Everyone's saying it now, but I was among the first to say it here, here, here, and here -- exclusives for OEN -- that the Invasion was coaxed and the war was going to happen because we wanted it to happen. We, meaning the People. We love it. Atrocities hide our hypocrisies really well. The Good Germans were just "doing their jobs" as jobs, too, encouraging the cattle car murderers and kristallnacht looters, by looking the udder way. It became a kiner and gentiler place overnight. Our "Leni" Riefenstahl MSM have made Ever-War our own American version of the Triumph of the Will, itself a pittilish travesty of Nietzsche's Der Wille zur Macht, reminiscent of the snot-beating Machiavelli's Prince took in the wrong hands. We seem desperate to mix it up with the Reds -- here's why.
All the usual signs are there. Mass Manipulations. Pictures of atrocities. Calling Putin a war criminal. Once more we hear, The War has "united" Americans. Our dearly beloved Ukrainians are being falsely accused of running dangerous biolab research facilities. The Cancel Culture is busy liquidating those "seen as" Putin supporters. Yer either Fer Me or Agin' Me reporting. Calling Putin "crazy." Talk that his top aides "misinformed" him (and may not be trustworthy). Biden, of all people, 'toe-to-toe"-ing and looking into the soul (and seeing the opposite of what GW Bush saw).
All that's left is to discover Putin once got kicked out of art school and, for a while, in his Seele Kampf, wore his clipped-off paintbrushes as a mustache. Do you smell bunker mentality cologne from Mennen? Raising questions, in the current milieu, means being called out stupidly as, gah-gah, a conspiracy theory.
I'm not going to play the game and say I'm not a pro-Putin man. F*ck Putin. F*ck Biden. You don't have to do much 'unpacking' or gain-of-function academic 'interrogation' (it's torture) of a tied-up ululating dogma to see it's all baloney. Flibber Flabber. Jibber Jabber. It's all about money and power. In this episode of Oligarch East versus Oligarch West, it's getting depressing: The Chinese do capitalism better than us and the Russians are like the Founding Fathers of oligarchy, going back to the Tsars.
The Europeans, with whom we have a special relationship, onnacounta the world wars we bailed the 'cheese-eating surrender coccyxers' out of, are already turning to a new global reserve currency. The Russians and Chinese, in collusion and apart, are looking to exchange goods (and maybe spit) by means other than the SWIFT transactional system that the monkey paws in Washington control.
Are there atrocities going on? Duh. It's war. That there are wars at this stage of our evolution is an atrocity in itself. Do we give a sh*t? The Left says it does, and some do, I do, but don't. Like most of us far, far lefties, meaning neo-Yippies, we don't want to see people hurt in any way and strive for a system of thinking and pragmatics that can get some basic needs met for as many as possible (democratic socialism) so that we can get on to following our respective (and, in most cases, respectable) blisses. What's happened and is happening in Ukraine right now is another case of a fascist coming along and putting his knee in Ukraine's neck. And now we lefties are all in anguish again. I myself have gone back to re-reading Antonin Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty ouvre. Sometimes it seems like some witchdoctor is fuggin with us, keeping us on pins and needles, as it were, lovin our handwriting toll bells, followed by a food fight.
Is Putin a war criminal? I don't know. He hasn't been tried yet. Is GW Bush a war criminal? I don't know. He hasn't been tried yet. Is Joe Biden a criminal? I don't know. He hasn't been impeached yet. But I get a little queasy inside when I hear it reported that Joe Biden is collecting evidence of war criminality. Are we sh*tting? Next to the Nazis, who some of our military brass have so admired, "we" have so much to answer before a Nuremburg setting that it's embarrassing Ugly American bullshit to hear us talk of such things. It's almost like they're testing us to see if anyone in there still remembers the war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that Julian Assange and Wikileaks revealed. Remember "Collateral Murder" anyone? Christ, we could use Julian's prolixity and acuity and display of leaky condoms from the Pentagon now.
The biolabs in Ukraine master debate between the MSM networks. The claim that the Russians are playing propaganda nonsense? Huh? We now know that we paid a Wuhan lab millions of dollars that partially went toward gain-of-function virus snot-beatings to get the info out of the little batshit crazy mass murderer -- so we could be prepared in case there was an outbreak. That's why you play God with G-O-F. That's what Fauci said was the silver lining of such research. The US thought it was too dangerous and shut it down in America under Obama. The Trump administration re-opened its funding. (No press coverage.)
Not long after, by coincidence, we have a pandemic, maybe as the result of that paid-for work in Wuhan spilling in our laps like hot coffee -- ooooh. Conspiracy theory? Do you have a dental plan? As I reported until I was exhausted, the US government released a framework describing how they would be creating synthetic biological monsters in the lab to find solutions in case our adversaries (not just Russians, can you believe it?) decided that the next Pearl Harbor event (don't get caught without a ticket and be discovered beneath a truck, as the Bard from Duluth would say) was to be a novel bio or chemo shock. WE CREATE MONSTERS. We scourge the monster and let the doctor who raised it from the dead off scotch free. The MSM is so caught up in sensationalism that even when there's the rare "down time" they dish up about all their inner office sexual predations taking pace -- just to sell ads.
Does Ukraine have biolabs? Whatever the answer, you learn a lot from the way the media look at it. Because the Ukrainians -- what's left of them (remember the pre-war diaspora -- millions have gone elsewhere for a better life away the slutty corruption of their government -- even the beloved Zelensky, who the media hold up like he's still playing a masterful role in Servant of the People, is owned by an oligarch) aren't darlings. Zelensky is a Jewish head of state in a country notoriously full of neo-Nazi types. Tough stuff. But even the Israelis question the integrity of some of his claims. Haaretz the other day had to knock back Zelensky claims he made before an address to the Knesset that Ukrainians helped liberate Jews during the war. Oh-oh. The headline says it all: "Ukrainians Saved Jews in the Holocaust? ...Zelenskyy, in his address to Israeli lawmakers, made a number of claims about Ukraine and the Holocaust - but some of them are not quite accurate". He begins to seem like a self-loathing Jew on the order of Kissinger or Sydney Gottlieb.
Ukrainians don't deserve the atrocities, and, with luck, some heads will roll, so to speak, after a post-war trial for war crimes. But do they have biolabs? Why not? The American Press said, No! They're not like that. But they lied, Just recently, at a congressional meeting grilling Victoria Nuland, the former liaison to Ukraine under Obama (and so, a confidante of Biden, who held the Ukraine portfolio under Obama), said, yes, there are biolabs there.
Whether those biolabs are being run to do something to Russia is a totally separate question. After all, we are forced to presume that "our" contract work with the Wuhan lab was not meant as a menace to the public. (We have had other labs in Shanghai.)
Whoever started the Cancel Culture gangland executions of character should be punched in the face, disfiguratively speaking. Woke? It's too late to Woke with your Coke; just go back to sleep, fuggit, you can't solve anything and you don't really want to try. When the "revolution" comes and 400 million guns shot off are heard around the world, then run, because if the world's premiere Democracy caves, then it's gonna be chickaboom-chickaboom-chickaboomboomboom around the world. "We" call Putin crazy, but shrug like Atlas when Joe goes, "You're not Black unless you vote for me" or "You're a lying dog-faced pony soldier." If Biden's not trotting around like a centaur, naked from the saddle up, it's because he hasn't hit the gym in a while, and his pecs have lost their lifeguard allure.
The American response to events in Ukraine is driven by money. Just recently, I interviewed Heidi Peltier, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, whose researchers have concluded that the 20 year wars after 9/11 add up to approximately $8 trillion -- with nothing to show for it. Nothing. One great statistic that didn't come up in our discussion was the Cost to the Climate that the post-9/11 wars have caused. It's worth considering the figure researchers came up with:
1.2 Billion Metric Tons put out by the world's biggest polluter -- the Pentagon! Verily, we may be able to claim that the single largest contributor to the Climate Crisis and the post-apocalyptic implications it brings is the US military and its endless wars! What the Pentagon itself has done to the world may be the worst war crime of all time. Just stopping the wars would put us on the path of healing. But...
Peltier emphasized the influence of contractors during the 20-year period since 9/11, She points out that during that period, contractors have received half of all that money -- $4 trillion -- and confirms that such an arrangement skirts direct public scrutiny. It's a worry, she says, that such contractors may influence the US involvement in Ukraine -- pushing for a military solution over a political settlement, motivated by money only:
"And you can see that in their stock prices. There's a quote from the CEO of Raytheon who's saying this is going to be good for us. And so I think that's one thing to watch is that contractors and some contractors are benefiting from this and we'll have no incentive for the US to minimize its intervention.
Again, note the Climate Change data above. They/ we don't care. The call should be for a ceasefire and political settlement -- by the world -- and instead we get fiery rhetoric from the US and mad calls from Ukrainian President Zelensky for an air-support from the US and NATO and direct confrontation with the Russians.
Our heads are being played -- online and off. I thought the best take on the psychology being played out in the War was delivered right here in these OEN pages recently by Caitlin Johnstone. In her "Defending Psychological War,"
This NBC report confirms rumors we've been hearing for months. Professional warmonger Max Boot said via The Council on Foreign Relations think tank in February that the Biden administration had ushered in "a new era of info ops'' with intelligence releases designed not to tell the truth but to influence Putin's decisions. Former MI6 chief John Sawers told The Atlantic Council think tank in February that the Biden administration's "intelligence" releases were based more on a general vibe than actual intelligence and were designed to manipulate rather than to inform.
The very specialized "info ops" that the US was accusing the Russians of executing during the 2016 (and 2020) presidential elections turns out to be a feature of American foreign policy, along with unilateral economic sanctions. Alas, poor Julian Yorick, we miss you for the balance. Johnstone, though, is on the ball.
But frankly, Glenn Greenwald deserves a lot of kudos for his dogged refusal to back off from calling Russiagate what it was/is -- an intel operation. He would say that it began with the 2016 presidential election cycle and the rise of Donald J. Trump. We now know that Hillary -- like her or hate her (I lean toward the latter) -- won the popular vote by the millions. And thanks to the investigative work of Greg Palast, we have plenty of evidence that a collusion of Republican secretaries of state stole the 2016 election. What Greenwald was quick to sniff out was the nonsense fashion in which American intelligence agencies were interfering in the elections by baseless claims of Russian meddling. The main "evidence" was an "assessment" that the DNC headquarters had been hacked and Clinton's beans spilled by way of Wikileaks, working with the Russkies, as a "non-state combatant" -- making him eligible for a new car! and a drone to blow it up with-- him driving.
Greenwald staked his reputation on the claim of nonsense reporting by the MSM in support of the IC "assessment." Over and over, he showed that, when you thought about it, there is no real evidence of the claims made by the IC community, and that everything rode on trusting the words of -- principally -- two known liars: John Brennan and James Clapper. These two, arguably, should be in prison for their lies. The "assessment," as Greenwald unpacked, is little more than an opinion. Further, the DNC "hack," having ostensibly happened on American soil was FBI turf, not the NSA's -- or, God help us all, the CIA's. , whose mandate requires that they stay out of domestic politics if for no other reason than that they exist to take down governments with subterfuge. As Kissinger said before Chile's 9/11, some elections are "too important to let the people decide." Ask Nixon.
So, "we" let Assange take the fall in what amounts to a set up. Hillary had asked rhetorically, "Can't we just drone him?" Answer, paddy clarke ha-ha, is No, we can't. So they set him up as an enemy combatant working for the Russians in a propaganda role. Since "they" couldn't refute the evidence that Wikileaks dropped on the public ("Collateral Murder" is what it was.) they had to work on his character and by that means reduce his credibility as a person and a journalist. My favorite bit of theirs was the gambit whereby "they" were trying to equate how if he would be willing to hump a Swedish hottie with a leaky condom, then his website was, too, an unwanted pregnancy of consciousness. O, mon Dieu! the crazy little crackers the IC hires. Of course, Assange could help explain what's happened here, but his Espionage Act trial will probably be classified -- like Noreiga, who saw special opper coppers come rushing in to knee him in the neck when they got tired of him.
More recently, Greenwald quit the publication he co-found, The Intercept, when they broke contract and refused to publish his work -- as is -- just prior to the November 2020 presidential election in which he, following the lead of the NY Post, suggested that emails found on a Hunter Biden laptop that turned up in a repair shop had significant evidence of pay-for-play corruption involving the Biden family and their doings in Ukraine and China. The MSM approached the material, as advised by another IC "assessment," as being a Russian disinformation campaign to influence the 2020 election. The Intercept editors refused to run his piece without serious redactions. Greenwald walked.
In recent days, Greenwald has reminded us that the "disinformation" tag was false and that the MSM was actually the vehicle of disinformation by calling Hunter's laptopgate situation spy stuff. The NYT and WaPo have recently run stories indicating that the email information of the laptop is verified and accurate and that, indeed, there may be concern about corruption in the Biden family. Greenwald is making sure everyone knows that he was right all along and that the material will come back to haunt Joe Biden and could even lead to the payback impeachment Repugs have promised, should the House be lost in the fall. In the meantime, getting a Black supreme court judge in place and playing 'the Russians are evil' card, while staying away from calling every day for a peaceful solution in Ukraine instead of jacking up the pressure on Putin with vitriol, raises the f*cker's poll numbers. If he can just keep it going until mid-November without helping to blow up the world!
For my money, (*SPOILER ALERT* potential conspiracy theory ahead, but with evidence) the IC used the Trump victory in 2016 to begin the warpath we are now on with Russia in pre-planned re-entanglement some folks are already labelling Cold War 2.0. Greenwald sees the re-re-re-re-demonization of Russia that way. And, again, as Heidi Peltier suggests, a Cold War is a place to make money. A re-energized weapons race and tactical this-es and troop movements that could bring the logistics folks a lot of hard cold cash -- you know, on pallets.
What's my point? Well, one way of considering things is to see, as I'm sure many folks have already, that economic think-tankers got together a generation ago and could see the Nebuchadnezzar writing on the wall. Hell, there's even a game put out by Daniel Ellsberg's old haunt, RAND -- Hedgemony: A Game of Strategic Choices -- that plays this sh*t out on a game board what's actually going on right now. Check out the video, in case you think I'm conspiring with myself again:
You can purchase the game for $250. I'll pitch in. Anybody out there want to play unilateral make-their-economy scream with me?
I'm done with my point. So, a generation ago, the Pentagon could see it would eventually lose its hedges and need to return to brute force to get the world back in an order it could understand and control. (Probably it goes back to NIxon and the removal of the gold standard: money used to represent its weight in gold") Folks who mention the Project for A New American Century (PNAC), where the notorious expression of "absent another Pearl Harbor"is mentioned in reference to the shock to the system required to get America back in the Teddy saddle again, are usually seen by the MSM as "conspiracy theorists." The problem is, of course, that the PNACkers were theorists and they were conspiring (see the definition in the dictionary). So"9/11 happened, due to intel failures (see 9/11 Commission Report and Cofer Black), and the PNAC vision -- essentially of world conquest --was serendipitously put into play.
Fine. Let's take the world by storm. The problem is that two of the other players -- Russia and China -- have nukes. The other two opponents -- Iran and North Korea -- are seeking nukes because they have RAND board games too, and know how the game is played. Some players want to find the father of the Pakistan nuke program and beat the sh*t out of him, as the Pakis are suspected of providing the Saudis (think MBS and Khashoggi and infidel dismemberment worldwide*) with nukes, as well as to the North Koreans and maybe even the Iranians. It's clear now that it makes a significant difference in your board game position if you have a nuke or not. The Ukrainians, for instance, fucked themselves when they gave away their nukes to the Russians after the Soviet Union's collapse. They wouldn't have had a need to be part of NATO and nobody would be saying, I tawt I taw a Putin cat. I did. I did. I did see a Putin cat. Well, remember how it ends in the cartoon for the cat.
Since 2012 the US government has been making the case, through the compliant MSM, that the Chinese and Russians are coming after our intellectual property and electoral family jewels. That's mind and body, Sid. Cybersecurity companies Mandiant and Crowdstrike have together acted as the techie affirmers of IC accusations by locating cyber breaches within the corporate and media sectors and attributing them to the Eur/Asians. In 2012, WaPo, NYT, and WSJ were said to be breached by the Maoists (they claim they're over him). A picture of the Red Army hackers was published and their Shanghai location revealed, pic of the building included. A grand jury indicted the Maoists, in absentia, and then the story disappeared. The next year, Snowden snitched. Then we had 2016 and the DNC hack that Mandiant and Crowdstrike said the Stalinists were the culprits of. A picture of the other Red Army hackers was published and their Moscow location revealed, pic of the building included. A grand jury indicted the Stalinists, in absentia, and then the story disappeared. The two cybersecurity contractors got fabulously rich.
Then, as I wrote about a couple years back, it came to light that Mandiant (soon after their Chinese revelation sold to FireEye, a CIA start-up, for $1b) and Crowdstrike (affiliated with the FBI, through CSO Shawn Henry, who "oversaw half of the FBI's investigative operations, including all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide") had things in common that are interesting to the public. President and CEO and co-founder of Crowdstrike George Kurtz started out in the biz as a colleague of Mandiant's Kevin Mandia at a software security company called Foundstone. The company closed down in the shadow of a scandal involving -- of all things -- software piracy! So now, the good buds are in the protection racket again. And also in the Hedgemony game too.
But my gathering point is that to a discerning eye there's a line of inquiry unasked from the Choicepoint database in 2000 to the war in Ukraine and the sights beyond that is a Plan, not even necessarily secret -- just unexamined, which is practically the same thing. The global reserve currency controlled now by the US is going down. And with it the US middle class lifestyle and buffer between the rich and minimum wage lifers and debt slaves. Again, as Heidi Peltier and Andrew Bacevich have recently reiterated, the US war machine that spent $8 trillion over 20 years on nothing special -- including not one court conviction of a 9/11 terrorist -- is likely willing to risk everything to save its ass, including thinking the unthinkable, just as it is in board games, when you swear you won't sell Boardwalk -- and then you do.
Hillary once said of the Clinton predicament that she and her husband were facing "a vast right wing conspiracy," but instead of calling her theory conspiracist she went on to win the presidency -- only to have it stolen. Isn't that a kick in the head?
