Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
You know what's WORSE than mass murder?
This discussion thread was locked by Skinner (a host of the 2016 Postmortem forum).
War.
Especially "wars of choice."
Worst of all, are wars for profit.
"Commercial interests are very powerful interests," said the selected president George W Bush during a White House press conference on Feb. 14, 2007, in which he added, "Let me put it this way, ah, sometimes, ah, money trumps peace."
Then he giggled. And not a single member of the callow, cowed and corrupt press corpse has seen the profit industry's motive in war a fit subject to ask a follow-up.
Not. A. Single. One.
Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan, however, did try to bring it to our nation's attention back at the time. And to this day, apart from a few individual reporters, I don't recall even a single national news network seeing warmongers a fit subject for reporting, let alone comment.
Makes it also understandable how there has been zero national news media have EVER commented on how three generations of Bush men -- Senator Prescott Sheldon Bush, President George Herbert Walker Bush and pretzeldent George Walker Bush all had their eyes on Iraq's oil.
As millions of innocent people are dead from this war, I wish the Press had done its job. Those in authority would have to do their job. Millions might still be alive, the People might use the money spent on wars in better ways, and the Republic might see a return to Justice. To get that started requires jailing those who lied America into war, not making them into heroes cough Bush.
Click the warmonger's thumb for details from someone who knows, personally, what this post is about.
Oh, and it's posted here instead of GD because of her associations:
Hillary Clinton Pitched Iraq As 'A Business Opportunity' For US Corporations
BY DAVID SIROTA AND ANDREW PEREZ
International Business Times, Sept. 30, 2015
When then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the war against Iraq in 2002, she justified her support of the invasion as a way to protect America’s national security. But less than a decade later, as secretary of state, Clinton promoted the war-torn country as a place where American corporations could make big money.
“It's time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity," she said in a 2011 speech.
The quote was included in an email released by the State Department on Wednesday that specifically mentioned JPMorgan and Exxon Mobil. JPMorgan was selected by the U.S. government to run a key import-export bank in Iraq and in 2013 announced plans to expand its operations in the country. Exxon Mobil signed a deal to redevelop Iraqi oil fields. JPMorgan has collectively paid the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation at least $450,000 for speeches, and Exxon Mobil has donated over $1 million to the family’s foundation.
SNIP...
In the aftermath of the Iraq War, the Bush administration pushed to privatize wide swaths of the Iraqi economy. Many prominent political voices charged that the conflict was not about national security or a humanitarian mission against a dictator but was instead an attempt to use military force to open up Iraq’s closed economy to foreign corporations -- including oil giants like Exxon Mobil.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ibtimes.com/campaign-2016-hillary-clinton-pitched-iraq-business-opportunity-us-corporations-2121999
Some of the people who've contributed to her family's various charitable foundations have made a mint from war, too.
Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department
BY DAVID SIROTA AND ANDREW PEREZ
International Business Times, May 26, 2015
SNIP...
These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing -- the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 -- contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.
The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.
Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure -- derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) -- represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.
American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.
The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.
CONTINUED...
http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187
So, before you type "THREE DAYS!" in all caps or 3-2-1 or whatever, remember what this post is about:
War is the worst thing in the world, it kills MILLIONS of innocent people.
War is more than the worst thing in the world if you're also making a buck in the process.
228 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk
Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.
By MARK LANDLER
APRIL 21, 2016
EXCERPT...
Andrew Shapiro, then Senator Clinton’s foreign-policy adviser, called upon 10 experts — including Bill Perry, who was defense secretary under her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would eventually become President Obama’s fourth defense secretary — to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, an octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel. She visited the troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 and spoke at every significant military installation in New York State. By then — 30 years after she recalled being rejected by a Marine recruiter in Arkansas — Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.
Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.
Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army’s second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn’t get that whiff from her.
“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”
Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,’?” Keane told her dryly.
Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?_r=1
As for that poster: Been here all of 3 weeks and 670 posts already. I'd think in all that time, he or she should have read something about those who make their nut off War Inc.
Lt. Col. Ted Westhusing, US Army was in charge of training the New Iraqi Army and overseeing civilian contractors. He had served as an instructor at West Point, where he was known as the "Army's highest ranking ethicist." He is remembered as a good man, a brilliant man who followed the Cadet Code: "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.”
He had expressed doubts about his mission and worries about his safety. Then, he became the victim of a gunshot -- a "suicide."
Col. Westhusing was the Army's chief ethicist and someone who suspected something was wrong with David Petraeus, way back when. Then, just when he was about to come home to his loving wife and family, he became a suicide.
Is David Petraeus Dirty? Ted Westheusing Said So, and Then He Shot Himself
By Melina Hussein Ripcoco, Brilliant at Breakfast
Alternet.org
April 8, 2008
Ted Westhusing, was a champion basketball player at Jenks High School in Tulsa Oklahoma. A driven kid with a strong work ethic, he would show up at the gym at 7AM to throw 100 practice shots before school. He was driven academically too, becoming a National Merritt Scholarship finalist. His career through West Point and straight into overseas service was sterling, and by 2000 he had enrolled in Emory University to earn his doctorate in Philosophy. His dissertation was on honor and the ethics of war, with the opening containing the following passage: "Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge." Would that all military commanders took such an interest in the study of ethics and morality and what our conduct in times of war says about our development as human beings. Would that any educational system in this country taught ethics, decision making, or even political science that's not part of an advanced degree anymore.
Ted Westhusing, the soldier, philosopher and ethicist, was given a guaranteed lifetime teaching position and West Point by the time he had finished with his service and his education. he felt like he could do more for his country by trying to shape the minds coming out of the academy that were the ones that would be military commanders. He had settled into that life with his wife and kids, when in 2004 he volunteered for active duty in Iraq, feeling like the experience would help his teaching. He had missed combat in his active duty and it seemed like an important piece for someone who not only philosophized about war, but who was also preparing the military's future leaders.
But more than that, he was sure that the Iraq mission was a just one; he supported the cause and he bought the information that was put in front of him. Considering that vials of powder were being tossed around hearings by the highest level of military commanders how could he not? This was a man who was so steeped in the patriotism of idealistic military fervor that he barely could fit in regular society. His whole being was dedicated to this path, and he was proud to serve his country.
Once in Iraq, he found himself straddling the fence between a questioning philosopher and an unquestioning soldier. Westhusing had thought he was freeing a country in bondage, keeping America safe from a horrible threat, and spreading democracy to a grateful people. But the reality of what was happening in this out of control war was too much for him. His mission was to oversee one of the most important tasks left from the war; retraining the Iraqi military by overseeing the private contractors that had been put in charge of it.
As the assignment went on he found that everywhere he looked he was seeing corrupt contractors doing shoddy work, abusing people, and stealing from the government. These contractors were being paid to do many of the jobs that would normally be done by a regulated military, and they bore out the worst fears of those who don't believe in outsourcing such vital work. He responded to the corruption that he saw by reporting the problems up the line, but the response from his commanding officers was disappointing. He had, for much of his career, idolized military commanders, and in that assignment he found himself with some of the military's most famous faces, doing the most important job, but he was terribly disappointed and alarmed to realize that they were greedy and corrupt themselves.
CONTINUED...
http://www.alternet.org/story/81678/is_david_petraeus_dirty_ted_westhusing_said_so,_and_then_he_shot_himself
COMPLETE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.ripcoco.com/2008/04/is-david-petraeus-dirty-ted-westheusing.html
Gee. What kind of person would make money off war?
pull the trigger?
Interesting logic you got there.
" 
The above would represent libel of a private individual, but NOT of a public figure.
Here's the whole story:
Bernie Wins Wisconsin on Honesty and Inspiration; Gets Shamed on Cover of New York Paper
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade: April 6, 2016
According to ABC exit polls, Senator Bernie Sanders big win of 56.5 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 43.1 percent in the Democratic primary yesterday in Wisconsin was fueled by voters belief in his honesty, his ability to inspire and confidence that he can improve the economy. But the very day that Sanders should be enjoying that big win, the New York Daily News has seen fit to devote its full front cover of today’s newspaper to shaming Sanders.
What did Sanders do to infuriate the New York Daily News? Absolutely nothing. The newspaper has twisted an interview its editorial board conducted with Sanders on April 1 into a pretzel to come up with a headline screaming that Sanders “callously defends gunmakers” against the relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, who are attempting to sue the gun manufacturer for selling the assault weapon that killed the children and school staff.
What Sanders actually said in that interview is that (1) he would vote to ban assault weapons like the one used in Sandy Hook; (2) he supports suing gun manufacturers if they knowingly sell a gun to people exhibiting suspicious behavior; (3) he would “significantly strengthen and expand the instant background check,” (4) “do away with the gun show loophole, where people now are buying guns from unlicensed dealers,” and (5) “do away with the straw man provision, where you can buy a gun legally and then sell it to somebody who’s a criminal.” (Read the full transcript here.)
SNIP...
Clearly, Wisconsin Democrats and Independents who handed Sanders a 13 point victory over Clinton want experience infused with a track record of honesty. According to ABC exit polls, 90 percent of voters in yesterday’s Democratic primary “identified Sanders as honest and trustworthy” versus “57 percent who said the same about Clinton.”
The ABC exit poll also found that “Three-quarters of Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin are worried about the direction of the economy. Nearly four in 10 expect life for the next generation of Americans to be worse than life today, vs. only a third who think it’ll be better.”
CONTINUED w/links, sources, etc...
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/04/bernie-wins-wisconsin-on-honesty-and-inspiration-gets-shamed-on-cover-of-new-york-paper/
The entire article from Pam and Russ Martens is worth reading and remembering, IMO.
Background: How much was street artist Blu paid for whitewashed MOCA mural?
By now the much-talked-about “mural incident” between MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch and Italian street artist Blu has a lot of people seeing red. “Censorship,” some cry, referring to Deitch’s removal of Blu’s antiwar mural on the north wall of the Geffen. Others say it’s sensitivity, not censorship, as Deitch was concerned that the mural -- which pictured coffins covered in dollar bills -- would be offensive to some in the neighborhood, as there’s a Veterans Affairs hospital and a war memorial to Japanese-American soldiers in close proximity to the museum.
By now the much-talked-about “mural incident” between MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch and Italian street artist Blu has a lot of people seeing red. “Censorship,” some cry, referring to Deitch’s removal of Blu’s antiwar mural on the north wall of the Geffen. Others say it’s sensitivity, not censorship, as Deitch was concerned that the mural -- which pictured coffins covered in dollar bills -- would be offensive to some in the neighborhood, as there’s a Veterans Affairs hospital and a war memorial to Japanese-American soldiers in close proximity to the museum.
Some things are just too shocking to consider -- perhaps especially by those whose actions have led to the deaths of innocent people.
Thank you for grokking, Duval. It's good to read you!
Here's what I think about human life:
Each human being represents an infinite universe of possibility and should be treasured as such.
Here's someone who reinforces that radical idea for me:
"Every second we live is a new and unique moment for the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again.
And what do we teach children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France.
When will we also teach them: Do you know what you are?
You are a Marvel. You are Unique. In all the world there is no other child exactly like you.
In the millions of years that have passed there has never been another child like you.
And look at your body what a wonder it is! Your legs, your arms, your cunning fingers, the way you move!
You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel?
You must cherish one another. You must work. We all must work to make this world worthy of children." -- Pablo Casals
Time flies for us as it is. By what right can I cut another's brief time in this universe?
But, amazingly, it did not succeed. 
On Sun Jun 12, 2016, 02:54 PM an alert was sent on the following post:
You know what's WORSE than mass murder?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512179296
REASON FOR ALERT
This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate.
ALERTER'S COMMENTS
Hide this. Why on earth is a post equating the Democratic presumptive nominee or any other Democrat allowed to be with being a war monger and being worse than a mass murderer on a day that this country has lost so many to such a senseless crime? This post is just sick.
You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Sun Jun 12, 2016, 03:02 PM, and the Jury voted 3-4 to LEAVE IT.
Juror #1 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: To borrow a phrase from a wiser person than me, "Have you no decency?"
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Nothing wrong with this post.
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #4 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: Easy hide
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #7 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: An OP directly implicating Bernie Sanders in the Florida massacre is not hidden. This OP is about war, a traditional subject for liberals to discuss.
Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.
(* Approximate.)
So refreshingly.... What's the word I'm looking for.
Oh yes. Accurate.
Got it. 
I've quoted Don Fulsom because of what he wrote about Nixon's crimes:
So much fuel melted under the reactors that I'd forgotten the clowns with the evil stares. LOL.
The Mob's President: Richard Nixon's Secret Ties to the Mafia
Don Fulsom
CrimeMagazine.com, February 5, 2006
EXCERPT...
Many Nixon biographers say Richard Danner, a former FBI agent gone bad, introduced Nixon to Rebozo in 1951. Danner was the city manager of Miami Beach when it was controlled by the Mob. Danner eventually became a top aide to Nixon’s financial angel, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. And, years later, during the final act of the Watergate scandal, Danner delivered a $100,000 under-the–table donation from Hughes to President Nixon.
Nixon and Rebozo hit it off almost immediately. Their mutual friend, Sen. George Smathers of Florida, once said: “I don’t want to say that Bebe’s level of liking Nixon increased as Nixon’s (political) position increased, but it had a lot to do with it.”
The two men were almost inseparable from then on. Rebozo was there to lend moral as well as financial support to his idol through Nixon’s many political ups and downs. He was there in Florida in 1952 when Nixon celebrated his election to the vice presidency; Rebozo was in Los Angeles in 1960 when Nixon got word that Sen. John Kennedy had edged him out for the presidency; he comforted Nixon after his 1962 defeat for California governor; and Rebozo and Nixon drank and sunbathed together in Key Biscayne after Nixon’s political dreams came true and he won the 1968 presidential election. During Nixon’s White House years, rough estimates show Rebozo was at Nixon’s side one out of every 10 days.
Known as “Uncle Bebe” to Nixon’s two children, Trisha and Julie, Rebozo frequently bought the girls – and Nixon’s wife Pat – expensive gifts. He purchased a house in the suburbs for Julie after she married David Eisenhower. The Saturday Evening Post, in a March 1987 article, put the price at $137,000.
Rebozo came in and out of the White House as he pleased, without being logged in by the Secret Service. Though he had no government job, Rebozo had his own private office and phone number in the executive mansion. When he travelled on Air Force One, which was frequently, Bebe donned a blue flight jacket bearing the Presidential Seal and his name. (Nixon’s own flight jacket was inscribed “The President” – as though no one would recognize that fact by just looking at him.)
Rebozo’s organized crime connections were solid. For one, he had both legal and financial ties with “Big Al” Polizzi, a Cleveland gangster and drug kingpin. Rebozo built an elaborate shopping center in Miami, to be leased to members of the rightwing Cuban exile community, and he let out the contracting bid to Big Al, a convicted black marketer described by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as “one of the most influential members of the underworld in the United States.”
Nixon and Rebozo bought Florida lots on upscale Key Biscayne, getting bargain rates from Donald Berg, a Mafia-connected Rebozo business partner. The Secret Service eventually advised Nixon to stop associating with Berg. The lender for one of Nixon’s properties was Arthur Desser, who consorted with both Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa and mobster Meyer Lansky.
Nixon and Rebozo were friends of James Crosby, the chairman of a firm repeatedly linked to top mobsters, and Rebozo’s Key Biscayne Bank was a suspected pipeline for Mob money skimmed from Crosby’s casino in the Bahamas. By the 1960s, FBI agents keeping track of the Mafia had identified Nixon’s Cuban-American pal as a “non-member associate of organized crime figures.”
Former Mafia consigliere Bill Bonanno, the son of legendary New York godfather Joe Bonanno, asserts that Nixon “would never have gotten anywhere” without his old Mob allegiances. And he reports that — through Rebozo — Nixon “did business for years with people in (Florida Mafia boss Santos) Trafficante’s Family, profiting from real estate deals, arranging for casino licensing, covert funding for anti-Castro activities, and so forth.”
If friendships enabled Nixon to craft links with the Mafia, so did hatred. Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa hated John and Robert Kennedy as much as Nixon did. Robert Kennedy had been trying to put Hoffa in jail since 1956, when RFK was staff counsel for a Senate probe into the Mob’s influence on the labor movement. In a 1960 book, Robert Kennedy said, “No group better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his lieutenants.”
Because he shared a common enemy with Nixon, Hoffa and his two million-member union backed Vice President Nixon against Sen. John Kennedy in the 1960 election, and did so with more than just a get-out-the-vote campaign. Edward Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later government informant, revealed that Hoffa met with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello to secretly fund the Nixon campaign. Partin told Mob expert Dan Moldea: “I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon ... (Another $500,000 contribution) was coming from Mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” Hoffa himself served as Nixon’s bagman.
CONTINUED (now, for-pay, but a few more graphs can be read gratis)...
http://www.crimemagazine.com/mobs-president-richard-nixons-secret-ties-mafia
Nixon and the Mob go way back. Thanks to Bush political dynasty, their influence is felt to the present day. Here's the original post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027026587#post58
Most DUers would be happy to shed light on them. You seem to enjoy protecting them by bashing me, SidDithers of DU.
As always, thank you, Octafish. 
Nothing you say or write from now until then will prevent Hillary from being our nominee. The primary is over! Hillary wins DC! Sanders endorses Hillary. It's over!
Can't cope? I'm not caring. Your problem, not mine. She won, he lost.
Well that's disappointing.
by this homophobic asshole with an AR-15.
Oh wait....the OP doesn't.
My bad.
I tried to click on Hillary's thumb but couldn't find it. 
The timing might be bad for some but as a country we never address war and the many filthy, fucked up reasons behind it. It's way past time that we do.
I thought those Bernie Fans who reach for bottom-of-the-barrel arguments had all FFR'ed themselves to oblivion by now.
Apparently not. 
Both, warmongers and mass murderers.
You know what may be even worse? Those who lie America into war. Like Iraq.
Not in 2003. In 1991. When Poppy George Herbert Walker Bush, courtesy of Hill & Knowlton, had to resort to some serious PR to get the country behind his war on the new Hitler Saddam Hussein (our former ally, propped up by the CIA the same Poppy Bush had headed:
The Kuwait ambassador's daughter, committing perjury on behalf of the administration as she tells the US Congress she was a nurse at a Kuwaiti City hospital who saw the Iraqi soldiers take babies from their incubators and leave them on the cold, hard floor so they could steal the incubators for babes in Baghdad.
"If I wanted to lie, or if we wanted to lie, if we wanted to exaggerate, I wouldn't use my daughter to do so. I could easily buy other people to do it." -- Kuwait Ambassador
So. When is this disgusting subject of lying America into war on Iraq talked about on tee vee?
I'd say the checks in the mail, but I don't get paid to post on DU.
Speaking of missing the point, here's information on Online Propaganda - Invisible Tool of Secret Government:
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
By Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 24 Feb 2014
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
SNIP...
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:
SNIP...
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
CONTINUED w/links, sources, details...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
By Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 24 Feb 2014
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
SNIP...
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:
SNIP...
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
CONTINUED w/links, sources, details...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
Imagine how they feel about people who point out their criminal warmongering ways, Dr Hobbitstein.
And still they don't care about the people they kill and those who seek to avenge the killed.
Neocon Kagan Endorses Hillary Clinton
Exclusive: Hillary Clinton’s cozy ties to Washington’s powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews, February 25, 2016
Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel’s interests.
SNIP...
A Reagan Propagandist
Kagan, who I’ve known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan’s State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department’s chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton’s patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014.
Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had begun to call “liberal interventionist” would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. The Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes” and quoted Kagan as saying:
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.
CONTINUED...
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/25/neocon-kagan-endorses-hillary-clinton/
Exclusive: Hillary Clinton’s cozy ties to Washington’s powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
ConsortiumNews, February 25, 2016
Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel’s interests.
SNIP...
A Reagan Propagandist
Kagan, who I’ve known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan’s State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department’s chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton’s patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014.
Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had begun to call “liberal interventionist” would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. The Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes” and quoted Kagan as saying:
“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”
Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.
CONTINUED...
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/25/neocon-kagan-endorses-hillary-clinton/
Our woman in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, is married to PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan
Robert Kagan's brother is Frederick Kagan
Frederick Kagan's spouse is Kimberly Kagan
Brilliant people, big ideas, etc. The thing is, that's a lot of PNAC. And the PNAC approach to international relations means more wars without end for profits without cease, among other things detrimental to democracy, peace and justice.
On September 11, non-PNACers got "got left behind."
How long did it take you to figure out how to slam Clinton over this horrible event?
Bonus points for showing zero compassion to the lives lost and the lives changed forever in Orlando this morning.
Take a bow!
no fucking idea what this is about.
Bonus: Great capitalization on what we ALL knew happened in Orlando, but obviously you did not, until announcing it here.
Let's hear it for you! 
For instance:
Obama said he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. People are still dying there in combat, including US service men and women.
What's worse, war has spread to Syria and Libya and who knows it's classified where else.
Go Democracy!
Oh, almost forgot:
Look who's playing politics!
where 50 people, at a gay bar, were killed, and another 53 were injured?
Why can't this tragedy stand on its own?
Sid
"The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe," Nixon explained. "Latin America doesn't matter. Long as we've been in it, people don't give one damn about Latin America, Don." Stay away from Africa, too, Nixon warned. As for the Middle East, getting involved there carried too many potential hazards for a politician. "People think it's for the purpose of catering to the Jewish vote," Nixon told Rumsfeld. "And anyway, there's nothing you can do about the Middle East."
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2003/11/rumsfelds-roots/378570/
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2003/11/rumsfelds-roots/378570/
I can't leave a tragedy to "stand on its own." It's how wars after wars have continued without end since Vietnam.
"Why should we hear about body bags and death? I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" -- Barbara Bush, March 18, 2003, on Good Morning America
Of course, there wasn't much follow up on that or her family, friends and cronies cashing in on all the resultant war. What else America missed:
The Rise of a ‘Democratic’ Fascism
Traditional fascism is defined as a right-wing political system run by a dictator who prohibits dissent and relies on repression. But some analysts believe a new form of fascism has arisen that has a democratic façade and is based on relentless propaganda and endless war, as journalist John Pilger describes.
By John Pilger
ConsortiumNews.com, March 2, 2015
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”
Gaddafi’s Torture/Lynching
The public sodomizing of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people.
“We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Barack Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention.”
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in U.S. dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power.
Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the U.S. as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships.”
Following NATO’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency.”
The Kosovo Model
The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.
David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59? might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.”
The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”
A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
Expanding Markets
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia.
By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the U.S. saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics.
The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the U.S. delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
American Interventions
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.
“The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of U.S. policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion. . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” He is right.
As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
Afghan’s Shining Moment
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.
“Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example.”
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government.
In August 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.”
His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.
Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror,” in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”
Threads of Fascism
[font size="5"][font color="red"]The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. [/font color][/font size]The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the U.S.; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered.
In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat.”
“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
American Exceptionalism
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s.
As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture.
I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, U.S. losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”
There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America.
Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the U.S.; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the U.S. space program.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”
The Ukraine Coup
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On Feb. 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington to get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the U.S. arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defense Minister as “the minister for defeatism.”
It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary who was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998. She was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup in Ukraine did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions.
More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion.” The NATO commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
Repressing Ethnic Russians
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On Jan. 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news.
Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
On Feb. 21, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established. …
“If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
Nuremberg Lessons
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. …
“In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
In the Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit.”
In 2003, Garton-Ash repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”
The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader.
The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, is a former senior U.S. State Department official who was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border.
Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com
SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/02/the-rise-of-a-democratic-fascism/
Traditional fascism is defined as a right-wing political system run by a dictator who prohibits dissent and relies on repression. But some analysts believe a new form of fascism has arisen that has a democratic façade and is based on relentless propaganda and endless war, as journalist John Pilger describes.
By John Pilger
ConsortiumNews.com, March 2, 2015
The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”
Gaddafi’s Torture/Lynching
The public sodomizing of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people.
“We knew … that if we waited one more day,” said President Barack Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda.” Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for NATO’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention.”
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by NATO bombers.
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in U.S. dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power.
Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the U.S. as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships.”
Following NATO’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency.”
The Kosovo Model
The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent NATO to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo.
David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59? might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War.”
The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the NATO bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust.” The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”
A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
Expanding Markets
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia.
By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognize Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the U.S. saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. NATO, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics.
The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the U.S. delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatization of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; NATO bombs fell on a defenseless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
American Interventions
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions.” The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment.
“The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of U.S. policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion. . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.” He is right.
As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
Afghan’s Shining Moment
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers.
“Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution].” Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example.”
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorized support for tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government.
In August 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.”
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilize” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims.”
His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them.
Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone.” Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror,” in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”
Threads of Fascism
[font size="5"][font color="red"]The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. [/font color][/font size]The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones,” “body counts” and “collateral damage.” In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the U.S.; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered.
In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat.”
“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarization of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
American Exceptionalism
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s.
As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognized as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognized brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture.
I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, U.S. losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days.”
There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America.
Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the U.S.; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the U.S. space program.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of NATO, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists.”
The Ukraine Coup
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum,” including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On Feb. 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington to get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry.” If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the U.S. arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defense Minister as “the minister for defeatism.”
It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary who was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, which began pushing for the invasion of Iraq in 1998. She was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup in Ukraine did not go to plan. NATO was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions.
More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion.” The NATO commander, General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing.” In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
Repressing Ethnic Russians
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history.” In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says.” Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint.”
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On Jan. 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army.” There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups,” but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news.
Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
On Feb. 21, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorize American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established. …
“If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
Nuremberg Lessons
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. …
“In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
In the Guardian on Feb. 2, Timothy Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit.”
In 2003, Garton-Ash repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist.” In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”
The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader.
The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain.” This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Natalie Jaresko, is a former senior U.S. State Department official who was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbor, Russia. They want to Balkanize or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border.
Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilization to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com
SOURCE: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/02/the-rise-of-a-democratic-fascism/
NOTE: Robert Parry and ConsortiumNews allow DUers to post articles in their entirety. This excellent read is an example of why that kindness makes sense for those interested in democracy.
Thank you, JEB. I very much appreciate that you consider each human life infinitely more important than money.
Explain that to all the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, grand-parents, you two...
Scholar. Sage. Pro-business. Big ideas of how to make a killing heh heh heh from academia.
The Pitfalls of Peace
The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth
Tyler Cowen
The New York Times, JUNE 13, 2014
The continuing slowness of economic growth in high-income economies has prompted soul-searching among economists. They have looked to weak demand, rising inequality, Chinese competition, over-regulation, inadequate infrastructure and an exhaustion of new technological ideas as possible culprits.
An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.
The world just hasn’t had that much warfare lately, at least not by historical standards. Some of the recent headlines about Iraq or South Sudan make our world sound like a very bloody place, but today’s casualties pale in light of the tens of millions of people killed in the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century. Even the Vietnam War had many more deaths than any recent war involving an affluent country.
Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.
It may seem repugnant to find a positive side to war in this regard, but a look at American history suggests we cannot dismiss the idea so easily. Fundamental innovations such as nuclear power, the computer and the modern aircraft were all pushed along by an American government eager to defeat the Axis powers or, later, to win the Cold War. The Internet was initially designed to help this country withstand a nuclear exchange, and Silicon Valley had its origins with military contracting, not today’s entrepreneurial social media start-ups. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred American interest in science and technology, to the benefit of later economic growth.
War brings an urgency that governments otherwise fail to summon. For instance, the Manhattan Project took six years to produce a working atomic bomb, starting from virtually nothing, and at its peak consumed 0.4 percent of American economic output. It is hard to imagine a comparably speedy and decisive achievement these days.
SNIP...
Living in a largely peaceful world with 2 percent G.D.P. growth has some big advantages that you don’t get with 4 percent growth and many more war deaths. Economic stasis may not feel very impressive, but it’s something our ancestors never quite managed to pull off. The real questions are whether we can do any better, and whether the recent prevalence of peace is a mere temporary bubble just waiting to be burst.
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/upshot/the-lack-of-major-wars-may-be-hurting-economic-growth.html?_r=0
The guy seems to specialize in Big Ticket themes:
Just when I thought, maybe, we had reached bottom and were ready to bounce up -- I discovered there may be no bottom -- for me and the large part of the 99-percent.
Economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University has seen the future and it looks bleak for most of us. Thankfully, those at the top, though, are in for some more good times. He spoke about his findings with NPR's Steve Inskeep. I almost dropped my smartphone into my coffee while texting during rush hour, listening to the report this morning, I was so steamed.
Tired Of Inequality? One Economist Says It'll Only Get Worse
by NPR STAFF
September 12, 2013 3:05 AM
Economist Tyler Cowen has some advice for what to do about America's income inequality: Get used to it. In his latest book, Average Is Over, Cowen lays out his prediction for where the U.S. economy is heading, like it or not:
"I think we'll see a thinning out of the middle class," he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "We'll see a lot of individuals rising up to much greater wealth. And we'll also see more individuals clustering in a kind of lower-middle class existence."
It's a radical change from the America of 40 or 50 years ago. Cowen believes the wealthy will become more numerous, and even more powerful. The elderly will hold on to their benefits ... the young, not so much. Millions of people who might have expected a middle class existence may have to aspire to something else.
SNIP...
Some people, he predicts, may just have to find a new definition of happiness that costs less money. Cowen says this widening is the result of a shifting economy. Computers will play a larger role and people who can work with computers can make a lot. He also predicts that everyone will be ruthlessly graded — every slice of their lives, monitored, tracked and recorded.
CONTINUED with link to the audio...
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/12/221425582/tired-of-inequality-one-economist-says-itll-only-get-worse
For some reason, the interview with Steve Inskeep didn't bring up the subject of the GOVERNMENT DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT LIKE IN THE NEW DEAL so I thought I'd bring it up. Older DUers may recall the Democratic Party once actually did do stuff for the average American, from school and work to housing and justice. But, we can't afford that now, obviously.
Oh, the good news is the 1-percent may swell to a 15-percent "upper middle class" while the rest of the middle class goes the other way. Gee. That sounds eerily familiar. Oh..."Commercial interests are very powerful interests" uttered same press conference where Smirko said, "Money trumps peace." Pretty much always the on-message 24/7/366 for most of the last century.
Tyler Cowen, man of the Final Hours.
Its so easy to point fingers at some deranged individual in order to ignore our collective guilt.
Would "they" be here if we weren't there?
Thank You for remembering Cindy Sheehan.
She was attacked with some of the same abuse and twisted logic that is being used in this thread to attack you and support the perpetual wars.
Back then, DU was a different place, but there were the early warning signs of conservatives and WAR supporters who attacked her for being unpatriotic, or attention seeking, though they were the minority.
I have a wonderful photo that I posted to DU back when it was a much safer place. This photo showed members of the DU Minnesota Group holding up a poster that said:
"We support Cindy Sheehan"
Since most, if not all, of those posters are gone now,
I was tempted to post it here, but discretion prevented that.
This is no longer a safe place.
Thank You for your courage to Keep It REAL!
Proud DURec
We know what the intention was.
Well Done as usual... 
But, geek tragedy, the reason it must be done is to speed the end of war.
The other thing, I did mention the political angle in the OP.
PS: I'm not first:
The above would represent libel of a private individual, but NOT of a public figure.
Here's the Whole Truth:
Bernie Wins Wisconsin on Honesty and Inspiration; Gets Shamed on Cover of New York Paper
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade: April 6, 2016
According to ABC exit polls, Senator Bernie Sanders big win of 56.5 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 43.1 percent in the Democratic primary yesterday in Wisconsin was fueled by voters belief in his honesty, his ability to inspire and confidence that he can improve the economy. But the very day that Sanders should be enjoying that big win, the New York Daily News has seen fit to devote its full front cover of today’s newspaper to shaming Sanders.
What did Sanders do to infuriate the New York Daily News? Absolutely nothing. The newspaper has twisted an interview its editorial board conducted with Sanders on April 1 into a pretzel to come up with a headline screaming that Sanders “callously defends gunmakers” against the relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, who are attempting to sue the gun manufacturer for selling the assault weapon that killed the children and school staff.
What Sanders actually said in that interview is that (1) he would vote to ban assault weapons like the one used in Sandy Hook; (2) he supports suing gun manufacturers if they knowingly sell a gun to people exhibiting suspicious behavior; (3) he would “significantly strengthen and expand the instant background check,” (4) “do away with the gun show loophole, where people now are buying guns from unlicensed dealers,” and (5) “do away with the straw man provision, where you can buy a gun legally and then sell it to somebody who’s a criminal.” (Read the full transcript here.)
SNIP...
Clearly, Wisconsin Democrats and Independents who handed Sanders a 13 point victory over Clinton want experience infused with a track record of honesty. According to ABC exit polls, 90 percent of voters in yesterday’s Democratic primary “identified Sanders as honest and trustworthy” versus “57 percent who said the same about Clinton.”
The ABC exit poll also found that “Three-quarters of Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin are worried about the direction of the economy. Nearly four in 10 expect life for the next generation of Americans to be worse than life today, vs. only a third who think it’ll be better.”
CONTINUED w/links, sources, etc...
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/04/bernie-wins-wisconsin-on-honesty-and-inspiration-gets-shamed-on-cover-of-new-york-paper/
The entire article from Pam and Russ Martens is worth reading, remembering and recommending. Not that you're interested in learning on this thread as much as bashing, geek tragedy. Will you be gone in three days?
Like Poppy Bush laughing during Gerald Ford's eulogy upon mention of a "deluded gunman."
It was a telling moment:
Poppy Bush brought up JFK Assassination and ''Conspiracy Theorists'' at Ford Funeral
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3029417
Poppy smirks or laughs or grins at the moment he says "deluded gunman" near the 1:09 mark:
George H.W. Bush’s Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford
The New York Times
Published: January 2, 2007
Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by former President George H.W. Bush in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.
EXCERPT…
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Ford’s word was always good.
A decade later, when scandal forced a vice president from office, President Nixon turned to the minority leader in the House to stabilize his administration because of Jerry Ford’s sterling reputation for integrity within the Congress. To political ally and adversary alike, Jerry Ford’s word was always good.
SOURCE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-ghwb.html
PS: Of course, to Gerald Ford Warren Commission skeptics presented "no problem."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3772251
PPS: What's even more telling is how there are still people interested in scrubbing the assassination record of any reference to Poppy.
PPPS: For those interested, background...
Know your BFEE: Poppy Bush was in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
C-SPAN has the film, too: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4479286/jfk-assassination-player-george-herbert-walker-bushs-eulogy-snippet-president-fords-funeral-smiles
The part that uses humanity as cannon fodder, especially.
9 Shameless Warmongers Who Call Fox News Home
By , Media Matters for America
Posted on September 5, 2010, Printed on September 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148086 /
1. Karl Rove...
White House Iraq Group was formed to “set strategy” for going to war with Iraq.
The Washington Post reported in 2003 (accessed via Nexis) that the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed in August 2002 “to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it ‘an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.’ ” Part of the WHIG’s mission, according to the Post, was to decide “what to demand of the United Nations in the president’s Sept. 12 <2002> address to the General Assembly, when to take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day.” Rove was a regular participant in this group.
WHIG promoted view that Saddam “had weapons of mass destruction and was seeking more.” The Los Angeles Times reported on August 25, 2005, (accessed via Nexis) that the WHIG “promoted the view that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was seeking more”
SNIP...
4. Bill Kristol
Kristol: “American and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators.”
In testimony delivered February 7, 2002, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Kristol said:
(A)s in Kabul but also as in the Kurdish and Shi’ite regions of Iraq in 1991, America and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators. Indeed, reconstructing Iraq may prove to be a less difficult task than the challenge of building a viable state in Afghanistan.
The political, strategic and moral rewards would also be even greater. A friendly, free, and oil-producing Iraq would leave Iran isolated and Syria cowed; the Palestinians more willing to negotiate seriously with Israel; and Saudi Arabia with less leverage over policymakers here and in Europe. Removing Saddam Hussein and his henchmen from power presents a genuine opportunity — one President Bush sees clearly — to transform the political landscape of the Middle East.
CONTINUED with details on each warmonger...
http://www.alternet.org/story/148086/9_shameless_warmongers_who_call_fox_news_home
Welcome to DU, lapucelle! You may note I don't like Buy Partisan warmongering, especially.
Oh. Kristol's partner in War Inc, Robert Kagan, endorsed Ms. Clinton recently.
Right wing/left wing, where war is concerned they meet up in the middle with no problem.
“Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in The Washington Post, in a positive review of his book “World Order.”
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/12/hillary-clintons-ties-to-henry-kissinger-come-back-to-haunt-her/
