John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease”
I think there is truth here, but it misses the fundamentals.
First, empires are never sound institutions. They always eventually collapse because they contain from the beginning the seeds of their own destruction, and, truly, they do a whole lot of damaging things along the way.
Men as brilliant as David Hume and Adam Smith said long ago that empires were unsound projects.
They waste great resources in having to maintain huge security and military establishments, which are in and of themselves not economic and not productive. Nothing on earth is less economically productive than the military. The more of it you have, the more economic damage it does.
Wherever military and security culture begin to dominate, liberal values - liberal in the best classical sense of the word - suffer. Military and security organizations are inherently anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-human rights – they are authoritarian in nature, and their heavy influence anywhere is rather poisonous.
Empires tend to violate the principles of free trade which are the real source of wealth.
They tend to induce a mercantilist system of trade, and that is a beggar-thy-neighbor system which does not work in the long term. They are much associated with plantation systems, even today, and the maintenance of those systems against reform.
Empires tend to corrupt the leaders running them because they begin to think and act as though they have unique qualities and privileges. We see this very strongly in the United States today with a pervasive sense of entitlement and special privilege. It is always so with empires, and it was quite unpleasantly dominant during the late 18th century and much of the 19th century in the British Empire.
Empires violate many ethical principals, as those around “might makes right” and “acting the bully” and abusing people and killing people and stealing.
In the end, a nation such as the United States can have either an empire or a decent country, but it cannot have both.
And it very much does not.
Its own people suffer in many cases complete government neglect because the political power establishment is intensely busy with the affairs of empire which can be very rewarding to them personally. And there are no resources left after vast imperial costs to help your own people.
This only enhances the sense of distance between a people and their government, something which has been a notable feature of the United States for a very long time.
A kind of closed political system develops with powerful and influential people and parties working towards empire and its rewards in terms of personal power, wealth, and advancement. It stimulates, too, some of humanity’s ugliest characteristics in terms of selfishness and authoritarianism.
There really isn’t a whole lot of good to say for empire, but it always is something which tempts powerful states and the people who run them. And, as with so many human institutions, people lose all sight of what has been done in the past or think that they can somehow do it better, avoiding the pitfalls.
In late 1770s America, the Redcoats and Britain’s hired German mercenaries, the Hessians, came to be truly hated symbols. How ironic that today, America’s professional (mercenary) army is regarded in the same way in many, many places in the world, and rightly so.
An interesting anecdote around this was the New York Times’ adopting, back during the totally illegal and heavily destructive Iraq invasion, the practice of calling America’s invading army, “GIs,” a ridiculous usage attempting to claim the good feelings of citizen soldiers doing their duty back in the 1940s.
Lord Acton, whom I’ve quoted many times owing to the profound truth of his words on the subject, told us that power tends to corrupt and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those are words you can count on. They state a universal human experience, yet that truth is ignored over and over.
America’s Founders were concerned with just such matters which is why they were so concerned with concepts like “checks and balances.” And yet they got a very good deal wrong in the structure of the Constitution that bedevils American society to this day, as, for example, the Electoral College, and it is a very difficult document to change, even if you are minded to do so.
But, over and above what they got wrong, there is the simple fact that if the powers-that-be choose to ignore things, they will be ignored. A consensus of powerful people often and easily ignores the most worthy-sounding paper declarations. And who is in a position to call them on it?
Look at America’s behavior at Guantanamo and in the hideous CIA’s International Gulag of Black Sites. These ignored or deliberately suppressed every principle of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. As though, somehow, if you build dungeons and torture chambers and conduct kidnappings offshore, it’s just fine because the Constitution does not apply there. You can find no better example of completely corrupt imperial thinking in a people supposedly guided by constitutional principles.
And, of course, the entire “War on Terror” is just a reflection of American imperial efforts in the first place. So-called international terror has two main components. One includes the horrible mercenaries the United States itself often hires or subsidizes to do its dirty work abroad (terrorists like al-Nusra in Syria) and, as well, there are the oppressive state forces it supports in many places, as in Israel or Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
The other component is what security people refer to as “blowback.” These are people reacting to what has been done to them or their families or countries with either bombing or Marines or hired mercenary forces. In another context, they would just be called “partisans” or even “freedom fighters,” striking back at oppressors.
In either case, they wouldn’t exist if the United States weren’t up to its armpits in the dirty work of empire.
Imperial activity over time can even change definitions and norms. A few decades back, in the 1970s, Argentina’s military junta carried on with the practice of “disappearing” people. Thousands of them. Pictures of mothers and relatives piteously looking for information about lost loved ones were in our television news regularly, and most people deeply sympathized with them.
It was only much later that we learned that the military junta had a secret program of kidnapping people it did not approve of, drugging them, and flying them out over the ocean where they were thrown out of the plane to drown. They did this to a great many people.
But, of course, while our press either didn’t know or pretended not to know what was going on, the American security forces and State Department very much did know, and they did nothing about it. I’m sure they were secretly pleased that, mainly, the right kind of people were being eliminated.
Today, America has just such a program itself, and it is carried on in public and with little opposition. It was created, to operate on an industrial scale, by the same President Obama, so widely (and mistakenly) regarded as a liberal and a man of good will.
People working in secure CIA control centers sit at monitors to guide drones into position for firing Hellfire missiles at people they don’t even know. The targets have no rights. They are legally guilty of nothing. But they are burned alive by America.
Often others, completely innocent bystanders (“collateral damage” as the Pentagon calls them) are also killed, but even the targets are people guilty of nothing, only accused and accused in a secretive organization by a secretive process. And it has been done thousands of times.
If you see nothing wrong or threatening in all that, I just don’t know how to respond. But you cannot build or maintain any kind of decent society with activity which suppresses every principle of enlightened government we have developed slowly and painfully since the Middle Ages.
Because of the vague and unproved accusation, “terrorist,” actually not all that different than calling someone “witch,” this practice now goes on as though it were perfectly normal. “Say, Johnny, would you pick up a loaf of bread at the store? And, say, Johnny, nice going on that ‘kill’ the other day.”
Well, I’m sure the colonels in Argentina considered their thousands of victims as some equivalent term to terrorist or witch, but it did not make their state terror right. It can never be right, just as with many corrupt practices of empire.
The United States is well into the absolutely-corrupt stage of things in Lord Acton’s dictum. But in addition, its power establishment is keenly aware, though they do not speak of it openly, that the country has been in relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
There are many new and ambitious competitors in the world, and, of course, the traditional competitors who were all flattened for a while after WWII, giving the United States its unique and temporary historical opportunity to enjoy an illusory “American Dream,” now are all booming.
Meanwhile, American workers can’t compete. American management is often not competitive. America cannot even run its own finances on anything approaching a sound basis. And America is saddled with a monstrously unproductive military-security establishment. The best of a trillion dollars a year spent on guys who have little to do but pick their noses and read copies Playboy bought at the PX when they are not bombing and shooting people. Fleets of costly machines that, unlike bulldozers or cranes, accomplish nothing.
America’s elites have decided on the desperate strategy of using the country’s remaining brute force to secure as many future advantages for itself as possible in the world. Of course, many such advantages will be completely uneconomic.
Just take one contemporary example. America is shoving American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) on Europe to displace Russian gas in conventional pipeline systems. But this is totally uneconomic. LNG costs much more than conventional pipeline gas – as you would expect from the elaborate refrigeration plants needed to prepare it and the special ships needed to haul it and the special ports needed to unload it.
So, Europeans will become that much poorer for buying it. American producers will be encouraged by something that is essentially an artificial subsidy (the Mafia tactics of their government pushing the liquified gas where it is not wanted) into producing more of a product with inadequate free markets. Russia, which has the needed gas at lowest possible cost, has markets stripped from it by bullying. Everyone simply gets poorer in the long run than they otherwise might have been.
This set of acts is just one of the reasons, too, for Washington’s promoting Russophobia, itself a dangerous and unproductive behavior.
This way of doing things sadly represents the future towards which American elites are now hurling themselves enthusiastically across a range of activities. They are driven by pride and arrogance to try keeping on top without genuinely competing.
And because they, so many of them, are corrupt and spoiled, they have no difficulty adopting such a national strategy. It also very much satisfies that base human instinct about dominating others. It is all both dangerous – since it involves threats and the military - and not the kind of activity which increases the wealth of nations.
We face dark times indeed.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Monday, July 30, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND A DOCUMENTARY IN WHICH A MAN CLAIMS HE FIRED THE FATAL SHOT FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL - I WAS INTERESTED ENOUGH TO WATCH BUT IT IS A CLEAR FRAUD - AGAIN, IMPORTANT CLUES TO THE TRUTH
John Chuckman
REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM “CONFESSIONS FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL” BY JOHN CHUCKMAN ON AMAZON.CA
I watched this some time ago.
It is of course a riveting claim, and the man is fairly convincing in the way he speaks.
But I’m afraid to say that what he says is no truer than the Warren Commission report, which is to say, not at all.
As someone long familiar with the assassination literature, I spotted a serious error in the man’s story.
There is no question that someone on the Knoll fired from the front. We had witnesses at the hospital to damage to the limo’s front windshield and the metal trim around it.
That evidence was always denied by officials, and the limo was rushed to Detroit to be re-built, very much including a new front windshield.
And there is no doubt that Kennedy was hit by at least two shots from the front.
The first in the throat as his limo emerged, in the Zapruder film, from behind the freeway sign. This is supported by testimony of all attending emergency room doctors that that wound was a wound of entrance.
They performed tracheotomy on the wound for breathing apparatus, somewhat enlarging it. It was further cut sometime in the autopsy work. In the photos we have of Kennedy’s body, illegally distributed by someone unknown, there is a rather stark one of Kennedy lying on a table with the then much-enlarged wound clearly visible.
This was done to support the notion of its being a wound of exit rather than entrance, the official Warren Commission story. We needed Oswald behind the President firing.
The second shot, the truly fatal one, was from the right front. This is the one that blew away a portion of his skull and scattered brain material behind, striking police outriders.
This is the shot the man featured in the film claims was his. But he claims only a single shot. Moreover, the way he describes firing it just does not quite jive with what we see in the Zapruder film.
So, just on that basis, the man’s claim is not true.
But we have new evidence now, the first seriously important evidence in many years. This also suggests something quite different than the man in the film claims.
Just-released assassination documents show that two people - Eugene Dinkin of the Army and David Christensen of the Air Force - intercepted independently, in their official work with decoding and secret communications, some advance discussion of the Kennedy assassination. The names Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey were in the decoded material. Both men were committed to mental institutions for a time, the old Soviet trick to totally discredit someone.
It is very interesting the name of the notorious Corsican assassin, Jean Souetre, coming up.
The greatest book ever written on the assassination was Anthony Summer's original "Conspiracy" about forty years ago.
It is not to be confused with any of the later editions which are totally different books. Indeed, I’ve always suspected someone got to Summers for his later editions. The books tended to take the unconvincing Mafia-did-it slant which offialdom made great efforts to promote.
Summers, who was a gifted investigative reporter from Britain and did some other ground-breaking work, as with his books on J. Edgar Hoover and Marylin Monroe, mentioned the Corsican figure and trying to trace him in the original book.
Of course, the name Guy Bannister (retired Senior FBI agent from Chicago) is interesting, too. He was in his retirement from FBI running some kind of dirty operation in New Orleans under a cover. Guns for anti-Cuba forces likely and other anti-Castro activity. He was a virulent American commie-hater type.
He had Oswald working at his shop, something we only learned by an accident.
Oswald was running a phony campaign about fair play for Cuba in which he handed out pamphlets to people which contained a form to be filled-out and mailed.
The concept is an old security agency trick for getting names of people who are sympathizers with some cause under suspicion.
The accident was Oswald's in using an office stamp for Bannister's Camp street office on the backs of some of the pamphlets. It connected them, and that wasn't supposed to happen.
Oswald's pamphlet activity has always been cited as yet more evidence of Oswald's communism or sympathies with communism, but we know from many little facts that Oswald was not a communist. He was a patriotic type in fact. His statements about Marxism, made, mind you, at the time of working covertly with Bannister, were clearly legend-building stuff.
Just the opposite was true. He was being paid to hand out phony pamphlets and to do other tasks, working against Castro and with guys like red-neck Bannister.
Cuba is pretty much what the whole assassination was about, which is why the assassins needed someone identified as a communist as their patsy. There were large numbers of men associated with America’s security agencies at the time who were almost hysterical about Castro because he represented a serious challenge to an American Imperial Plantation System which had long kept an entire continent subservient.
And one of those particularly vicious types at the CIA was William Harvey, the third name mentioned on the intercepts. Harvey ran such dirty stuff as Operation Mongoose, a 1960 secret plan to decapitate Cuba's leadership. He was known as CIA's chief assassin.
REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM “CONFESSIONS FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL” BY JOHN CHUCKMAN ON AMAZON.CA
I watched this some time ago.
It is of course a riveting claim, and the man is fairly convincing in the way he speaks.
But I’m afraid to say that what he says is no truer than the Warren Commission report, which is to say, not at all.
As someone long familiar with the assassination literature, I spotted a serious error in the man’s story.
There is no question that someone on the Knoll fired from the front. We had witnesses at the hospital to damage to the limo’s front windshield and the metal trim around it.
That evidence was always denied by officials, and the limo was rushed to Detroit to be re-built, very much including a new front windshield.
And there is no doubt that Kennedy was hit by at least two shots from the front.
The first in the throat as his limo emerged, in the Zapruder film, from behind the freeway sign. This is supported by testimony of all attending emergency room doctors that that wound was a wound of entrance.
They performed tracheotomy on the wound for breathing apparatus, somewhat enlarging it. It was further cut sometime in the autopsy work. In the photos we have of Kennedy’s body, illegally distributed by someone unknown, there is a rather stark one of Kennedy lying on a table with the then much-enlarged wound clearly visible.
This was done to support the notion of its being a wound of exit rather than entrance, the official Warren Commission story. We needed Oswald behind the President firing.
The second shot, the truly fatal one, was from the right front. This is the one that blew away a portion of his skull and scattered brain material behind, striking police outriders.
This is the shot the man featured in the film claims was his. But he claims only a single shot. Moreover, the way he describes firing it just does not quite jive with what we see in the Zapruder film.
So, just on that basis, the man’s claim is not true.
But we have new evidence now, the first seriously important evidence in many years. This also suggests something quite different than the man in the film claims.
Just-released assassination documents show that two people - Eugene Dinkin of the Army and David Christensen of the Air Force - intercepted independently, in their official work with decoding and secret communications, some advance discussion of the Kennedy assassination. The names Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey were in the decoded material. Both men were committed to mental institutions for a time, the old Soviet trick to totally discredit someone.
It is very interesting the name of the notorious Corsican assassin, Jean Souetre, coming up.
The greatest book ever written on the assassination was Anthony Summer's original "Conspiracy" about forty years ago.
It is not to be confused with any of the later editions which are totally different books. Indeed, I’ve always suspected someone got to Summers for his later editions. The books tended to take the unconvincing Mafia-did-it slant which offialdom made great efforts to promote.
Summers, who was a gifted investigative reporter from Britain and did some other ground-breaking work, as with his books on J. Edgar Hoover and Marylin Monroe, mentioned the Corsican figure and trying to trace him in the original book.
Of course, the name Guy Bannister (retired Senior FBI agent from Chicago) is interesting, too. He was in his retirement from FBI running some kind of dirty operation in New Orleans under a cover. Guns for anti-Cuba forces likely and other anti-Castro activity. He was a virulent American commie-hater type.
He had Oswald working at his shop, something we only learned by an accident.
Oswald was running a phony campaign about fair play for Cuba in which he handed out pamphlets to people which contained a form to be filled-out and mailed.
The concept is an old security agency trick for getting names of people who are sympathizers with some cause under suspicion.
The accident was Oswald's in using an office stamp for Bannister's Camp street office on the backs of some of the pamphlets. It connected them, and that wasn't supposed to happen.
Oswald's pamphlet activity has always been cited as yet more evidence of Oswald's communism or sympathies with communism, but we know from many little facts that Oswald was not a communist. He was a patriotic type in fact. His statements about Marxism, made, mind you, at the time of working covertly with Bannister, were clearly legend-building stuff.
Just the opposite was true. He was being paid to hand out phony pamphlets and to do other tasks, working against Castro and with guys like red-neck Bannister.
Cuba is pretty much what the whole assassination was about, which is why the assassins needed someone identified as a communist as their patsy. There were large numbers of men associated with America’s security agencies at the time who were almost hysterical about Castro because he represented a serious challenge to an American Imperial Plantation System which had long kept an entire continent subservient.
And one of those particularly vicious types at the CIA was William Harvey, the third name mentioned on the intercepts. Harvey ran such dirty stuff as Operation Mongoose, a 1960 secret plan to decapitate Cuba's leadership. He was known as CIA's chief assassin.
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: BRITISH GOVERNMENT TAKES "SAFETY MEASURES" FOR MOURNERS AT THE FUNERAL OF AMESBURY WOMAN SAID TO HAVE DIED FROM NOVICHOK EXPOSURE - A WORD ON THERESA MAY'S GOVERNMENT
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Safety measures to protect mourners at funeral of novichok victim Dawn Sturgess”
Safety measures?
Protect mourners?
I'm sorry, but this poor woman died from using an unknown substance brought home as a gift by her mate.
There is nothing more to the story.
No enemies. No Russians. No proof of anything.
This just represents the continued government hyping of two unexplained events, the first of which was embroidered by totally unsubstantiated and unwarranted government claims and precipitous diplomatic action.
We must remember, this is the government of Theresa May at work, the same ineffectual PM whose cabinet is in open disarray, who has no idea what to do about Brexit, and who thought it fit to invite the world's most destructive leader for a state visit in the face of public opposition.
_______________________
Response, tongue-in-cheek, to another comment about the poor working of The Independent’s new comments system:
The comment system was reportedly designed by a nephew of Tony Blair's.
After all, The Independent does whatever it can for Tony.
One should hardly expect it to be accurate.
___________________________
Response to another comment, one mentioning Britain’s Porton Down facility, located close to these events, for studying chemical weapons and agents:
Porton Down indeed is not to be ruled out.
Readers may enjoy this on that possibility:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/14/john-chuckman-comment-the-amebury-incident-in-britain-almost-more-bizarre-than-the-original-salisbury-novichok-incident/
___________________
Response to another comment, one talking about Russia’s military intelligence organization, GRU:
I suspect the writer is a Theresa May supporter.
He sure takes the same approach to unknown facts and lack of evidence and making big uninformed accusations.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Safety measures to protect mourners at funeral of novichok victim Dawn Sturgess”
Safety measures?
Protect mourners?
I'm sorry, but this poor woman died from using an unknown substance brought home as a gift by her mate.
There is nothing more to the story.
No enemies. No Russians. No proof of anything.
This just represents the continued government hyping of two unexplained events, the first of which was embroidered by totally unsubstantiated and unwarranted government claims and precipitous diplomatic action.
We must remember, this is the government of Theresa May at work, the same ineffectual PM whose cabinet is in open disarray, who has no idea what to do about Brexit, and who thought it fit to invite the world's most destructive leader for a state visit in the face of public opposition.
_______________________
Response, tongue-in-cheek, to another comment about the poor working of The Independent’s new comments system:
The comment system was reportedly designed by a nephew of Tony Blair's.
After all, The Independent does whatever it can for Tony.
One should hardly expect it to be accurate.
___________________________
Response to another comment, one mentioning Britain’s Porton Down facility, located close to these events, for studying chemical weapons and agents:
Porton Down indeed is not to be ruled out.
Readers may enjoy this on that possibility:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/14/john-chuckman-comment-the-amebury-incident-in-britain-almost-more-bizarre-than-the-original-salisbury-novichok-incident/
___________________
Response to another comment, one talking about Russia’s military intelligence organization, GRU:
I suspect the writer is a Theresa May supporter.
He sure takes the same approach to unknown facts and lack of evidence and making big uninformed accusations.
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP THREATENS TO CLOSE DOWN GOVERNMENT - THE AMERICAN VERSION OF THE REICHSTAG FIRE - RESPONSES TO BRITISH READERS ASKING ABOUT HIS AUTHORITY AND PUBLIC SUPPORT
John Chuckman
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Trump threatens to 'shut down' government unless Democrats agree to fund Mexico wall’
Isn't that what Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire?
__________________________
Response to a reader who asked, “Has anyone checked under the US Constitution what federal activities are under the direct control of the president?”:
Very little actually.
Congress is supposed to provide "checks and balances."
The President cannot even make a major appointment without the Senate's approval.
But a loud-mouthed bully like this needs some outspoken opposition.
Where is it?
Just as we see in the EU in dealing with this destructive man.
_____________________
Response to a comment referring to Trump’s “IQ of what and a mental age of 7”:
If you were right, he wouldn't be so dangerous.
He is not an intellectual, but he does have a keen cunning intelligence and out-of-control aggressive impulses.
__________________
Response to a comment saying, “The problem they have is one of popular support. The American people don't want massive immigration and Trump knows it’:
Yes, indeed.
And he knows Congress is not liked.
Its regular approval rating is among the lowest of any American institution.
This ugly man just keeps playing to the "no damned guv'ment" folks that America has by the tens of million.
They tend to congregate at Walmarts, gun meets and NASCAR events. They are "his” people
________________________
Response to a comment, “Actually the majority of Americans don't want the wall, realising it is a massive waste of money”:
I’m not sure you are correct about that, but in any case, you are talking about the thinking portion of the population.
If you haven't noticed, America has a huge other population.
Trump throws them red meat almost daily.
And they do like him.
They are not a majority, but then you don't need a majority to win in America, do you?
COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Trump threatens to 'shut down' government unless Democrats agree to fund Mexico wall’
Isn't that what Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire?
__________________________
Response to a reader who asked, “Has anyone checked under the US Constitution what federal activities are under the direct control of the president?”:
Very little actually.
Congress is supposed to provide "checks and balances."
The President cannot even make a major appointment without the Senate's approval.
But a loud-mouthed bully like this needs some outspoken opposition.
Where is it?
Just as we see in the EU in dealing with this destructive man.
_____________________
Response to a comment referring to Trump’s “IQ of what and a mental age of 7”:
If you were right, he wouldn't be so dangerous.
He is not an intellectual, but he does have a keen cunning intelligence and out-of-control aggressive impulses.
__________________
Response to a comment saying, “The problem they have is one of popular support. The American people don't want massive immigration and Trump knows it’:
Yes, indeed.
And he knows Congress is not liked.
Its regular approval rating is among the lowest of any American institution.
This ugly man just keeps playing to the "no damned guv'ment" folks that America has by the tens of million.
They tend to congregate at Walmarts, gun meets and NASCAR events. They are "his” people
________________________
Response to a comment, “Actually the majority of Americans don't want the wall, realising it is a massive waste of money”:
I’m not sure you are correct about that, but in any case, you are talking about the thinking portion of the population.
If you haven't noticed, America has a huge other population.
Trump throws them red meat almost daily.
And they do like him.
They are not a majority, but then you don't need a majority to win in America, do you?
Saturday, July 28, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE "WHITE HELMETS" CONTROVERSY - BUT THERE IS NO REAL CONTROVERSY - THE WHITE HELMETS ARE A FRAUD - ONE UGLY PIECE OF WHAT AMERICA AND ISRAEL AND FRIENDS HAVE BEEN DOING TO REDUCE SYRIA TO A BLOODBATH
John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RICK STERLING IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The ‘White Helmets’ Controversy”
Actually, I don’t think there is any real controversy. The White Helmets are a fraud.
They were created and financed by some of the same governments supporting the entire terror campaign in Syria. Created by France, financed by Britain.
They have been seen by independent observers and journalists working with al-Nusrah.
They have been caught a number of times over fraud in their videos – as when children who were made-up to look piteously hurt were observed and photographed later as normal and smiling, or when White Helmets were photographed working with supposed nerve-agent victims on the ground without so much as any gloves on.
The White Helmets have created ugly incidents to promote American and British bombing.
We had the testimony of a local hospital doctor and others about the supposed gas attack in East Ghouta earlier this year in Syria. They were unaware any such thing happened, but they were aware of a sudden effort by the White Helmets rushing in and dousing some people with water and taking videos of them, people who had come to the hospital from the effects of long breathing very poor air while living underground in the shelter of caves.
Of course, the final verdict on the White Helmets is provided by the simple fact that Israel recently evacuated hundreds of them from Southwestern Syria as the victorious Syrian Army approached, apparently, according to some reports, along with Mossad guys who had been covertly working in Syria. Israel is not known for engaging in purely humanitarian efforts.
Israel has always worked to destabilize Syria, and for years advocated with the American government that action be taken there. Israel was part of the original “club” that created, supported, and armed the rag-tag mercenaries posing as jihadi types in the artificially-induced Syrian civil war. The “club” consisted of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey.
Six hundred thousand people killed, millions of refugees created, and the beautiful and peaceful land of Syria half destroyed. That’s what the American-led “club” achieved.
Israeli weapons have been discovered many times by the Syrian Army as it defeated some of the mercenaries, and wounded al-Nusrah fighters are known to have been treated in hospitals in Northern Israel.
The White Helmets actually are a good measure of the ugly depths to which America’s government goes to get its way in the world.And there’s good old Hollywood doling out an Oscar last year for a “documentary” film about the White Helmets. Of course, it is pretty much the same Hollywood crowd which each year holds a gala fund-raising dinner on behalf of the Israeli Army, having sent them millions of dollars over the years.
One can even speculate about equipment and training for the many White Helmet propaganda videos, promoting hostility towards Syria, having come from the same source. Quite likely, I would think.
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RICK STERLING IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The ‘White Helmets’ Controversy”
Actually, I don’t think there is any real controversy. The White Helmets are a fraud.
They were created and financed by some of the same governments supporting the entire terror campaign in Syria. Created by France, financed by Britain.
They have been seen by independent observers and journalists working with al-Nusrah.
They have been caught a number of times over fraud in their videos – as when children who were made-up to look piteously hurt were observed and photographed later as normal and smiling, or when White Helmets were photographed working with supposed nerve-agent victims on the ground without so much as any gloves on.
The White Helmets have created ugly incidents to promote American and British bombing.
We had the testimony of a local hospital doctor and others about the supposed gas attack in East Ghouta earlier this year in Syria. They were unaware any such thing happened, but they were aware of a sudden effort by the White Helmets rushing in and dousing some people with water and taking videos of them, people who had come to the hospital from the effects of long breathing very poor air while living underground in the shelter of caves.
Of course, the final verdict on the White Helmets is provided by the simple fact that Israel recently evacuated hundreds of them from Southwestern Syria as the victorious Syrian Army approached, apparently, according to some reports, along with Mossad guys who had been covertly working in Syria. Israel is not known for engaging in purely humanitarian efforts.
Israel has always worked to destabilize Syria, and for years advocated with the American government that action be taken there. Israel was part of the original “club” that created, supported, and armed the rag-tag mercenaries posing as jihadi types in the artificially-induced Syrian civil war. The “club” consisted of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey.
Six hundred thousand people killed, millions of refugees created, and the beautiful and peaceful land of Syria half destroyed. That’s what the American-led “club” achieved.
Israeli weapons have been discovered many times by the Syrian Army as it defeated some of the mercenaries, and wounded al-Nusrah fighters are known to have been treated in hospitals in Northern Israel.
The White Helmets actually are a good measure of the ugly depths to which America’s government goes to get its way in the world.And there’s good old Hollywood doling out an Oscar last year for a “documentary” film about the White Helmets. Of course, it is pretty much the same Hollywood crowd which each year holds a gala fund-raising dinner on behalf of the Israeli Army, having sent them millions of dollars over the years.
One can even speculate about equipment and training for the many White Helmet propaganda videos, promoting hostility towards Syria, having come from the same source. Quite likely, I would think.
Friday, July 27, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THERE ARE NO LIBERALS WHO LEAD EITHER PARTY IN AMERICA - THE GHASTLY TOLL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION FROM AMERICA'S LEADERS SINCE WWII - A TOLL GREATER THAN THE HOLOCAUST
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The World According to Ben Rhodes: Hypocrisy in Obama’s Foreign Policy”
“ liberal imperialist”?
I’m sorry, but that is an oxymoron.
I know versions of it are frequently used in America, but then so are a great many other meaningless phrases.
Imperialism is imperialism, and the American establishment is up to its armpits in it. Both parties.
There’s not a genuine liberal in the crowd.
Indeed, to speak of liberalism in America is contradictory. The country, in its various imperial wars just since WWII, has killed at least 8 million people, crippled countless others, and created tens of millions of desperate refugees.
And then there are all the coups and assassinations and the support for bloody and brutal governments whose only “merit” is that they support American policy.
On Obama, readers may enjoy:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/john-chuckman-comment-obama-is-widely-regarded-as-a-liberal-but-nothing-could-be-more-false-heres-his-bloody-record-abroad-and-his-do-nothing-one-at-home-do-nothing-except-for-massive-spying/
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The World According to Ben Rhodes: Hypocrisy in Obama’s Foreign Policy”
“ liberal imperialist”?
I’m sorry, but that is an oxymoron.
I know versions of it are frequently used in America, but then so are a great many other meaningless phrases.
Imperialism is imperialism, and the American establishment is up to its armpits in it. Both parties.
There’s not a genuine liberal in the crowd.
Indeed, to speak of liberalism in America is contradictory. The country, in its various imperial wars just since WWII, has killed at least 8 million people, crippled countless others, and created tens of millions of desperate refugees.
And then there are all the coups and assassinations and the support for bloody and brutal governments whose only “merit” is that they support American policy.
On Obama, readers may enjoy:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/john-chuckman-comment-obama-is-widely-regarded-as-a-liberal-but-nothing-could-be-more-false-heres-his-bloody-record-abroad-and-his-do-nothing-one-at-home-do-nothing-except-for-massive-spying/
Thursday, July 26, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: YET AGAIN A LOWLIFE ATTACK ON BRITAIN'S THOROUGHLY DECENT JEREMY CORBYN - THIS TIME BY THREE JEWISH PAPERS WHO ON THE SAME DAY USE TRUE MASS-KILLER NETANYAHU'S TWISTED "EXISTENTIAL THREAT" PHRASE
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Corbyn government would pose an 'existential threat to Jewish life', say three major Jewish newspapers
“The joint editorial in The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and the Jewish Telegraph accused Labour of showing 'contempt for Jews and Israel”'
This really is as sick as any of Trump's ugly stunts.
Corbyn is no more 'anti-Semitic' than the Queen, which is to say, not at all.
Corbyn is simply hated because he is fair-minded on the Middle East, and you are not allowed to be fair-minded on that topic.
We must watch medics and children and women and unarmed men shot by rows of Israeli snipers like animals being mowed down by a big safari party, and you must just smile and say, "My, Israel shows such restraint!"
Or you must twirl around, smiling, in your designer dress like Ivanka Trump while within earshot of mass-killing.
Corbyn is a decent man.
What a cheap way to try hurting him and try swinging an election.
Talk about Russian interference!
Here's a perfect example of Israel's constant efforts at inappropriate influence.
British or not, the men who put this out are acting as agents for Israel.
And they are employing the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the way they do it.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Corbyn government would pose an 'existential threat to Jewish life', say three major Jewish newspapers
“The joint editorial in The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and the Jewish Telegraph accused Labour of showing 'contempt for Jews and Israel”'
This really is as sick as any of Trump's ugly stunts.
Corbyn is no more 'anti-Semitic' than the Queen, which is to say, not at all.
Corbyn is simply hated because he is fair-minded on the Middle East, and you are not allowed to be fair-minded on that topic.
We must watch medics and children and women and unarmed men shot by rows of Israeli snipers like animals being mowed down by a big safari party, and you must just smile and say, "My, Israel shows such restraint!"
Or you must twirl around, smiling, in your designer dress like Ivanka Trump while within earshot of mass-killing.
Corbyn is a decent man.
What a cheap way to try hurting him and try swinging an election.
Talk about Russian interference!
Here's a perfect example of Israel's constant efforts at inappropriate influence.
British or not, the men who put this out are acting as agents for Israel.
And they are employing the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the way they do it.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE DANGEROUS IRRATIONALITY OF NATIONALISM - ESPECIALLY THE EXTREME FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGIOUS FORMS OF IT WE FIND IN THE "PATRIOTISM" OF AMERICA AND ISRAEL
John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANATOLY KARLIN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Russia Must Style Itself After Israel, Adopt Unapologetic Nationalism
“Good for the geese, good for the gander”
What an absurd article.
The idea that a state is for the people of a specific ethnic or linguistic origin comes from the 19th century, a time marked by the emergence of many modern European states, as, for instance, modern Italy or Germany. At that time, various linguistic and ethnic groups broke away from having been part of large, long-standing empires such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Before the 19th century, it wasn’t ordinary at all to think in terms of nation states. In great empires, a variety of languages being spoken was entirely normal. And just look at what happened when this new ideology of nationalism really took hold. It would bring a long series of major wars to Europe, such as the Franco-Prussian War.
And in the next century, as nationalism got a really fierce hold on things, it brought us two world wars, which together killed about 70 million people and caused suffering and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.
The 19th century was also the time of the early Zionist writing, arising from precisely the same influences. Zionist advocates wanted to be separate from entities such as the Russian Empire or Imperial Germany. But Jews as a whole were mostly successful in Europe, and Zionism never became a big and influential force until the truly fierce nationalism of a state like Germany produced catastrophe.
When the Zionist dream did finally become reality, it produced yet another unhappy record of the abuse and oppression of others.
Nationalism, at least in its fiery original version, is an obsolete faith which generated many terrible results. In the United States, nationalism has always come wrapped in a cloak called Patriotism, giving it intense emotional force, and what has it produced? A new empire with a long series of wars and constant abuse of tens of millions.
Yes, interestingly, the United States is called a nation of immigrants, but that is somewhat deceptive. The early United States was quite homogeneous in its British make-up with sprinklings of other Northern European people. There were, of course, large numbers of Blacks and Native people, but they were not citizens and were consigned to a status less than fully human.
The overwhelmingly British-origin early Americans, having broken away from the world’s great power, Britain, with its own strong national identity, were left quite unsure of themselves in terms of national identity. The fact comes through strongly in writing and recorded attitudes up into the 19th century. Patriotism filled the void to give some national identity, although, as we shall see in the following brief and interesting digression, “impose” might be a more suitable word than “give.”
You could call American Patriotism a form of nationalism but with a heavy added burden of religious belief about America’s birth and loyalty to its founding principles. Very heady stuff. In this, it much resembles Zionism. After all, any sense of American nationalism in the early days was mostly lingering British colonial nationalism. You saw that in everything from the practice of still burning effigies of Guy Fawkes each November, which went on for many decades, to the singing of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“God Save the King” with new words).
As few contemporary Americans realize, the American Revolution was a minority affair. It has been estimated that the colonies were about one-third Patriots, one-third Loyalists, and one-third indifferent. The large Black and Native populations, of course, had no say in the matter.
The Revolution was driven by the French, with huge amounts of monetary aid and military assistance, always trying to get back at their great rival, the British, after their loss in the world’s first world war, the Seven Years War (aka, the French and Indian War). Without the immense French help, the American Revolution – actually more of a revolt by the local elites against Britain’s ruling elites - almost certainly would have fizzled out. Indeed, it nearly did more than once.
So, in its first days as a separate state, the United States had a population of which only a small minority were Patriots, and stern measures were taken. The Loyalists were abused beyond belief. Their property was stolen, great numbers were deported, a number were killed, and they suffered ugly abuse with homes being burnt down and beatings. The example was sufficient for the indifferent portion of the population.
Right from the start, it was felt there was need for a new kind of nationalism – that is, something other than the natural and lingering British colonial nationalism - to be imposed, and Patriotism served the purpose. We’ve seen many times in history when an intensely motivated minority manages to impose its will on the rest of a population and give the whole the coloration and sense of its fervor. That, precisely, was the origin of Patriotism in America, a force that went on to countless conflicts and cruelties in the future.
Even Patriotism experienced its own breakdown and conflict and war with the American Civil War, a war in which each side saw itself as true Patriots. The Confederacy regarded itself as a truer version of what the Founders wanted, but the North, beginning to feel its new “industrial oats” with the growth of industry and large rail networks, disagreed. It was a war only incidentally about slavery, although later national myths tried shaping it in those terms.
States’ Rights were at its heart, just as they had played a big role in the Post-revolutionary days as a new country tried to form its rules and practices, Thomas Jefferson having been a fanatical proponent of them, and, as Governor of Virginia, he was almost ready to secede from the country over certain matters he believed encroached on States’ Rights long before Jefferson Davis was ever heard of.
And for a lawyer like Lincoln, who did a lot of lucrative work for the Illinois Central Railroad, the excessive limits of States’ Rights worked against the expansion and trade and flow of things in the new railroad and industrial empire emerging in the country.
I only offer this digression about America to dispel the idea of a nation of immigrants coming to the kind of intense nationalism we see in the United States. It really didn’t start as a true nation of immigrants, and from its birth as a separate country, the dominate group worked to impose an ideology that hadn’t been there for most.
That effort was reinforced by the outcome of the Civil War, so that the idea that there could be more than one kind of Patriot was crushed. And with the huge and rapid build-up of the military during that desperate war, the victors were left with an industrial capacity and armaments which well suited them to become an international force. And they quickly did so.
Into the 19th Century, America’s dominant establishment began its long march of imperialism, and it has never stopped. It was not so very different in nature from the many (unsuccessful) efforts of Germany from the Franco-Prussian War to WW II, but America’s efforts were all against weaker, more dispersed, and even backward enemies, and they were extremely successful.
It is just a fact of human nature that success like that breeds a lot of arrogance and the drive for still more success. America got up a national head of steam which continues to this day. So, we have a great international empire, and indeed a new drive recently towards complete global dominance. Even though much of what supports that empire violates the principles of the Founders, as in the ongoing existence of a huge standing military or the intrusion into every citizen’s privacy by a vast security/police apparatus.
America had the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the overthrow of Hawaii plus many, many other warlike efforts. Any migrants who came to America along the way – as, for instance, great numbers, millions, did near the turn of the last century – were given to understand they had better quickly adopt the dominant view, and they very much did.
There never was much tolerance in America for newcomers with views departing from the Patriot narrative. Later, this would be wrapped in friendlier terms as America’s being “a melting pot.”
Coming from some of the places the new waves of immigrants did – places dense with population and with the great aristocratic estates holding much of the land so that there was limited opportunity ever to own land or a home - they were only too happy to do so for the most part. Although there definitely were immigrants from time to time who took a different view. Their fates would resemble those of the early Loyalists.
So, we have a “nation of immigrants” that behaves with the same intensity and aggression we’ve come to expect from more traditional nationalism, as that of 19th century Germany. By the way, this brief review of history very much explains why the United States is such a violent society at home, with high violent crime rates, high rates of police violence against citizens, and a huge and brutal prison system, by far the biggest on earth. Constant wars, slavery, and conquest – all seasoned with intolerance for any but the accepted Patriotic narrative – have shaped it powerfully.
The state of violence in America actually well suits the country’s purposes, even now at work trying to subject the entire globe to its dominance. It is handy to have a population of young men who are hardened to violence and embrace guns, and so they do. Even if they have no other ability or training, there is opportunity at good wages to do what they do, and even to be praised for it, in the military.
Just look at the countries of Europe today, and you will see that all the big ones do not embrace this notion of narrow nationalism, and for good reasons. They each have affection for their place and culture, and that’s just natural, but it is tempered by the experience of world war and imperialism, and the knowledge of certain other realities. Realities such as the well-known fact that advanced states simply do not replace their own population as a result of an inexorable phenomenon called Demographic Transition. If an advanced state wants to maintain its population level for economic and other reasons, it can only do so through immigration.
Taking Israel as an example to be copied is very strange. Here is the most difficult and troublesome state on the planet, one causing constant wars and crises, and it is to be embraced as a good example of nationalism? Literally, since its inception, there has been almost a constant state of war against one or another neighbor, all accompanied by other violent programs involving thousands of assassinations (a recent book cites more than 2,700) and dirty tricks and decades-long oppression and brutality against millions living under its rule.
And why is that? Because they do not share the same religious/ethnic identity and must be excluded from Israel’s sense of nationalism. Hence violence and war and hatreds follow automatically, and they continue seventy years later.
In the recent Neocon Wars, America’s years-long rampage through the Middle East, the United States has been enlisted to do much additional dirty work for Israel, effectively creating a vast cordon sanitaire around the country.
It really doesn’t appear any human lessons were learned from the savageries of extreme German nationalism. Israel’s behavior represents a miniature replica of the same impulses. One should keep in mind, too, that the Holocaust was really concerned with a dominant group of Germans trying to destroy another group of Germans for their unacceptable differences, the Askenazi Jews whose language, Yiddish, is a dialect of German and many of whose cultural practices, right down to many of the foods they eat, also are German. The word “Ashkenazi” means German.
The Holocaust had nothing to do with the Middle East, but that is where its terrible aftereffects have most been felt. It had nothing to do with Arabs or Palestinians, but they are people who have paid a terrible price. And the United States, which might in the 1930s have done immensely more to prevent it ever happening, is the main force helping to inflict all these unjust consequences.
It was in the United States that boatloads of Jews Hitler tried sending away well before the Holocaust were turned away. And it was in the United States that we had many influential men like Henry Ford, whom Hitler greatly admired, and many great businessmen who almost tripped over themselves assisting and doing business with the Reich, including bankers who helped with its financing, and publishers like Time Magazine, who happily made Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938.
Despite the Holocaust having had nothing to do with the Middle East, the memory of the Holocaust has tirelessly been used to fire up Israeli nationalism. Today, for example, Israeli public-school students are regularly sent on learning trips to Auschwitz. There is an inevitable emotional blurring, I believe, between events three-quarters of a century ago in another continent and realities in the Middle East today.
The American connection for Israel, apart from a source of vast amounts of subsidies, is the America busy trying to impose its views on the entire globe. The America which has so supported Israel not out of any great concern for what happened in Germany but out of the strategic view of it as useful in its global imperial march, as a kind of colony in the Mideast. The two countries share many interests, but there is nothing positive or admirable about these shared interests. They are the interests of imperialists.
The re-creation of Israel has proved a very costly matter with one major result being that millions live in what appears to be perpetual abuse and oppression, and we have a small state about as arrogant and aggressive as any we’ve seen. And most Jews do not live in Israel, neither are they likely ever to do so, because they are well-integrated and successful in a great many countries, from Canada and the United States to Germany and France and, yes, even Iran.
Most of these places are places of far better economic opportunity than Israel. Lower taxes. Lower costs. Higher incomes. More opportunities. Greater choices. These limits pretty well affect only ordinary citizens because Israel’s elites generally maintain dual citizenships in places like the United States, something giving them many options others do not have. When you think about that, it is a strange fact for people associated with an intense nationalism.
Israel offers also the disadvantages of a society which functions as a huge military camp, a kind of military-security state more pervasive than anything experienced in these other places. And it is a place of immense and continuing hostilities, always in the air. The hostilities towards Arabs and those returned. The hostilities of the Ultra-Orthodox and hyper-aggressive “settlers” vis-à-vis many other Jews. The sense of living in a place, much as in the Old South, where millions are kept without rights and against their wills. And they are kept that way by your sons and daughters with obligatory service in a military whose main dispiriting job is suppressing millions of residents.
If you create new wars and new oppression and new abuse, as Israel has, you have created nothing good. And the idea of Israel as a refuge for all Jews should some terrible event ever occur has always been completely unrealistic, a re-assuring fantasy used to help cover Israel’s many dark acts.
The Holocaust was an attack of German people upon a religious minority of their own people. It had no connection with the Middle East. Nor is it ever likely to be repeated, representing as it did a unique set of historical circumstances. Indeed, the truth is history does not repeat itself. Heraclitus told us you can never step into the same river twice, and it remains a profound observation.
The likely truth is that the Palestinians are as close as we have to descendants of the Hebrews, and just look what has happened to them with the "nationalists" from Europe and North America acting out of myths about themselves.
Loving your country is just fine, but the kind of "nationalism" we see in Israel or in the United States is really another form of religion, a fanatical and violent one with just as little rationality or substance as any strange cult.
Such is the irrationality of much of human thought and behavior that religious zealots like the patriots of America or those of Israel are praised as somehow being worthy. They’re not.
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANATOLY KARLIN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Russia Must Style Itself After Israel, Adopt Unapologetic Nationalism
“Good for the geese, good for the gander”
What an absurd article.
The idea that a state is for the people of a specific ethnic or linguistic origin comes from the 19th century, a time marked by the emergence of many modern European states, as, for instance, modern Italy or Germany. At that time, various linguistic and ethnic groups broke away from having been part of large, long-standing empires such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Before the 19th century, it wasn’t ordinary at all to think in terms of nation states. In great empires, a variety of languages being spoken was entirely normal. And just look at what happened when this new ideology of nationalism really took hold. It would bring a long series of major wars to Europe, such as the Franco-Prussian War.
And in the next century, as nationalism got a really fierce hold on things, it brought us two world wars, which together killed about 70 million people and caused suffering and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale.
The 19th century was also the time of the early Zionist writing, arising from precisely the same influences. Zionist advocates wanted to be separate from entities such as the Russian Empire or Imperial Germany. But Jews as a whole were mostly successful in Europe, and Zionism never became a big and influential force until the truly fierce nationalism of a state like Germany produced catastrophe.
When the Zionist dream did finally become reality, it produced yet another unhappy record of the abuse and oppression of others.
Nationalism, at least in its fiery original version, is an obsolete faith which generated many terrible results. In the United States, nationalism has always come wrapped in a cloak called Patriotism, giving it intense emotional force, and what has it produced? A new empire with a long series of wars and constant abuse of tens of millions.
Yes, interestingly, the United States is called a nation of immigrants, but that is somewhat deceptive. The early United States was quite homogeneous in its British make-up with sprinklings of other Northern European people. There were, of course, large numbers of Blacks and Native people, but they were not citizens and were consigned to a status less than fully human.
The overwhelmingly British-origin early Americans, having broken away from the world’s great power, Britain, with its own strong national identity, were left quite unsure of themselves in terms of national identity. The fact comes through strongly in writing and recorded attitudes up into the 19th century. Patriotism filled the void to give some national identity, although, as we shall see in the following brief and interesting digression, “impose” might be a more suitable word than “give.”
You could call American Patriotism a form of nationalism but with a heavy added burden of religious belief about America’s birth and loyalty to its founding principles. Very heady stuff. In this, it much resembles Zionism. After all, any sense of American nationalism in the early days was mostly lingering British colonial nationalism. You saw that in everything from the practice of still burning effigies of Guy Fawkes each November, which went on for many decades, to the singing of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (“God Save the King” with new words).
As few contemporary Americans realize, the American Revolution was a minority affair. It has been estimated that the colonies were about one-third Patriots, one-third Loyalists, and one-third indifferent. The large Black and Native populations, of course, had no say in the matter.
The Revolution was driven by the French, with huge amounts of monetary aid and military assistance, always trying to get back at their great rival, the British, after their loss in the world’s first world war, the Seven Years War (aka, the French and Indian War). Without the immense French help, the American Revolution – actually more of a revolt by the local elites against Britain’s ruling elites - almost certainly would have fizzled out. Indeed, it nearly did more than once.
So, in its first days as a separate state, the United States had a population of which only a small minority were Patriots, and stern measures were taken. The Loyalists were abused beyond belief. Their property was stolen, great numbers were deported, a number were killed, and they suffered ugly abuse with homes being burnt down and beatings. The example was sufficient for the indifferent portion of the population.
Right from the start, it was felt there was need for a new kind of nationalism – that is, something other than the natural and lingering British colonial nationalism - to be imposed, and Patriotism served the purpose. We’ve seen many times in history when an intensely motivated minority manages to impose its will on the rest of a population and give the whole the coloration and sense of its fervor. That, precisely, was the origin of Patriotism in America, a force that went on to countless conflicts and cruelties in the future.
Even Patriotism experienced its own breakdown and conflict and war with the American Civil War, a war in which each side saw itself as true Patriots. The Confederacy regarded itself as a truer version of what the Founders wanted, but the North, beginning to feel its new “industrial oats” with the growth of industry and large rail networks, disagreed. It was a war only incidentally about slavery, although later national myths tried shaping it in those terms.
States’ Rights were at its heart, just as they had played a big role in the Post-revolutionary days as a new country tried to form its rules and practices, Thomas Jefferson having been a fanatical proponent of them, and, as Governor of Virginia, he was almost ready to secede from the country over certain matters he believed encroached on States’ Rights long before Jefferson Davis was ever heard of.
And for a lawyer like Lincoln, who did a lot of lucrative work for the Illinois Central Railroad, the excessive limits of States’ Rights worked against the expansion and trade and flow of things in the new railroad and industrial empire emerging in the country.
I only offer this digression about America to dispel the idea of a nation of immigrants coming to the kind of intense nationalism we see in the United States. It really didn’t start as a true nation of immigrants, and from its birth as a separate country, the dominate group worked to impose an ideology that hadn’t been there for most.
That effort was reinforced by the outcome of the Civil War, so that the idea that there could be more than one kind of Patriot was crushed. And with the huge and rapid build-up of the military during that desperate war, the victors were left with an industrial capacity and armaments which well suited them to become an international force. And they quickly did so.
Into the 19th Century, America’s dominant establishment began its long march of imperialism, and it has never stopped. It was not so very different in nature from the many (unsuccessful) efforts of Germany from the Franco-Prussian War to WW II, but America’s efforts were all against weaker, more dispersed, and even backward enemies, and they were extremely successful.
It is just a fact of human nature that success like that breeds a lot of arrogance and the drive for still more success. America got up a national head of steam which continues to this day. So, we have a great international empire, and indeed a new drive recently towards complete global dominance. Even though much of what supports that empire violates the principles of the Founders, as in the ongoing existence of a huge standing military or the intrusion into every citizen’s privacy by a vast security/police apparatus.
America had the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the overthrow of Hawaii plus many, many other warlike efforts. Any migrants who came to America along the way – as, for instance, great numbers, millions, did near the turn of the last century – were given to understand they had better quickly adopt the dominant view, and they very much did.
There never was much tolerance in America for newcomers with views departing from the Patriot narrative. Later, this would be wrapped in friendlier terms as America’s being “a melting pot.”
Coming from some of the places the new waves of immigrants did – places dense with population and with the great aristocratic estates holding much of the land so that there was limited opportunity ever to own land or a home - they were only too happy to do so for the most part. Although there definitely were immigrants from time to time who took a different view. Their fates would resemble those of the early Loyalists.
So, we have a “nation of immigrants” that behaves with the same intensity and aggression we’ve come to expect from more traditional nationalism, as that of 19th century Germany. By the way, this brief review of history very much explains why the United States is such a violent society at home, with high violent crime rates, high rates of police violence against citizens, and a huge and brutal prison system, by far the biggest on earth. Constant wars, slavery, and conquest – all seasoned with intolerance for any but the accepted Patriotic narrative – have shaped it powerfully.
The state of violence in America actually well suits the country’s purposes, even now at work trying to subject the entire globe to its dominance. It is handy to have a population of young men who are hardened to violence and embrace guns, and so they do. Even if they have no other ability or training, there is opportunity at good wages to do what they do, and even to be praised for it, in the military.
Just look at the countries of Europe today, and you will see that all the big ones do not embrace this notion of narrow nationalism, and for good reasons. They each have affection for their place and culture, and that’s just natural, but it is tempered by the experience of world war and imperialism, and the knowledge of certain other realities. Realities such as the well-known fact that advanced states simply do not replace their own population as a result of an inexorable phenomenon called Demographic Transition. If an advanced state wants to maintain its population level for economic and other reasons, it can only do so through immigration.
Taking Israel as an example to be copied is very strange. Here is the most difficult and troublesome state on the planet, one causing constant wars and crises, and it is to be embraced as a good example of nationalism? Literally, since its inception, there has been almost a constant state of war against one or another neighbor, all accompanied by other violent programs involving thousands of assassinations (a recent book cites more than 2,700) and dirty tricks and decades-long oppression and brutality against millions living under its rule.
And why is that? Because they do not share the same religious/ethnic identity and must be excluded from Israel’s sense of nationalism. Hence violence and war and hatreds follow automatically, and they continue seventy years later.
In the recent Neocon Wars, America’s years-long rampage through the Middle East, the United States has been enlisted to do much additional dirty work for Israel, effectively creating a vast cordon sanitaire around the country.
It really doesn’t appear any human lessons were learned from the savageries of extreme German nationalism. Israel’s behavior represents a miniature replica of the same impulses. One should keep in mind, too, that the Holocaust was really concerned with a dominant group of Germans trying to destroy another group of Germans for their unacceptable differences, the Askenazi Jews whose language, Yiddish, is a dialect of German and many of whose cultural practices, right down to many of the foods they eat, also are German. The word “Ashkenazi” means German.
The Holocaust had nothing to do with the Middle East, but that is where its terrible aftereffects have most been felt. It had nothing to do with Arabs or Palestinians, but they are people who have paid a terrible price. And the United States, which might in the 1930s have done immensely more to prevent it ever happening, is the main force helping to inflict all these unjust consequences.
It was in the United States that boatloads of Jews Hitler tried sending away well before the Holocaust were turned away. And it was in the United States that we had many influential men like Henry Ford, whom Hitler greatly admired, and many great businessmen who almost tripped over themselves assisting and doing business with the Reich, including bankers who helped with its financing, and publishers like Time Magazine, who happily made Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938.
Despite the Holocaust having had nothing to do with the Middle East, the memory of the Holocaust has tirelessly been used to fire up Israeli nationalism. Today, for example, Israeli public-school students are regularly sent on learning trips to Auschwitz. There is an inevitable emotional blurring, I believe, between events three-quarters of a century ago in another continent and realities in the Middle East today.
The American connection for Israel, apart from a source of vast amounts of subsidies, is the America busy trying to impose its views on the entire globe. The America which has so supported Israel not out of any great concern for what happened in Germany but out of the strategic view of it as useful in its global imperial march, as a kind of colony in the Mideast. The two countries share many interests, but there is nothing positive or admirable about these shared interests. They are the interests of imperialists.
The re-creation of Israel has proved a very costly matter with one major result being that millions live in what appears to be perpetual abuse and oppression, and we have a small state about as arrogant and aggressive as any we’ve seen. And most Jews do not live in Israel, neither are they likely ever to do so, because they are well-integrated and successful in a great many countries, from Canada and the United States to Germany and France and, yes, even Iran.
Most of these places are places of far better economic opportunity than Israel. Lower taxes. Lower costs. Higher incomes. More opportunities. Greater choices. These limits pretty well affect only ordinary citizens because Israel’s elites generally maintain dual citizenships in places like the United States, something giving them many options others do not have. When you think about that, it is a strange fact for people associated with an intense nationalism.
Israel offers also the disadvantages of a society which functions as a huge military camp, a kind of military-security state more pervasive than anything experienced in these other places. And it is a place of immense and continuing hostilities, always in the air. The hostilities towards Arabs and those returned. The hostilities of the Ultra-Orthodox and hyper-aggressive “settlers” vis-à-vis many other Jews. The sense of living in a place, much as in the Old South, where millions are kept without rights and against their wills. And they are kept that way by your sons and daughters with obligatory service in a military whose main dispiriting job is suppressing millions of residents.
If you create new wars and new oppression and new abuse, as Israel has, you have created nothing good. And the idea of Israel as a refuge for all Jews should some terrible event ever occur has always been completely unrealistic, a re-assuring fantasy used to help cover Israel’s many dark acts.
The Holocaust was an attack of German people upon a religious minority of their own people. It had no connection with the Middle East. Nor is it ever likely to be repeated, representing as it did a unique set of historical circumstances. Indeed, the truth is history does not repeat itself. Heraclitus told us you can never step into the same river twice, and it remains a profound observation.
The likely truth is that the Palestinians are as close as we have to descendants of the Hebrews, and just look what has happened to them with the "nationalists" from Europe and North America acting out of myths about themselves.
Loving your country is just fine, but the kind of "nationalism" we see in Israel or in the United States is really another form of religion, a fanatical and violent one with just as little rationality or substance as any strange cult.
Such is the irrationality of much of human thought and behavior that religious zealots like the patriots of America or those of Israel are praised as somehow being worthy. They’re not.
Sunday, July 22, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: HOW AMERICAN POLITICS REALLY WORK - WHY THERE ARE TERRIBLE CANDIDATES AND CONSTANT WARS AND PEOPLES' PROBLEMS ARE IGNORED - WHY HEROES LIKE JULIAN ASSANGE ARE PERSECUTED AND RIGHTS ARE TRAMPLED AND WHY NOTHING WORTH DOING GETS DONE
John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRIS HEDGES IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom”
"The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations."
Wow, what an excellent piece of analysis.
I wouldn't subtract or change a word.
I might add a point or two.
Chris Hedges includes the rot of money in American politics, but there is a lot more to be said about what is at the very heart of things.
The extent of it is not well understood by the average American and certainly not understood by observers abroad.
America has basically managed to create an elaborate political system with all the showy external trappings of democracy but almost none of its content.
America today is run by a relatively small number of people who control the levers in both parties because they control the money available, truckloads of it. These people are served by the American empire's security-military apparatus and the politicians in Washington who are beholden to them.
The whole gang together, what I tend to call America’s power establishment, has an almost closed system serving themselves. That is why nothing beneficial or useful or even decent can get done in America anymore. And, of course, they do not like those who, like Assange, bring any light to the dark realities of American government.
The unquestioned power of that money-drenched American establishment is why there is now a continuous stream of wars which are not in the average American’s interest at all but are buried under thick layers, almost like stage make-up, of rhetoric about Patriotism and defending freedom.
There are almost no useful or effective rules governing the use of money in American politics. There are also no useful or effective rules governing the operations of America’s immensely powerful special-interest lobbies.
So, if I were a motivated young politician with some good ideas and intentions, I would virtually never stand a chance against the establishment candidate whose millions buy television ads, enable him to travel everywhere with elaborate support, and have the services of everything from a make-up man to pollsters and public relations flacks.
Of course, accidents do happen, and, once in a thousand times, a little guy does manage to win owing to some peculiar local set of circumstances, an event which will be jumped on by the establishment press as showing that things still work for the little guy in America. But such events are almost meaningless because their numbers are necessarily so small. They do not characterize the system because they cannot.
An individual little hero here or there, as a Bernie Sanders, means nothing in the big picture. Its just like a nice little bookstore trying to compete with Amazon or a local specialty soft drink maker trying to compete with Coca-Cola.
They can have their tiny local business, but they cannot dream of seriously competing with the monster corporation. And the truth is often that the monster corporation can put them out of business at any time it decides to do so, or it can buy them out, but it is usually not worth the effort.
Many people do not understand that marketing products has become a monstrous effort which includes everything from research and nonstop advertising to literally buying the shelf space for products from the local grocery store chains. You, as a small producer of anything, can often barely get space on the store shelves, will certainly not be able to get the favorable paid-for space at eye-level and easy-reach, and may indeed in some cases be closed out completely from getting space. That’s just part of the way corporate marketing works.
America has taken these proven practices from corporate business and applied them to politics. Every step in a modern political election campaign reflects the same kinds of efforts as Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay pushing their products, and it all costs a great deal of money. You need money just to recover from money spent on a tactic that proves not to work. And money itself acts as what economists call “a barrier to entry” against potential competitors. You are, in effect, not even allowed to play cards at the table without a very large stake.
The only way to stop this behavior in politics, so that candidates could have a fairer opportunity to talk about their actual ideas and views, would be to choke off the money, but no one with power is willing to do that because everyone of them benefits from the way things are run.
Note also that money not only closes off honest campaigning and exchange of ideas, it serves to discourage from running those who have sincerely-held independent views and a desire for changing something that is wrong. This way of doing things is responsible for pre-packaged candidates and lists of campaign phrases out of manuals. In those senses, too, it is closed system.
But the people putting up the large amounts of political campaign money – literally billions in every major American election – want things to be exactly that way. They don’t want surprises or significant change. They want what they want and what they pay for. It is easy to see the tendency for government to become plutocracy, no matter what nice words are written on pieces of parchment kept in museums.
When a country has become an international imperial force, such as the United States very much has, it is just not the money people who want things to remain as they are. It is the powerful groups running massive agencies like the Pentagon and CIA. They, too, spend vast amounts of money, most of it serving the interests of those same money people, and they do not want change.
Great bureaucracies always have a tendency to protect and perpetuate themselves. The values and intentions of huge forces like the Pentagon and CIA are not friendly to democratic principles, no matter what their charters may say. They are intrinsically authoritarian organizations, and the more they grow and influence a society, the less it becomes a free place, again no matter what the old words on parchment say.
They are, of course, the natural allies of the money people. They serve them abroad in the workings of empire and have a common interest in minimizing political change at home. It is easy to see why ordinary citizens come to feel politics is useless and unresponsive to them. It is.
Whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans, you get the Pentagon, the CIA, the money people, and a ruthless empire abroad, with just some differences in rhetoric. Here again the system operates much like great corporations with their promotional and marketing wars for McDonald’s or Burger King, Coke or Pepsi. Huge amounts of money are spent, and the result is a choice between products similar in most essential respects. Both corporations prosper and their vast walls of spending make it mighty hard for any new competitors to enter against them. That is pretty much what American politics is reduced to.
And this way of operating applies not only to political campaigns in America but to matters like major foreign policy. Take the example of the bizarre relationship America has with Israel, a country with a population the size of Ecuador’s. It is a relationship which causes great amounts of war and trouble in the world and truly works against the long-term interests of ordinary Americans, to say nothing of its spurning of all ethical principles.
The relationship is based on the same money-drenched methods which govern American politics. Israel, despite its insignificant size and greatly troubling behavior, is able to stay right at the forefront of things, to be on every politician’s lips, to be constantly mentioned (favorably) in the press, and to heavily influence American foreign policy through exactly the same mechanisms.
Some of its demands today are even going beyond foreign policy and into the internal affairs of the United States, as with the constant advocacy for laws making support for peaceful boycotts to influence Israel’s awful behavior illegal or the advocacy for laws in every state equating criticism of a powerful state actor like Israel with hate-speech. Just nasty, self-serving nonsense, but it goes on day after day with little attention paid.
Well, Washington’s establishment today just goes on and on about supposed Russian influence in America. It is unproved stuff serving powerful imperial establishment interests, but, even were there some bit of truth in the accusations, the underlying reality of Russian influence in America is a bad joke. Russia cannot even get a good word in the press and is treated unfairly in countless serious matters.
When I saw the silly Facebook stuff, about so many insignificant ads having been bought during the election by a few people in Russia, offered as evidence of influence, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Out of countless billions of dollars in advertising and advocacy on Facebook, the claim represented national concern about someone spitting into an ocean.
But here is Israel and its domestic advocates waging a vast and ongoing campaign to influence a great many matters inside America - from freedom of speech and peaceful protest action to foreign affairs and every national political campaign held - and we hear no complaints or concerns at all. And Israel’s influence in foreign affairs has been deadly, tumbling America into pointless wars time and again.
And it is doing so again, right now. Only recently, we have a recording leaked in Israel of Netanyahu bragging about how he is personally responsible for Trump’s destroying the Iran Nuclear Accord, an act opposed by every expert and most countries on earth, and an act causing dangerous tensions and threats of instability and hostilities.
Israel doesn’t have to worry because it is protected. But what about everyone else? The results of deliberately destroying a peaceful, smoothly-working international accord could be truly catastrophic.
A small country is able to leverage the United States in this unacceptable and dangerous way, against the wishes of almost every statesman and expert in the world, precisely because of the way America runs its national politics. Trump is looking to assure the success of his 2020 campaign, and everyone else on the planet is taxed with fear and threats so that he can feel secure politically. I think nothing better demonstrates the insanity of America’s laws about money in politics.
But we keep getting the silly distraction of what a threat to American democracy Russia is, simply an idiotic and unsupported idea. Meanwhile, Israel’s direct meddling in American politics threatens to bring an economic and military calamity down on our heads, and you will not find a word of criticism from politicians or the press.
Israel’s lobby in the United States is one of the best organized, best financed, and feared in existence. If you go along with it, you benefit with campaign money and good press and perhaps assistance from various experts and professionals. If you oppose it, those same resources will be applied to working against you and making you look bad in one way or another. It undoubtedly has information systems for tracking all political activities and attitudes that would be the envy of many large corporations.
It is easy to see that if the rules governing lobbies and campaign donations were changed, this would all come screeching to a halt. American policy in the Mideast could reflect fairness and decency and even most of America’s long-term interests. Wars and threats and terrible things like millions of desperate refugees created by those same wars would disappear.
But you will not see it changing any time soon in a country whose hideous Supreme Court – each member appointed by politicians benefiting from things just as they are - has ruled that money is “free speech,” just as it once ruled in favor of the rules governing slavery. No one with power in Washington wants change, just as the various estates (the great lords and churchmen) of the Ancien Régime in 18th century France wanted no change affecting their personal situations and privileges. And their unblinking selfishness ultimately brought catastrophe to France.
The model for Israel’s influence in American politics is the model for the general operation of the American government. The same elements are at work in every important matter. And that’s why there is continuous war, massive security and spying systems, gigantic corporations with no limits on their size and influence, and no attention paid to the pitiful rot and poverty so easy to find in a thousand places in America.
Men like Assange - and there are few of them, just as there are always relatively few brave and intelligent people who work to change what is wrong in the world (after all, gifted people can make a whole lot more money by going with the flow of things and working for a corporation) - become effectively “the enemies of the people” under the system. His work shed light on the rot and served as real investigative reporting, while the corporate press just functions as part of the system, defending it, avoiding investigating it, and almost never publishing anything adverse about it.
The corrupt nature of America’s national politics is nicely symbolized by Obama, a man so often regarded (wrongly) as liberal and principled. He came to politics as a second-rate lecturer in constitutional law, the kind of work that earns a moderate middle-class income and maybe a pension. Yet, he just left the presidency as a man worth literally tens of millions of dollars. His new home alone cost more than eight million dollars.
Doing the establishment’s work - which in Obama’s case involved killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad and supporting massive new intrusions into the privacy of Americans - is very rewarding. And that is pretty well the story of every major American politician.
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHRIS HEDGES IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom”
"The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations."
Wow, what an excellent piece of analysis.
I wouldn't subtract or change a word.
I might add a point or two.
Chris Hedges includes the rot of money in American politics, but there is a lot more to be said about what is at the very heart of things.
The extent of it is not well understood by the average American and certainly not understood by observers abroad.
America has basically managed to create an elaborate political system with all the showy external trappings of democracy but almost none of its content.
America today is run by a relatively small number of people who control the levers in both parties because they control the money available, truckloads of it. These people are served by the American empire's security-military apparatus and the politicians in Washington who are beholden to them.
The whole gang together, what I tend to call America’s power establishment, has an almost closed system serving themselves. That is why nothing beneficial or useful or even decent can get done in America anymore. And, of course, they do not like those who, like Assange, bring any light to the dark realities of American government.
The unquestioned power of that money-drenched American establishment is why there is now a continuous stream of wars which are not in the average American’s interest at all but are buried under thick layers, almost like stage make-up, of rhetoric about Patriotism and defending freedom.
There are almost no useful or effective rules governing the use of money in American politics. There are also no useful or effective rules governing the operations of America’s immensely powerful special-interest lobbies.
So, if I were a motivated young politician with some good ideas and intentions, I would virtually never stand a chance against the establishment candidate whose millions buy television ads, enable him to travel everywhere with elaborate support, and have the services of everything from a make-up man to pollsters and public relations flacks.
Of course, accidents do happen, and, once in a thousand times, a little guy does manage to win owing to some peculiar local set of circumstances, an event which will be jumped on by the establishment press as showing that things still work for the little guy in America. But such events are almost meaningless because their numbers are necessarily so small. They do not characterize the system because they cannot.
An individual little hero here or there, as a Bernie Sanders, means nothing in the big picture. Its just like a nice little bookstore trying to compete with Amazon or a local specialty soft drink maker trying to compete with Coca-Cola.
They can have their tiny local business, but they cannot dream of seriously competing with the monster corporation. And the truth is often that the monster corporation can put them out of business at any time it decides to do so, or it can buy them out, but it is usually not worth the effort.
Many people do not understand that marketing products has become a monstrous effort which includes everything from research and nonstop advertising to literally buying the shelf space for products from the local grocery store chains. You, as a small producer of anything, can often barely get space on the store shelves, will certainly not be able to get the favorable paid-for space at eye-level and easy-reach, and may indeed in some cases be closed out completely from getting space. That’s just part of the way corporate marketing works.
America has taken these proven practices from corporate business and applied them to politics. Every step in a modern political election campaign reflects the same kinds of efforts as Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay pushing their products, and it all costs a great deal of money. You need money just to recover from money spent on a tactic that proves not to work. And money itself acts as what economists call “a barrier to entry” against potential competitors. You are, in effect, not even allowed to play cards at the table without a very large stake.
The only way to stop this behavior in politics, so that candidates could have a fairer opportunity to talk about their actual ideas and views, would be to choke off the money, but no one with power is willing to do that because everyone of them benefits from the way things are run.
Note also that money not only closes off honest campaigning and exchange of ideas, it serves to discourage from running those who have sincerely-held independent views and a desire for changing something that is wrong. This way of doing things is responsible for pre-packaged candidates and lists of campaign phrases out of manuals. In those senses, too, it is closed system.
But the people putting up the large amounts of political campaign money – literally billions in every major American election – want things to be exactly that way. They don’t want surprises or significant change. They want what they want and what they pay for. It is easy to see the tendency for government to become plutocracy, no matter what nice words are written on pieces of parchment kept in museums.
When a country has become an international imperial force, such as the United States very much has, it is just not the money people who want things to remain as they are. It is the powerful groups running massive agencies like the Pentagon and CIA. They, too, spend vast amounts of money, most of it serving the interests of those same money people, and they do not want change.
Great bureaucracies always have a tendency to protect and perpetuate themselves. The values and intentions of huge forces like the Pentagon and CIA are not friendly to democratic principles, no matter what their charters may say. They are intrinsically authoritarian organizations, and the more they grow and influence a society, the less it becomes a free place, again no matter what the old words on parchment say.
They are, of course, the natural allies of the money people. They serve them abroad in the workings of empire and have a common interest in minimizing political change at home. It is easy to see why ordinary citizens come to feel politics is useless and unresponsive to them. It is.
Whether you vote for Democrats or Republicans, you get the Pentagon, the CIA, the money people, and a ruthless empire abroad, with just some differences in rhetoric. Here again the system operates much like great corporations with their promotional and marketing wars for McDonald’s or Burger King, Coke or Pepsi. Huge amounts of money are spent, and the result is a choice between products similar in most essential respects. Both corporations prosper and their vast walls of spending make it mighty hard for any new competitors to enter against them. That is pretty much what American politics is reduced to.
And this way of operating applies not only to political campaigns in America but to matters like major foreign policy. Take the example of the bizarre relationship America has with Israel, a country with a population the size of Ecuador’s. It is a relationship which causes great amounts of war and trouble in the world and truly works against the long-term interests of ordinary Americans, to say nothing of its spurning of all ethical principles.
The relationship is based on the same money-drenched methods which govern American politics. Israel, despite its insignificant size and greatly troubling behavior, is able to stay right at the forefront of things, to be on every politician’s lips, to be constantly mentioned (favorably) in the press, and to heavily influence American foreign policy through exactly the same mechanisms.
Some of its demands today are even going beyond foreign policy and into the internal affairs of the United States, as with the constant advocacy for laws making support for peaceful boycotts to influence Israel’s awful behavior illegal or the advocacy for laws in every state equating criticism of a powerful state actor like Israel with hate-speech. Just nasty, self-serving nonsense, but it goes on day after day with little attention paid.
Well, Washington’s establishment today just goes on and on about supposed Russian influence in America. It is unproved stuff serving powerful imperial establishment interests, but, even were there some bit of truth in the accusations, the underlying reality of Russian influence in America is a bad joke. Russia cannot even get a good word in the press and is treated unfairly in countless serious matters.
When I saw the silly Facebook stuff, about so many insignificant ads having been bought during the election by a few people in Russia, offered as evidence of influence, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Out of countless billions of dollars in advertising and advocacy on Facebook, the claim represented national concern about someone spitting into an ocean.
But here is Israel and its domestic advocates waging a vast and ongoing campaign to influence a great many matters inside America - from freedom of speech and peaceful protest action to foreign affairs and every national political campaign held - and we hear no complaints or concerns at all. And Israel’s influence in foreign affairs has been deadly, tumbling America into pointless wars time and again.
And it is doing so again, right now. Only recently, we have a recording leaked in Israel of Netanyahu bragging about how he is personally responsible for Trump’s destroying the Iran Nuclear Accord, an act opposed by every expert and most countries on earth, and an act causing dangerous tensions and threats of instability and hostilities.
Israel doesn’t have to worry because it is protected. But what about everyone else? The results of deliberately destroying a peaceful, smoothly-working international accord could be truly catastrophic.
A small country is able to leverage the United States in this unacceptable and dangerous way, against the wishes of almost every statesman and expert in the world, precisely because of the way America runs its national politics. Trump is looking to assure the success of his 2020 campaign, and everyone else on the planet is taxed with fear and threats so that he can feel secure politically. I think nothing better demonstrates the insanity of America’s laws about money in politics.
But we keep getting the silly distraction of what a threat to American democracy Russia is, simply an idiotic and unsupported idea. Meanwhile, Israel’s direct meddling in American politics threatens to bring an economic and military calamity down on our heads, and you will not find a word of criticism from politicians or the press.
Israel’s lobby in the United States is one of the best organized, best financed, and feared in existence. If you go along with it, you benefit with campaign money and good press and perhaps assistance from various experts and professionals. If you oppose it, those same resources will be applied to working against you and making you look bad in one way or another. It undoubtedly has information systems for tracking all political activities and attitudes that would be the envy of many large corporations.
It is easy to see that if the rules governing lobbies and campaign donations were changed, this would all come screeching to a halt. American policy in the Mideast could reflect fairness and decency and even most of America’s long-term interests. Wars and threats and terrible things like millions of desperate refugees created by those same wars would disappear.
But you will not see it changing any time soon in a country whose hideous Supreme Court – each member appointed by politicians benefiting from things just as they are - has ruled that money is “free speech,” just as it once ruled in favor of the rules governing slavery. No one with power in Washington wants change, just as the various estates (the great lords and churchmen) of the Ancien Régime in 18th century France wanted no change affecting their personal situations and privileges. And their unblinking selfishness ultimately brought catastrophe to France.
The model for Israel’s influence in American politics is the model for the general operation of the American government. The same elements are at work in every important matter. And that’s why there is continuous war, massive security and spying systems, gigantic corporations with no limits on their size and influence, and no attention paid to the pitiful rot and poverty so easy to find in a thousand places in America.
Men like Assange - and there are few of them, just as there are always relatively few brave and intelligent people who work to change what is wrong in the world (after all, gifted people can make a whole lot more money by going with the flow of things and working for a corporation) - become effectively “the enemies of the people” under the system. His work shed light on the rot and served as real investigative reporting, while the corporate press just functions as part of the system, defending it, avoiding investigating it, and almost never publishing anything adverse about it.
The corrupt nature of America’s national politics is nicely symbolized by Obama, a man so often regarded (wrongly) as liberal and principled. He came to politics as a second-rate lecturer in constitutional law, the kind of work that earns a moderate middle-class income and maybe a pension. Yet, he just left the presidency as a man worth literally tens of millions of dollars. His new home alone cost more than eight million dollars.
Doing the establishment’s work - which in Obama’s case involved killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad and supporting massive new intrusions into the privacy of Americans - is very rewarding. And that is pretty well the story of every major American politician.
Saturday, July 21, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP IS OUT-MANEUVERING HIS ENEMIES ON RUSSIA? OFFICIAL U.S. RUSSOPHOBIA IS EPIDEMIC - IT SERVES REAL INTERESTS - TRUMP DOES NOT HAVE LEVERAGE - HE CAN'T EVEN BUILD HIS SILLY WALL - A BIG EFFORT FOR RUSSIA COULD ADD MOMENTUM FOR GETTING RID OF HIM
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAT BUCHANAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
Trump's Enemies Are Hysterical Because He's Out-Maneuvering Them
"Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and conflicts with Russia, and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this country."
I'm totally in favor of good Russian-American relations, and I want Russia to come to enjoy her time in the sun, but I am sorry to say that I don't for a minute believe there is any way Trump is going to establish those relations or give Russia her opportunity.
He does not have any leverage over the power players in Washington’s establishment. He is a loud outsider with a minority constituency in trailer parks and Walmarts across America, and those are not influential people. The truth is, if the Democrats hadn’t insisted on running the repulsive Hillary, he would never have won.
But even in winning, he was supported only by a minority. It was the antiquated Electoral College system that handed him victory, a fluke that happens every once in a while. Despite his political base, he is not popular in the United States.
Everywhere he goes abroad, he makes enemies with his rash, unguarded tongue. And he has nothing to “horse trade” with the Congress in Washington. He cannot even get his beloved wall with Mexico built.
With each passing day, we see Trump for what he really is, a bizarre clown or village idiot who, every once in a while, happens to blurt out some truth or sharp observation along with great quantities of rubbish.
His truths almost resemble random events, not the kind of thing you can put much stock into.
Just because he says the odd line with which I agree, as about relations with Russia, does not change my opinion of him.
By the way, besides all of his other poor qualities – poor understanding of many things, not listening to others, immense arrogance, and very little couth - Trump has no sense of loyalty to anyone, a fact we can observe in everything from his behavior towards associates to his marriage. Add to that is tendency to lie and exaggerate almost continuously, and you do not see a politician who inspires confidence in other politicians with whom he must work.
I think he will achieve little.
But Putin is using Trump skillfully to achieve his own limited goals, which very much include striking any jabs possible against Washington's anti-Russian establishment, shaking up their sense of unity and self-confidence.
What better tool than a man like Trump whose immense ego lets him think he can play in the big leagues? He is a gift to Putin.
Of course, the more successful Putin is in his maneuvers, the worse things become for Trump. The more the powers in Washington can choose to see him as being a Russian tool.
Trump's legions of opponents in Washington - including important parts of his own party, something many observers keep missing as they consistently accuse Democrats - are only going to have more motive for getting rid of him, more motive for incapacitating him, more motive for making life difficult for him.
If he isn’t impeached before his term is out (I would have completely discounted the possibility before, but facts about Trump’s ex-lawyer and the Special Prosecutor are starting to sound more threatening), he will be defeated in 2020, and in the meantime, the 2018 Congressional elections will likely make him a “lame duck” President, one unable to get anything done. In the American system, a President with little or no Congressional support gets nothing done.
I doubt Putin cares much about Trump’s fate because I'm sure that clever and subtle man sees Trump for just what he is, but right now, he has some use for him. It seems Putin has little to lose in the effort, unless he overplays his hand, which is unlikely with such a skillful player. He can make some gain, risking little loss. Washington’s Russophobia is already at epidemic proportions, and backlash against Trump will give great satisfaction to Trump’s enemies, perhaps serving almost as a kind of general pressure valve release.
As a measure of how completely off-the-tracks Trump is, just consider his economic and trade initiatives, if I may use that word, "initiatives,' for such utterly destructive, chaotic behavior. Does anyone think that a man who behaves like that in one vital sphere is somehow able to perform miracles in another?
Just read this brief article from Russia Today as one measure of things:
https://www.rt.com/business/433854-trade-war-to-accelerate-decline/
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAT BUCHANAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
Trump's Enemies Are Hysterical Because He's Out-Maneuvering Them
"Trump is edging toward the defining battle of his presidency: a reshaping of U.S. foreign policy to avoid clashes and conflicts with Russia, and the shedding of Cold War commitments no longer rooted in the national interests of this country."
I'm totally in favor of good Russian-American relations, and I want Russia to come to enjoy her time in the sun, but I am sorry to say that I don't for a minute believe there is any way Trump is going to establish those relations or give Russia her opportunity.
He does not have any leverage over the power players in Washington’s establishment. He is a loud outsider with a minority constituency in trailer parks and Walmarts across America, and those are not influential people. The truth is, if the Democrats hadn’t insisted on running the repulsive Hillary, he would never have won.
But even in winning, he was supported only by a minority. It was the antiquated Electoral College system that handed him victory, a fluke that happens every once in a while. Despite his political base, he is not popular in the United States.
Everywhere he goes abroad, he makes enemies with his rash, unguarded tongue. And he has nothing to “horse trade” with the Congress in Washington. He cannot even get his beloved wall with Mexico built.
With each passing day, we see Trump for what he really is, a bizarre clown or village idiot who, every once in a while, happens to blurt out some truth or sharp observation along with great quantities of rubbish.
His truths almost resemble random events, not the kind of thing you can put much stock into.
Just because he says the odd line with which I agree, as about relations with Russia, does not change my opinion of him.
By the way, besides all of his other poor qualities – poor understanding of many things, not listening to others, immense arrogance, and very little couth - Trump has no sense of loyalty to anyone, a fact we can observe in everything from his behavior towards associates to his marriage. Add to that is tendency to lie and exaggerate almost continuously, and you do not see a politician who inspires confidence in other politicians with whom he must work.
I think he will achieve little.
But Putin is using Trump skillfully to achieve his own limited goals, which very much include striking any jabs possible against Washington's anti-Russian establishment, shaking up their sense of unity and self-confidence.
What better tool than a man like Trump whose immense ego lets him think he can play in the big leagues? He is a gift to Putin.
Of course, the more successful Putin is in his maneuvers, the worse things become for Trump. The more the powers in Washington can choose to see him as being a Russian tool.
Trump's legions of opponents in Washington - including important parts of his own party, something many observers keep missing as they consistently accuse Democrats - are only going to have more motive for getting rid of him, more motive for incapacitating him, more motive for making life difficult for him.
If he isn’t impeached before his term is out (I would have completely discounted the possibility before, but facts about Trump’s ex-lawyer and the Special Prosecutor are starting to sound more threatening), he will be defeated in 2020, and in the meantime, the 2018 Congressional elections will likely make him a “lame duck” President, one unable to get anything done. In the American system, a President with little or no Congressional support gets nothing done.
I doubt Putin cares much about Trump’s fate because I'm sure that clever and subtle man sees Trump for just what he is, but right now, he has some use for him. It seems Putin has little to lose in the effort, unless he overplays his hand, which is unlikely with such a skillful player. He can make some gain, risking little loss. Washington’s Russophobia is already at epidemic proportions, and backlash against Trump will give great satisfaction to Trump’s enemies, perhaps serving almost as a kind of general pressure valve release.
As a measure of how completely off-the-tracks Trump is, just consider his economic and trade initiatives, if I may use that word, "initiatives,' for such utterly destructive, chaotic behavior. Does anyone think that a man who behaves like that in one vital sphere is somehow able to perform miracles in another?
Just read this brief article from Russia Today as one measure of things:
https://www.rt.com/business/433854-trade-war-to-accelerate-decline/
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: A RUSSIAN POLITICIAN SPEAKS OF AMERICA'S PRESS BEING LIBERAL (MAKING HIM SOUND LIKE AMERICA'S RIGHT WING HAS SOUNDED FOR AGES) AND SOMEHOW ASSOCIATES THAT WITH ITS BEING RUSSOPHOBIC - DOES ANYONE IN EITHER COUNTRY UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT THE OTHER?
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump and Putin Got a Lot Done in Helsinki — Top Russian Politician Sets Record Straight”
"[T]he liberal media, firstly, is Russophobic, [and] secondly, opposed to Trump"
I don't know what this official is trying to say, but there are no liberal media in the United States. It is almost silly to characterize the American press that way. America’s Right Wing has long done so, but it remains an interest group which speaks only to itself.
Even Trump’s detested CNN network has an appalling record that could never be accurately described as liberal. Sure, it doesn’t like Trump, but that does not, ipso facto, make it liberal.
The American press is, indeed, sickeningly Russophobic, and I don't see how that has anything to do with being liberal or not. In fact, it is evidence of the opposite. A liberal point of view simply does not include fixating on imagined enemies.
The press is pure American establishment. It defends establishment interests, and does anyone on the planet regard America's establishment as liberal? Constant wars, dirty security service tricks in many lands, coups, and friendship with some of the world’s most criminal and repressive governments, just so long as they support what good old America wants?
The American establishment sees Russia as an unwelcome competitor, bringing different interests and points of view to many areas of international conflict and supporting interests - eg., Assad - to which it is opposed.
A major US interest is its quasi-colony in the Mideast, otherwise known as Israel. That’s why it tried destroying Syria. That’s why it destroyed Iraq and Libya. And why it is so violently opposed to Iran. Indeed, we just now have a recording, leaked in Israel, of Netanyahu bragging in private about Trump following his directions on Iran.
Does anyone see liberalism in the terrible behavior of Israel? Mass-killing, abuse, repression, and theft – where’s anything liberal, or even decent, in its behavior? Or in the American establishment’s additional mass-killing in support of Israel, the toll, from Iraq to Syria, being on the order of two million killed and many million turned into refugees?
Obama is often cited as a liberal president. My God, the man was dropping bombs every single day for eight years. He started coups, as in Ukraine. He initiated the American extrajudicial-killing operation with fleets of drones. He spied on people and had the NSA building its huge new secret infrastructure under him. This is someone’s idea of a liberal?
His obsession with secrecy and his frequently observed arrogance – remember how he referred to Russia with petty contempt on more than one occasion? – and his willingness to use and tolerate underhanded methods in the 2016 election, none of these are characteristics of a liberal.
Well, the truth is Obama is no liberal. He is a ruthless man with a boyish smile. He once actually said, almost jokingly, “I guess I’m pretty good at this killing stuff.” No wonder the murderous Hillary Clinton got on so well with him.
As for the rest of America’s senior political establishment, you won’t find a liberal among them. What you will find are arrogant, self-important, and corrupt people who faithfully serve the interests of major lobby groups and the interests of American imperial dominance in the world.
America uses the word “liberal” in much the same way it uses words like “democracy” and “human rights.” It uses them in speeches, with about as much conviction as a corrupt Pope from the Middle Ages talking about honesty.
But more importantly, it sees Russia as the only country whose armaments are capable of destroying America, and it does not welcome that fact, especially given the rampage America has been on in so many parts of the world with its new drive to exert dominance. It feels the loss of its glory days, after WWII when it enjoyed carefree domination, drawing to a close, keenly.
The American establishment pursues wars and coups in many parts of the world today. It supports without hesitation the law-breaking and mass-killings in Israel. How on earth are they reckoned to be liberal, always remembering that America’s corporate press supports them unquestioningly in all these things as just another part of the establishment?
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump and Putin Got a Lot Done in Helsinki — Top Russian Politician Sets Record Straight”
"[T]he liberal media, firstly, is Russophobic, [and] secondly, opposed to Trump"
I don't know what this official is trying to say, but there are no liberal media in the United States. It is almost silly to characterize the American press that way. America’s Right Wing has long done so, but it remains an interest group which speaks only to itself.
Even Trump’s detested CNN network has an appalling record that could never be accurately described as liberal. Sure, it doesn’t like Trump, but that does not, ipso facto, make it liberal.
The American press is, indeed, sickeningly Russophobic, and I don't see how that has anything to do with being liberal or not. In fact, it is evidence of the opposite. A liberal point of view simply does not include fixating on imagined enemies.
The press is pure American establishment. It defends establishment interests, and does anyone on the planet regard America's establishment as liberal? Constant wars, dirty security service tricks in many lands, coups, and friendship with some of the world’s most criminal and repressive governments, just so long as they support what good old America wants?
The American establishment sees Russia as an unwelcome competitor, bringing different interests and points of view to many areas of international conflict and supporting interests - eg., Assad - to which it is opposed.
A major US interest is its quasi-colony in the Mideast, otherwise known as Israel. That’s why it tried destroying Syria. That’s why it destroyed Iraq and Libya. And why it is so violently opposed to Iran. Indeed, we just now have a recording, leaked in Israel, of Netanyahu bragging in private about Trump following his directions on Iran.
Does anyone see liberalism in the terrible behavior of Israel? Mass-killing, abuse, repression, and theft – where’s anything liberal, or even decent, in its behavior? Or in the American establishment’s additional mass-killing in support of Israel, the toll, from Iraq to Syria, being on the order of two million killed and many million turned into refugees?
Obama is often cited as a liberal president. My God, the man was dropping bombs every single day for eight years. He started coups, as in Ukraine. He initiated the American extrajudicial-killing operation with fleets of drones. He spied on people and had the NSA building its huge new secret infrastructure under him. This is someone’s idea of a liberal?
His obsession with secrecy and his frequently observed arrogance – remember how he referred to Russia with petty contempt on more than one occasion? – and his willingness to use and tolerate underhanded methods in the 2016 election, none of these are characteristics of a liberal.
Well, the truth is Obama is no liberal. He is a ruthless man with a boyish smile. He once actually said, almost jokingly, “I guess I’m pretty good at this killing stuff.” No wonder the murderous Hillary Clinton got on so well with him.
As for the rest of America’s senior political establishment, you won’t find a liberal among them. What you will find are arrogant, self-important, and corrupt people who faithfully serve the interests of major lobby groups and the interests of American imperial dominance in the world.
America uses the word “liberal” in much the same way it uses words like “democracy” and “human rights.” It uses them in speeches, with about as much conviction as a corrupt Pope from the Middle Ages talking about honesty.
But more importantly, it sees Russia as the only country whose armaments are capable of destroying America, and it does not welcome that fact, especially given the rampage America has been on in so many parts of the world with its new drive to exert dominance. It feels the loss of its glory days, after WWII when it enjoyed carefree domination, drawing to a close, keenly.
The American establishment pursues wars and coups in many parts of the world today. It supports without hesitation the law-breaking and mass-killings in Israel. How on earth are they reckoned to be liberal, always remembering that America’s corporate press supports them unquestioningly in all these things as just another part of the establishment?
Friday, July 20, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE INTERESTING CASE OF SOUTH AFRICAN FARMERS SEEKING TO SETTLE IN RUSSIA - GENERAL NOTES ON THE NEED FOR RUSSIA TO HAVE A GOOD IMMIGRATION PROGRAM - DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Russia Considers Taking in 15,000 White South African Farmers Fleeing Black Violence”
They would make excellent immigrants for the most part.
Hard-working and skillful, they can make a real contribution. Plus, they have financial resources.
I hope it works out for both parties, although South Africans would have quite a climate-adjustment to make.
And people are not racists, as one comment suggested, just because they want to flee a terrible situation.
South Africa's violent crime rate, sadly, is one of the highest in the world.
_______________________
Response to a comment saying the migrants were too many at one time:
Too many too quick?
15,000 on a population of about 150,000,000?
That's tiny.
It's an excellent opportunity to get some very capable migrants.
By the way, Russia is definitely going to have to become more of a country of migrants.
You face the prospect of Demographic Transition.
This is what has happened to much of Europe, America, Canada, Japan, and others.
After that, you simply do not replace your existing population, and, if nothing is done, population ages and declines. Japan is facing a true crisis in this way because it has been a country that historically has been reluctant about migration. It is loaded with older people.
And there is no use talking about incentives to have babies. They've all been tried in various countries, and they simply do not work, unless they are so generous that they make no economic sense.
When women and men reach a certain level of prosperity, they do not want kids, at least not more than one or two.
This is a universal phenomenon with human societies, and of course there is little familiarity with it for many people since any society's population only goes through this change once.
The past of desiring lots of kids to help with the farm and to provide a form of old-age security simply disappears in cities with women pursuing careers and couples experiencing increasing prosperity. No one then wants a huge new, high-cost, long-term burden with several kids.
So, national birth rates drop below the level required to replace the existing population. The replacement level is always an average of more than two children per couple because you must allow for infant and child mortality as the children grow up.
It would be a good idea to develop national plans for this with a well-constructed immigration program which encourages quality migrants, those with skills, ambition, and education.
By the way, such people also are not going to have lots of children, so immigration must be on-going.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Russia Considers Taking in 15,000 White South African Farmers Fleeing Black Violence”
They would make excellent immigrants for the most part.
Hard-working and skillful, they can make a real contribution. Plus, they have financial resources.
I hope it works out for both parties, although South Africans would have quite a climate-adjustment to make.
And people are not racists, as one comment suggested, just because they want to flee a terrible situation.
South Africa's violent crime rate, sadly, is one of the highest in the world.
_______________________
Response to a comment saying the migrants were too many at one time:
Too many too quick?
15,000 on a population of about 150,000,000?
That's tiny.
It's an excellent opportunity to get some very capable migrants.
By the way, Russia is definitely going to have to become more of a country of migrants.
You face the prospect of Demographic Transition.
This is what has happened to much of Europe, America, Canada, Japan, and others.
After that, you simply do not replace your existing population, and, if nothing is done, population ages and declines. Japan is facing a true crisis in this way because it has been a country that historically has been reluctant about migration. It is loaded with older people.
And there is no use talking about incentives to have babies. They've all been tried in various countries, and they simply do not work, unless they are so generous that they make no economic sense.
When women and men reach a certain level of prosperity, they do not want kids, at least not more than one or two.
This is a universal phenomenon with human societies, and of course there is little familiarity with it for many people since any society's population only goes through this change once.
The past of desiring lots of kids to help with the farm and to provide a form of old-age security simply disappears in cities with women pursuing careers and couples experiencing increasing prosperity. No one then wants a huge new, high-cost, long-term burden with several kids.
So, national birth rates drop below the level required to replace the existing population. The replacement level is always an average of more than two children per couple because you must allow for infant and child mortality as the children grow up.
It would be a good idea to develop national plans for this with a well-constructed immigration program which encourages quality migrants, those with skills, ambition, and education.
By the way, such people also are not going to have lots of children, so immigration must be on-going.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THERE ARE TOO MANY TODAY BLAMING EITHER ONE PARTY OR A NEWSPAPER FOR DARK EVENTS WE SEE - BUT THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM IS AMERICA'S ESTABLISHMENT WHICH INCLUDES BOTH PARTIES AND ALL ITS PRESS - NOTES ON PAST GAMES PLAYED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PATRIOT RISING
“Strzok Farce Shows Obstacles to Opening TWA 800 Case”
Well said.
But I'm afraid the patterns discussed here are far more common than just the cases of TWA Flight 800 and Mr. Strzok's recent, controversial activity.
As far as Strzok goes, just the fact that he was both an FBI agent and worked for CIA should be enough to impugn all credibility, but we really don’t see that kind of appropriate cynicism in Washington concerning the security services.
I read a piece recently that discussed why 9/11 happened, given all the activity of American security services. And someone was quoted as saying it had to do with “the wall,” and by “the wall,” he meant the old strict separation between the work of CIA and that of FBI. I just laughed at that, it’s such nonsense.
The anecdote though clearly highlights how the security services are regarded in official Washington. It is with a very illusory sense of things. Of course, the truth of 9/11 is that it is one more completely unexplained event, not unlike Flight 800.
If you believe that the gang in the planes actually caused the entire event, then I suppose you might say what the person said in the article, but then you already start from a false premise.
The fundamental problem has to do with America’s being an imperial power, a huge and hugely corrupt political power, and in that role, it engages in many dark and criminal behaviors throughout the world, and, by the way, it does so under whichever of the two parties is in power.
They both, Democrats and Republicans, loyally serve the empire and its willing helpers at the CIA and the Pentagon. They might argue about school prayer or abortion rights or flag-burning Amendments to the Constitution, but when it comes to launching wars and coups and assassinations, they are all “on side.”
And that goes for the various dirty tricks played by the security services, too, which are major parts of their work. It’s only when one of the parties feels it has been targeted that they climb up on their high horse.
The problem in America that gives us matters such as the Flight 800 dishonest investigation or the work of a man like Strzok, is not a matter of a political party, such as the Democrats, or of a newspaper, such as The New York Times.
The workings of imperial America involve a vast number of dark acts and, of course, a compliant press to keep them covered up. “Compliant” isn’t even the right word because the major high-end newspapers in the United States are parts of large corporate entities which operate hand-in-glove with government.
Newspapers and broadcasters are highly dependent on government, for everything from approvals for mergers and acquisitions on their business side to leaks and access for interviews on the news side.
And then there’s the press’s dependence on advertising revenue, which doesn’t tend to come from critics or humanitarians or intellectuals, but from other profit-seeking corporations whom they cannot afford to offend.
The New York Times, for example, has been quite accurately described as the official house organ for the American power establishment.
If you’ve ever worked for a corporation and received their in-house publication for employees, you know it is not the place where you will read of any controversies, secrets, or advocacy for anything beyond the company’s continuing to function profitably.
Now, a newspaper must behave a little differently than a corporate house organ, or it would quickly lose all credibility and trust, but its “house organ” status definitely defines limits and boundaries, activities which are permitted and others which are not. It doesn’t tell its reading public about this unwritten contract that it has with government and corporate interests, but it is there, and critical readers will understand its outlines over time.
In the case of The New York Times, there is a very long list of past actions which should have created greater skepticism about it, but readers like their fat newspaper each day full of everything from travel stories to business news, and many are loath to give it up on concerns for journalistic principles. And on all those kinds of things, papers like The Times do a very good job, a fact which continuously rubs off on their credibility and popularity.
The Times has been caught countless times doing questionable things, but it maintains its position, threatened seriously only by changing technology and changing advertising patterns. Who knows, it may even receive hidden subsidies here and there from interested parties, such as the CIA, just as we now know Google was helped into this world by the CIA which now benefits greatly from its operations.
The Times has hounded people wrongly accused of crimes – as Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympic bombing or government scientist Wen Ho Lee concerning espionage for China - by the FBI, from whom it undoubtedly received a stream of leaks.
It has identified people it was not supposed to identify when it is defending its clan, as in the case of a woman who accused a member of the Kennedy family of rape years ago.
It only recently confirmed what many long thought, that every story about Israel is passed by the official Israeli Censor before publication.
It has been caught with CIA people salted into its staff on more than one occasion, and it has published outright lies or disinformation, which, if it were unlucky to be caught at, it later retracted.
Retraction has been a favorite technique of The Times. It gets to publish something wrong at the time when the information may be critical, and then come back later to retract, when the information may be far less critical. This way it achieves its disinformation or propaganda goal while later giving itself a pat on the back for admitting errors, bolstering its reputation for honest journalism, a reputation in critical matters it just does not deserve.
But The Times has many such games that it plays and does not use any one of them excessively for fear of disturbing readers. It is a constant artful balancing act which must be performed in all “news” about key political matters and absolutely all matters bearing on the operations of America’s armies, security services, and of the empire abroad.
To turn true and frightening events, such as the Strzok matter or the Flight 800 investigation, into mere partisan politics diminishes their import and, in the end, rather serves itself as a kind of "cover up," a cover up of fundamental problems at work in the country.
Power, as Lord Acton said, tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
America, unfortunately, finds itself pretty much in the absolutely corrupt stage of its life-cycle. And no single political party or publication is responsible for that.
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PATRIOT RISING
“Strzok Farce Shows Obstacles to Opening TWA 800 Case”
Well said.
But I'm afraid the patterns discussed here are far more common than just the cases of TWA Flight 800 and Mr. Strzok's recent, controversial activity.
As far as Strzok goes, just the fact that he was both an FBI agent and worked for CIA should be enough to impugn all credibility, but we really don’t see that kind of appropriate cynicism in Washington concerning the security services.
I read a piece recently that discussed why 9/11 happened, given all the activity of American security services. And someone was quoted as saying it had to do with “the wall,” and by “the wall,” he meant the old strict separation between the work of CIA and that of FBI. I just laughed at that, it’s such nonsense.
The anecdote though clearly highlights how the security services are regarded in official Washington. It is with a very illusory sense of things. Of course, the truth of 9/11 is that it is one more completely unexplained event, not unlike Flight 800.
If you believe that the gang in the planes actually caused the entire event, then I suppose you might say what the person said in the article, but then you already start from a false premise.
The fundamental problem has to do with America’s being an imperial power, a huge and hugely corrupt political power, and in that role, it engages in many dark and criminal behaviors throughout the world, and, by the way, it does so under whichever of the two parties is in power.
They both, Democrats and Republicans, loyally serve the empire and its willing helpers at the CIA and the Pentagon. They might argue about school prayer or abortion rights or flag-burning Amendments to the Constitution, but when it comes to launching wars and coups and assassinations, they are all “on side.”
And that goes for the various dirty tricks played by the security services, too, which are major parts of their work. It’s only when one of the parties feels it has been targeted that they climb up on their high horse.
The problem in America that gives us matters such as the Flight 800 dishonest investigation or the work of a man like Strzok, is not a matter of a political party, such as the Democrats, or of a newspaper, such as The New York Times.
The workings of imperial America involve a vast number of dark acts and, of course, a compliant press to keep them covered up. “Compliant” isn’t even the right word because the major high-end newspapers in the United States are parts of large corporate entities which operate hand-in-glove with government.
Newspapers and broadcasters are highly dependent on government, for everything from approvals for mergers and acquisitions on their business side to leaks and access for interviews on the news side.
And then there’s the press’s dependence on advertising revenue, which doesn’t tend to come from critics or humanitarians or intellectuals, but from other profit-seeking corporations whom they cannot afford to offend.
The New York Times, for example, has been quite accurately described as the official house organ for the American power establishment.
If you’ve ever worked for a corporation and received their in-house publication for employees, you know it is not the place where you will read of any controversies, secrets, or advocacy for anything beyond the company’s continuing to function profitably.
Now, a newspaper must behave a little differently than a corporate house organ, or it would quickly lose all credibility and trust, but its “house organ” status definitely defines limits and boundaries, activities which are permitted and others which are not. It doesn’t tell its reading public about this unwritten contract that it has with government and corporate interests, but it is there, and critical readers will understand its outlines over time.
In the case of The New York Times, there is a very long list of past actions which should have created greater skepticism about it, but readers like their fat newspaper each day full of everything from travel stories to business news, and many are loath to give it up on concerns for journalistic principles. And on all those kinds of things, papers like The Times do a very good job, a fact which continuously rubs off on their credibility and popularity.
The Times has been caught countless times doing questionable things, but it maintains its position, threatened seriously only by changing technology and changing advertising patterns. Who knows, it may even receive hidden subsidies here and there from interested parties, such as the CIA, just as we now know Google was helped into this world by the CIA which now benefits greatly from its operations.
The Times has hounded people wrongly accused of crimes – as Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympic bombing or government scientist Wen Ho Lee concerning espionage for China - by the FBI, from whom it undoubtedly received a stream of leaks.
It has identified people it was not supposed to identify when it is defending its clan, as in the case of a woman who accused a member of the Kennedy family of rape years ago.
It only recently confirmed what many long thought, that every story about Israel is passed by the official Israeli Censor before publication.
It has been caught with CIA people salted into its staff on more than one occasion, and it has published outright lies or disinformation, which, if it were unlucky to be caught at, it later retracted.
Retraction has been a favorite technique of The Times. It gets to publish something wrong at the time when the information may be critical, and then come back later to retract, when the information may be far less critical. This way it achieves its disinformation or propaganda goal while later giving itself a pat on the back for admitting errors, bolstering its reputation for honest journalism, a reputation in critical matters it just does not deserve.
But The Times has many such games that it plays and does not use any one of them excessively for fear of disturbing readers. It is a constant artful balancing act which must be performed in all “news” about key political matters and absolutely all matters bearing on the operations of America’s armies, security services, and of the empire abroad.
To turn true and frightening events, such as the Strzok matter or the Flight 800 investigation, into mere partisan politics diminishes their import and, in the end, rather serves itself as a kind of "cover up," a cover up of fundamental problems at work in the country.
Power, as Lord Acton said, tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
America, unfortunately, finds itself pretty much in the absolutely corrupt stage of its life-cycle. And no single political party or publication is responsible for that.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: "COLD WAR II CALLED OFF" WRITES PAT BUCHANAN - HERE'S WHY THAT IS SO SADLY WRONG - TRUMP JUST DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO BLUNT THE ESTABLISHMENT'S DRIVES - AND THIS MORNING'S PRESS IS FULL OF SENSATIONAL CHARGES OF "TREASON" AGAINST A SITTING PRESIDENT
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAT BUCHANAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump Calls Off Cold War II
“There will be no Cold War II. Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of the nation and the fate of his presidency”
Well, I very much wish that it were so.
But one man, and one who is much disliked in Washington, even within his own party, can do no such thing.
There is, and I say this very sadly, no sense of realism in what Pat Buchanan writes.
Indeed, even a President well-liked by his fellow politicians in Washington could do no such thing because American Presidents simply do not have that kind of power. Power is distributed in Washington among a number of major establishment figures and interest groups, and none of them shows any sign of supporting Trump’s views of Russia.
This very morning, Washington’s major politicians are widely quoted, and all of the major Western newspapers are just full of sensational accusations, calling Trump a "traitor." They actually use that strong and stinging word, over and over, for a sitting American President. I don’t recall anything like it.
America's establishment has powerful drives pushing its Russo-phobia, and those do not disappear just because Trump talks to Putin.
The drives are not identified in public speeches and documents about Russia. No, they are hidden, kept in the dark, just as is America’s support for the savage bands of mercenaries posing as jihadis or freedom fighters who have worked to destroy peaceful countries like Syria, Libya, and others in recent years.
In America, nothing which really drives affairs is out on the surface to be seen and understood by the public. It just does not work that way in a fairly ruthless imperial power which maintains the pose of land of liberty and human rights, an imperial power in fact run by a fairly small establishment of special interests. It does not put its dirty laundry out to be seen.
The accusations filling the newspapers this morning are reinforced by the fact that Trump has been attacked from the beginning about being too friendly with Russia, and the people who created that phony line of attack knew just what they were doing.
They understood the vulnerabilities of this political outsider who suddenly came from nowhere to seize control of a major party, one long adrift with little purpose, and to go on to win America’s biggest political prize.
That simply is not the way things are supposed to happen in America’s carefully constructed political duopoly, one designed to give an illusion of democracy while guaranteeing that the establishment wins every election, at least in terms of the military and imperial interests which really matter. Both parties are slavishly loyal to those.
Trump simply cannot change the reasons driving the establishment’s Russo-phobia, and the reasons are shared by the Democrats, major Republicans, powerful lobbies, the CIA, and the Pentagon – pretty much every party making up the American power establishment.
He is himself a confused figure, here talking about fighting the establishment - “the swamp” as he calls it - there perfectly serving its interests. And doing all of it with boisterous and unpleasant rhetoric which only helps the establishment in promoting its dislike of him.
The charges of “treason” sound just like the Cold War to me, at its worst, and I lived through the Cold War. This is a repeat of ugly Senator Joe McCarthy in about 1950, wildly waving his sheets of paper supposedly filled with lists of communists and traitors in the government.
Sen. McCarthy was in fact a closet-drunk trying to fire up a failing political career, and he was encouraged secretly by some powerful Washington interests for a while – people like J. Edgar Hoover - because his ugly nonsense served their dark purposes.
McCarthy was both a hateful man and a victim of secret establishment interests, and that is just the way I see Trump.
The situation in Washington much resembles what it was in the early 1950s, only the secret purposes of the establishment actors creating the whole flap are somewhat different, as you would expect with the passage of seventy years.
Again, much about what really is going on is found here:
http://chuckmanotherchoiceofwords.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-chuckman-comment-why-i-think-trump.html
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAT BUCHANAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump Calls Off Cold War II
“There will be no Cold War II. Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of the nation and the fate of his presidency”
Well, I very much wish that it were so.
But one man, and one who is much disliked in Washington, even within his own party, can do no such thing.
There is, and I say this very sadly, no sense of realism in what Pat Buchanan writes.
Indeed, even a President well-liked by his fellow politicians in Washington could do no such thing because American Presidents simply do not have that kind of power. Power is distributed in Washington among a number of major establishment figures and interest groups, and none of them shows any sign of supporting Trump’s views of Russia.
This very morning, Washington’s major politicians are widely quoted, and all of the major Western newspapers are just full of sensational accusations, calling Trump a "traitor." They actually use that strong and stinging word, over and over, for a sitting American President. I don’t recall anything like it.
America's establishment has powerful drives pushing its Russo-phobia, and those do not disappear just because Trump talks to Putin.
The drives are not identified in public speeches and documents about Russia. No, they are hidden, kept in the dark, just as is America’s support for the savage bands of mercenaries posing as jihadis or freedom fighters who have worked to destroy peaceful countries like Syria, Libya, and others in recent years.
In America, nothing which really drives affairs is out on the surface to be seen and understood by the public. It just does not work that way in a fairly ruthless imperial power which maintains the pose of land of liberty and human rights, an imperial power in fact run by a fairly small establishment of special interests. It does not put its dirty laundry out to be seen.
The accusations filling the newspapers this morning are reinforced by the fact that Trump has been attacked from the beginning about being too friendly with Russia, and the people who created that phony line of attack knew just what they were doing.
They understood the vulnerabilities of this political outsider who suddenly came from nowhere to seize control of a major party, one long adrift with little purpose, and to go on to win America’s biggest political prize.
That simply is not the way things are supposed to happen in America’s carefully constructed political duopoly, one designed to give an illusion of democracy while guaranteeing that the establishment wins every election, at least in terms of the military and imperial interests which really matter. Both parties are slavishly loyal to those.
Trump simply cannot change the reasons driving the establishment’s Russo-phobia, and the reasons are shared by the Democrats, major Republicans, powerful lobbies, the CIA, and the Pentagon – pretty much every party making up the American power establishment.
He is himself a confused figure, here talking about fighting the establishment - “the swamp” as he calls it - there perfectly serving its interests. And doing all of it with boisterous and unpleasant rhetoric which only helps the establishment in promoting its dislike of him.
The charges of “treason” sound just like the Cold War to me, at its worst, and I lived through the Cold War. This is a repeat of ugly Senator Joe McCarthy in about 1950, wildly waving his sheets of paper supposedly filled with lists of communists and traitors in the government.
Sen. McCarthy was in fact a closet-drunk trying to fire up a failing political career, and he was encouraged secretly by some powerful Washington interests for a while – people like J. Edgar Hoover - because his ugly nonsense served their dark purposes.
McCarthy was both a hateful man and a victim of secret establishment interests, and that is just the way I see Trump.
The situation in Washington much resembles what it was in the early 1950s, only the secret purposes of the establishment actors creating the whole flap are somewhat different, as you would expect with the passage of seventy years.
Again, much about what really is going on is found here:
http://chuckmanotherchoiceofwords.blogspot.com/2018/07/john-chuckman-comment-why-i-think-trump.html
Monday, July 16, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: WHY I THINK TRUMP IS GOING TO HELSINKI - ANALYSIS OF TRUMP'S WEAK POSITION IN WASHINGTON - THE REASONS RUSSO-PHOBIA CANNOT BE DISLODGED IN WASHINGTON - ALL THE POWERFUL ACTORS SUPPORT IT FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS - WHAT THE SUBTLE PUTIN IS DOING WITH TRUMP
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump's Open Defiance of Washington's Russophobia Is a Revolutionary Act”
This analysis is flawed.
Yes, it is good that Trump is meeting Putin and, yes, that fact flies in the face of many Washington establishment figures.
But please examine the overall record of this man, Trump.
It is loaded with contradictions and downright stupidities.
You cannot count on anything when dealing with someone like that. He is out-of-touch and uninformed on a great many matters. He often is caught making up his own version of something while he speaks or is being interviewed. He listens to almost no one, and he has little patience for most people trying to tell him anything.
He is a total living, breathing America-Firster. Actually, I believe Trump is a Donald Trump-Firster, always and in all things, and America really only comes into the picture because it provides the stage for his hammy and often-blundering acting performance. He is in many ways a rather sick and isolated man.
But he does have a fairly powerful political base, which feeds on the raw meat of xenophobia and fear of migrants and Islamophobia and love of walls, and he uses that base to push back in Washington. He has to push, even his own party, because most of its establishment truly dislike Trump. He’s treated like an unwelcome dinner-party guest who somehow got a genuine invitation by mistake.
With Trump, there's no substance of which to get hold, just a lot of noise and a massive ego. He betrays friends, insults allies as well as enemies, and is totally for himself and is highly protective of his hermetically-sealed mindset about the world and its people.
This trip for Trump serves another purpose, too, having nothing to do with geo-politics. He is effectively telling the Washington establishment off about Russia because he fears some of the efforts underway by the Special Prosecutor are leading to serious trouble.
Whether the material the Special Prosecutor is gathering from past Trump associates - and several are cooperating - is damning enough ultimately to remove him from office is, in the end, up to the court of public opinion.
Evidence in any legal case of any nature can be interpreted in different ways. And we often end up with either convictions or exonerations which don't reflect the underlying hard facts.
Humans are fallible and the legal systems they create are fallible. Often, the truth, the kind of truth you would believe if you actually sorted through all the evidence carefully and without partiality, gets tossed into the garbage.
We've seen it happen many times - from the phony case made against Lee Oswald in the Kennedy assassination or the manufactured investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 to the phony "not guilty" verdict in the O J Simpson murder case. Truth simply does not prevail in an atmosphere thick with interests and influence.
Trump has reason to fear because there's no denying it, Washington is just totally in the grasp of the Russia-Fear-and-Loathing Crowd. Not just the Democratic Party, but the security services, the Pentagon, and some of the most powerful lobbies, such as the one for Israel.
Yes, Russia maintains pretty good relations with Israel - one of Putin's great strengths is maintaining good relations with many differing interests – but Israel’s rulers’ deepest feelings are undoubtedly that Russia is intrinsically a barrier.
You see, Israel and its lobby in Washington very much like a hyper-aggressive United States, the kind of United States which has rampaged through the Middle East. They see that kind of United States as a guarantee of Israel’s future. Israel’s position in the Middle East is inherently weak and always has been, but its de facto role as an American colony in the region gives it strength it wouldn’t have on its own as a truly independent nation state, something it emphatically is not.
And no group is more influential in Washington than the Israel Lobby, owing to the sheer fact that it represents so many very successful and influential American businessmen, including those who own or manage all of the high-end national press and broadcasting. Trump has bent over backward trying to please them with stuff like the illegal recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and his total ignoring of Israel’s murderous activity against the people of Gaza, who want nothing but their rights.
He also has his big plan brewing for an “historic final settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians, which is in the hands of his son-in-law, a good friend of Netanyahu, and, by all accounts leaking out, is so biased against Palestinian interests, it is sure to fail, however that does not mean that the effort won’t please members of the Lobby.
The CIA and Pentagon tend to be on side with the Israel Lobby because they see Israel as a strategic asset in the Middle East, and they just basically loathe the only country on earth, Russia, which is capable of destroying the United States. The Democrats are “on side” because they are political opponents of Trump and because they are loyal servants of American imperial interests and because they have pretty much all been politically bought-and-paid-for over many years by the Israel Lobby. But then, so has the Republican Party whose biggest big-shots do not really like Trump.
I do not see any powerful interest group in Washington right now which wants or demands better relations with Russia. It’s a good cause that completely lacks a base of support, because nothing in Washington is decided on the basis of merit. Matters are decided by politics and by imperial geo-politics.
Those groups – Democrats, Republicans, CIA, Pentagon, and powerful lobbies - are all married to the concept of America re-asserting itself in the world through a new kind of multi-faceted and hybrid aggression on almost every front.
They are not satisfied to accept the relative economic decline underway for “the indispensable nation” as states who were not competitors in the past become competitors. They want to push and bully their way into as many advantages in the world as they possibly can. It really is a Mafia-like business model for the country. And that is just what has been happening, with or without Trump, for some years now. Obama, for example, worked full-time towards the goal although you never heard him make speeches about it.
There’s only Trump in Washington saying America needs better relations with Russia – and, of course, he is right, but being right in Washington won’t get you so much as a cup of coffee. There is also the fact, not appreciated by many people abroad, that, in terms of the American Constitution, the President just isn’t all that powerful inside the United States. His only unquestioned power comes in time of war when he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In other matters, it is a constant struggle with other elements of a divided government, one divided by its very design in the American Constitution.
Putin understands this all clearly, I’m sure, and I believe he is using Trump to drive a wedge into the heart of the powerful and dominant anti-Russia coalition in Washington. I don’t think he necessarily sees Trump as Russia’s friend – and, let’s be honest, with an erratic man like Trump, what kind of dependable friendship does he offer to anybody? - but Putin very much sees Trump as a tool to use in a very dark and dangerous game being played inside the United States. This is the way high-level power-politics is played, and Putin is a master at it.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Trump's Open Defiance of Washington's Russophobia Is a Revolutionary Act”
This analysis is flawed.
Yes, it is good that Trump is meeting Putin and, yes, that fact flies in the face of many Washington establishment figures.
But please examine the overall record of this man, Trump.
It is loaded with contradictions and downright stupidities.
You cannot count on anything when dealing with someone like that. He is out-of-touch and uninformed on a great many matters. He often is caught making up his own version of something while he speaks or is being interviewed. He listens to almost no one, and he has little patience for most people trying to tell him anything.
He is a total living, breathing America-Firster. Actually, I believe Trump is a Donald Trump-Firster, always and in all things, and America really only comes into the picture because it provides the stage for his hammy and often-blundering acting performance. He is in many ways a rather sick and isolated man.
But he does have a fairly powerful political base, which feeds on the raw meat of xenophobia and fear of migrants and Islamophobia and love of walls, and he uses that base to push back in Washington. He has to push, even his own party, because most of its establishment truly dislike Trump. He’s treated like an unwelcome dinner-party guest who somehow got a genuine invitation by mistake.
With Trump, there's no substance of which to get hold, just a lot of noise and a massive ego. He betrays friends, insults allies as well as enemies, and is totally for himself and is highly protective of his hermetically-sealed mindset about the world and its people.
This trip for Trump serves another purpose, too, having nothing to do with geo-politics. He is effectively telling the Washington establishment off about Russia because he fears some of the efforts underway by the Special Prosecutor are leading to serious trouble.
Whether the material the Special Prosecutor is gathering from past Trump associates - and several are cooperating - is damning enough ultimately to remove him from office is, in the end, up to the court of public opinion.
Evidence in any legal case of any nature can be interpreted in different ways. And we often end up with either convictions or exonerations which don't reflect the underlying hard facts.
Humans are fallible and the legal systems they create are fallible. Often, the truth, the kind of truth you would believe if you actually sorted through all the evidence carefully and without partiality, gets tossed into the garbage.
We've seen it happen many times - from the phony case made against Lee Oswald in the Kennedy assassination or the manufactured investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 to the phony "not guilty" verdict in the O J Simpson murder case. Truth simply does not prevail in an atmosphere thick with interests and influence.
Trump has reason to fear because there's no denying it, Washington is just totally in the grasp of the Russia-Fear-and-Loathing Crowd. Not just the Democratic Party, but the security services, the Pentagon, and some of the most powerful lobbies, such as the one for Israel.
Yes, Russia maintains pretty good relations with Israel - one of Putin's great strengths is maintaining good relations with many differing interests – but Israel’s rulers’ deepest feelings are undoubtedly that Russia is intrinsically a barrier.
You see, Israel and its lobby in Washington very much like a hyper-aggressive United States, the kind of United States which has rampaged through the Middle East. They see that kind of United States as a guarantee of Israel’s future. Israel’s position in the Middle East is inherently weak and always has been, but its de facto role as an American colony in the region gives it strength it wouldn’t have on its own as a truly independent nation state, something it emphatically is not.
And no group is more influential in Washington than the Israel Lobby, owing to the sheer fact that it represents so many very successful and influential American businessmen, including those who own or manage all of the high-end national press and broadcasting. Trump has bent over backward trying to please them with stuff like the illegal recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and his total ignoring of Israel’s murderous activity against the people of Gaza, who want nothing but their rights.
He also has his big plan brewing for an “historic final settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians, which is in the hands of his son-in-law, a good friend of Netanyahu, and, by all accounts leaking out, is so biased against Palestinian interests, it is sure to fail, however that does not mean that the effort won’t please members of the Lobby.
The CIA and Pentagon tend to be on side with the Israel Lobby because they see Israel as a strategic asset in the Middle East, and they just basically loathe the only country on earth, Russia, which is capable of destroying the United States. The Democrats are “on side” because they are political opponents of Trump and because they are loyal servants of American imperial interests and because they have pretty much all been politically bought-and-paid-for over many years by the Israel Lobby. But then, so has the Republican Party whose biggest big-shots do not really like Trump.
I do not see any powerful interest group in Washington right now which wants or demands better relations with Russia. It’s a good cause that completely lacks a base of support, because nothing in Washington is decided on the basis of merit. Matters are decided by politics and by imperial geo-politics.
Those groups – Democrats, Republicans, CIA, Pentagon, and powerful lobbies - are all married to the concept of America re-asserting itself in the world through a new kind of multi-faceted and hybrid aggression on almost every front.
They are not satisfied to accept the relative economic decline underway for “the indispensable nation” as states who were not competitors in the past become competitors. They want to push and bully their way into as many advantages in the world as they possibly can. It really is a Mafia-like business model for the country. And that is just what has been happening, with or without Trump, for some years now. Obama, for example, worked full-time towards the goal although you never heard him make speeches about it.
There’s only Trump in Washington saying America needs better relations with Russia – and, of course, he is right, but being right in Washington won’t get you so much as a cup of coffee. There is also the fact, not appreciated by many people abroad, that, in terms of the American Constitution, the President just isn’t all that powerful inside the United States. His only unquestioned power comes in time of war when he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In other matters, it is a constant struggle with other elements of a divided government, one divided by its very design in the American Constitution.
Putin understands this all clearly, I’m sure, and I believe he is using Trump to drive a wedge into the heart of the powerful and dominant anti-Russia coalition in Washington. I don’t think he necessarily sees Trump as Russia’s friend – and, let’s be honest, with an erratic man like Trump, what kind of dependable friendship does he offer to anybody? - but Putin very much sees Trump as a tool to use in a very dark and dangerous game being played inside the United States. This is the way high-level power-politics is played, and Putin is a master at it.
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: I AGREE WITH THE VIEW HELSINKI IS LIKELY TO BE A DAMP SQUIB - STILL IT IS IMPORTANT TO MEET - TALKING WITH FRIENDS OR OPPONENTS IS ALWAYS GOOD
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"Let's Be Serious, the Helsinki Meeting Will Be a Damp Squib
There is actually nothing the two can or are willing to bargain on"
I tend to agree with the point of view.
And we have a great deal of evidence that Trump is less an opponent of the Washington establishment than a supporter, albeit a very noisy and unpleasant one. I also think he is being driven in this summit by certain personal fears, as I explain in another comment.
But it is important that they meet. Talking is always good, whether with friends or enemies.
Just the fact of their meeting is of some substance given the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, truly poisonous.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"Let's Be Serious, the Helsinki Meeting Will Be a Damp Squib
There is actually nothing the two can or are willing to bargain on"
I tend to agree with the point of view.
And we have a great deal of evidence that Trump is less an opponent of the Washington establishment than a supporter, albeit a very noisy and unpleasant one. I also think he is being driven in this summit by certain personal fears, as I explain in another comment.
But it is important that they meet. Talking is always good, whether with friends or enemies.
Just the fact of their meeting is of some substance given the poisonous atmosphere in Washington, truly poisonous.
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: SILLY PROPAGANDA IN GUARDIAN CALLS HELSINKI AN "UNHOLY ALLIANCE" - WHY THAT IS RIDICULOUS - AND WAR ON IRAN - GUARDIAN AGAIN SUSPENDS ME FROM COMMENT AFTER THIS ONE - FREE SPEECH AND INFORMED THOUGHT INDEED!
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SIMON TISDALL IN THE GUARDIAN
(AND NOTE: NOT MANY DAYS AFTER THIS POST, THE GUARDIAN YET AGAIN SUSPENDED ME FROM MAKING COMMENTS – I HAD BEEN MAKING THEM UNDER A PSEUDONYM SINCE THE PREVIOUS SUSPENSION)
"Trump and Putin’s unholy alliance could lead to war with Iran”
Unholy alliance?
Are we to take the writer seriously using a phrase like that?
They've met briefly, likely have spoken a few times on the phone, and they are an unholy alliance?
Moreover, the United States remains at loggerheads with Russia, a totally artificial state of aggression by America's establishment, and I don't see where he's lifted a finger to make things better.
Indeed, Trump promotes war everywhere. In personal relations. In international trade. In intelligence activities. And with record spending and bomb-dropping.
He has troops illegally in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and a lot of other places. He speaks now of invading poor democratic Venezuela, a government the CIA has worked to destroy for several years.
He has done nothing about the mess America created with a coup in democratic Ukraine. He sends fleets charging around to anger China. He supports horrific acts in many places, including notably in Gaza by Israel.
The US drops a large bomb somewhere today every twelve minutes. And it spends almost a trillion dollars a year (when you take all the costs into account such as veterans' hospitals) on death and destruction. A trillion dollars, and it doesn't have a dime in its pocket.
The pragmatic, calm, even-tempered Putin maybe could teach Trump something. We'd all benefit.
In truth the only thing on earth pushing anyone towards war with Iran, a country which has attacked no one, is the influence of Israel, a country which literally has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once.
Its dark influence upon the United States has never been greater or more dangerous than under Trump.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SIMON TISDALL IN THE GUARDIAN
(AND NOTE: NOT MANY DAYS AFTER THIS POST, THE GUARDIAN YET AGAIN SUSPENDED ME FROM MAKING COMMENTS – I HAD BEEN MAKING THEM UNDER A PSEUDONYM SINCE THE PREVIOUS SUSPENSION)
"Trump and Putin’s unholy alliance could lead to war with Iran”
Unholy alliance?
Are we to take the writer seriously using a phrase like that?
They've met briefly, likely have spoken a few times on the phone, and they are an unholy alliance?
Moreover, the United States remains at loggerheads with Russia, a totally artificial state of aggression by America's establishment, and I don't see where he's lifted a finger to make things better.
Indeed, Trump promotes war everywhere. In personal relations. In international trade. In intelligence activities. And with record spending and bomb-dropping.
He has troops illegally in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and a lot of other places. He speaks now of invading poor democratic Venezuela, a government the CIA has worked to destroy for several years.
He has done nothing about the mess America created with a coup in democratic Ukraine. He sends fleets charging around to anger China. He supports horrific acts in many places, including notably in Gaza by Israel.
The US drops a large bomb somewhere today every twelve minutes. And it spends almost a trillion dollars a year (when you take all the costs into account such as veterans' hospitals) on death and destruction. A trillion dollars, and it doesn't have a dime in its pocket.
The pragmatic, calm, even-tempered Putin maybe could teach Trump something. We'd all benefit.
In truth the only thing on earth pushing anyone towards war with Iran, a country which has attacked no one, is the influence of Israel, a country which literally has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once.
Its dark influence upon the United States has never been greater or more dangerous than under Trump.
Saturday, July 14, 2018
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE AMESBURY INCIDENT IN BRITAIN - ALMOST MORE BIZARRE THAN THE ORIGINAL SALISBURY "NOVICHOK" INCIDENT
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA
“As expected, Russia was accused of the death of a British woman, who died at a hospital in Britain a few days ago after she was supposedly exposed to Novichok nerve agent”
This latest event in Amesbury is almost more bizarre than the original Salisbury “Novichok” Incident.
If we can even believe the British government and press after a great many fables from the original incident, the chemical in the recent one came from a small bottle in the home of the stricken people, something they picked up somewhere.
It has not been confirmed yet whether the chemical is the same batch (supposedly) used in the Salisbury Incident, but nerve poisons are not exactly common things to be around.
If it proves to be the case that the poison came from the same batch, it suggests someone disposed of the bottle after Salisbury, and rather carelessly.
Was a vile of this material stolen from Britain’s nearby Porton Down facility by someone or other, with the authorities never advising anyone? All these major government labs either have samples of such material or they can synthesize it. That is part of their job, to know all the different compounds so they can be identified in future and appropriate antidotes administered.
You may recall the big Anthrax scare in the US in the 1990s. We never heard more, but it appeared from some evidence that the material may have been stolen from an American military lab by an insider.
Readers may enjoy:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/john-chuckman-comment-the-scandal-that-never-stops-giving-everything-that-is-but-some-truth-new-disinformation-provided-on-the-british-skripal-poisoning-affair-implausibilities-of-the-affai/
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/john-chuckman-comment-manufactured-events-in-salisbury-are-a-response-to-recent-events-in-syria-a-fascinating-news-report-about-the-doctor-who-found-the-daughter-and-treated-her/
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA
“As expected, Russia was accused of the death of a British woman, who died at a hospital in Britain a few days ago after she was supposedly exposed to Novichok nerve agent”
This latest event in Amesbury is almost more bizarre than the original Salisbury “Novichok” Incident.
If we can even believe the British government and press after a great many fables from the original incident, the chemical in the recent one came from a small bottle in the home of the stricken people, something they picked up somewhere.
It has not been confirmed yet whether the chemical is the same batch (supposedly) used in the Salisbury Incident, but nerve poisons are not exactly common things to be around.
If it proves to be the case that the poison came from the same batch, it suggests someone disposed of the bottle after Salisbury, and rather carelessly.
Was a vile of this material stolen from Britain’s nearby Porton Down facility by someone or other, with the authorities never advising anyone? All these major government labs either have samples of such material or they can synthesize it. That is part of their job, to know all the different compounds so they can be identified in future and appropriate antidotes administered.
You may recall the big Anthrax scare in the US in the 1990s. We never heard more, but it appeared from some evidence that the material may have been stolen from an American military lab by an insider.
Readers may enjoy:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/john-chuckman-comment-the-scandal-that-never-stops-giving-everything-that-is-but-some-truth-new-disinformation-provided-on-the-british-skripal-poisoning-affair-implausibilities-of-the-affai/
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/john-chuckman-comment-manufactured-events-in-salisbury-are-a-response-to-recent-events-in-syria-a-fascinating-news-report-about-the-doctor-who-found-the-daughter-and-treated-her/
JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: HOW AMERICAN FOOTBALL RESEMBLES THE ARENA SPECTACLES OF ANCIENT ROME ONLY THEY DON'T KILL THE PLAYERS, JUST INJURE THEM - BUT THAT COULD CHANGE GIVEN DEVELOPMENTS IN AMERICA
John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA
“The NFL is a criminal enterprise”
I've always regarded American football as resembling imperial Rome's arena spectacles.
It's a sports culture designed to reinforce the attitudes and values of American empire.
Marching bands in the full splendor of Ruritanian palace guards, monster flags carried by an obligatory real-soldier color guard with rifles and white shoulder straps, gals in Ruritanian military caps high-stepping with short skirts, sequined panties, and matching booties while twirling batons, the unsingable imperial anthem with a loud-speaker demand for all to rise, not infrequently sung by someone who can’t sing or garbles the words, and the crowds of tens of thousands straining their vocal cords.
A big war parade before armor-clad players come out the field to hit and smash each other
They are very similar types of gatherings to those of Rome with the noise and displays and bloodlust, only football doesn't kill the players, it just hurts them.
But I'm sure if it were possible America would have a big audience for the exact Roman spectacles.
Maybe it will come to that with all the spirit of killing, from the colonial wars abroad to local cops who kill about three people a day in America, with ignoring great human misery, as in the refugees of the Middle East or in the horrors of Gaza, and with readiness to accept the violation of many traditional laws and ethical principles and agreements that today characterizes America.
After all, in America's South, well into the 1930s, while FDR was in the White House, lynchings were often treated as family picnic occasions with gatherings on the town square while a man was hanged. Eleanor complained to Franklin about it and asked him to intervene, but he said he could do nothing without losing his support from Southern Democrats.
Ah, yes, America, you do have some proud moments. The rah-rah is good for the guys you send off to places like Vietnam where you managed to kill 3 million souls or Iraq where you killed another million.
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA
“The NFL is a criminal enterprise”
I've always regarded American football as resembling imperial Rome's arena spectacles.
It's a sports culture designed to reinforce the attitudes and values of American empire.
Marching bands in the full splendor of Ruritanian palace guards, monster flags carried by an obligatory real-soldier color guard with rifles and white shoulder straps, gals in Ruritanian military caps high-stepping with short skirts, sequined panties, and matching booties while twirling batons, the unsingable imperial anthem with a loud-speaker demand for all to rise, not infrequently sung by someone who can’t sing or garbles the words, and the crowds of tens of thousands straining their vocal cords.
A big war parade before armor-clad players come out the field to hit and smash each other
They are very similar types of gatherings to those of Rome with the noise and displays and bloodlust, only football doesn't kill the players, it just hurts them.
But I'm sure if it were possible America would have a big audience for the exact Roman spectacles.
Maybe it will come to that with all the spirit of killing, from the colonial wars abroad to local cops who kill about three people a day in America, with ignoring great human misery, as in the refugees of the Middle East or in the horrors of Gaza, and with readiness to accept the violation of many traditional laws and ethical principles and agreements that today characterizes America.
After all, in America's South, well into the 1930s, while FDR was in the White House, lynchings were often treated as family picnic occasions with gatherings on the town square while a man was hanged. Eleanor complained to Franklin about it and asked him to intervene, but he said he could do nothing without losing his support from Southern Democrats.
Ah, yes, America, you do have some proud moments. The rah-rah is good for the guys you send off to places like Vietnam where you managed to kill 3 million souls or Iraq where you killed another million.
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