander who was trying to help out his friends.

Most of us learn that provocation is real as children with siblings, kicking the other under the table or whatever to provoke a loud outburst, and we’ve understood it ever since. But in 2022 everyone’s pretending that this extremely basic, kindergarten-level concept is some kind of bizarre, alien gibberish. It’s intensely stupid, and it needs to stop.

Empire apologists will also argue that saying Russia was provoked into invading by the US empire is like saying a rape victim provoked her rapist by wearing a tight skirt, or a battered wife provoked her abuser by disobeying him. And as a survivor of multiple rapes and an abusive relationship I must say I find it extremely offensive when people compare blaming the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its well-documented aggressions to blaming victims of rape and domestic violence. The poor widdle globe-spanning empire is not comparable to a rape victim, and if you find yourself thinking that it is it’s time to re-think your entire worldview.

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in September of 2022 and still say the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. You’ve got a brain between your ears and an entire internet of information at your fingertips. Use them.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

A US senate report which is an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 has people talking due to the surprising statements it includes about the US government’s current position on UFOs.

I mean Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

I mean Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena.

This latest moniker for the thing we all still think of as UFOs is the US government’s way of addressing how these alleged appearances, which began entering mainstream attention in 2017, are said to be able to transition seamlessly from traveling through the air to moving underwater in what’s been labeled “cross-domain transmedium” movement. Because branches of the US war machine are roughly broken up into forces specializing in air, sea, land and space operations, the notion that these things move between those domains gets special attention.

UFO enthusiasts are largely focusing on a part of the addendum which oddly stipulates that the government’s newly named Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office shall not be looking into objects “that are positively identified as man-made,” because of the obvious implications of that phrase. This is understandable; if you’ve got a government office that’s responsible for investigating unidentified phenomena, you can just say it won’t be looking into phenomena that are “positively identified”. You wouldn’t have to add “identified as man-made” unless you had a specific reason for doing so.

After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn’t believe all UFOs are “man-made.” https://t.co/LrNgDc3auH

— VICE News (@VICENews) August 23, 2022

But for me the claim that really jumps off the page, authored by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, is the claim that these unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena are a “threat” that is increasing “exponentially”.

“At a time when cross-domain transmedium threats to United States national security are expanding exponentially, the Committee is disappointed with the slow pace of DoD-led efforts to establish the office to address those threats,” Warner writes in the report.

“Exponentially” is a mighty strong word. Taken in its least literal sense, it means that threats to US national security from UFOs are increasing at an alarmingly rapid rate. That they have swiftly become much greater than they used to be.

What is the basis for this incendiary claim? What information are US lawmakers being given to make them draw such conclusions and make such assertions? There’s a long chain of information handling between an alleged UFO encounter and a US senator’s pen, and corruption can occur at any point in that chain (including the first and last link).

I remain comfortably agnostic about most aspects of the UFO question, up to and including the possibility that there are actual extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings zipping around our planet in technology our science cannot comprehend. But one thing I absolutely will take a hard and fast position on is that the moment the US government starts labeling something a “threat”, all trust and credulity must be immediately be thrown out the window.

This is after all occurring as the US enters a steadily escalating new cold war against both Russia and China, and we know that during the last cold war the CIA sought to exploit public panic about UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Soviets, and that the CIA has claimed that its newly developed spy planes were responsible for many UFO sightings in the 1950s, and that the US military was working on developing “flying saucer” aircraft during that same time. It also occurs after the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics stated at a 2020 conference that the Air Force has a brand new aircraft prototype, designed using new digital engineering technology, that has “broken a lot of records.”

This new mainstream UFO narrative also has highly suspicious origins, with key players ranging from shady US intelligence cartel operatives like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, to corrupt senator Harry Reid and his plutocratic campaign donor Robert Bigelow, to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge, who believes humanity is being tormented by malevolent extraterrestrials who feed off negative human emotions and that the US military is heroically protecting us from their evil agendas. Filmmaker Steven Greenstreet put out a short, well-sourced documentary with The New York Post this past May laying out copious amounts of evidence that the groundwork for the new UFO narrative was built on journalistic malpractice and negligence, obfuscation, omission, and outright lies. The footage we’re being shown of these supposed vehicles to justify this new narrative consist of blurs, flashes and smudges which can all be explained by mundane phenomena.

So in my opinion this isn’t a subject we can just ignore, as weird and uncomfortable as the subject of UFOs be for serious analysts. Whatever the subject, when you’ve got the US government claiming on highly suspect grounds that there’s an exponentially growing threat that urgently needs to be addressed militarily, it’s time to sit up and start paying attention.

Not that I myself have any clear idea of what’s going on here beyond the distinct impression that we are being deceived about something potentially very important. And I don’t get the impression that other people have a very clear picture of what’s going on either.

Some say this is just a scam to get more funding for the Space Force or the military in general. That could very well be, but as far as publicly available information goes we’re not seeing anyone saying anything like “Hey we need $40 billion to address this UFO problem.”

Some say this is part of an agenda to justify getting weapons into space, but I suspect anyone likely to support that agenda would support it with or without the claim that we need to fight ET. And again, there’s the problem that nobody’s saying “Hey we need to get weapons into space because of UFOs.”

Some say this is just a deliberate “distraction” designed to keep people from focusing on more important issues, but the problem there is that (A) the empire doesn’t normally roll out distractions in that way, and (B) the UFO issue isn’t getting much mainstream attention. It’s a peripheral story, dwarfed in comparison to real propaganda initiatives like Ukraine.

Some say there’s a conspiracy to use high-tech weaponry to create a false flag alien invasion and unite humanity under a one world government, but that’s a fairly mainstream idea that’s being pushed on viral Netflix films by known fraud Steven Greer. I think the world is paranoid enough at this point that few would buy such a psyop even if it were somehow convincingly orchestrated.

Some say this narrative is all a cover for new technology the empire is keeping under wraps, presenting an official position that the US government has nothing to do with the strange vehicles people are seeing in the air as stated in the ODNI’s report on UFOs last year. That would certainly explain the empire’s cockiness in confronting Russia and China simultaneously when public knowledge of its economic and military capabilities would indicate that that’s a bad idea.

It could be as simple as the fact that once it becomes the established orthodoxy in Washington that UFOs are a threat and something needs to be done about them, it’s a safe bet that we’re going to see massive amounts of money moving around to deal with that threat and the emergence of war machinery that can be used in future confrontations with Russia and China. There are any number of creatures lurking in DC who would stand to benefit from that happening, and would stand to benefit from pushing that agenda. It’s possible that contracts have already been signed. It’s possible that finances have already been allocated for it from the war machine’s dark money slush fund, and that all this public talk is just narrative management to preemptively justify that spending when information about it comes out.

Or maybe it’s some mixture of these things, or none of them. I don’t know. I do know that someone’s benefiting from all this. And I know it’s unreasonable to expect the most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth to tell us the truth about UFOs when it would stand nothing to gain by doing so, and we ordinary people should therefore do our best to understand what’s happening for ourselves.

I think it would be good if people on the anti-empire fringes of the spectrum started looking at this thing more and describing what they’re seeing, even though it’s impossible to see everything behind the walls of government opacity. Otherwise the only people looking at it will be UFO enthusiasts who just want “disclosure” at any cost, and the operatives of the empire itself.

This article was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone’s Substack.

On August 8th, 2022 the FBI executed a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Trump is accused of taking sensitive government documents from the White House to his residence in Florida, instead of handing over all documents and emails to the National Archives and Records Administration. Contents of the material seized by the FBI have not yet been released but were reported to include nuclear documents and other highly confidential information. The raid of Trump’s residence by the FBI represents a new low to which the current regime seems willing to go in order to sully Trump’s reputation but also exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party and the left more broadly. With the US midterm elections just months away and Biden’s approval rating having recently risen to 41%, the raid serves to tarnish the image of the Republicans going into the polls this November, if not to improve Americans’ perceptions of the Democratic Party and President Biden.

Two years ago, we saw massive protests from mostly leftist groups condemning police brutality and calling for the defunding and abolition of police departments across the country. Along with these movements came calls to abolish ICE and the DEA. In 2020, a massive campaign against criminal justice institutions animated the left. Just two years later, many on the left have been among the first to openly celebrate the FBI for executing a search warrant on former President Trump. It increasingly seems as though the American left only supports institutions that serve their interests against perceived “enemies.”

Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor goes so far as to claim that the FBI raid on Trump is a sign of the US joining other “healthy democracies.” For Tharoor, investigating former and current leaders is an example of how a government can fight corruption and punish those deemed enemies of the state. Of course, the Washington Post has also run a panoply of articles condemning Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega for his crackdown on Western-funded politicians trying to infiltrate and upend the state that the Sandinistas have worked so hard to develop and retain over the decades. El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele expressed a similar sentiment in a tweet reacting to the FBI raid of Trump: “What would the US Government say, if OUR police raided the house of one of the main possible contenders of OUR 2024 presidential election?”

While the liberal left may see the raid on Trump as an indicator of a “healthy democracy,” anti-imperialists at home and abroad understand the history of intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA furthering the interests of Western governments and their corporate allies while opposing anyone who would challenge this hegemony. Where the FBI’s recent raid on Trump may lead remains unclear, but its timing and framing are clearly part of a narrative meant to bolster the current regime going into midterm elections this November.

Four months ago, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of its Disinformation Governance Board. According to AP News, this board was created to combat “disinformation coming from Russia” as well as misleading information that human traffickers use to target migrants who are crossing the US-Mexico border. About one month after this announcement, the DHS paused its new Disinformation Governance Board after widespread criticism.

On August 24th, the DHS shut down its Disinformation Governance Board, after the Homeland Security Advisory Council reviewed the Board and recommended that it be shuttered. This may seem like good news for free speech advocates, researchers who rely on access to news from both Russia and the West for a better understanding of the military conflict in Ukraine, and anyone insulted by the insinuation that they cannot figure out for themselves which sources of information are “good” or “bad.” Unfortunately, while the official DHS “Ministry of Truth” has closed down, it has in fact endured in the form of ever-greater Big Tech censorship.

In the Information Age, it is easier than ever for people to access information and media from all over the world. This is quite to the dismay of the US Empire and multinational corporations, which seek to hide their crimes from the people. With neoliberalism, tech monopolies (private companies not bound by the same rules as the government) increasingly dominate the internet of the West, the online Anglosphere, and to especially control the information space of the imperial core here in the U.S. Intelligence agencies work with Big Tech giants to manipulate social media platforms and censor inconvenient information. Why deal with all the legal red tape and government bureaucracy when a private corporation could unquestioningly do your dirty work for you, in exchange for future contracts?

Facebook founder & CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg was featured on The Joe Rogan Experience on August 25, 2022. Rogan first asked Zuckerberg about his life and his opinions on the future of technology, then broached the topic of social media censorship. The host specifically asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and whether the company’s protocol had been similar to Twitter’s, i.e. blocking and censoring links to the article.

Zuckerberg’s answer confirmed that his social media corporation had worked directly with an intelligence agency to limit the spread of a story that could have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”

The FBI had warned Facebook about supposed “disinformation” that was later proven to in fact be accurate information. Zuckerberg explained how Facebook handled the potential misinformation. Rather than completely block the Hunter Biden story, Facebook instead used a third-party fact-checking service to determine the validity of the information. Based on their determination, Facebook then moved posts about the story lower on users’ newsfeeds (even though these fact-checkers didn’t determine the Hunter Biden story to be false).

Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg did not apologize for sheepishly following intelligence agencies’ orders to infringe on our First Amendment rights. He compared suppression of the true story to “the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial, but being proven innocent in the end, sucks. Like it still sucks that you had to go through a criminal trial, but at the end you’re free.”

Of course, Facebook is just one Big Tech platform at the service of intelligence agencies and advancing US foreign policy interests. Russian journalist Andrey Guselnikov recently shared six photos on Telegram of a presentation directed at YouTube content moderators on how to identify “hate” and “extremism.” According to the slides, YouTube apparently considers it “harmful” to point out that the Ukrainian military is deliberately targeting Ukrainian and Russian civilians and “hateful” to refer to denazification as being one of the stated goals of the special operation.

Social media corporations’ collusion with intelligence agencies to control the information that we consume is not limited to demonetization, manipulation of the algorithm, or banning of specific information. There is also an effort to cultivate and co-opt the next generation’s social influencers. Announced in a tweet by Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, the White House has held a “press briefing with content creators” about the recently-announced plan for limited student loan debt forgiveness. The tweet featured a video by the TikTok influencer @yourrichbff explaining the application process for the debt forgiveness program.

The above influencer was at least transparent about her own influences, declaring herself “your favorite Wall Street girlie” and excitedly informing her audience that she personally talked to Joe Biden about student loans. But how many other “influencers” and “content creators” attending these White House social media press briefings are less than forthright about their main patrons and motives?