I'm no fan of Rusell Brand's particular brand of stand-up and his new-found political zeal is barely about 5 minutes old.
But this backfiring Indie hit piece on him, here carefully dissected by Jimmy Dore and Kurt Metzger, is hilarious...
Saturday 26 March 2022
Thursday 24 March 2022
Harvard International Human Rights Clinic recognises that Israel's actions constitute Apartheid in the occupied West Bank.
Harvard International Human Rights Clinic recognises that Israel's actions constitute Apartheid in the occupied West Bank.
February 28, 2022
The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association welcome the opportunity to respond to the call for submissions by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. This submission focuses on the legal regime enforced by Israel in the occupied West Bank that denies Palestinians their civil and political rights in violation of international law.1 Specifically, this submission finds that Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank are in breach of the prohibition of apartheid and amount to the crime of apartheid under international law. Full submission.
Wednesday 23 March 2022
Monday 21 March 2022
Navigating our Humanity: Ilan Pappé on the Four Lessons from Ukraine
The USA Today reported that a photo that went viral about a high-rise in the Ukraine being hit by Russian bombing turned out to be a high-rise from the Gaza Strip, demolished by the Israeli Air Force in May 2021. A few days before that, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister complained to the Israeli ambassador in Kiev that “you’re treating us like Gaza”; he was furious that Israel did not condemn the Russian invasion and was only interested in evicting Israeli citizens from the state (Haaretz, February 17, 2022). It was a mixture of reference to the Ukrainian evacuation of Ukrainian spouses of Palestinian men from the Gaza Strip in May 2021, as well as a reminder to Israel of the Ukrainian president’s full support for Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in that month (I will return to that support towards the end of this piece).
Israel’s assaults on Gaza should, indeed, be mentioned and considered when evaluating the present crisis in the Ukraine. It is not a coincidence that photos are being confused – there are not many high-rises that were toppled in the Ukraine, but there is an abundance of ruined high-rises in the Gaza Strip. However, it is not only the hypocrisy about Palestine that emerges when we consider the Ukraine crisis in a wider context; it is the overall Western double standards that should be scrutinized, without, for one moment, being indifferent to news and images coming to us from the war zone in the Ukraine: traumatized children, streams of refugees, sights of buildings ruined by bombing and the looming danger that this is only the beginning of a human catastrophe at the heart of Europe.
At the same time, those of us experiencing, reporting and digesting the human catastrophes in Palestine cannot escape the hypocrisy of the West and we can point to it without belittling, for a moment, our human solidarity and empathy with victims of any war. We need to do this, since the moral dishonesty underwriting the deceitful agenda set by the Western political elites and media will once more allow them to hide their own racism and impunity as it will continue to provide immunity for Israel and its oppression of the Palestinians. I detected four false assumptions which are at the heart of the Western elite’s engagement with the Ukraine crisis, so far, and have framed them as four lessons.
Lesson One: White Refugees are Welcome; Others Less So
The unprecedented collective EU decision to open up its borders to the Ukrainian refugees, followed by a more guarded policy by Britain, cannot go unnoticed in comparison to the closure of most of the European gates to the refugees coming from the Arab world and Africa since 2015. The clear racist prioritization, distinguishing between life seekers on the basis of color, religion and ethnicity is abhorrent, but unlikely to change very soon. Some European leaders are not even ashamed to broadcast their racism publicly as does the Bulgarian Prime Minister, Kiril Petkov:
“These [the Ukrainian refugees] are not the refugees we are used to … these people are Europeans. These people are intelligent, they are educated people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists…”
He is not alone. The Western media talks about “our kind of refugees” all the time, and this racism is manifested clearly on the border crossings between the Ukraine and its European neighbours. This racist attitude, with strong Islamophobic undertones, is not going to change, since the European leadership is still denying the multi-ethnic and multicultural fabric of societies all over the continent. A human reality created by years of European colonialism and imperialism that the current European governments deny and ignore and, at the same time, these governments pursue immigration policies that are based on the very same racism that permeated the colonialism and imperialism of the past.
Lesson Two: You Can Invade Iraq but not the Ukraine
The Western media’s unwillingness to contextualize the Russian decision to invade within a wider – and obvious – analysis of how the rules of the international game changed in 2003 is quite bewildering. It is difficult to find any analysis that points to the fact that the US and Britain violated international law on a state’s sovereignty when their armies, with a coalition of Western countries, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Occupying a whole country for the sake of political ends was not invented in this century by Vladimir Putin; it was introduced as a justified tool of policy by the West.
Lesson Three: Sometimes Neo-Nazism Can Be Tolerated
The analysis also fails to highlight some of Putin’s valid points about the Ukraine; which by no means justify the invasion, but need our attention even during the invasion. Up to the present crisis, the progressive Western media outlets, such as The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post etc., warned us about the growing power of neo-Nazi groups in the Ukraine that could impact the future of Europe and beyond. The same outlets today dismiss the significance of neo-Nazism in the Ukraine.
The Nation on February 22, 2019 reported:
“Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultra nationalism and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.”Two years earlier, the Washington Post (June 15, 2017) warned, very perceptively, that a Ukrainian clash with Russia should not allow us to forget about the power of neo-Nazism in the Ukraine:
“As Ukraine’s fight against Russian-supported separatists continues, Kiev faces another threat to its long-term sovereignty: powerful right-wing ultra-nationalist groups. These groups are not shy about using violence to achieve their goals, which are certainly at odds with the tolerant Western-oriented democracy Kiev ostensibly seeks to become.”
However, today, the Washington Post adopts a dismissive attitude and calls such a description as a “false accusation”:
“Operating in Ukraine are several nationalist paramilitary groups, such as the Azov movement and Right Sector, that espouse neo-Nazi ideology. While high-profile, they appear to have little public support. Only one far-right party, Svoboda, is represented in Ukraine’s parliament, and only holds one seat.”
The previous warnings of an outlet such as The Hill (November 9, 2017), the largest independent news site in the USA, are forgotten: “There are, indeed, neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine. This has been overwhelmingly confirmed by nearly every major Western outlet. The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing. It is especially disturbing given the current surge of neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.”
Lesson Four: Hitting High-rises is only a War Crime in Europe
The Ukrainian establishment does not only have a connection with these neo-Nazi groups and armies, it is also disturbingly and embarrassingly pro-Israeli. One of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first acts was to withdraw the Ukraine from the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People – the only international tribunal that makes sure the Nakba is not denied or forgotten.
The decision was initiated by the Ukrainian President; he had no sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, nor did he consider them to be victims of any crime. In his interviews after the last barbaric Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip in May 2021, he stated that the only tragedy in Gaza was the one suffered by the Israelis. If this is so, than it is only the Russians who suffer in the Ukraine.
But Zelensky is not alone. When it comes to Palestine, the hypocrisy reaches a new level. One empty high-rise hit in the Ukraine dominated the news and prompted deep analysis about human brutality, Putin and inhumanity. These bombings should be condemned, of course, but it seems that those leading the condemnation among world leaders were silent when Israel flattened the town of Jenin in 2000, the Al-Dahaya neighborhood in Beirut in 2006 and the city of Gaza in one brutal wave after the other, over the past fifteen years. No sanctions, whatsoever, were even discussed, let alone imposed, on Israel for its war crimes in 1948 and ever since. In fact, in most of the Western countries which are leading the sanctions against Russia today, even mentioning the possibility of imposing sanctions against Israel is illegal and framed as anti-Semitic.
Even when genuine human solidarity in the West is justly expressed with the Ukraine, we cannot overlook its racist context and Europe-centric bias. The massive solidarity of the West is reserved for whoever is willing to join its bloc and sphere of influence. This official empathy is nowhere to be found when similar, and worse, violence is directed against non-Europeans, in general, and towards the Palestinians, in particular.
We can navigate as conscientious persons between our responses to calamities and our responsibility to point out hypocrisy that in many ways paved the way for such catastrophes. Legitimizing internationally the invasion of sovereign countries and licensing the continued colonization and oppression of others, such as Palestine and its people, will lead to more tragedies, such as the Ukrainian one, in the future, and everywhere on our planet.
Sunday 20 March 2022
Would you like some Freedom Fries with that?
Western rush to ban everything Russian, from cats to Dostoevsky, smacks of totalitarianism
Russophobic campaign straddles the entire western political spectrum, with the full endorsement of cultural elites
Western Russophobic hysteria is now in full force. German political culture, heir of the most totalitarian system the world has ever known, has led to the recent firing of a Russian orchestra conductor who refused to condemn Moscow’s military actions in Ukraine, and Russian opera singer Anna Netrebko.
As a German Jewish activist friend recently told me, this incident is not totally unrelated to the firing of German Jewish musicians in 1933 as well as German Christian musicians for refusing to support National Socialism, and that was before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.
And a few weeks ago, Germany’s state-owned Deutsche Welle was busy purging Arab staff who expressed views critical of Israel - views that are identified in rabidly pro-Israel Germany as “antisemitic”.
In Italy, whose political culture is also an heir of fascism, a university course on Dostoevsky was suspended in the name of the new Russophobia - though as a result of pressure, it was later reinstated. In the US, video game giant EA Sports removed Russian teams from its FIFA video game series.
The Russophobic campaign straddles the entire western political spectrum, and it is fully endorsed by western liberals and cultural elites. The political credulity of the majority of the populations of the US and Western Europe has always been shocking to me. Ever since I arrived in the US to attend university in 1982, I could not believe how gullible my American peers of all races were in their unshakable belief that whatever their government or corporate media said, especially about other countries, was the absolute truth.
Having grown up in Jordan under an autocratic regime, I learned, like many Jordanians, to believe very little that the government or media said. I remain partial to the idea that autocratic regimes foster democratic scepticism in their populations, while western liberal “democratic” regimes foster utter conformity and subservience to the “Ministry of Truth”, as George Orwell dubbed it.
Add to that the mob mentality and mainstream rejection of contrary opinions to prevalent beliefs in most western countries, and the situation is not that different from the fascistic culture of many European countries in the interwar period.
Incessant racist attacks
This long and thoughtful article by Joseph Massad should be read at source (useful links inluded).
Saturday 19 March 2022
Vaping Demystified...
In a brief interlude from the R/U madness/Western propaganda blitz, I'm making a little time for those who (like Yorkshire Cancer Research) succesfully dispell the propaganda machine made up of the myriad myths and downright lies promulgated by anti-vaping/anti-tobacco harm reduction prohibitionist nutzies from the inept WHO and many fellow prohibitionists. The video below really does sum up neatly what vaping really is and why it should be promoted as a tobacco harm reduction (THR) strategy worldwide.
Some of the myths debunked here:
In a hurry? Go to 08:30 and watch a demonstration comparing tobacco generated smoke to vapour generated by vaping:
Monday 14 March 2022
On Duty for the CIA: German Nazis and Italian Fascists
Apart from employing German Nazi scientists, and adopting the methods, principles, and science of the Nazis in developing modern warfare, for what other purposes were Nazis sought after the end of World War II? How were Italian Fascists able to perpetuate their ideology and expand their networks after the US had occupied Italy, and particularly when the CIA was most active in Italian affairs? After all, was it not the case that the US entered WWII to “fight fascism”? What happened to the wealth stored in secret by the Nazis? How did the US interfere in Italian elections? Did the US sponsor terrorism in Italy? Is it wrong to associate the US-backed generals that seized power across Latin America in the 1970s, and after, as “Nazis,” or is there something substantially valid about the association? In which other ways did the US directly profit from taking over from the Nazis? To what high-profile positions were Nazis promoted after WWII? What were the consequences?
In WWII Nazis were violently confronted, and only in strict military terms can it be said that they “lost” the war. The Nazis were not erased: they were simply rendered more or less stateless. The end of the war even allowed Nazis to expand their networks into new jurisdictions. Nazis came to be widely employed, and were even copied, in numerous nations for decades to come. It is well past time that we stopped repeating the myth that the US entered WWII in order to combat and defeat the Nazis as such, that it was all about “stopping fascism”. The evidence simply does not support such a view.
In the US, where in recent years a significant sector of popular opinion has bestowed a sacred status on agencies like the CIA for presumably acting as a “check” on the power of a government elected by Americans, one would hope that a re-encounter with historical reality would have a sobering effect. Least of all should the broad public turn to something like the CIA for “the truth”—spreading truthful information is far from the agenda of the CIA, and it’s amazing that this reminder is even needed. Desiring an inversion of civilian rule, expecting an elected administration to bend its knee to the CIA and other agencies of the “national security” apparatus and show due deference and respect, is in effect the same as a coup, even if not the same kind of coup that the CIA has engineered in dozens of nations around the planet. What the CIA is not, and has never been, is a “check” on the expansion of Nazis and Fascists.
Nazis in the CIA
Nazis in the CIA (2017) by director Dirk Pohlmann is a documentary that runs for 51 minutes, with each minute offering exceptional insight and information. It was originally released in German in 2013 as Dienstbereit—Nazis und Faschisten im Auftrag der CIA (which is the version that can be viewed online for free on YouTube and on Der Spiegel). It is in fact one of the best documentaries reviewed so far on this site. Far from a “conspiratorial” film that is automatically and thoughtlessly dismissed as such by the average good citizen naysayer, the film presents substantial documentation with an approach that is professional, calm, and expository. The film relies heavily on declassified documents revealing CIA activities after WWII, many of which were released to the National Archives in Washington, as well as interviews with experts and even some of the key actors discussed in the film.
The subject matter of the film is obvious from the title. It takes us beyond the common knowledge of the basics of Operation Paperclip, by showing us that Nazis (not just Germans working under Nazis) were desired for far more than just their knowledge of rocketry and nuclear physics. And that is just the start. For those who are unable to obtain a copy, the film will be outlined below in detail, along with two clips.
Interpol, the German Federal Police, and the CIA
The BKA, the German Federal Police in Wiesbaden, was for six years headed by Paul Dickopf, a man who claimed to have opposed the Nazis. Until 1971, he was Germany’s top crime-fighter. In 1968, he became the head of Interpol. After his death in 1973, staff searched his files to compile an obituary of this man upheld by top government officials as an example for all German police. What they found was evidence that Dickopf had been a staunch Nazi, and a member of the SS. Not just a member of the SS and a Nazi spy, shortly before the end of WWII Dickopf entered employment as an agent of the Americans, under the CIA code name “Caravel”. This relationship continued past the end of WWII, and thus it was that the highest-ranking member of the German police force was an informant for the CIA, who passed on his government’s secrets to the CIA. Chancellor Willy Brandt was “of particular interest to the Americans,” as the film’s narrator tells us, reminding us that Brandt pursued policies that were increasingly independent of US geopolitical interests.
One of Dickopf’s key friends was the notorious François Genoud, a Switzerland-based Nazi financier. For a time, Dickopf even lived with Genoud. Genoud was an undying fan of Adolf Hitler. Genoud also safeguarded Nazi and SS fortunes after 1945. He published Goebbels’ diaries, and made a lot of money as a result, using the proceeds to finance the legal defense for Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie. He was also connected to a range of Middle Eastern terrorism.
Particularly damning are some of the film’s contentions. Genoud was reputed to be a financier of several terrorist attacks, including the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight that resulted in millions of dollars paid in ransom to Palestinians, as well as the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972, which resulted in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. In response to these terrorist attacks, Dickopf—then head of Interpol—insisted that it was not Interpol’s job to solve international terrorist crimes, taking a radical “hands off” approach. Documents shown in the film make it crystal clear that the CIA knew of Dickopf’s ties to Genoud, and that Dickopf himself told the CIA that he knew Genoud since WWII.
Particularly damning are some of the film’s contentions. Genoud was reputed to be a financier of several terrorist attacks, including the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight that resulted in millions of dollars paid in ransom to Palestinians, as well as the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972, which resulted in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes. In response to these terrorist attacks, Dickopf—then head of Interpol—insisted that it was not Interpol’s job to solve international terrorist crimes, taking a radical “hands off” approach. Documents shown in the film make it crystal clear that the CIA knew of Dickopf’s ties to Genoud, and that Dickopf himself told the CIA that he knew Genoud since WWII.
Why did Nazis—more than just Dickopf alone—serve the CIA after WWII? The film advances its first explanation, stating that American intelligence agencies used the Nazis’ pasts in order to blackmail them into service. This sounds almost like their service was not voluntary. Christopher Simpson, an historian at American University, is quoted in the film calling them “pawns” in the Cold War. In return for keeping details of the their past silent, the Americans made no effort to punish them for their crimes, and offered payment to Nazis of interest for their services in the fields of psychological warfare and covert operations. Wilhelm Dietl, a German former intelligence agent interviewed in the film stated:
“The Americans were never very bothered if the people they needed had closes ties to mass murderers, or extremists, or terrorists. The ends justified the means”.
The film details the case of a notorious SS officer, Eugen Steimle, who was responsible for executing prisoners in the Soviet Union among other atrocities. Captured by the Americans near the end of WWII, and confronted with details of his crimes, Steimle cooperated with the US and provided them with information that helped to uncover a network of dozens of Nazi spies that had relocated to Madrid. With the collapse of the Third Reich, the Nazis in Madrid set to work on establishing the Fourth Reich, or “worldwide fascism” as the documentary translates it. The Americans observed the Madrid-based Nazis, and then recruited them to work on their behalf.
Steimle had in fact been sentenced to death by hanging, following his interrogation. However, he was then pardoned. There is no proof that the US intervened on his behalf for, as the film states, “there are important files missing from the US interrogation center in Oberursel”.
Looting Nazi Gold: The Myth of US Marshall Plan Beneficence
More than just Nazi spies, the US was interested in obtaining Nazi wealth. Towards the end of the war, German industries made plans to store their capital in the event of defeat. The idea was to reconstitute Germany after Hitler, and as Simpson notes in the film, some of those plans still exist. Meanwhile, Allied intelligence services under US direction tracked the movement of Nazi capital in an operation code named “Safe Haven”. The US was aware of a network of foreign companies created to safeguard the funds, and of a network of depots in which gold and cash were stored. Monaco in particular was home to numerous shell corporations that kept millions of dollars’ worth of Nazi capital.
Sitting on the board of one of the shell companies in Monaco, one that posed as a broadcaster, was a certain Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who would later rise to the highest political office in Germany, becoming the West German Chancellor. His service as a Nazi is typically downplayed in Western encyclopaedia articles, which emphasize that he was “cleared” by Allied courts. This saves them from stating that, from early on, we have witnessed the resurgence of Nazis in Europe (rather than all of a sudden since 2016).
Especially knowledgeable of the Nazis’ financial transactions was a US intelligence agent, based in Switzerland: Allen Dulles, who would soon rise to the top of the CIA. In addition the US was aware that after it had bombed the Deutsche Reichsbank in March of 1945, 360 tons of gold and 300 tons of silver and banknotes were spirited away. Sixty years later, Karl Bernd Esser found the missing bank documents that recorded how much capital was held by the bank at the time of the bombing. Esser found that all the gold was moved to Merkers or to select depots in Bavaria, in documents that listed how much was deposited in each depot. Thanks to Operation Safe Haven, the Americans knew exactly where the gold was stored—and they raided almost every single depot. US forces entered the Soviet occupation zone, at the Merker’s salt mine in the eastern state of Thuringia, before the Soviets themselves. The US declared the Reichsbank gold to be “Nazi loot,” and appropriated it for themselves. They also found other treasures there, including Italian gold reserves.
The US did not turn over the loot to either the victims or the relatives of victims of the German Nazis and Italian fascists, nor did they return the seized capital back to either Germany or Italy. This was an act of plunder, pure and simple. It was outright theft. The Americans looted German and Italian reserves—“to the victor go the spoils” indeed.
Karl Bernd Esser concludes that this was an act of theft, because it meant that the Germans twice repaid their Marshall Plan loans to the US:
“The Marshall Plan was a successful American invention of how to trick ‘friends’ without them realizing it. If I take a thousand Euros from you, and you don’t notice, and then I say, ‘I’ll lend you a thousand Euros and you pay it back with a bit of interest’. You’d think, ‘What a nice gesture’. But in reality, I took a thousand Euros from you already, you just didn’t notice”.
From the US perspective, laying claim to money that had been stolen from Europe’s Jews, without returning it to either the surviving victims or the families of those killed, could be rationalized as follows: the Exchange Stabilization Fund was set up early during World War II to seize Nazi assets in international trade, as part of an international blockade of Germany.
CIA Recruitment of Italian Fascists & US Election Interference in Italy
In post-war Italy, and at the start of the Cold War with the USSR, the US was gravely concerned that communism was becoming hugely popular with Italian voters. In fact, Italy’s Communist Party would grow to become the world’s second biggest Communist Party in terms of membership, and the biggest in the West. The CIA repeatedly interfered in Italian elections, in an attempt to thwart the rise of the Communists. The US intelligence services did not only use their knowledge and looted treasures in Germany to recruit Nazis spies, they also actively recruited Italian Fascists during the Cold War.
When US troops first entered Italy they encountered some Italian forces that refused to surrender and continued to fight on the side of the Germans for two years. One of these was the world’s first frogman commando unit, the Decima Flottiglia MAS led by the so-called “Black Prince,” Valerio Borghese. They continued to fight for two years, before the US finally seized Italy in 1945. Borghese had been almost killed by Communists at the end of the war—and this gives us a second explanation for why “the enemy” enlisted with the CIA: a personal anti-Communist commitment.
CIA agent James Jesus Angleton drew up plans for a coup in Italy, in the event that the Communist Party was elected into power during the critical elections of 1947–1948. Angleton and Borghese became good friends. The film states that the CIA in fact enlisted Borghese. As indicated by the historian, Christopher Simpson, Angleton succeeded in convincing the US government to plough millions of dollars into Italy in an effort to disrupt the elections. The US used funds from Operation Safe Haven, discussed above. Money, much of which had been looted from Europe’s Jews by the Nazis, was now being employed by the US to subvert Italian elections.
Angleton set up a partisan militia—and the documentary shows rarely-seen footage of their training. That militia consisted mostly of ex-frogmen from Borghese’s Decima MAS. The unit was called Gladio, and was under the exclusive command of the CIA. (This was the first such unit in a program that later covered Europe and was called Operation Gladio.)
In the event that Italy voted to become socialist, in a democratic election, the CIA established a so-called “stay behind network” of underground subversives that were paid and trained to overturn the democratically elected government. As the Communists in fact lost the election, Gladio was called off. The Soviet Union itself gave up on having Italy join its camp, and effectively sealed off that option by signing on to the Yalta agreement.
“Our political position was very simple and quite clear. It was based on historical experience for which we had great respect, and that was fascism. We tried to apply basic fascist values to the reality surrounding us”.
In 1970, Fascist rebels planned a coup in Italy, with the intention of seizing power and eradicating leftist parties. They discussed their plans with the CIA. Historian Alessandro Massignani speaks in the film attesting to knowledge uncovered that the CIA was informed of the Fascists’ plans.
On December 7, 1970, supporters of Delle Chiaie in a group calling itself Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard), along with members of the Italian military, set their plan in motion. Their first targets were to be the state broadcaster, RAI, and government buildings. While Delle Chiaie claimed responsibility for hatching the coup (“I was morally and political responsible,” he states in the film), this documentary states that the coup was driven from elsewhere. Indeed, by his own admission, Delle Chiaie was not even in Italy at the time. The documentary claims that figures such as Delle Chiaie and Borghese, “were just puppets”. The film instead names Giulio Andreotti, the leader of the Christian Democrats, seen as virtually a pawn of the US, as being the power behind those acting in the intended coup. Alongside Andreotti was Licio Gelli, head of the P2 (Propaganda Due) Freemasons lodge and a CIA agent. Shortly before the coup started, the US Sixth Fleet was put on a state of alert. The film suggests that Gelli and Andreotti were keen on impressing the CIA, showing that they had the power to implement and call off military coups.
The film also sheds doubt on the standard, authorized narrative surrounding the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. The official explanation is that the left-wing terrorist group, the Red Brigades, were responsible. However, it was discovered that senior intelligence agents and military officials were also involved, and that the CIA and Gladio had succeeded in effectively seizing the direction of the Red Brigades. Aldo Moro had been part of the “historic compromise” with Italy’s Communist Party, that saw the formation of a “government of national solidarity”. Moro was in favour of the “Third Way”. The international, geopolitical ramification of this Third Way was alignment with neither the USSR nor the USA. Then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, threatened Italy with the kind of upheaval engineered in Chile in 1973 against the government of Salvador Allende, if it had chosen non-alignment.
From Italy to South America: The Trail of CIA-backed Fascists
Having been sold out after the 1970 intended coup in Italy was called off, Fascists like Delle Chiaie and Borghese went underground and fled to South America. Even Gelli ended up in Argentina.
Stefano Delle Chiaie explains in the film that they wanted to spread Fascism, and their efforts met more fertile ground in South America, pointing out that many parties in South America had Fascist or Nazi roots.
Chile
Italian Fascists, along with the CIA, actively supported General Augusto Pinochet in his coup against President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Allende led a democratically-elected socialist government that took office in 1971, and from the start the US could not tolerate a peaceful revolutionary alternative that lessened US dominance. That is still true today, as we see in the case of Venezuela.
Delle Chiaie explicitly claims in the film that he and Borghese were involved in supporting the coup, and that in 1974 when they were in Santiago, Chile, they met with General Pinochet who personally hosted them, and the Italians started working more closely with his government. The Italian Fascists not only formally cooperated with the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, they also set up their headquarters in Chile.
Bolivia
The CIA gave its Nazi and Fascist proxies in South America free rein to expand their activities throughout South America, beyond Chile. On July 17, 1980, a military coup in Bolivia led by General Luís García Meza, known as the “cocaine coup” (since it was financed by cocaine traffickers) was also backed by agents recruited by Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief who committed numerous atrocities in Lyon, France, during WWII. Ultra-right Republican Senator Jesse Helms supported Meza, as did the Reagan administration. When the US launched its so-called “war on drugs,” it then turned on key people in the Meza administration.
Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. He describes Barbie in this film as a man of “great character, very intelligent, very capable, great integrity”. Barbie, also known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” was contracted by American intelligence services after WWII. Delle Chiaie himself led a troop of mercenaries in Bolivia, as this film explains. The cocaine trade was critical in financing an operation such as this, and as the film states, cocaine is a sector that has been entwined with secret services worldwide. This is the kind of drug trade that has been protected by the US, unlike that other drug trade. Barbie, the film emphasizes, was himself critical to the development of Bolivia’s cocaine industry by introducing a systematic regimen of punishments—so successful, that he gained notoriety, and this eventually led to his extradition to France and death in prison in 1991.
The film then presents its third explanation for why and how Nazis became involved with US intelligence. In this instance we hear again from Christopher Simpson who explains “intelligence entrepreneurism”: wanted Nazi officers would lay their hands on whatever intelligence assets they could, and then offer to sell themselves to US intelligence as a valuable source of information necessary to fight the Cold War. Barbie was thus able to effectively buy his own freedom. This explanation for Barbie’s collaboration with the Americans is also confirmed in the film by Andreas von Bülow, a former Secretary of State in the German Federal Ministry of Defence.
Klaus Barbie was found to be “a very compatible agent” (to quote Simpson) by a host of South American military dictatorships during the 1970s, who jointly with the US organized Operation Condor (for more, see the National Security Archive). The CIA was involved in this operation, which led to the murder of between 50,000 and 60,000 people in Latin America.
Saturday 12 March 2022
Thursday 10 March 2022
Vogue erases ‘Palestine’ from supermodel’s anti-war post
Article about Gigi Hadid’s anti-war Instagram post omits line about Palestine
Vogue magazine has edited out a line about Palestine from an article about an Instagram post by supermodel Gigi Hadid, in which she announced support for both the Ukrainian and Palestinian causes.
Supermodel Gigi Hadid, who, along with her sister Bella Hadid, are known for being vocal supporters of Palestine, recently announced on Instagram that she would be donating her earnings from Fashion Month to Ukrainian and Palestinian causes, stating: “I am pledging to donate my earnings from the Fall 2022 shows to aid those suffering from the war in Ukraine, as well as continuing to support those experiencing the same in Palestine.”
When Vogue magazine first picked up the story and posted an article about the supermodel’s statement, they included a direct quote of her caption in full, where the model drew comparisons between Ukrainians and Palestinians. But as the article was being promoted on Instagram, some users started posting comments accusing Vogue of “fanning the flames of anti-Semitism” and giving a platform for Hadid’s “highly offensive” views.
After just one day, Vogue edited the Instagram post caption as well as the original article to omit mentions of Palestine from Hadid’s initial statement, specifically dropping the last line of her post which read “HANDS OFF UKRAINE. HANDS OFF PALESTINE. PEACE. PEACE. PEACE.”
Vogue has not given an official reason for the edit, but most users have assumed that it was in direct response to the mounting pressure that is generally applied to anyone supporting the ‘wrong side’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Several actors, such as Mark Ruffalo and Emma Watson, who have spoken out in support of Palestinians, have recently been forced to apologize for their views or have faced accusations of anti-Semitism. The New York Times even featured an ad urging readers to condemn the likes of the Hadid sisters and Dua Lipa for their allegedly anti-Israel stance, while an entire website has been set up to doxx anyone who openly expresses support for the Palestinian side of the conflict.
Wednesday 9 March 2022
Doubling Down On Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz
What a strange feeling it was to know that the cruise missile shown descending towards an airport and erupting in a ball of flame was not fired by US or British forces.
Millions of Westerners raised to admire the ultimate spectacle of high-tech, robotic power, must have quickly suppressed their awe at the shock – this was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.
Rewind to April 2017: over video footage of Trump’s cruise missiles launching at targets in Syria in response to completely unproven claims that Syria had just used chemical weapons, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams felt a song coming on:
‘We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two US navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean – I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons” – and they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight…’
TV and newspaper editors feel the same way. Every time US-UK-NATO launches a war of aggression on Iraq, Libya, Syria – whoever, wherever – our TV screens and front pages fill with ‘beautiful pictures’ of missiles blazing in pure white light from ships. This is ‘Shock And Awe’ – we even imagine our victims ‘awed’ by our power.
In 1991, the ‘white heat’ of our robotic weaponry was ‘beautiful’ because it meant that ‘we’ were so sophisticated, so civilised, so compassionate, that only Saddam’s palaces and government buildings were being ‘surgically’ removed, not human beings. This was keyhole killing. The BBC’s national treasure, David Dimbleby, basked in the glory on live TV:
‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman?’ (Quoted, John Pilger, ‘Hidden Agendas’, Vintage, 1998, p.45)
Might makes right! This seemed real to Dimbleby, as it did to many people. In fact, it was fake news. Under the 88,500 tons of bombs that followed the launch of the air campaign on January 17, 1991, and the ground attack that followed, 150,000 Iraqi troops and 50,000 civilians were killed. Just 7 per cent of the ordnance consisted of so called ‘smart bombs’.
By contrast, the morning after Russia launched its war of aggression on Ukraine, front pages were covered, not in tech, but in the blood of wounded civilians and the rubble of wrecked civilian buildings. A BBC media review explained:
‘A number of front pages feature a picture of a Ukrainian woman – a teacher named Helena – with blood on her face and bandages around her head after a block of flats was hit in a Russian airstrike.
‘“Her blood on his hands” says the Daily Mirror; the Sun chooses the same headline.’
‘Our’ wars are not greeted by such headlines, nor by BBC headlines of this kind:
‘In pictures: Destruction and fear as war hits Ukraine’
The fear and destruction ‘we’ cause are not ‘our’ focus.
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook noted:
‘Wow! Radical change of policy at BBC News at Ten. It excitedly reports young women – the resistance – making improvised bombs against Russia’s advance. Presumably Palestinians resisting Israel can now expect similar celebratory coverage from BBC reporters’
A BBC video report was titled:
‘Ukraine conflict: The women making Molotov cocktails to defend their city’
Hard to believe, but the text beneath read:
‘The BBC’s Sarah Rainsford spoke to a group of women who were making Molotov cocktails in the park.’
For the entire morning of March 2, the BBC home page featured a Ukrainian civilian throwing a lit Molotov cocktail. The adjacent headline:
‘Russian paratroopers and rockets attack Kharkiv – Ukraine’
In other words, civilians armed with homemade weapons were facing heavily-armed elite troops. Imagine the response if, in the first days of an invasion, the BBC had headlined a picture of a civilian in Baghdad or Kabul heroically resisting US-UK forces in the same way.
Another front-page BBC article asked:
‘Ukraine invasion: Are Russia’s attacks war crimes?’
The answer is ‘yes,’ of course – Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq. But, of course, the idea that such an article might have appeared in the first week of that invasion is completely unthinkable.
Generating The Propaganda Schwerpunkt
On 27 February, the first 26 stories on the BBC’s home page were devoted to the Russian attack on Ukraine. The BBC website even typically features half a dozen stories on Ukraine at the top of its sports section.
On 28 February, the Guardian’s website led with the conflict, followed by 20 additional links to articles about the Ukraine crisis. A similar pattern is found in all ‘mainstream’ news media.
The inevitable result of this level of media bombardment on many people: Conflict in Ukraine is ‘our’ war – ‘I stand with Ukraine!’
Political analyst Ben Norton commented:
‘Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, and condemnation, in just 24 hours than the US-Saudi war on Yemen has gotten since it started nearly 7 years ago… US-backed Saudi bombing now is the worst since 2018’This is no small matter. Norton added:
‘An estimated 377,000 Yemenis have died in the US-Saudi war on their country, and roughly 70% of deaths were children under age 5’
Some 15.6 million Yemenis live in extreme poverty, and 8.6 million suffer from under-nutrition. A recent United Nations report warned:
‘If war in Yemen continues through 2030, we estimate that 1.3 million people will die as a result.’
Over half of Saudi Arabia’s combat aircraft used for the bombing raids on Yemen are UK-supplied. UK-made equipment includes Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Stormshadow missiles, and cluster munitions. Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports:
‘Researchers on the grounds have discovered weapons fragments that demonstrate the use of UK-made weapons in attacks on civilian targets.’Despite the immensity of the catastrophe and Britain’s clear legal and moral responsibility, in 2017, the Independent reported:
‘More than half of British people are unaware of the “forgotten war” underway in Yemen, despite the Government’s support for a military coalition accused of killing thousands of civilians.
‘A YouGov poll seen exclusively by The Independent showed 49 per cent of people knew of the country’s ongoing civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million more and left 14 million facing starvation.
‘The figure was even lower for the 18 to 24 age group, where only 37 per cent were aware of the Yemen conflict as it enters its third year of bloodshed.’
The Independent added:
‘At least 75 people are estimated to be killed or injured every day in the conflict, which has pushed the country to the brink of famine as 14 million people lack a stable access to food.’
On Twitter, Dr Robert Allan made the point that matters:
‘We as tax paying citizens and as a nation are directly responsible for our actions. Not the actions of others. Of course we can and should highlight crimes of nations and act appropriately and benevolently (the UK record here is horrific). 1st – us, NATO, our motives and actions.’
We can be sure that Instagram, YouTube and Tik Tok will never be awash with the sentiment: ‘I stand with Yemen!’
As if the whole world belongs to ‘us’, our righteous rage on Ukraine is such that we apparently forget that we are not actually under attack, not being bombed; our soldiers and civilians are not being killed. Nevertheless, RT (formerly Russia Today), Going Underground and Sputnik have been shut down on YouTube and Google as though the US and UK were under direct attack, facing an existential threat. Certainly, we at Media Lens welcome the idea that powerful state-corporate media should be prevented from promoting state violence. It is absurd that individuals are arrested and imprisoned for threatening or inciting violence, while journalists regularly call for massive, even genocidal, violence against whole countries with zero consequences (career advancement aside). But banning media promoting state violence means banning, not just Russian TV, but literally all US-UK broadcasters and newspapers.
Confirming the hypocrisy, The Intercept reported:
‘Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.’
In 2014, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote:
‘The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for fearlessness in battle.
‘But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine’s most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far right, even neo-Nazi, leanings of many of its members.’
The report continued:
‘Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.’
Perhaps the hundreds of journalists who attacked Jeremy Corbyn for questioning the removal of an allegedly anti-semitic mural – which depicted a mixture of famous historical and identifiable Jewish and non-Jewish bankers – with the single word, ‘Why?’, would care to comment?
According to our ProQuest search, the Guardian has made no mention of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the last week – as it most certainly would have, if Ukraine were an Official Enemy of the West. ProQuest finds a grand total of three mentions of the Azov Battalion in the entire UK national press – two in passing, with a single substantial piece in the Daily Star – in the last seven days. ‘Impressive discipline’, as Noam Chomsky likes to say. ‘Russia Must Be Broken’
Britain and the US have been waging so much war, so ruthlessly, for so long, that Western journalists and commentators have lost all sense of proportion and restraint. Neil Mackay, former editor of the Sunday Herald (2015-2018), wrote in the Herald:
‘Russia must be broken, in the hope that by breaking the regime economically and rendering it a pariah state on the world’s stage, brave and decent Russian people will rise up and drag Putin from power.’
If nothing else, Mackay’s comment indicated just how little impact was made by the deaths of 500,000 children under five when the US and Britain saw to it that the Iraq economy was ‘broken’ by 13 years of genocidal sanctions.
For describing his comment as ‘obscene’, Mackay instantly blocked us on Twitter. His brutal demand reminded us of the comment made by columnist Thomas Friedman in the New York Times:
‘Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation… and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.’
We can enjoy the ‘shock and awe’ of that comment, if we have no sense at all that Serbian people are real human beings capable of suffering, love, loss and death exactly as profound as our own.
On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine told a caller, Bill, from Manchester:
‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’
Unlike his celebrated interviewer, Bill, clearly no fan of Putin, had retained his humanity:
‘Do you?! Do kids deserve to die, 18, 20 – called up, conscripted – who don’t understand it, who don’t grasp the issues?’
Vine’s sage reply:
‘That’s life! That’s the way it goes!’
We all know what would have happened to Vine if he had said anything remotely comparable of the US-UK forces that illegally invaded Iraq.
MSNBC commentator Clint Watts observed:
‘Strangest thing – entire world watching a massive Russian armor formation plow towards Kyiv, we cheer on Ukraine, but we’re holding ourselves back. NATO Air Force could end this in 48 hrs. Understand handwringing about what Putin would do, but we can see what’s coming’
The strangest thing is media commentators reflexively imagining that US-UK-NATO can lay any moral or legal claim to act as an ultra-violent World Police.
Professor Michael McFaul of Stanford University, also serving with the media’s 101st Chairborne Division, appeared to be experiencing multiple wargasms when he tweeted:
‘More Stingers to Ukraine! More javelins! More drones!’
Two hours later:
‘More NLAWs [anti-tank missiles], Stingers (the best ones), and Javelins for Ukraine! Now!’
Echoing Mackay, McFaul raved (and later deleted):
‘There are no more “innocent” “neutral” Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!’
Courageous words indeed from his Ivy League office. Disturbing to note that McFaul was ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, widely considered to be a saint.
‘Shockingly Arrogant Meddling’ – The Missing History
So how did we get here? State-corporate news coverage has some glaring omissions.
In February 2014, after three months of violent, US-aided protests, much of it involving neo-Nazi anti-government militias, the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for Russia. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) provide some context:
‘On February 6, 2014, as the anti-government protests were intensifying, an anonymous party (assumed by many to be Russia) leaked a call between Assistant Secretary of State [Victoria] Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The two officials discussed which opposition officials would staff a prospective new government, agreeing that Arseniy Yatsenyuk — Nuland referred to him by the nickname “Yats” — should be in charge. It was also agreed that someone “high profile” be brought in to push things along. That someone was Joe Biden.’
The BBC reported Nuland picking the new Ukrainian leader:
‘I think “Yats” is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience.’
FAIR continues:
‘Weeks later, on February 22, after a massacre by suspicious snipers brought tensions to a head, the Ukrainian parliament quickly removed Yanukovych from office in a constitutionally questionable maneuver. Yanukovych then fled the country, calling the overthrow a coup. On February 27, Yatsenyuk became prime minister.’We can read between the lines when Nuland described how the US had invested ‘over $5 billion’ to ‘ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine’.
In a rare example of dissent in the Guardian, Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote this week:
‘The Obama administration’s shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine’s internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro‐Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance…’Carpenter concluded:
‘Washington’s attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country’s formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.
‘History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.’
Within days of the 2014 coup, troops loyal to Russia took control of the Crimea peninsula in the south of Ukraine. As Jonathan Steele, a former Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, recently explained:
‘NATO’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans.’
The New Yorker magazine describes political scientist John Mearsheimer as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’:
‘For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”’Mearsheimer argues that Russia views the expansion of NATO to its border with Ukraine as ‘an existential threat’:
‘If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that.’
Mearsheimer adds:
‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’
In 2014, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had the gall to proclaim of Russia’s takeover of Crimea:
‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.’
Senior BBC correspondents somehow managed to report such remarks from Kerry and others, without making any reference to the West’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The pattern persists today. When Fox News recently spoke about the Russia-Ukraine crisis with former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, one of the key perpetrators of the illegal invasion-occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, she nodded her head in solemn agreement when the presenter said:
‘When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.’The cognitive dissonance required to engage in this discussion and pass it off as serious analysis is truly remarkable.
Noam Chomsky highlights one obvious omission in Western media coverage of Ukraine, or any other crisis involving NATO:
‘The question we ought to be asking ourselves is why did NATO even exist after 1990? If NATO was to stop Communism, why is it now expanding to Russia?’It is sobering to read the dissenting arguments above and recall Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s warning to MPs last week:
‘Let me be very clear – There will be no place in this party for false equivalence between the actions of Russia and the actions of Nato.’
The Independent reported that Starmer’s warning came ‘after leading left-wingers – including key shadow cabinet members during the Jeremy Corbyn-era key, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – were threatened with the removal of the whip if their names were not taken off a Stop the War letter that had accused the UK government of “aggressive posturing”, and said that Nato “should call a halt to its eastward expansion”’.
Starmer had previously waxed Churchillian on Twitter:
‘There will be dark days ahead. But Putin will learn the same lesson as Europe’s tyrants of the last century: that the resolve of the world is harder than he imagines and the desire for liberty burns stronger than ever. The light will prevail.’
Clearly, that liberty does not extend to elected Labour MPs criticising NATO.
In the Guardian, George Monbiot contributed to the witch-hunt, noting ominously that comments made by John Pilger ‘seemed to echo Putin’s speech the previous night’. By way of further evidence:
‘The BBC reports that Pilger’s claims have been widely shared by accounts spreading Russian propaganda.’
Remarkably, Monbiot offered no counter-arguments to ‘Pilger’s claims’, no facts, relying entirely on smear by association. This was not journalism; it was sinister, hit and run, McCarthy-style propaganda.
Earlier, Monbiot had tweeted acerbically:
‘Never let @johnpilger persuade you that he has a principled objection to occupation and invasion. He appears to be fine with them, as long as the aggressor is Russia, not Israel, the US or the UK.’
In fact, for years, Pilger reported – often secretly and at great risk – from the Soviet Union and its European satellites. A chapter of his book, ‘Heroes’, is devoted to his secret meetings with and support for Soviet dissidents (See: John Pilger, ‘Heroes’, Pan, 1987, pp.431-440). In his 1977 undercover film on Czechoslovakia, ‘A Faraway Country’, he described the country’s oppressors as ‘fascists’. He commented:
‘The people I interview in this film know they are taking great risks just by talking to me, but they insist on speaking out. Such is their courage and their commitment to freedom in Czechoslovakia.’Three days before Monbiot’s article was published in the Guardian, Pilger had tweeted of Ukraine:
‘The invasion of a sovereign state is lawless and wrong. A failure to understand the cynical forces that provoked the invasion of Ukraine insults the victims.’Pilger is one of the most respected journalists of our time precisely because he has taken a principled and consistent stand against all forms of imperialism, including Soviet imperialism, Chinese imperialism (particularly its underpinning of Pol Pot), Indonesian imperialism (its invasion of East Timor), and so on.
Conclusion – ‘Whataboutism’ Or ‘Wearenobetterism’?
Regardless of the history and context of what came before, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major international crime and the consequences are hugely serious.
Our essential point for over 20 years has been that the public is bombarded with the crimes of Official Enemies by ‘mainstream’ media, while ‘our’ crimes are ignored, or downplayed, or ‘justified’. A genuinely free and independent media would be exactly as tough and challenging on US-UK-NATO actions and policies as they are on Russian actions and policies.
To point out this glaring double standard is not to ‘carry water for Putin’; any more than pointing out state-corporate deceptions over Iraq, Libya and Syria meant we held any kind of candle for Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad.
As Chomsky has frequently pointed out, it is easy to condemn the crimes of Official Enemies. But it is a basic ethical principle that, first and foremost, we should hold to account those governments for which we share direct political and moral responsibility. This is why we focus so intensively on the crimes of our own government and its leading allies.
We have condemned Putin’s war of aggression and supported demands for an immediate withdrawal. We are not remotely pro-Russian government – we revile Putin’s tyranny and state violence exactly as much as we revile the West’s tyrannical, imperial violence. We have repeatedly made clear that we oppose all war, killing and hate. Our guiding belief is that these horrors become less likely when journalism drops its double standards and challenges ‘our’ crimes in the same way it challenges ‘theirs’.
Chomsky explained:
‘Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.’
Our adding a tiny drop of criticism to the tsunami of Western global, billion-dollar-funded, 24/7 loathing of Putin achieves nothing beyond the outcome identified by Chomsky. If we have any hope of positively impacting the world, it lies in countering the illusions and violence of the government for which we are morally accountable.
But why speak up now, in particular? Shouldn’t we just shut up and ‘get on board’ in a time of crisis? No, because war is a time when propaganda messages are hammered home with great force: ‘We’re the Good Guys standing up for democracy.’ It is a vital time to examine and challenge these claims.
What critics dismiss as ‘Whataboutism’ is actually ‘Wearenobetterism’. If ‘we’ are no better, or if ‘we’ are actually worse, then where does that leave ‘our’ righteous moral outrage? Can ‘compassion’ rooted in deep hypocrisy be deeply felt?
Critics dismissing evidence of double standards as ‘whataboutery’, are promoting the view that ‘their’ crimes should be wholly condemned, but not those committed by ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ allies. The actions of Official Enemies are to be judged by a different standard than that by which we judge ourselves.
As we pointed out via Twitter:
Spot all the high-profile commentators who condemn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine…
…and who remain silent about or support:
* Invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq
* NATO’s destruction of Libya
* Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen
* Apartheid Israel’s crushing of Palestinians
The question has to be asked: Is the impassioned public response to another media bombardment of the type described by Howard Zinn at the top of this alert a manifestation of the power of human compassion, or is it a manifestation of power?
Are we witnessing genuine human concern, or the ability of global state-corporate interests to sell essentially the same story over and over again? The same bad guy: Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad and Putin; the same Good Guys: US, UK, NATO and ‘our’ obedient clients; the same alleged noble cause: freedom, democracy, human rights; the same means: confrontation, violence, a flood of bombs and missiles (‘the best ones’). And the same results: control of whole countries, massively increased arms budgets, and control of natural resources.
Ultimately, we are being asked to believe that the state-corporate system that has illegally bombed, droned, invaded, occupied and sanctioned so many countries over the last few decades – a system that responds even to the threat of human extinction from climate change with ‘Blah, blah, blah!’ – is motivated by compassion for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians. As Erich Fromm wrote:
‘To be naive and easily deceived is impermissible, today more than ever, when the prevailing untruths may lead to a catastrophe because they blind people to real dangers and real possibilities.’ (Fromm, ‘The Art Of Being’, Continuum, 1992, p.19)
From the excellent medialens.
Tuesday 8 March 2022
Al CNN?
Al Jazeera's coverage of Russia's war crimes in Ukraine has actually become almost indistinguishable from that of the MSM.
The shift toward pro-Western positions had started when AJ was seeking greater market penetration, particularly in the US. The AJ website is now also running paid ads.
I would describe AJ's coverage of Russia/Ukraine as:
I now fear for future coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict...
Friday 4 March 2022
That Victoria Nuland - Geoffrey Pyatt leaked phone conversation... (2014)
This is what regime change sounds like:
H/T: Farmer
Thursday 3 March 2022
'Worthy' and 'Unworthy' victims...
Ukraine has swiftly been promoted to 'Worthy victims' status.
April 20, 2018, Consortium News
In their book Manufacturing Consent Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky distinguished between two kinds of victims: the worthy victims and the unworthy victims. The “worthy victims” are the victims (real and alleged) of leaders on the U.S. enemies list, such as Bashar al-Assad. The “unworthy victims” are those of the U.S. and its client states, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The U.S.-led alliance calling itself the “international community” is outraged when there are worthy victims. For example, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley holds up pictures in the Security Council of dead Syrian babies for the world to see. Worthy victims are granted human rights, and Assad deserves our outrage.
Unworthy victims for example are the 50,000 Yemeni children who have died of starvation because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen, including food, water and medicine.
Unworthy victims are blamed for being victims and ignored by the international community and the mainstream media. Unworthy victims have no human rights. Yemen is a humanitarian disaster that is ignored. Saudi Arabia is a friend of the U.S. and Washington is helping the Saudi war effort with equipment and logistical support.
So there is no outrage from the U.S. when Saudi Arabia Crown Prince and defense minister Mohammad bin Salman drops U.S.- manufactured bombs from U.S.-made planes, which indiscriminately slaughter Yemeni men, women and children below. MBS is instead the darling of the neocons. Columnist Thomas Friedman praises him as if being an absolute monarch is the thing to be in the 21st century. Robert Parry, the late founder and editor of this site, described Friedman and the neocons as “disconnected from reality.”
Protesting for a Right to Return
For weeks now, tens of thousands of Gazans have been legally protesting for their right to return to their homes in Palestine. There is no outrage in the U.S. when Netanyahu and his regime orders Israeli soldiers to massacre them. Hundreds of Palestinians were gunned down on Land Day and during demonstrations for the Right to Return. Four more have been killed today and hundreds more wounded in the fourth week of the protests. But Netanyahu has every reason to believe that the U.S. will protect him, as it has many times in the past. Nikki Haley is not going to hold up pictures of dead Palestinian children.
Instead she will shield Netanyahu from criticism, and accuse his critics of being anti-Semitic. Netanyahu’s victims are unworthy victims. And in what appears to be a major shift in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, the latest US State Department annual human rights report released today no longer labels the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as “Occupied Territories,” the accurate legal term, as it had previously, reports the Institute for Middle East Understanding.
The Palestinians that have been shot dead in Gaza were inside the Israeli enclosure that has been their prison for over a decade. They were on Palestinian land. They presented no danger to the Israeli soldiers that were on the Israeli side of the barricade. The soldiers had telescopic sights on their rifles and fired from a distance of over 100 yards away. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot with illegal fragmentation bullets that have been banned by the 1899 Hague Declaration.
WATCH: Yesterday Israeli soldiers in Hebron held Palestinian school children inside of a checkpoint, trapping them by closing the checkpoint and refusing to allow them to move. The children, clearly terrified, were left without any recourse—they had to wait to be released. pic.twitter.com/D55May68FP
— Good Shepherd Collective (@Shepherds4Good) March 2, 2022
Netanyahu’s orders were illegal and the soldiers followed illegal orders. The Nuremberg Trials declared that “just following orders” is not a defense against war crimes.
Two million Palestinian refugees have been trapped in Gaza for over a decade. Gaza has become an inhumane, open-air prison. Even former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron called it that.
The people in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world. Israel controls everything and anything that goes in or out. What goes in is barely enough food for Gazans to survive. Netanyahu joked once he put Gaza on a diet. The sick, wounded and dying are not allowed to get out of Gaza to go to a hospital for medical treatment without Israeli permission. Netanyahu rarely gives that permission. Netanyahu’s victims are unworthy victims and are blamed for being victims.
Total Blockade–an Act of War
In 2006 Israel tightened the noose around Gaza by imposing a total blockade by air, land and sea. The supposed crime for which Israel imposed an illegal collective punishment on Gazans is that they democratically elected the wrong government, against Israel’s wishes. Instead of electing the Israeli controlled Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known as Fatah, Gazans elected the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas.
Israel used to consider Fatah a terrorist organization, but now it does not because they are collaborators. Instead Israel, which secretly backed the formation of Hamas in a divide and conquer strategy, calls Hamas terrorists. Netanyahu then falsely brands the demonstrators terrorists.
Israel has killed and wounded journalists reporting from Gaza. They are unworthy victims too. So there’s no outcry from the mainstream media. Instead it repeatedly accuses Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, of (allegedly) killing journalists. Then there is a huge outcry because they are worthy victims.
The U.S. has imposed economic sanctions on Russia. Israel gets billions of dollars in U.S. financial aid every year, regardless of what Netanyahu does. Putin is accused of invading Crimea when Russian troops were already legally deployed there and Crimeans voted in a referendum to rejoin their historical attachment to Russia. Putin is vilified for (allegedly) meddling in U.S. politics. Netanyahu gets standing ovations from joint sessions of Congress.
The Israeli prime minister has been illegally occupying the West Bank of Palestine, and he is building more illegal Israeli colonies there, euphemistically called settlements. Meanwhile, Netanyahu thumbs his nose at international law. The U.S. has vetoed 43 U.N. Security Council resolutions against Israel. Haley fumes that Putin is an obstructionist for vetoing a U.N. resolution condemning Assad for an alleged chemical weapons attack, even before any investigation was begun. The U.S. tried to block an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of the alleged chemical weapon attack site in Syria. The OPCW says it will investigate anyway.
RIP Russia Today?
This morning, while channel hopping on the Sky platform, I noticed the channel sequence 510 - 511 - 512 - 513 had been changed to 510 - 512 - 513. 511 is RT (513 is Al Jazeera). And indeed RT is no longer available on Sky, as per now:
The Russian state-backed television channel RT is set to disappear from Sky TV in the UK within the next 24 hours, irrespective of the outcome of an investigation by the media regulator Ofcom into its coverage of the war in Ukraine.
The plug will be pulled as a result of EU sanctions, which will target the company used to broadcast RT across the continent.
Sky receives its RT broadcast from a satellite operator based in Luxembourg, which will be instructed to remove the news channel formerly known as Russia Today, as soon as the EU sanctions are officially approved on Tuesday night.
RT’s broadcast slot on Sky will initially be blank but the channel will eventually be removed from its programme guide altogether. Representatives of British broadcast platforms Freesat and Freeview were initially unclear as to whether the decision to block the satellite signal would also result in RT vanishing from their platforms.
So the censors have won...
Ofcom is currently investigating RT for 15 potential breaches of the broadcasting code on impartiality in relation to its Ukraine coverage. However, there is unlikely to be an update on this process for several days and any decision on potentially revoking RT’s licence could take longer.
The "broadcasting code on impartiality" is of course no-existent because "impartiality" is a unicorn ('one man's news is another man's noise'). Striving for it is just the 'system's' way of forcing broadcasters/publicists to align themselves with the official, system's official viewpoint.
Funnily enough, Liz Truss, dumbest of the dumb, actually had a useful insight on the matter (but to no avail):
Despite substantial political pressure to ban the channel in the UK, the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has warned of the risk of banning RT, which has a small audience in Britain.
She told the House of Commons: “The reality is that if we ban RT in the United Kingdom, that is likely to lead to channels like the BBC being banned in Russia. What we want is the Russian population to hear the truth about what Vladimir Putin is doing, so there’s a very careful judgment to be made.”
... "careful judgement..."
Wednesday 2 March 2022
To the idiots who claim 'this wouldn't have happened under Trump!'
Trump praises ‘genius’ Putin for moving troops to eastern Ukraine
Former president says Russian leader made ‘very savvy’ decision to recognise two territories of eastern Ukraine as independent
Donald Trump has said that Vladimir Putin is “very savvy” and made a “genius” move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and moving Russian armed forces to them.
Trump said he saw the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis on TV “and I said: ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”
The former US president said that the Russian president had made a “smart move” by sending “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the area.
Trump, a long-term admirer of Putin who was impeached over allegations he threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless it could help damage the reputation of Joe Biden, praised the Russian president’s moves while also claiming that they would not have happened if he was still president.
“Here’s a guy who’s very savvy … I know him very well,” Trump said of Putin while talking to the The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. “Very, very well. By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened.
“But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”
Got that, idjeets?
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