As temperatures drop across Europe, Ukrainians in black-out-induced areas are being told by their government that they have only themselves to blame should the energy difficulties continue. Freezing temperatures are expected to plunge down further, yet Ukrainian president  Volodymyr Zelenskyy <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-ukraine-war-snow-power-outages-zelenskyy-freezing-temperatures-rcna58847">advised his citizens</a>, “If consumption increases in the evening, the number of outages may increase…This once again shows how important it is now to save power and consume it rationally.” Zelenskyy claims Ukraine has built over 4,000 “invincibility shelters” to help people endure the winter (yet to be seen or photographed), an unimpressive feat given the United States alone has sent over $100 billion dollars to Ukraine, <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/house-passes-unbelievably-huge-defense-budget-and-it-could-get-worse">ramping up its military budget</a> to fund the conflict.
It is ironic that Zelenskyy is asking his citizens to bear the brunt of the ongoing conflict and not seeking more support from the Ukrainian elites who have fled the country in droves since February and continue to prosper. Even before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) to end the barbaric shelling of civilians in the Donbass, <a href="https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2022/02/14/news/jet_privati_e_charter_la_grande_fuga_da_kiev_di_oligarchi_e_deputati-337773360/">private jets across Ukraine</a> were already departing with some wealthy backers of Kiev&#8217;s coup government alongside their families and close associates. The pro-Kiev media outlet Ukrainska Pravda released <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2ZOBFFvXFw&amp;feature=youtu.be">a short film</a> spotlighting Ukraine&#8217;s so-called “Monaco Battalion,” a group of elite men otherwise “fit for service” who instead spend their time gallivanting around the French Riviera on yachts. While the conflict ensues and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-24-22-intl/h_4309a4916d57670f85519210a07fb2c9/">men under 60 years old</a> are forced to stay and fight, men like Kharkov entrepreneurs Alexander Yaroslavsky and Konstantin Zhevago continue to enjoy a life of luxury. The Mediterranean coast of France was not the only destination for this exodus of the fleeing Ukrainian elite. The <a href="https://www.rt.com/russia/566935-they-robbed-ukraine/">list of the countries</a> for their destinations is extensive; some have even formed whole expat neighborhoods in places like Cap Ferrat, the former palace owned by Belgium’s King Leopold II. Not even western mainstream media can hide this corrupt and blatant double standard, fueled by the large amounts of aid going to Ukraine.
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CBS news released its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1061&amp;v=xCu4klafHKw&amp;feature=youtu.be">own documentary</a> on the ongoing conflict. In it, US Marine Corps veteran Andy Milburn speaks on how aid is not getting where it is supposed to go. “I can tell you unarguably that on the frontline units these things are not getting there. Drones, Switchblades, IFAKs. They’re not, alright. Body armor, helmets, you name it.” His comments echo <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/08/18/ukraine-veterans-us-aid-soldiers-war/">another</a> recent interview by the Grayzone of a soldier fighting on the Ukrainian side, who said, “Imagine telling an American soldier that we are using our personal cars in the war, and we’re also responsible for paying for repairs and fuel. We’re buying our own body armor and helmets. We don’t have observation tools or cameras, so soldiers have to pop their heads out to see what’s coming, which means at any moment, a rocket or tank can tear their heads off.” However, this fact comes as no surprise to those who have tracked Ukraine&#8217;s government following the Maidan coup d&#8217;état in 2014. Before Zelenskyy and Ukraine were the darlings of Western media, the country was rightly considered one of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-most-corrupt-nation-in-europe-ukraine">most corrupt countries in Europe</a>. In a 2015 interview regarding the funding of his hospital, consultant anesthetist Konstantin Sidorenko said, “Presumably there is money at the institute, but for some reason that money doesn’t reach the most important places, like intensive care. So it means we have to earn everything ourselves.” It is clear that government corruption funneling funds into the pockets of Ukrainian elites was an ongoing problem that started well before the Russian SMO.
American civilians continue to struggle with high inflation, failing infrastructure, and underfunded social programs, all while the US government remains fixated on starting and waging wars abroad. Whether or not the Biden administration is aware of or even cares about the mishandling of funds, the money it continues to squander could so obviously be put to better use, in innumerable ways. The <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/sideshow-u-s-midterms-come-to-an-end">recent midterm elections</a> caused Zelenskyy and Ukraine to consider the possibility that it could become more difficult so secure endless &#8220;aid&#8221; from the United States. It was also <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/biden-lost-temper-zelenskyy-during-123038750.html">reported that even Joe Biden</a> has grown frustrated with the badgering requests for more money and arms to Ukraine. Is it possible that rampant corruption is finally catching up with Zelenskyy and the authorities in Kiev? With increased Republican representation after the midterms and growing annoyance on the part of Biden, 2023 may make life more complicated for those who have spent this conflict vacationing on the United States’ dollar.

United States Funding the Vacations of Ukrainian Oligarchs

American civilians continue to struggle with high inflation, failing infrastructure, and underfunded social programs, all while the US government remains fixated on starting and waging wars abroad

In early October, a group of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine submitted to parliament a draft appeal to the UN, the European Union and the Council of Europe, with a request to establish an international tribunal to investigate &#8220;Russia&#8217;s aggression against Ukraine.&#8221; Several days later, the appeal was adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament. Although Ukraine&#8217;s leadership is appealing to the provisions of the International Criminal Court, it did not recognize its jurisdiction for fear of being held responsible for war crimes committed in Donbass.
RELATED: <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/ukraine-continues-its-terrorist-attacks-against-russia-and-the-donbass">Ukraine Continues its Terrorist Attacks Against Russia and the Donbass</a>
On October 3, 2022, a group of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada headed by Alexander Kachura, one of Vladimir Zelensky&#8217;s closest associates and a member of his Servant of the People faction, introduced bill No. 8094 on the adoption of a &#8220;Resolution on the appeal of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to the UN, parliaments and governments of its member states, the European Union, the Council of Europe on the creation of a special the International Tribunal for Criminal Aggression against Ukraine.&#8221; On October 7, the resolution was adopted by 283 votes of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada and signed by its chairman three days later.
The resolution notes that &#8220;the creation of a special tribunal is necessary, since there is no perfect mechanism yet that could judge the highest political and military leadership of Russia for committing crimes of aggression against Ukraine.&#8221; Kiev has already prepared lists of suspects.
Thus, the document states that &#8220;in the main case on the aggression of the Russian Federation, 626 suspects are representatives of the military-political leadership of the Russian Federation.&#8221; These are ministers, deputies, military commanders, officials, heads of law enforcement agencies, &#8220;warmongers and propagandists of the Kremlin,&#8221; Ukrainian politicians claimed.
<h4>Evasive justifications</h4>
In the text of the appeal, in addition to the general points concerning the appeal of the Verkhovna Rada to all possible international bodies, there are several contradictory provisions. As justification for the creation of a new &#8220;tribunal,&#8221; the resolution states that &#8220;the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to consider cases of aggression against Ukraine.&#8221;
However, later in the operative part of the resolution, it is already stated that when creating a &#8220;tribunal&#8230;the definition of the crime of aggression enshrined in customary international law, in article 8-bis of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, will be applied&#8221;.
To understand the reason for this ambivalent position on ICC jurisdiction in Ukraine, it is necessary to refer to another bill adopted by the Verkhovna Rada on September 20 of this year &#8211; Draft Law No. 7728 &#8220;On Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine regarding the improvement of cooperation with the International Criminal Court in Conducting Procedural Actions on the Territory of Ukraine.&#8221;
The amendments to the National Code of Criminal Procedure signed by President Zelensky do not contain an obligation to ratify the Rome Statute, which regulates the activities of the International Criminal Court. Ukraine signed the international treaty on the establishment of the ICC on January 20, 2000, but has yet to ratify it. The statute&#8217;s rules specify that without ratification, the state does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court in criminal cases &#8211; except for the condition when it submits a proper application.
<h4>Justified concerns</h4>
The reluctance of Ukraine&#8217;s leadership to join the ICC is likely due to a fear of investigating the involvement of the political leadership of this country in war crimes, according to Nikita Mendkovich, chairman of the Eurasian Analytical Club, in an interview with RT. He recalled that in a recent report of the UN Human Rights Council, the commission&#8217;s established facts concerning war crimes by Ukraine&#8217;s military, i.e. the summary executions of captured Russian servicemen, were recognized.
&#8220;Ukraine&#8217;s war crimes against the civilian population of the Donbass republics lasted for eight years and became one of the reasons for the special military operation,&#8221; Mendkovich said. &#8220;Ukraine&#8217;s leadership is afraid that their boomerang will fly back and they themselves will be held accountable. This applies to both the current President Zelensky and the previous one, Poroshenko. Therefore, they shy away from ratifying the Rome Statute of the ICC, and any potentially dangerous international jurisdictions for them.&#8221;
Mendkovich believes that the inclusion of a paragraph on alleged sexual violence committed by Russian troops in the preamble of the Verkhovna Rada&#8217;s appeal is purely for propaganda purposes. He recalled the dismissal of Ukraine&#8217;s Human Rights Chief, Lyudmila Denisova, who &#8220;lied so much about fake &#8216;rapes&#8217; that the Verkhovna Rada itself had to deprive her of her powers.&#8221;
&#8220;Now this topic is being actively used in the falsification of recent history, as idiotic stuffing by Western media about the issuance of &#8216;rapist kits&#8217; with Viagra to Russian soldiers. All this has one goal — to create a demonized image of Russia. And then justify any crimes and any violence against our country,&#8221; he stressed.
Earlier, Russia&#8217;s Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Maxim Buyakevich, said that in Ukraine, in the regions controlled by Kiev, &#8220;terrorist acts planned, committed and prepared for commission by Ukrainian special services, as well as mass killings of civilians&#8221; are recorded. At the same time, the leadership of the OSCE and other international humanitarian organizations ignore these crimes.

Double Standards: Ukraine Wants a Tribunal For Russia &#8211; Risks Falling Under One Itself

&quot;All this has one goal — to create a demonized image of Russia. And then justify any crimes and any violence against our country&quot;

A rank-and-file slate backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union has won leadership of Local 135, one of the union&#8217;s biggest locals with 14,000 members. Photo: TDU
<div class="paragraph">Members overwhelmingly elected new leadership in the 14,000-member Teamsters Local 135, where Dustin Roach and the 135 Members First Slate won with 68 percent of the vote.
The election is a triumph for grassroots action and rank-and-file power, after an intense grassroots member-to-member campaign.
Local 135 is one of the biggest locals in the Teamsters, representing members across Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan as well as 2,000 flight attendants nationwide at Republic Airlines.
Until recently, no one could have seen this change coming to a local that was tightly controlled by officers and dominated from the top down.
But Local 135 members organized for change from the bottom up—and now they’re in the driver’s seat.</div>
<h4 class="wsite-content-title">​START SMALL, BUILD BIG</h4>
<div class="paragraph">The Members First movement began with two Teamsters deeply frustrated with their union’s resistance to involving members and standing up to employers. 
​ 
In January, a group of trusted friends met privately to discuss what it would take to bring change to the local.
“We knew that members were tired of being kept in the dark and not getting strong representation,” said Roach. “But honestly, we didn’t know if people would be ready to step up. Like any organizing drive, we had to map it out and make realistic assessments.”
For the next several months, a small committee of leaders and activists got to work talking to other Teamsters and building a network of members in beverage, warehousing, freight, construction, and UPS.</div>
<h4 class="wsite-content-title">​ONE-ON-ONE CONVERSATIONS</h4>
<div class="paragraph">“It was all about agitation at the start,” said Bob Axum, a member at Transervice. “We asked a lot of questions and started to figure out that most members felt like we do—it’s time for change.”
Local 135 represents 1,200 members in a chain of related employers in the grocery industry. Members in the “Kroger Triangle” work under separate contracts but share common concerns, including disrespect on the job, weak representation, and a lack of transparency or coordination in contract negotiations.
The 4,500 UPS Teamsters in Local 135 voted to <a href="https://labornotes.org/2018/10/updated-teamster-brass-overrule-member-no-vote-ups">reject the 2018 contract</a> and voted overwhelmingly for <a href="https://labornotes.org/2021/11/teamsters-united-takes-wheel">new leadership at the international union</a>.
“Our message was that we could elect new leadership in our local too, leaders that would mobilize the members to win the contract we deserve,” said UPS driver Corey Warren. 
​ 
Members First held a series of organizing meetings to recruit volunteers at worksites across the local. They set a goal of 100 endorsements by stewards and members from worksites across the local – and they exceeded it.</div>
<h4 class="wsite-content-title">​COORDINATED CAMPAIGN KICKOFF</h4>
<div class="paragraph"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3606" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt-300x300.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt-150x150.jpg 150w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt-768x768.jpg 768w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt-250x250.jpg 250w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/FightTheBossTshirt.jpg 900w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />After six months of small private organizing meetings, 135 Members First launched its campaign with a bang.
Slate members and volunteers fanned out across the local and campaigned at 20 worksites in a week. At every company, they passed out a flyer with their slate’s platform on one side and the photos of dozens of member endorsers on the other.
“It was a very public showing that Local 135 members were done being scared. We were uniting and using our strength in numbers to win change,” said Jesse Mikesell.
Their launch rocked the union hall, sending incumbents into panic mode. Within days, the top two officers, Danny Barton and Jeff Combs, announced they would retire.
Taking a page from the playbook of longtime Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who endorsed Steve Vairma of Denver Local 455 to succeed him in the union’s 2021 presidential race, the local officers propped up a successor slate to run against the Members First insurgents.
It didn’t work.
Campaign activists stayed focused and continued to hit the streets. Their network grew as they identified workplace leaders and held campaign organizing and fundraising events.
In just four months, they collected 3,000 phone numbers from supporters and prepared to Get Out the Vote.
The ballot count lasted 18 hours. But when the dust settled, Members First had swept the election, 2,434 to 1,156.
Change couldn’t be coming at a better time, with contract negotiations coming up at Sysco, UPS, T-Force, ABF, YRC, Holland, and across the Kroger Triangle.
More than 20 Members First leaders are attending the <a href="https://www.tdu.org/convention-week-2022">TDU Convention</a> this weekend.
“The election win was powered by Local 135 members. But it never would have happened without Teamsters for a Democratic Union,” said Sarah Revard, Secretary-Treasurer elect. 
​ 
“This is about more than winning an election,” she said. “We can rebuild our union’s power by educating, informing, and mobilizing the members. That’s what Members First is about—and that’s what TDU is about, too.”</div>
<div></div>
<div>Beth Breslaw is an organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, where a version of this article <a href="https://www.tdu.org/new_leadership_new_direction_in_major_teamster_local">first appeared</a>.</div>
<div></div>
<div>This article was originally published in <a href="https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/new-leadership-new-direction-in-major-midwest-teamsters-local-by-beth-breslaw">Midwestern Marx</a> and <a href="https://labornotes.org/2022/10/new-leadership-new-direction-major-midwest-teamsters-local">Labor Notes.</a></div>
<div></div>

New Leadership, New Direction in Major Midwest Teamsters Local

When last week Allied troops quit the right (= western, or in this case northern (1)) bank of the Dnieper and so the regional city of Kherson (original population 283,000), confusion reigned among those with a short-term view of this conflict. Probably they had been listening to Western propaganda for too long. Probably they had forgotten that if Russia had difficulties holding right-bank Kherson, then the Ukraine would certainly have even more difficulties. Let us return to some basic facts in order to clear up some of the confusion
<h4>Military Matters</h4>
The government of the Russian Federation was reluctant to intervene in the post-regime change Ukraine of 2014. It always hoped that negotiations and diplomacy would overcome Western aggressiveness and stupidity.
The government of the Russian Federation knew that the USA through its NATO vassals was pumping the Ukraine full of arms and training its troops for the eight years between 2014 and 2022.
Therefore the government of the Russian Federation had eight years in which to plan for this conflict, planning different scenarios and also preparing probing and distracting movements, like that towards Kiev last March. One scenario was that the US would continue to intervene on the side of its Kiev puppet and arm it to the teeth, also using NATO countries, officers and huge numbers of mercenaries to prolong the conflict, so that it would develop into a US war against Russia. That is exactly what has happened. Russia defeated the Ukraine in March, but since then it has had to defeat the USA and its NATO allies, demilitarising them just as it demilitarised the Ukraine in the first month of the conflict. This is why there will be no quick end to what the conflict has become – a war of liberation against the Combined West.
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A NATO Ukraine with Cargill-Monsanto-Blackstone-Black Rock-owned land, anti-Slav biolabs, potential nuclear arms, US missiles on the border with the Federation, genocide in the Russian East and South, Western globalism and its escaped covid experiment with bioweapons helping it to destroy Russia and so set up its World Dictatorship, became more and more abhorrent. All this made Russian liberation more and more probable. But liberation only of the willing. And who was willing?
The government of the Russian Federation always knew that in the far west of the Ukraine, formerly Poland, there was hatred for Russia and therefore it had no interest in taking that. The government of the Russian Federation and its Allies first had to free its allies in the Donbass and then demilitarise and denazify the rest of the ‘Anti-Russia’ Ukraine, which was threatening its survival.
Today Ukraine is running a budget deficit of up to $5 billion per month, with the country’s military spending increasing fivefold to $17 billion for the first seven months of 2022.
The Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy admitted last month that the country’s real GDP fell by as much as 40% in the second quarter of 2022. The annual decrease in Ukraine’s economic output is expected to reach 35%, according to the World Bank. Ukrainian officials forecast that inflation could reach 40% at the beginning of 2023, possibly turning into hyperinflation. All Kiev can do is to urge its Western backers to pour even more into its black hole.
<a href="https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-support-tracker-data-17410/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According</a> to the German Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the US, EU, and other countries promised a total of $93.62 billion to the Ukraine between January and October 2022.
In addition to sending weapons and money to Kiev, the EU is also accommodating Ukrainian ‘refugees’. According to UN data, Poland has taken 1,365,810, Germany 1,003,029, the Czech Lands 427,696, Italy 159,968, Turkey 145,000, Spain 140,391, the UK 122,900 and the USA 100,000. Virtually 3.5 million in all. The possibility of more refugees, this time genuine ones, sends shudders down the already very weak spines of the EU and the UK.
The cost of housing Ukrainians in Europe is considerable, especially given high inflation and the economic slowdown, both caused by the Western politicians’ boycott of Russian energy and natural resources. According to the German Kiel Institute, for some nations the cost of housing Ukrainian refugees has exceeded their overall aid to Ukraine. For instance, Estonia is spending more than 1.2% of its GDP on aid to Kiev and Ukrainian refugees. Latvia’s and Poland’s cumulative aid also exceeds 1% of their GDP.
<div class="su-pullquote su-pullquote-align-left">In addition to sending weapons and money to Kiev, the EU is also accommodating Ukrainian ‘refugees’. According to UN data, Poland has taken 1,365,810, Germany 1,003,029, the Czech Lands 427,696, Italy 159,968, Turkey 145,000, Spain 140,391, the UK 122,900 and the USA 100,000. Virtually 3.5 million in all. The possibility of more refugees, this time genuine ones, sends shudders down the already very weak spines of the EU and the UK.</div>
In addition, popular support for Ukrainian ‘refugees’ has been declining throughout the EU. Ukrainian flags have been taken down nearly everywhere: the novelty has worn off. Many hoodwinked Western people, now impoverished, have realised that most of the ‘refugees’ are not refugees at all, but profiteers. For the most part the ‘refugees’ are the better off Ukrainians. They have fancy German cars, better than those of their hosts, extremely high expectations and an incredible sense of entitlement. They push and shove and do not say thank you. All owe to them. As a result of grasping and downright lazy attitudes, many of them are now on the streets of European towns and cities, having been expelled by their naive sponsors, and there is no-one to rehouse them.
Kiev is running out of resources and money. It cannot obtain frozen Russian assets, because Russia froze an almost equivalent amount of Western assets.
The assistance from the West cannot last forever. The manoeuvre of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to take advantageous positions along the Dnieper switches the special operation to Ukraine’s exhaustion. After a record-breakingly mild October, the warmth has continued in November in Europe. But it will not last.
Conclusion: This will be a difficult winter for the Ukraine and for the Combined West, which is being bled white by the attrition of the Ukraine. The Allies are in no hurry – unlike the Collective West. It now looks as though the Allied strategy may be to push westwards to the natural border of the Dnieper, occupying all the provinces east of it, even if that means abandoning Kherson for a while. This will give the Allies a relatively short and well-protected front. Only then will the Allies consider crossing the river in the south and taking Nikolaev and Odessa – which is quite likely in the longer-term future. And only then, having linked up with Transdnistria would they consider taking back Non-NATO Moldova. And only once they have crushed NATO in the Ukraine, would they consider taking back the three Baltic States, which have mounted such a cruel persecution of their Russian minorities.
<h4>Political, Economic and Ideological Matters</h4>
For 30 years the Russian Federation has been musing on what to do about the collapse of the USSR and the ensuing injustices and absurd borders of the fifteen republics formed out of it. Huge numbers of Russians found themselves outside the Russian Federation and have been subject to persecution. Since 2000, President Putin has been making allies and friends outside the Federation, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the last few years a Russia-China-Iran axis has taken shape. At the same time the Russian Federation has been cultivating self-sufficiency, a process much accelerated out of necessity by the illegal Western sanctions enforced against Moscow when the Crimea rejoined the Motherland.
The US empire is apoplectic about all of this, as Russia is now the main obstacle to totalitarian US global power, its World Dictatorship, which is what its neocons want. Russia is the ideological leader of the BRICS+ and the Russia-China-Iran axes which have been taking shape. However, it now looks as though even to fail in its aims, the US elite will have to spend another £2.3 trillion on the Ukraine, the same as it spent trying to conquer Afghanistan. And we all know how that ended. As for the US poodle, the British Establishment, having lost its Empire, it is now losing its own disunited and bankrupt kingdom. And the EU? It is in its death-throes.
As a symbol of the victory of the Russian ideology, we quote from an article published on his Telegram-Channel by the journalist Ruslan Ostashko and noted by pravda.ru. He states that Americans from Texas, Detroit, Minnesota and other states have come to fight on the Russian side against globalism and Nazism. The Americans declare that: ‘Russia is the last place on earth which is fighting against globalism, liberalism and for a New World Order, which America is destroying’. ‘Guys, this is the last battle for the world’.
<hr />
13 November 2022
Note:
1. The right bank is the one on your right, as you sail downstream. This could be on the left as you look at a map. But maps are not reality.
This article was <a href="https://www.greanvillepost.com/2022/11/15/the-last-battle-for-the-world/">originally published on Greanville Post.</a>

The Last Battle for the World

According to the German Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the US, EU, and other countries promised a total of $93.62 billion to the Ukraine between January and October 2022.

Thousands of Iranians have been protesting in all major cities of Iran for weeks now, with hundreds reportedly killed due to clashes with police and thousands detained. Women are demonstratively taking their headscarves off and even cutting their hair. Anti-government protests are not rare in Iran and we have witnessed them in previous years. They were mainly fueled by economic grievances. This time however, what served as a spark was the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who died after being detained by the “Morality police” for not properly wearing a headscarf. Protesters are claming that she was tortured by police and died of her injuries even though there is a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiCSejWJMQU">video of Mahsa Amini collapsing</a> on her own at the police station.
“Women, Life, Freedom“ &#8211; protesters have been actively chanting at demonstrations in Iran and different western countries. On Saturday, October 22, approximately 80,000 Iranians and others marched in Berlin alone. Huge protests also happened in London, Toronto and Los Angeles. Iranians living abroad have marched in solidarity with citizens who are uprising in their homeland against the government of Iran, which they call “the evil Islamic regime”. They are calling for tougher sanctions against Iran, to close Iranian embassies and expel diplomats. US Joe Biden recently <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-vows-free-iran-west-coast-campaign-speech-2022-11-04/">vowed to &#8220;free Iran&#8221; in his west coast campaign speech.</a> 
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3585" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/women-life-freedom-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/women-life-freedom-300x169.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/women-life-freedom.jpg 512w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Tellingly, not reported by western media have been the massive rallies in a number of Iranian cities <a href="https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/mass-rallies-in-iran-against-riots-raisi-vows-to-punish-perp">in support</a> of the Islamic Republic and repudiation of the anti-government riots. Demonstrators chanted slogans denouncing the US and Israel, which they blamed for inciting the riots. 
Is it mere coincidence that protests began the day after <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/15/iran-signs-memorandum-join-shanghai-cooperation-organisation">Iran signed a memorandum to join Shanghai Cooperation Organisation</a> on September 15th, 2022? During a meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in a conversation with Russian President Putin, Iranian President Raisi said: “The relationship between countries that are sanctioned by the US, such as Iran, Russia or other countries, can overcome many problems and issues and make them stronger. The Americans think whichever country they impose sanctions on, it will be stopped, their perception is a wrong one.” Putin replied that relationships were “developing positively” between Russia and Iran and he is supporting Iran’s membership of SCO. Earlier this year, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/6/28/iran-applies-to-join-brics-group-of-emerging-countries">Iran also applied to join the BRICS group.</a> BRICS is a powerful market alternative to the West emerging before our eyes. It is an acronym for five leading economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Besides Iran, other countries have also expressed their interest in joining BRICS (Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt). 
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3589" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/map-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/map-300x169.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/map.jpg 512w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Iranian capital, where he met with President Raisi to discuss energy partnership. <a href="https://atalayar.com/en/content/iran-and-russia-plan-create-opec-gas-exports">Iran and Russia plan to create an OPEC for gas exports</a>. “The energy giant Gazprom and the Iranian National Iranian Oil Company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) sealing a $40 billion Russian investment.” Iran holds the world&#8217;s second-largest gas reserves. 
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3588" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/pompeo-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/pompeo-300x169.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/pompeo.jpg 512w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />The United States and Israel have tried many times to mobilize Iranians to overthrow their government, through sanctions, media propaganda and the Iranian diaspora. Twenty years ago, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister Netanyahu said that the U.S. <a href="https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/09/12/Netanyahu-US-should-attack-Iran-with-TV/63711031863825/">should attack Iran with TV</a>. It has used that tactic ever since.  No wonder we now hear about protests on every news channel, while social media are full of posts with gruesome pictures specifically designed to cause disturbance and provoke a response. One of the first to report on the current protests in Iran was Masoumeh &#8220;Masih&#8221; Alinejad-Ghomi (short Masih Alinejad), Iranian journalist-in-exile, who claims to “lead” this revolution attempt in Iran. In her interview to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-exiled-dissident-fuelling-the-hijab-protests-in-iran">The New Yorker</a>, she said: “I’m leading this movement, the Iranian regime will be brought down by women. I believe this.” Alinejad had lived outside of Iran for more than ten years working for Voice of America Persia (VOAP), funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) formerly known as Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). She received at least $628,050, documented <a href="https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/1ae4153a-dd63-f4f5-0735-fa1cbf3a29d3-C/all">here.</a> 
In a <a href="https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1570104003022950401">Twitter post</a> on September 14th, Alinejad wrote: “22 years old woman Mahsa Amini suffers heart attack after being arrested by morality police for wearing an inappropriate hijab.” Next day she is <a href="https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1570402940489187328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1570402940489187328%7Ctwgr%5E8b390ea730a7f067f191625e059317ca4944cce4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.almayadeen.net%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fdirty-money%3A-meet-the-us-agent-driving-the-cia-led-riots-in">adding to her story</a>: “In Iran this woman is in a coma because morality police savagely arrest her in order to force her to follow sharia law &amp; wear hijab.” On September 16, her rhetoric changed dramatically when she began using #MahsaWasMurdered in her <a href="https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1570806641142173697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1570806641142173697%7Ctwgr%5E8b390ea730a7f067f191625e059317ca4944cce4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish.almayadeen.net%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2Fdirty-money%3A-meet-the-us-agent-driving-the-cia-led-riots-in">tweets</a>, implying that Mahsa Amini was killed by the Islamic Republic’s “hijab police” in Iran. From there, Alinejad and thousands of Iranians living abroad and sympathizers started sharing the hashtag and demanding justice for Mahsa Amini. Of course by justice they mean a complete overthrow of the government, even if it requires a foreign invasion. They hope to reproduce a successful color revolution as happened nine years ago in Ukraine or during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat">1953 Iranian coup d&#8217;état</a>, in which the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown by the US and UK in order to install the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Unfortunately for them, there are many Iranians still alive who remember the history. And they will not allow the Western Imperialist powers to do it again. The Iranian people are strong and more than capable of deciding their own fate.

Iran Crisis and US Complicity

Loud calls for overthrow of the Iranian &quot;regime&quot; have been popping in Western media lately. Coincidentally, we started to witness it as soon as Iran signed a memorandum to join Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and applied to join BRICS. 

Westerners are taught that evil foreign &#8220;regimes&#8221; don&#8217;t let their people criticize their government, meanwhile westerners themselves are trained to never criticize their government. They&#8217;re trained instead to criticize decoy dichotomies — false partisan nonsense — not the real power.
Westerners are trained to criticize the actions of the other party or the beliefs of the other ideological faction, never the foreign or domestic policies which are fully supported by both parties. The power structure which maintains 99.9% of the same policies regardless of which party is officially in charge is the real government, but westerners are trained never to look there. They&#8217;re instead trained to fixate on a false two-handed puppet show diversion.
Westerners say &#8220;Well I&#8217;d rather live here than China or Russia, because here I can criticize my government whenever I want!&#8221; Okay. But you don&#8217;t. You don&#8217;t criticize your government. You just criticize the puppets, and usually only the puppets of the party you don&#8217;t like. You never criticize your actual government. Criticizing your actual government looks like attacking the murderous foreign policy that&#8217;s supported by both parties. Attacking the authoritarian domestic policies supported by both parties. Attacking the exploitative capitalist systems supported by both parties.
Westerners are trained not to do that. They&#8217;re trained to believe that &#8220;criticizing your government&#8221; looks like saying &#8220;Drumpf&#8221; or &#8220;Let&#8217;s go Brandon&#8221; while the same tyrannical agendas march forward regardless of who sits in the White House.
Westerners are &#8220;free&#8221; in the same way <a href="https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/free-speech-in-the-us-empire-is-as-illusory-as-free-range-eggs-60b13bc1b561" rel="">&#8220;free range&#8221; chickens are free</a>; sure the door&#8217;s technically open and they can technically go outside, but they&#8217;re conditioned never to do so. Western so-called liberal democracy purports to offer freedom while in practice only offering the illusion of freedom. It uses the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised to keep people trapped in an existence as blindly obedient gear-turners while cartoons about freedom play in their heads.
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The problem isn&#8217;t &#8220;wokeism&#8221;, the problem is that important conversations like US militarism and imperialism get bogged down in ridiculous conversations about whether the US military is too woke or not woke enough instead of how it&#8217;s killing people and threatening the whole world. Engaging in either side of that debate protects the worst impulses of the most powerful and dangerous people in the world, because it moves the crosshairs of public scrutiny from the powerful to the other side of the &#8220;wokeness&#8221; culture war. This is happening all over the place.
A good example is the way Republicans have been pushing the most horrific agendas of US imperialism but using &#8220;anti-wokeness&#8221; as a carrying agent for their propaganda, like when Jesse Kelly <a href="https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1472019332507090947" rel="">said on Tucker Carlson</a> that &#8220;We don’t need a military that’s woman-friendly. We don’t need a military that’s gay-friendly, with all due respect to the Air Force. We need a military that’s flat-out hostile. We need a military full of Type-A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Tucker Carlson&#8217;s guest: &#8220;We don&#8217;t need a military that&#8217;s woman-friendly, that&#8217;s gay friendly&#8221; we need men &#8220;who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls, but we don&#8217;t have that now. We can&#8217;t get women off of naval vessels, that should be step one but most are pregnant anyway.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/9uNzdbx0ON">pic.twitter.com/9uNzdbx0ON</a>
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) <a href="https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1472019332507090947?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 18, 2021</a></blockquote>
Or when Psycho Rubio <a href="https://twitter.com/KyleMatovcik/status/1562754102010200064" rel="">said</a> “We don’t need a military focused on the proper use of pronouns. We need a military focused on blowing up Chinese aircraft carriers.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
From a speech <a href="https://twitter.com/marcorubio?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@marcorubio</a> gave yesterday. 
To a roaring applause. 
This is playing with literal fire. Republicans aren&#8217;t anti war post Trump, they just got conned into shifting their focus to China, after OBAMA&#8217;S Asia pivot. 
This rhetoric cannot be accepted. <a href="https://t.co/Md5rSLYzWU">pic.twitter.com/Md5rSLYzWU</a>
— Kyle Matovcik. (@KyleMatovcik) <a href="https://twitter.com/KyleMatovcik/status/1562754102010200064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 25, 2022</a></blockquote>
The culture war says you should push back on the &#8220;anti-woke&#8221; rhetoric. Anti-imperialism says you should push back on their omnicidal warmongering. It&#8217;s hard to focus on both. This is being exploited by empire managers in myriad ways. They get people chasing decoy dichotomies so they can&#8217;t focus on the powerful.
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Step 1: Be a progressive.
Step 2: Ignore a major problem that progressives are supposed to oppose.
Step 3: Keep ignoring it until right wingers start paying attention to it.
Step 4: Frame opposing that problem as a right wing position.
See: See nuclear brinkmanship, Ukraine proxy warfare, Assange, Syria, internet censorship, etc.
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One of the reasons people are so casual about risking nuclear war is because it&#8217;s a difficult concept for the mind to wrap itself around. Full-scale nuclear war wouldn&#8217;t just kill everyone, it&#8217;d prevent every other human who would have been born in the future from ever existing.
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This is how all mainstream Russia hysteria victims think; they&#8217;re just not normally this forthcoming about the infantile nature of their worldview. This is how stupid US empire propaganda has made the average westerner. They think like small boys watching a cartoon show. <a href="https://t.co/Gj2RguhGYz">pic.twitter.com/Gj2RguhGYz</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1591972347619442688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 14, 2022</a></blockquote>
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I have no special feelings one way or the other about China or Russia, I just acknowledge the indisputable fact that they are quantifiably far less destructive than the US-centralized empire. If they weren&#8217;t being aggressively targeted by that empire I probably wouldn&#8217;t notice them much.
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Discussion of revolution and communism in the English-speaking world is just fantasy role playing unless it begins and ends with the cold hard reality that the left has been completely neutralized and marginalized here and the numbers are nowhere close to what they need to be. Moving revolutionary leftism out of the farthest margins and closer to the mainstream should be your first and foremost objective before you talk about anything else, because otherwise you&#8217;re just LARPing. You&#8217;re arguing about a political movement that has no actual movement.
You can do this by outreach and activism. You can also do this by finding ways to make socialism and communism look so fucking cool that people start knocking each other over to be a part of it. Finding clever ways to make it shiny and attractive in a very indoctrinated society.
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Western journalism is becoming more and more illegal. The western empire is guilty of everything it accuses its enemies of doing. <a href="https://t.co/96YPlqe8zy">https://t.co/96YPlqe8zy</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1591533663497654273?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 12, 2022</a></blockquote>
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Anyone who tries hard to convince you to like a powerful person has traded their mind for personality cult doctrine, whether their hero is Bernie Sanders, AOC, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson or Elon Musk. Proselytizing for the powerful is a sign that critical thinking has been abandoned.
Think about it: what would be gained by one more person having positive feelings about Elon Musk or some other powerful figure? How does that benefit the world? It doesn&#8217;t, yet people try to win converts for them constantly, just like evangelists proselytizing their religion. This is because they&#8217;re all about the individual, not the cause or the policies that individual supposedly stands for.
Anyone who tries to convince me to support a given goal or perspective will have my interest if their case is lucid and well-argued, but anyone who tries to convince me to like a given individual is instantly dismissed as a mindless automaton. I know I won&#8217;t be hearing anything intelligent from them.
Pushing agendas serves those agendas. Pushing individuals serves only those individuals. If you care about advancing a cause, then advance that cause. Don&#8217;t get caught up in the propaganda-friendly, thought-killing tar pit of personality worship.
Famous people are not your friend, and uplifting the powerful only serves power. This is especially true in the power structure we currently live under where the only people who are allowed to get to the top are those who facilitate the interests of power.
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Filmmakers can trick you into cheering for the seal or for the polar bear just by choosing which one&#8217;s being followed by the camera and framed as the protagonist. They can also trick you into cheering for cops, a corrupt legal system, or an imperialist military in the same way.
This article was <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/they-keep-us-focused-on-decoy-dichotomies">originally published on Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack.</a>

They Keep Us Focused On Decoy Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The Atlantic, which is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurene_Powell_Jobs#Activism_and_later_career" rel="">owned by</a> billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and run by <a href="https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/jeffrey-goldberg/" rel="">neoconservative war propagandist</a> Jeffrey Goldberg, has published a pair of articles that are appalling even by its own standards.
<a href="https://archive.ph/wvZts" rel="">Virulent Russiagater</a> Anne Applebaum argues in &#8220;<a href="https://archive.ph/00b2b" rel="">Fear of Nuclear War Has Warped the West’s Ukraine Strategy</a>&#8221; that the US and its allies should escalate against Russia with full confidence that Putin won&#8217;t respond with nuclear weapons.
&#8220;Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them,&#8221; Applebaum writes.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Anne Applebaum&#8217;s disdain for &#8220;restraint,&#8221; her insouciance regarding the nuclear threat, and her reckless call for &#8220;belief&#8221;at the end of this article, is truly chilling. This is the new McCarthyism. <a href="https://twitter.com/PatPorter76?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PatPorter76</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/samuelmoyn?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@samuelmoyn</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/QuincyInst?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@QuincyInst</a> <a href="https://t.co/tG7z6KED6O">https://t.co/tG7z6KED6O</a>
— Jeanne Morefield (@JeanneMorefiel1) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeanneMorefiel1/status/1590630733529288705?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 10, 2022</a></blockquote>
But throughout her own essay Applebaum also acknowledges that she does not actually know the things she is claiming to know.
&#8220;We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war,&#8221; she writes. &#8220;We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.&#8221;
&#8220;I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can,&#8221; says Applebaum after confidently asserting that more western aggression would actually have deterred Russia&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine.
These are the kinds of things it&#8217;s important to have the highest degree of certainty in before taking drastic actions which can, you know, <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-huge-gap-between-how-serious?s=w" rel="">literally end the world</a>. It&#8217;s absolutely nuts how western pundits face more scrutiny and accountability when publicly recommending financial investments than when recommending moves that could end all terrestrial life.
On that note it&#8217;s probably worth mentioning here that Applebaum&#8217;s husband, European Parliament member Radoslaw Sikorski, recently <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-environment/polish-politician-suggests-us-sabotaged-russia-germany-gas-pipelines" rel="">made headlines</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1574857056040853504" rel="">publicly thanking</a> the United States for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-3595 size-full" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/2674ec96-1728-4340-8174-223b49fe4b0f_816x744.jpg" alt="" width="816" height="744" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/2674ec96-1728-4340-8174-223b49fe4b0f_816x744.jpg 816w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/2674ec96-1728-4340-8174-223b49fe4b0f_816x744-300x274.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/2674ec96-1728-4340-8174-223b49fe4b0f_816x744-768x700.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 816px) 100vw, 816px" />
The Atlantic has also published an article titled &#8220;<a href="https://archive.ph/3Koy2" rel="">The Age of Social Media Is Ending</a>,&#8221; subtitled &#8220;It never should have begun.&#8221; Its author, Ian Bogost, argues that the recent management failures in Twitter and Facebook mean the days of just any old schmuck having access to their own personal broadcasting network are over, and that this is a good thing.
Bogost&#8217;s piece contains what has got to be the single most elitist sentence that I have ever read:
<blockquote>&#8220;A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset.&#8221;</blockquote>
Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences. That&#8217;s why the official authorized commentariat have been the most vocal voices calling for internet censorship and complaining about the rise of a more democratized information environment. These elitist wankers have been fuming for years about the way the uninitiated rabble have been granted the ability to not just talk, but to talk back.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Social networking had its problems, but the real horror was its evolution into social media (which it did without anyone really noticing).
Making connections for modest use was okay. Turning everyone into constant content creators/sinks was not. <a href="https://t.co/Ishu3HDYzG">https://t.co/Ishu3HDYzG</a>
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) <a href="https://twitter.com/ibogost/status/1591074262827556865?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 11, 2022</a></blockquote>
Hamilton Nolan of In These Times posted a <a href="https://twitter.com/hamiltonnolan/status/1591438194964406272" rel="">recent observation</a> on Twitter which makes the perfect counter to The Atlantic&#8217;s snooty pontifications.
&#8220;The best thing Twitter did for journalism was to show everyone there are thousands of regular people who are better writers than most professionals which is why the most mediocre famous pundits have always been quickest to dismiss it as a cesspool,&#8221; Nolan writes, adding, &#8220;Best thing Twitter did for the world in general was to allow anyone to yell directly at rich and powerful people, which drove many of them insane, including the richest guy on earth.&#8221;
Of course the imperial narrative managers at The Atlantic would be opposed to normal people getting a voice in public discourse. When your job is to control the narrative, the bigger a monopoly you hold over it the better.
This article was <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-atlantic-is-a-shitty-propaganda">originally published on Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack.</a>

The Atlantic Is A Shitty Propaganda Rag Run By Elitist Wankers

Nothing enrages the official authorized commentariat like the common riff raff having access to platforms and audiences.

Democratic Party infiltrators are at this moment the biggest threat to the communist movement in the USA. Conversely, the pro-NATO psyop is the largest propaganda operation happening at present. The great priority of our ruling class as of now is to maintain imperial hegemony, which they’re trying to do by using Ukraine as a cudgel to destabilize Eurasia. They’re sacrificing the U.S. economy’s stability, as well as the stability of Europe’s, in order to make their geopolitical ploy in Ukraine pay off.
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It’s getting increasingly apparent that such a payoff for the empire won’t come. After exhausting Ukraine’s forces to the point where Kiev is having to draft men up to their sixties, Russia has so far only used around a fourth of its potential mobilization capacity, and it’s only now transitioning into a full-on war campaign. As the costs of this futile effort mount, the ultra-nationalist faction of the U.S. ruling class will likely win the midterms, brought to victory by Biden’s prioritization of geopolitical games over the people’s economic wellbeing. “Woke” imperialism, where liberals market Washington’s global violence as a social justice mission, has created a political vacuum, soon to be filled by America’s fascist movement.
As a consequence, the LGBT community, racially marginalized groups, and the other targets of this reactionary force will come under greater threat. Liberals have shown themselves incapable of combating the rising far right. The goal of the Democrat infiltrators within leftist and communist spaces is to keep woke imperialism dominant within the opposition to the GOP, even after woke imperialism has so thoroughly lost credibility.
These actors seek to serve as an obstacle for anti-imperialists, perpetuating a culture within the left that passively goes along with every facet of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy agenda. They regurgitate each shallow argument about current affairs that their funders in the ruling class provide for them, upholding the cultural hegemony which keeps imperialism in motion. One organization that plays this left imperialist role is NDN Collective, the group that’s sought to establish itself as the default face of the Land Back concept within the eyes of the public.
The fact that they’ve received $12 million from Jeff Bazos isn’t in itself the reason why they advance a pro-imperialist agenda. It’s because their ideas are not based in a revolutionary analysis, much less the type of <a href="https://partyofcommunistsusa.net/february-25th-2022-party-of-communists-usa-statement-on-russian-military-operation-in-ukraine/" rel="">analysis</a> which recognizes how Russia’s operation is a justified response to Washington’s using Ukraine as a proxy terrorism weapon. Without this perspective, an organization naturally takes on the pro-imperialist stance in regards to Ukraine and other foreign policy issues. This is the case even if that org recognizes the U.S. as an imperialist power, as NDN does in its <a href="https://ndncollective.org/ndn-collective-responds-to-russian-governments-attacks-on-ukraine/" rel="">statement</a> on Ukraine:
The crisis started by the Russian government has the potential to impact the entire world – and while the US government has already been quick to get involved, we must be wary of their imperialist tactics. At this moment, it is critical that we stand in solidarity with Russians and Ukrainians who are protesting the moves towards war. The future of humanity depends on our ability to divest from the fossil fuel industry, and nothing is a greater threat to our environment than increased militarization. As the war machine ramps up, there will be direct impacts on Indigenous people from the Ukrainian region and globally. They will extract resources from our lands and recruit our young people to risk their lives for a fight rooted in greed, pride, and colonization. We need to center ourselves in the truth that the US is not the hero – that only the people have the answers we need to build a safe and peaceful world.
What makes liberal infiltrators like them a threat to our movement is that their arguments are insidious. They decry imperialism as a concept and say to be wary of U.S. imperialist tactics, which are the bare minimum for leftists who haven’t yet been ideologically trained in Marxism and geopolitics. At the same time, they blame the crises that U.S. imperialism has caused—in this case through a 2014 fascist coup in Ukraine—on the same countries imperialism seeks to destabilize. One can repudiate the idea that the U.S. is a hero while taking a pro-imperialist stance. All they need to do is reinforce the lies imperialism needs in order to exact its violence.
To sell these lies, the Collective frames what it’s saying in the rhetoric of decolonial liberation and environmentalism. It emphasizes the ways this conflict is harming the planet and America’s indigenous communities, again making the ideologically untrained leftist more inclined to trust what this organization is saying. But you don’t have to be studied in Ukraine to see NDN is a force for bourgeois co-optation. You simply have to have the bare minimum of intellectual honesty about what it means when a nonprofit organization receives corporate funding. The radical group Indigenous Action <a href="https://www.indigenousaction.org/smash-the-non-profit-indigenous-complex/" rel="">wrote</a> this last year about NDN, and about the other parts of the nonprofit-industrial complex that claim to represent hope for the liberation movements:
The overall strategy of the NPIC is colonial, upholds unjust power relationships, and capitalism. Groups like NDN Collective are prime examples of the problems with the NPIC. They have co-opted the term “collective,” which is a radical non-hierarchical practice, but are structured with a president and CEO. They purchase and maintain private property as a “land back” campaign that is not a radically anti-colonial action to build Indigenous autonomy, but a capitalist strategy.Their CEO is paid more than $200,000 a year and their annual operating budget is more than $10 million dollars. They recently received more than $10 million dollars from extreme capitalist and working class exploiter Jeff Bezos. The NDN Collective organizes with the idea of “Decolonizing Wealth,” which is really just a marketing strategy to commodify and cash-in on Indigenous struggles.
Organizations like NDN are the U.S. empire’s domestic equivalents of the NGOs that get sent across the globe to advance counterrevolutionary schemes under the guise of social justice and “humanitarianism.” They exist to drown out the revolutionary organizations in the competition over organizing platforms, making themselves the more easily visible groups to the casual observer. This effort depends on their bourgeois funding, as their rhetoric and analyses are shallow compared to that of revolutionaries and therefore less able to gain an audience on their own merits.
They seek to absorb and redirect popular discontent, particularly discontent from within the U.S. empire’s internal colonies. This is because the internal colonies are what pose an existential threat to the U.S. empire. It’s with their guidance that the class struggle in this country can act as a genuine class struggle, a struggle which liberates the peoples who are currently ensnared by the prison house of nations which is the USA. Without a vision to dismantle settler-colonial land relations, to restore full sovereignty to the occupied nations, the continent’s proletariat will remain divided. Restorative justice for the nations whose land and labor were stolen to create the U.S. empire is indispensable for freeing the working class as a whole, because colonialism and capitalism are inextricably intertwined.
The first phase in the bourgeoisie’s effort to thwart such a revolution is a campaign to co-opt the liberation movements. They both poison these movements with corporate grifting schemes disguised as sources for help, and divert these movements towards embracing the Democratic Party as the thing which will address their needs. The latter tactic has particularly been applied to the black liberation struggle, as described by Black Agenda Report in its <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/laundering-black-rage" rel="">analysis</a> on how the capitalist settler state manages the “substance” of discontent within the African diaspora: “Attempts to outright suppress this substance only further stoke the flames of rebellion. Conversely, supporting its unfettered spread is State suicide. So, whether it&#8217;s suppressed or supported, explosion is imminent. As a result, Black Rage cannot be entirely controlled, only managed. To manage Black Rage, it must be laundered like the Blood Money that birthed it. To launder Black Rage into the market, its potency must be defanged. The social capital it produces, the clarion call by the Black masses for a free and equitable world, must be snatched and funneled into the hands of the State; ‘cleaned’ of the original people and conditions that manufactured its existence but still recognizable enough to appear untraced.”
The next phase is a campaign of racial terror, as we’ve seen happen in cycles dozens of times throughout U.S. history. The liberals who are exploiting the struggles of colonized peoples to sell imperialist agendas hold no commitments to actually aiding these struggles. Biden <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/04/biden-pentagon-police-military-weapons-equipment-1033-executive-order" rel="">could have</a> reversed the continued flow of military equipment to police, but he’s remained complacent these last two years, instead focusing on the buildup to and execution of another proxy war. When the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy allows reactionaries to regain control, these liberals will blame the black community; they already have been scapegoating them in a preemptive sense. The more the country declines, the more the internal colonies will be sacrificed in favor of imperialism’s military adventures and further neoliberal austerity. And the more brutal our police state will be in waging war against these communities, who are being harmed the most by the economic and climatic crises.
This betrayal by America’s liberal leaders will spark a revolt that the empire can’t contain. So for as long as possible, the empire’s liberal wing seeks to pretend to be on the side of these movements, selling reformist faux-solutions and using decolonial rhetoric as another imperialist marketing tool. But at some point, this game won’t be able to be played any longer, and the struggle will escalate.
This article was <a href="https://rainershea.substack.com/p/woke-imperialism-the-tactic-liberals">originally published on Rainer Shea&#8217;s Substack</a>.
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pinch during late-stage capitalism, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon <a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744" rel="">here</a>.
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Woke Imperialism: the Tactic Liberals are Using to try to Delay Revolution in the Imperial Center

The first phase in the bourgeoisie’s effort to thwart such a revolution is a campaign to co-opt the liberation movements.

<h4>Dear comrades!</h4>
I cordially welcome the participants in the 22nd International Meeting of Communist and Workers&#8217; Parties on behalf of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The party which has been illegally banned in my country, where our comrades and like-thinking people suffer political persecution, arrests and physical violence on the part of the ruling Neo-Nazi-oligarchic regime; a regime which is, in essence, reactionary and fascist.
We have gathered here on the Island of Freedom at a difficult time. The forces of international imperialism&#8211;the sharks of globalization in their struggle for redrawing the political map of the world, for resources and commodity markets&#8211;resort to any methods and, in fact, act as instigators of the Third World War. The tragedy is that the reactionary forces make active use of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism to achieve their goals.
Analysis of the international situation shows growing aggressiveness of imperialism and a dramatic sharpening of its internal contradictions in two areas:
1) The ideological – between the US-led imperialist west and communist China, which, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, they consider to be “an empire of evil,” as well as Vietnam and Cuba.
2) The inter-imperialist – the USA seeks to preserve its hegemony and the world order under which it plays the dominant role.
The USA is creating new military blocs in southeast Asia, stoking up tensions in the Middle East and north Africa, and is pursuing an aggressive policy in using Ukraine against Russia, and Taiwan against China. The provocative visit of Pelosi to Yerevan and her pledges of support for Armenia inevitably led to a widening of the conflict in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The situation in Central Asia gives grounds for concern (given the recent conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan).
After the breakup of the USSR, it was the USA and Britain that set about creating a neo-fascist state on the territory of the former Soviet Ukraine and became the main sponsors and beneficiaries of it.
The reforms they foisted on Ukraine put capital in control of all the spheres of societal life and ensured total control of transnational corporations over the country&#8217;s socioeconomic life. This created the material basis for the advent and establishment in power, as a result of an armed coup in February 2014, of the most reactionary forces: the comprador bourgeoisie allied with neo-fascists and organized crime.
It was these forces in Ukraine that were instrumental in destroying all the socialist gains and economic sovereignty, bringing about a profound lumpenization of society.
It is through these forces that the USA formed a puppet vertical power structure and introduced external control of the country.
It was through these forces that the USA unleashed in Ukraine a fratricidal civil war; a war against the citizens of Donbass, who are upholding their constitutional rights and freedoms. It was these forces which, at the instigation of the US ruling circles, turned civil war in Donbass into a war against Russia.
Humankind has, in fact, already been dragged into a new world war. I would like to draw one of the many tragic parallels.
During the Second World War, Europe was working for Hitler in the war against the USSR. Today, acting in the interests of the USA, Europe is supplying weapons to the pro-fascist regime in Ukraine and is strengthening it financially.
The continuation of this policy will inevitably lead to the spread of the theater of hostilities to the territory of the EU.
The aggressive attempts of some new European countries, notably Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, to revise the post-World War II borders will merely accelerate this process.
The former Foreign Minister of Romania, Marga, recently said without mincing words: “Ukraine is within unnatural borders. It should cede territories: Transcarpathia to Hungary, Galicia to Poland, Bukovina to Romania. These are the territories of other countries.”
US senator Lindsey Graham said cynically that with American weapons Ukraine will fight Russia to the last man.
Civilians, innocent people—old folks, women and children — are dying in Ukraine. This is a tragedy.
In backing the fascist regime in Ukraine, the USA and NATO are pursuing a policy which former US senator Richard Blake outlined as: “We don’t care how many Ukrainians die. How many women, children, civilians and military die. We don’t care. It is like a football match and we want to win. Ukraine cannot accept a peace solution. It is up to Washington to take the peace decision, but in the meantime we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.”
Such statements by war-hawks vindicate our position and the warnings the Ukrainian communists voiced in Izmir last week: the threat of a fascist offensive is real, and the war which the USA and NATO are waging with Ukrainian hands on Ukrainian territory is a war solely in the interests of the USA imperialists.
Billions of dollars are funneled into the production of lethal weapons and ammunition, Britain’s new-baked Prime Minister Liz Truss is prepared to use nuclear weapons, and huge numbers of NATO troops are concentrated on the borders of Ukraine and Belarus.
The imperialists turn a blind eye to the fact that Zelensky’s pro-fascist regime is ruthlessly doing away with political opponents. Any manifestations of free thinking are quashed by punitive units. The crimes of Hitlerites and their accomplices during the Second World War who burned people alive in Oswiecim and who staged Gernica and Khatyn massacres are being glorified.
The monuments and graves of Soviet soldiers, who gave their lives to have the flames in the furnaces of Nazi death camps doused, are being destroyed.
This happens not only in Ukraine but all over Europe. The Moloch of glorification of Nazi criminals devours minds, turning homo sapiens (“the wise man”) into a “mad man.”
The process of recreating a semblance of the Nazi Third Reich is practically underway.
This “Reich,” like its prototype nurtured by transnational capital, American and British corporations, bases its ideology on the superiority of the “indigenous” race. Hence the law on indigenous peoples, which has turned into outcasts the Russians who have always lived on Ukrainian territory &#8211; including Donbass, Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson &#8211; indeed, the whole territory of our country. Like Jews in Nazi Germany. We know from history what tragedy it visited on millions of people.
<h4>Comrades!</h4>
In view of what is happening in Ukraine, I would like to note first of all that, unfortunately, there is no consensus between Communist and workers’ parties on the nature of the armed conflict in Ukraine, nor on the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which has supported the special operation.
Since any military confrontation has its own specific features, the very first task of any Marxist is to identify its class-oriented nature with appropriate assessment.
As we believe, the war of Donbass against the Kiev regime should be considered as national liberation struggle; in essence, a war for independence from the ruling fascist regime, for the right of the people to speak their native Russian language and not to follow the anti-Russian course imposed by the United States.
Hence, on the basis of Marxist theory, the military conflict in Ukraine should not be considered as an imperialist war in a literal sense of the word. And moreover, in view of Russia, it is considered as the struggle against an external threat to national security and fascism.
We all understand that the people’s militia of Donbass was not able to resist the Ukrainian army of many thousands equipped with foreign weaponry, so their defeat would have inevitably led to the total destruction of the Russian-speaking population, many of whom were citizens of Russia.
The army of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists under the command of American and NATO instructors concentrated on the borders of the republics; the detailed invasion plan had been developed by Washington generals, in advance. They all were waiting for the command.
Accordingly, in order to protect its citizens and ensure national security, Russia had no other choice but to deliver a preventive strike.
In accordance with the constitution of the Russian Federation, the President has taken the actions stipulated by the law, since it was impossible to resist aggression in any other way.
In addition, the negotiation process within the framework of the Minsk agreements has been deliberately sabotaged by Kiev with the support of the United States and the European Union, since the establishment of peace in Ukraine is not stipulated by the plans of Washington and NATO.
In this regard, the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation seems to us quite reasonable.
The increasingly reactionary character of modern imperialism is the result of several factors that have brought about a decline of the workers’ movement and the weakening of the communist and workers’ parties.
Ukrainian communists believe that in working out the tactics of our actions and defining the main areas of struggle, it is necessary to proceed on the basis that the modern balance of forces in the world has tilted in favor of reaction, which is making use of fascism.
Sowing discord within the working classes, using puppet regimes, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis, imperialism intensifies the exploitation of countries and peoples and destroys the foundations of people’s democracy and a just world order.
Modern world trends and constant economic crises, unfortunately, diminish the revolutionary potential of the principles of proletarian internationalism and undermine the unity of the working classes. This is also happening in Ukraine, where a special “working” class of war is being created, the class which lives off the war and cannot imagine itself without it.
The sanctions policy initiated by the USA and Britain and their political satellites inevitably worsens the life of common people, weakens the states’ economic potential, provokes unemployment and consequently increases social discontent and, unfortunately, disunites the workers’ movement. World imperialism uses all these phenomena as a weapon in the class struggle.
What do we see today in Europe and, indeed, in the USA? Prices and tariffs have grown many times over. Enterprises are shutting down, people publicly burn their bills for gas, electricity and water, stage protest actions against their governments. They are demanding, among other things, an end to the sanctions madness and the war in Ukraine. All this is happening against the background of militarization of the economy, politics and the media hysteria around the prospect of nuclear war.
I am convinced that the communist and workers’ parties must channel people’s economic and social demands towards political struggle. The struggle against the threat of fascism and a change of the social system that engenders it; that is, the capitalist system as such.
Today the progressive forces – we have to admit it honestly – are losing the cognitive battle for the minds of people. It is our task to win it. This is the only way, if we want to prevent the catastrophe of a Third World War.
I believe that – in the context of the goals and tasks of our meeting, considering the situation in the world and the need to struggle for an end to the war and the establishment of a just world order – we the communist and workers’ parties should concentrate our efforts on the following areas:
The strengthening of our solidarity; solidarity with other progressive forces in the struggle against neo-fascism and the instigators of a Third World War, by organizing a system of truthful public information about what is taking place in Ukraine today, how it threatens Europe and how it threatens humankind. By explaining to people that the civil war in Donbass (2014-2022), like the Ukraine-Russia war, have been provoked and unleashed by the pro-fascist regimes in Ukraine on the demand and in the interests of the USA, in order to create a bridgehead for the dismemberment and destruction of Russia as a geopolitical rival. By stepping up the struggle against any attempts to glorify the Nazi ideology, restoring the true history of the Second World War. And by supporting (without compromising on our ideological principles) those who call for a peaceful settlement and end to the war in Ukraine, regardless of their political affiliation. Such politicians and such forces exist in every country.
I also consider it necessary to bend every effort at the level of national parliaments and the European parliament to neutralize the provocative actions of the USA and its allies in the Asia Pacific region against China. Combined with the war in Ukraine and the possible direct clash of nuclear powers, China and the USA, and especially against the background of declarations about a Russian “nuclear threat,” the worst forecasts may unfortunately become reality.
<h4>Dear comrades!</h4>
The struggle to put an end to the fratricidal war in Ukraine unleashed by the transnational corporations and their stooges in the governments of European (and not only European states), the war in which Washington-led NATO is a de facto party to the conflict (through its supply of arms, ammunition and training of Ukrainian armed forces, funding and controlling the military campaign), is the struggle for preventing a Third World War which is but a step away. We must do everything we can to prevent it.
Once again, thank you for the opportunity to address the participants in this international meeting and to express confidence of our victory, a victory of “light” over “darkness.&#8221;

Communist Party of Ukraine Leader: We Must Do Everything We Can To Avoid World War III

Speech by First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Pyotr Simonenko at the 22nd Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, Havana, Cuba, October 2022

The already volatile world of cryptocurrency descended into a frenzy over the weekend when the crypto exchange FTX declared bankruptcy and many investors saw their holdings disappear overnight. The company&#8217;s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019, becoming a billionaire by the age 30. Fortune magazine called him the next <a href="https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&amp;ccid=O9XBZlW8&amp;id=9474627BBF837F88F26E48DB07B0368126770C95&amp;thid=OIP.O9XBZlW8Fwe6WdxYKNuHnAFcH0&amp;mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2Fimages%2Fg%2FjIkAAOSwoepjUHnH%2Fs-l500.jpg&amp;cdnurl=https%3A%2F%2Fth.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FR.3bd5c16655bc1707ba59dc5828db879c%3Frik%3DlQx3JoE2sAfbSA%26pid%3DImgRaw%26r%3D0&amp;exph=500&amp;expw=348&amp;q=sam+bankman+fried+fortune+magazine+warren+buffet+&amp;simid=607993286026860567&amp;form=IRPRST&amp;ck=CD6AA830D1FBFE01B5CDD0323283EEEE&amp;selectedindex=0&amp;ajaxhist=0&amp;ajaxserp=0&amp;vt=0&amp;sim=11">Warren Buffet</a>. But the fintech celebrity&#8217;s meteoric rise came suddenly crashing down in early November when the world&#8217;s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/binance-backs-out-of-ftx-rescue-leaving-the-crypto-exchange-on-the-brink-of-collapse.html">backed out</a> of a potential buyout of FTX. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao declared that the issues it had uncovered at FTX were “beyond our control or ability to help.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of <a href="https://t.co/FQ3MIG381f">https://t.co/FQ3MIG381f</a>.
— Binance (@binance) <a href="https://twitter.com/binance/status/1590449161069268992?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 9, 2022</a></blockquote>
Zhao wasn&#8217;t the only prominent figure in the crypto world who had grown skeptical of Bankman-Fried. Elon Musk disclosed he had been equally unimpressed with Bankman-Fried: “I got a ton of people telling me [that] he’s got, you know, huge amounts of money that he wants to invest in the Twitter deal. And I talked to him for about half an hour. And I know my bullshit meter was redlining. It was like, this dude is bullshit – that was my impression.” Following Binance&#8217;s withdrawal decision, it quickly became apparent that FTX did not have the funds available to investors trying to withdraw their holdings. Once valued at $32 billion dollars, FTX has imploded. Some <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/726277bb-35a1-4d35-9df9-3e1cca587b77">hedge funds</a> with around $100 million dollars invested in FTX are now nursing their losses.
Extreme volatility is a hallmark of the crypto market; in March 2022, the cryptocurrency Luna met <a href="https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/luna-crypto-crash-how-ust-broke-and-whats-next-for-terra/">a similar fate</a>. However, what makes Bankman-Fried&#8217;s FTX unusual was its linkages with the current authorities in Kiev, Ukraine and the Democratic Party, and the emerging role it appears to have played in the 2022 US midterm elections. The mainstream media omits from its celebrity coverage that Bankman-Fried and FTX have played a key role in bankrolling the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. In March 2022, FTX and the Ukrainian Government <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/14/ukraine-partners-with-ftx-everstake-to-launch-new-crypto-donation-website/">announced a partnership</a> to allow for crypto donations to be quickly converted by the National Bank of Ukraine to use in its fight against Russia. Donors have since funneled an <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/09/ukraine-has-received-close-to-100-million-in-crypto-donations/">estimated $100 million</a> to Ukraine through FTX.
Following the sudden collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried’s relationship with certain politicians as well as his generous donations have come under increased scrutiny. In 2020, aged just 28 and with his company FTX just a year old, Bankman-Fried was <a href="https://mustreadalaska.com/rip-ftx-democrat-ponzi-scheme-whose-founder-conned-billions-and-gave-millions-to-leftist-candidates-like-peltola/">fourth on the list of donors</a> to the Democratic Party. Only George Soros outspent him during the 2021-22 cycle, when he was the <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors?cycle=2022&amp;view=fc&amp;t0-search=Democrat">second biggest donor</a> to the Democratic Party. A reasonable person might wonder how such a new company with a young CEO came to so quickly rival an established multi-billionaire like George Soros.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3570" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/dem-donations.jpg" alt="" width="793" height="753" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/dem-donations.jpg 793w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/dem-donations-300x285.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/dem-donations-768x729.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 793px) 100vw, 793px" />
via opensecrets.org
While the story is still developing, it now appears that officials in Ukraine may have used taxpayer funds it received from the US government to invest in cryptocurrency at FTX, some of which Bankman-Fried later used to donate millions of dollars to Democratic Party candidates. Alex Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine was quick to dispel <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/14/ukrainian-official-refutes-ftx-ukraine-money-laundering-rumors/">the claim</a>: “A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March. Ukraine&#8217;s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.” But more investigation is clearly warranted, given the current Ukrainian Government&#8217;s <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/lyudmila-denisova-ukraine-commissioner-human-rights-removed-russian-sexual-assault-claims-1711680">penchant for lying</a>.
Bankman-Fried is reportedly residing under house arrest in the Bahamas at the request of the US, as the scandal grows and pressure mounts for an investigation. We will know sooner or later whether or not Ukraine directly invested in FTX. At the very least, Bankman-Fried&#8217;s donation history reveals he is deeply invested in helping the Democratic Party maintain its grip on power as well as in perpetuating the Biden administration&#8217;s reckless proxy war with Russia.
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FTX Cryptocurrency Bankruptcy Reveals a Tangle Web of Finances Involving Ukraine and the Democratic Party

Bankman-Fried is reportedly residing under house arrest in the Bahamas at the request of the US

There is <a href="https://archive.ph/1yWDF">now emerging among congressional Republicans (at last)</a> a recognition that (though they have until recently been every bit as neocon and pro-military-industrial-complex as their Democratic Party colleagues have been and are), <a href="https://archive.ph/QNu7p#selection-421.0-451.292">the best path forward for the Republican Party to again come to hold the reins of power in the U.S. federal Government is for congressional Republicans to declare the war in Ukraine to be a Democratic Party project</a> (begun, in fact, by Barack Obama, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221023174259/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWkfpGCAAuw">back in February 2014</a>, and even earlier, starting <a href="https://archive.is/cU1oa">secretly in 2011</a>), and to present themselves as being instead the party of peace, anti-war, and favoring domestic spending instead of spending on foreign countries. So: who, REALLY, have been the leaders in Congress backing the $40-billion+ U.S. expenditure to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine?
On <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdp-lzHZ2yg">23 May 2022, the World Economic Forum at Davos presented the far-right West Virginia Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin</a> saying “I am totally committed as one person to seeing Ukraine to the end as a win” against its next-door neighbor Russia, “not basically resolving itself in some type of treaty; I don’t think that that is where we are and what we should do [i.e., ‘we’ should instead proxy-wage that war by Ukrainians down to its last Ukrainian corpse — NEVER allow Ukraine to continue to retain U.S. support if Ukraine’s government signs “some type of treaty” with Russia].” The great international investigative journalist Caitlin Johnstone headlined about it, <a href="https://archive.ph/nY8iL">“They’re Just Outright Telling Us That Peace In Ukraine Is Not An Option”</a>, and she noted that Manchin added “Ukraine has the determination to do it. We should have the commitment to support it,” and that he also said this included “getting rid of Putin.” So: that’s what American taxpayers are now funding, to the tune of $40B, this war by Ukrainians, to achieve, for America’s billionaires (who control Lockheed Martin, etc.).
<a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?520501-1/us-lawmakers-participate-world-economic-forum">The complete video can be seen from Davos</a>; and, in it, (starting at 16:00 in the video) a group of U.S. lawmakers were repeatedly pressed on whether Congress is united in support for Ukraine and would continue with financial aid in the coming months even if Republicans take control of both chambers after the 2022 midterm elections. Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY) participated in the conversation. All participants supported increasing military spending and slashing everything else, in order for Ukraine to defeat Russia on Ukraine’s battlefields.
At that same time, the independent foreign-affairs journalist Stephen Kinzer, headlined on 26 May 2022, <a href="https://archive.ph/m6i9r">“Republicans return to their roots as the antiwar party”</a>, and he was the earliest to recognize what was then shaping up:
Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that.
With Americans now engulfed in passion for Ukraine, it wasn’t surprising that President Biden proposed sending <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095236237/biden-ukraine-33-billion-aid">$33 billion worth of weaponry and other aid to Ukraine’s beleaguered military</a>. Nor was it surprising that Congress <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/delay-senate-poised-send-40-billion-ukraine-aid-biden-rcna29470">raised the number to $40 billion</a>, or that both the Senate and House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor. Hidden within that lopsided vote, though, was a shocker: Every single “no” vote — 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House — came from a Republican.
Since the Vietnam era, Americans have come to expect antiwar rhetoric from liberal Democrats. Cancel that. This month’s votes in Washington signal a dramatic role reversal. Suddenly it is conservative Republicans who oppose US involvement in foreign wars.
The most ringing antiwar speeches during this month’s debate came from far-right members of Congress.<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/matt-gaetz-congress-decide-war-russia-1705734">Representative Matt Gaetz</a> of Florida sounded like a latter-day George McGovern when he warned of “a dangerous bipartisan consensus that is walking us into war with Russia. Just a year ago we lost a war against goat herders waving rifles. Now we’re rushing to fight a nation that possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads?” 
On the Democratic side, by contrast, there was nothing but outrage, denunciation of Russia, and aggressive chest-beating. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-socialist-is-bernie-sanders">a self-described democratic socialist</a>, voted for the $40 billion. So did Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her ultra-progressive comrades in “the Squad.” Even Representative Barbara Lee, who in 2001 cast the only vote against launching what became the “<a href="https://19thnews.org/2021/09/barbara-lee-forever-wars-20-years-after-9-11/">global war on terror</a>,” supported it.
Finally, the fake ‘left’ in American politics (which is all that still exists in America politics of “the left” — it’s now all gone) is starting to be exposed for what it is: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221105190505/https://orientalreview.org/2022/11/05/how-the-super-rich-control-the-u-s-government/">prostitutes to America’s billionaires in the dark, just like virtually everyone else in Congress has been ever since WW II</a> — i.e., after 12 April 1945).
This now leaves congressional Republicans free to blame ‘the Democrats’ if Russia defeats Ukrainians in the battlefields of Ukraine. Suddenly: the Republican Party is becoming ’the peace party’. But this means that the Democrats in Congress need to double-down on spending whatever it takes to defeat Russia in Ukraine — even if that will mean sending U.S. troops there (and cease this war’s being any longer MERELY a war by proxies of the American side, Ukrainians backed by NATO waged against Russia, on Russia’s very doorstep). However, that would be suicidal for the U.S. Democratic Party — even if not for the entire world.
Consequently: this is the biggest political opportunity that the Republican Party has had in recent times — to blame ‘the Democrats’ (not that they don’t all deserve it) for bringing the entire world to the brink of WW III (nuclear termination) for stakes that on the American side have no national-security significance but ONLY “KEEP AMERICA #1” ‘significance’. (Though this war has <a href="https://archive.ph/xOvj8">total national-security significance for Russia</a>, it has none for America, and takes place many thousands of miles away from America.) Fooling the American people to believe that because Obama started this war, it’s ‘a war by the Democrats’ (i.e., WASN’T bipartisan — which it WAS), will be the most successful way for the Republican Party to regain its clear dominance over U.S. politics. If they’re smart, they’ll do it (on the basis of recent history showing how gullible the American public are). It is a huge opportunity for the Republican Party. We’ll soon see how smart they are (or aren’t).
This article was <a href="https://www.greanvillepost.com/2022/11/06/who-are-the-most-bloodthirsty-u-s-senators-they-all-are/">originally published on Greanville Post.</a>
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1880026082">AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change</a>, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Who are the Most Bloodthirsty U.S. Senators? (They all are.)

The US/NATO political class, which mirrors the gangster DNA of the Western ruling elites, is almost uniformly comprised of crooks, hypocrites and sociopaths.

The United States&#8217; midterm elections took place on February 8th, 2022. Neither the Democrats or Republicans swept the board, the final results are still pending in a few areas, with the House and Senate up for grabs. Many Americans likely tuned out the midterms, jaded by the political gridlock that has paralyzed Washington for as long as they can remember. The corporate media has presented sideshows and “battles” between John Fetterman and Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, or Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker in Georgia. Midterm elections in an increasingly unstable United States is of interest to the rest of the world. Should Republicans gain control the House and Senate, President Joe Biden may encounter at least some resistance to sending large checks to Zelenskyy&#8217;s regime in Kiev, which would in turn further complicate geopolitical matters in the European Union.
One of the most vocal opponents to the Biden administration&#8217;s financial and military assistance to Ukraine has been Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Green. At a recent Save America rally, Green claimed “not another penny” would go to Ukraine if Republicans gained control. Greene who easily won reelection in her district, will hopefully continue to push for a stop to &#8220;aid&#8221; to Ukraine.
<div class="flex-video"><iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tvu9Oj3LbbQ" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
While not being as stern as Greene on the position, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy claims he supports Ukraine, but <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kevin-mccarthy-reiterates-support-for-ukraine-but-not-a-blank-check/ar-AA13Q4AF">does not want to continue</a> sending blank checks to the country. If only for reasons Greene and McCarthy both voice a growing concern felt by many Americans as we approach nine months since the Russian Special Military Operation began. <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/11/03/half-of-republicans-believe-us-sends-too-much-support-to-ukraine-poll-suggests/?sh=103dea0a7a51">About 30%</a> of US voters believe the US government is sending too much assistance to Ukraine, up 6% since March, including about half of Republicans. With an increase in the costs of everything from housing and utilities to groceries, most Americans <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/19/report-american-workers-are-worse-off-financially-than-a-year-ago.html">feel they are worse off than a year ago</a> and as they continue struggle through the holiday season, more Americans are bound to question the billions for Ukraine.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3542" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-12-19-56-46-1024x576.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-12-19-56-46-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-12-19-56-46-300x169.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-12-19-56-46-768x432.jpg 768w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-12-19-56-46.jpg 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
Authorities in Kiev were no doubt somewhat concerned leading up to the election that a “Red Wave&#8221; could threaten to stop propping up their government and economy. As the results poured in showing that no such wave formed, the head of Zelenskyy’s party David Arakhamia appeared optimistic: “We’re pretty confident it will remain, although we may expect more discussions about accountability and transparency.” Other politicians in western Europe, including German Parliament member Michael Gahler, agreed that he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/world/europe/europe-republican-party-election-ukraine.html">did not expect much to change</a>. “I believe that the bulk of the Republican Party is not sympathetic to Russia,” he said, “and in substance we would not see a shift in the U.S. policy toward Ukraine.” The Kiel Institute <a href="https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/">estimates that over 52 billion US Dollars</a> have been sent to Ukraine in the form of advanced military weapons, vehicles, and munitions. With the election results soon to be finalized, the world will have to wait and see if the flow of aid will continue unabated.
Whether or not there is in fact a growing divide between the Democrats and Republicans over Ukraine, they share the view of China as an enemy and a threat. Director of the German Marshall Fund Bonnie Glaser said, “The only issue with full bipartisan support is China,” she said. “I don’t expect a fundamental game-changer. If anything, there is stronger Republican support for strategic clarity on China.” With both parties collaborating on ways to combat Chinese influence and <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/fbi-announces-arrest-of-13-chinese-spies">in light the recent arrest of alleged spies</a>, we can be sure to expect a ratcheting up of the anti-China rhetoric and hate when our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine begins to fade from the headlines.

Sideshow U.S. Midterms Come to an End. What Happens Now?

Many Americans likely tuned out the midterms, jaded by the political gridlock that has paralyzed Washington for as long as they can remember.

Annually, each year, since 2005, the U.S. Government has been one of only from 1 to 3 Governments to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against an annual statement by the General Assembly against racism and other forms of bigotry — an annual Resolution condemning it, and expressing a commitment to doing everything possible to reduce bigoted acts. For the first time ever, on November 4th, America was joined not only by one or two voting against it, but 55 nations, and almost all gave as reasons that Russia was for it and has invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country that has almost always been joining America in opposing such resolutions; and many countries now vote against the resolution because Ukraine always does, and thus vote in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia — condemn the resolution because Russia supports it.
This year’s Resolution particularly offended America and its allies because “Nazism” is mentioned and condemned specifically in it.
No specific nation is ever mentioned in such resolutions.
The U.N. makes its documents and voting records as difficult as possible for the public to find, but, after many hours I have been able to find the following records regarding the 4 November 2022 resolution and vote.
The Resolution was completed in draft on 29 September 2022, and here it is (though the U.N. tends to change URLs in order to make documents unfindable, and also this and many other documents at the U.N. are designed so as not to be copyable into web archiving services; so, this document might soon become unfindable: 
<a href="https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N22/607/22/PDF/N2260722.pdf">https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N22/607/22/PDF/N2260722.pdf</a>. I made <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221107025747/https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N22/607/22/PDF/N2260722.pdf">the first copy of it at the main web archive</a>, and that archived image is very different, not the document itself. This is typical for the U.N. But, anyway, if you can see it, then at least you will be able to know the Resolution’s text.
The U.N likewise makes its voting records as difficult as possible for journalists to be able to report the specific votes of specific nations — the U.N. provides photo-images (such as <a href="https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1667720971034020.jpg">in this case</a>) of the nation-by-nation vote so that journalists will need to type everything out character-by-character instead of do copy-pastes, and journalists on rapid deadlines won’t typically retype an entire document. I have done it in this case, and here that is:
VOTE:
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3528" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/1667720971034020.jpg" alt="" width="825" height="454" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/1667720971034020.jpg 825w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/1667720971034020-300x165.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/1667720971034020-768x423.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 825px) 100vw, 825px" /> 
Item 66(a) draft resolution A/C.3/77/L.5 
Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and … 
DATE: 4 November 2022
IN FAVOR (105): Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Cabo Verde, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dem. PR [N.] Korea, Djirbouti, El Salvador, Equatorial Gunea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lao PDR, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Solomon Islands, S. Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Surinam, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Trinidad, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, UAR, United Rep. Tanza, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe 
AGAINST (52): Albania, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Latvia, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, N. Macedonia, Norway, Papua, Poland, Portugal, Rep. Moldova, Romania, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, UK, U.S. 
ABSTAIN (15): Antigua, Congo, Dominican Rep., Ecuador, Egypt, Mexico, Myanmar, Palau, Panama, Rep. of Korea, Samoa, Serbia, Switzerland, Tonga, Turkiye 
ABSENT: Afghanistan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Comoros, D.R. Congo, Dominica, Eswatini, Gambia, Grenada, Iran, Morocco, St. Lucia, Sao Tome, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, S. Sudan, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Venezuela
<a href="https://estatements.unmeetings.org/estatements/11.0030/20221104/EzjAGMY1JRTw/nwsdHACqG6rE_en.pdf">Here</a> is the U.S.’s explanation of its vote against the document.
<a href="https://estatements.unmeetings.org/estatements/11.0030/20221104/EzjAGMY1JRTw/0mKCbgtlPQ3c_en.pdf">Here</a> is Austria’s.
Since Austria backs the EU’s statement on this, <a href="https://archive.ph/bkCtm">here</a> is that statement from the EU.
The U.S. Government seems to be having remarkable success making even nazism fashionable among its allies.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://theduran.com/u-s-and-allies-vote-for-nazism-at-u-n">The Duran</a> and <a href="https://www.greanvillepost.com/2022/11/08/u-s-and-allies-vote-for-nazism-at-u-n/">Greanville Post</a>.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1880026082">AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change</a>, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

U.S. and Allies Vote For Nazism at U.N.

A new article for The Irish Times by Virginia Tech professor Gerard Toal, titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/11/03/ukraine-risks-being-locked-into-endless-war-in-bid-for-perfect-peace/" rel="">Ukraine risks being locked into endless war in bid for perfect peace</a>,&#8221; contains a very interesting paragraph:
<blockquote>Ordinary Ukrainians on the front lines are divided on a ceasefire and negotiations. My Ukrainian colleague Karina Korostelina and I surveyed the attitudes of both residents and displaced persons in three Ukrainian cities close to the southeast battlefields this summer. Almost half agreed it was imperative to seek a ceasefire to stop Russians killing Ukraine’s young men. Slightly more supported negotiations with Russia on a complete ceasefire, with a quarter totally against and a fifth declaring themselves neutral. Respondents were torn when considering whether saving lives or territorial unity were more important to them. Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s the third from the last paragraph in the article, whose overall content cannot be remotely construed as sympathetic toward Moscow, but it&#8217;s very important information.
&#8220;Those most touched by the war, namely the internally displaced, were more likely to prioritise saving lives. Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.&#8221;
Those two simple sentences sum up so much of the attitude we are seeing toward this war, and it applies as much to those cheerleading continual escalation and bloodshed from the comfort of their homes on the other side of the world.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Unlike sofa warriors in the West and elsewhere treating people like plastic figurines on a board, Ukrainians most affected by the fighting tend to be more in favour of talks for a ceasefire and prioritise actual human lives over borders &amp; land:<a href="https://t.co/Yh0dto1xPA">https://t.co/Yh0dto1xPA</a> <a href="https://t.co/VcHJwLs6ci">pic.twitter.com/VcHJwLs6ci</a>
— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) <a href="https://twitter.com/BMarchetich/status/1588309614935916545?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 3, 2022</a></blockquote>
&#8220;Other research reveals that those farthest from the battlefields have the most hawkish attitudes.&#8221;
Remember this as you watch pundits and politicians calling for escalations in Ukraine from Washington DC, Los Angeles and London.
Remember this as you watch armchair warriors and NAFO neckbeards dogpiling anyone who advocates peace talks.
Remember this as you watch progressives on Capitol Hill <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/worthless-house-progressives-retract" rel="">pressured into walking back</a> even the mildest support for potential ceasefire negotiations at some point.
Remember this as more and more information comes out about the way <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/2022/11/03/strongmassive-anti-russian-bot-army-exposed-by-australian-researchers-strong/" rel="">bot swarms</a> and <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/28/spooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll/" rel="">astroturf trolling operations</a> have been used to shout down and silence anyone who advocates peace online.
War is the single most horrific thing in the world. It is the most insane thing that humans do, by far. The most destructive. The least sustainable. The most conducive to human suffering. If people could spend even one hour in the cortisol-soaked mind of a mother trying to bring up her kids in the middle of the conflict, grieving people you&#8217;ve lost, worried about losing more, working out how to stretch the food and the fuel, trying to keep things as normal as possible for your stressed out children, jumping at every noise, trying to forget the things you have seen, peace would be achieved within that hour. Everyone and everything would be mobilized to stop this hell on earth as soon as humanly possible. It would be clear to all that the tragedy that is unfolding right now is not just causing enormous suffering in this moment, but every minute it goes on trauma is burning itself deeper into the subconscious of every single person going through it which will torment them and their descendents for generations to come.
But because we are primates who evolved in small social groups, humans often have trouble feeling empathy for that suffering until it enters into our own immediate circle. Our own city. Our own house. Our own sons, brothers and fathers going out to fight and never coming home.
So this war has become like a game for people. A vehicle from which to promote their political ideologies and masturbate their propaganda-induced Good Guys vs Bad Guys fantasies. A team sport where they can cheer on the total recapture of all annexed territories in eastern Ukraine from anonymous Shiba avatar accounts online to pass time in their meaningless lives.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The view that diplomacy is bad and the war should go on is held by former colonial powers in the Global North representing, generously, 13% of humanity. It&#8217;s Global South states representing ~65% of the world&#8217;s people calling for negotiations. Colonial reflex indeed. <a href="https://t.co/GNHMO9qsWK">pic.twitter.com/GNHMO9qsWK</a>
— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) <a href="https://twitter.com/BMarchetich/status/1588193179534336000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 3, 2022</a></blockquote>
The passive team sports cheerleading spirit that this war has brought on is made all the more obnoxious by the fact that Ukraine <a href="https://fightforua.org/" rel="">is still accepting volunteers</a> to fight on the front lines. If you think this war is good and should continue, the morally coherent thing to do would be to go fight in it, rather than sitting at home eating cheese puffs with one hand and tweeting with the other acting as a pro bono Pentagon propagandist between visits to Pornhub while other people die for your cause.
But that isn&#8217;t happening. People are happy to sit in the comfort of their own home and watch their remote war movie unfold on CNN.
This isn&#8217;t a game. This is a war <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-not-okay-for-grown-adults-to-2cf" rel="">the US empire provoked</a> to advance its own strategic agendas and therefore <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-narrative-that-this-war-was-unprovoked" rel="">has a responsibility</a> to help end, but instead we&#8217;re being hammered by that empire with propaganda, censorship, bot armies and troll farms dedicated to convincing everyone that <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-profoundly-stupid-narrative-that" rel="">nuclear brinkmanship is safety and peace talks are danger</a>.
Don&#8217;t help them do this. Don&#8217;t help manufacture consent for a proxy war whose continuation has less and less support the closer and closer you get to the actual killing. Find some other way to pass your time and scratch your itch for conflict and egoic gratification, one which doesn&#8217;t involve spending real people&#8217;s lives like video game money. Get a healthier hobby for God&#8217;s sake.
This article was <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-farther-people-are-from-the-fighting">originally published on Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack.</a>

The Farther People Are From The Fighting In Ukraine, The More They Oppose Peace Talks

I feel like we haven&#8217;t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/destroying-western-values-to-defend" rel="">were just caught</a> intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the &#8220;cognitive infrastructure&#8221; of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.
❖
It&#8217;s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/12/16/the-assange-case-explained-simply/" rel="">imprison a journalist for telling the truth</a> and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.
Look at this scumbag:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job. On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists. <a href="https://t.co/qXYyVoVlbM">https://t.co/qXYyVoVlbM</a>
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1587807060195958786?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 2, 2022</a></blockquote>
Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.
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There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.
The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it&#8217;s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You&#8217;re either honest about this or you&#8217;re not.
Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It&#8217;s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.
Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you&#8217;ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.
Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It&#8217;s not even sane. But because it&#8217;s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.
The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world&#8217;s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That&#8217;s the one and only reason. It&#8217;s not the moderate perspective, it&#8217;s just the most funded and marketed perspective.
All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It&#8217;s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.
The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.
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There&#8217;s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.
There&#8217;s no such thing as an objective journalist.
There&#8217;s no such thing as a moral billionaire.
There&#8217;s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.
There&#8217;s no such thing as an honest war.
People should learn all this in grade school.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
You know you&#8217;re living in an infantilized bootlicking paternalistic society when the prospect of not having a team of authority figures curating your information feed for you is seen as &#8220;dangerous&#8221;. <a href="https://t.co/5pZCXrn112">pic.twitter.com/5pZCXrn112</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1588724451843395585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 5, 2022</a></blockquote>
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Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.
Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.
This is the source of most problems.
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Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform&#8217;s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they&#8217;re not equal, and they&#8217;re not similar.
You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.
There&#8217;s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It&#8217;s unhelpful to conflate the two.
And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It&#8217;s important to be aware of these obfuscations.
There&#8217;s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don&#8217;t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They&#8217;re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it&#8217;s punching down.
❖
Nobody&#8217;s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia&#8217;s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come <a href="https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592" rel="">so many western experts</a> spent years warning that the west&#8217;s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?
❖
Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.
❖
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Anyone who believes US policy on Ukraine will change under Republicans is a fucking moron. <a href="https://t.co/00O5F0w522">https://t.co/00O5F0w522</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1588659410217623553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 4, 2022</a></blockquote>
❖
If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.
❖
It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are &#8220;human nature&#8221;. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are &#8220;human nature&#8221; are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.
And it isn&#8217;t even really accurate to call it their &#8220;nature&#8221;; it&#8217;s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven&#8217;t sincerely tried to yet.
❖
One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it&#8217;s not enough to tell people what you think, you&#8217;ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you&#8217;re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.
People are very distrusting in today&#8217;s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you&#8217;re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.
I can&#8217;t promise that I&#8217;ll always get everything right or that I&#8217;ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I&#8217;m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/no-such-thing-as-an-objective-journalist">Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack</a>.

No Such Thing As An Objective Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The commander of the US nuclear arsenal has stated unequivocally that the war in Ukraine is just a warmup exercise for a much larger conflict that&#8217;s already in the mail.
Antiwar&#8217;s <a href="https://news.antiwar.com/2022/11/06/us-nuclear-forces-chief-says-the-big-one-is-coming/" rel="">Dave DeCamp reports</a>:
<blockquote>The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.
“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”
Richard’s warning came after the US released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), <a href="https://fas.org/blogs/security/2022/10/2022-nuclear-posture-review/" rel="">which reaffirms that the US doctrine allows for the first use of nuclear weapons</a>. The review says that the purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is to “deter strategic attacks, assure allies and partners, and achieve US objectives if deterrence fails.”</blockquote>
Not only does Richard appear to believe that a hot war between major world powers is a foregone conclusion, he <a href="https://news.antiwar.com/2021/02/03/us-admiral-warns-nuclear-war-with-russia-china-is-a-real-possibility/" rel="">has also previously stated</a> that a nuclear war with Russia or China is now &#8220;a very real possibility.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The US empire really is threatening all life on Earth with potential nuclear apocalypse:
The US military commander who oversees nuclear forces said, “This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup”
“The big one is coming,” he added <a href="https://t.co/6c1iLEDOEk">https://t.co/6c1iLEDOEk</a>
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) <a href="https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1589444434827292672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 7, 2022</a></blockquote>
Again, this is not some armchair warrior opining from his desk at a corporate newspaper or DC think tank, this is the head of STRATCOM. Richard would be personally overseeing the very warfare he is talking about.
What I find most striking about remarks like these is how passive they always make it sound. Richard talks about &#8220;The Big One&#8221; like other people <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/big-one-mega-earthquake-what-will-happen-california-san-andreas-2019-8" rel="">talk about California earthquakes</a>, as though a hot war with China would be some kind of natural disaster that just happened out of nowhere.
This type of rhetoric is becoming more and more common. Describing an Atomic Age world war as something that would happen to the US empire, rather than the direct result of concrete A-or-B decisions made by the empire, is <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/28/all-at-once-mainstream-pundits-push-for-ww-iii/" rel="">becoming its own genre</a> of foreign policy punditry.
This passive, oopsy-poopsy narrative overlay that&#8217;s placed atop the US empire&#8217;s militarism is nothing new. Back in 2017 <a href="https://fair.org/home/syria-the-latest-case-of-us-stumbling-into-war/" rel="">Fair.org&#8217;s Adam Johnson documented</a> the way western media are always describing the United States as &#8220;stumbling&#8221; into wars and getting &#8220;sucked in&#8221; to military interventions, like a cheating spouse making up bad excuses after getting caught:
<blockquote>This framing serves to flatter two sensibilities: one right and one vaguely left. It satisfies the right-wing nationalist idea that America only goes to war because it’s compelled to by forces outside of its own control; the reluctant warrior, the gentle giant who will only attack when provoked to do so. But it also plays to a nominally liberal, hipster notion that the US military is actually incompetent and boobish, and is generally bad at war-making.
This is expressed most clearly in the idea that the US is “drawn into” war despite its otherwise unwarlike intentions. “Will US Be Drawn Further Into Syrian Civil War?” asked Fox News (<a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/5388999167001/" rel="">4/7/17</a>). “How America Could Stumble Into War With Iran,” disclosed The Atlantic (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/iran-trump-nuclear-deal/515979/" rel="">2/9/17</a>), “What It Would Take to Pull the US Into a War in Asia,” speculated Quartz (<a href="https://qz.com/969923/what-it-would-take-to-pull-the-us-into-a-war-in-asia/" rel="">4/29/17</a>). “Trump could easily get us sucked into Afghanistan again,” Slate predicted (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-could-easily-get-us-sucked-into-afghanistan-again-2017-5" rel="">5/11/17</a>). The US is “stumbling into a wider war” in Syria, the New York Times editorial board <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/stumbling-into-a-wider-war.html" rel="">(5/2/15</a>) warned. “A Flexing Contest in Syria May Trap the US in an Endless Conflict,” Vice News (<a href="https://news.vice.com/story/a-flexing-contest-in-syria-may-trap-the-u-s-in-endless-conflict" rel="">6/19/17</a>) added.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Syria the Latest Case of US ‘Stumbling’ Into War &#8211; <a href="https://t.co/uZV7Lu3VFf">https://t.co/uZV7Lu3VFf</a> <a href="https://t.co/FVPtSGeery">pic.twitter.com/FVPtSGeery</a>
— FAIR (@FAIRmediawatch) <a href="https://twitter.com/FAIRmediawatch/status/878004137064931328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 22, 2017</a></blockquote>
So let&#8217;s get real clear about this here and now: if there is a hot war between the US and a major power, it will not be because that war was &#8220;stumbled into&#8221;. It will not be like an earthquake or other natural disaster. It will not be something that happens to or is inflicted upon the US empire while it just passively stands there in Bambi-eyed innocence.
It will be the result of specific choices made by the managers of empire. It will be the result of the US choosing escalation over de-escalation, brinkmanship over detente — not just once but over and over again, while declining off-ramp after off-ramp. It will be the result of real material decisions made by real material people who live in real material houses while collecting real material paychecks to make the choices they are making.
Another thing that strikes me about comments like those made by Charles Richard is how freakish and insane it is that everyone doesn&#8217;t respond to them with, &#8220;Okay, well, then let&#8217;s change all of the things we are doing, because that&#8217;s the worst thing that can possibly happen.&#8221;
And make no mistake: that absolutely is an option. The option to turn away from the collision course with potentially the most horrific war of all time is available right now, and it will remain available for some time into the future. This isn&#8217;t 1939 when war is already upon us; if anything it&#8217;s more like the early 20th century precursors to World War I and all the stupid aggressions and entanglements which ultimately gave rise to both world wars.
One of the many ways our cultural fascination with World War II has made us stupid and crazy is that it has caused us to forget that it was the worst single event in human history. Even if a hot war with Russia and/or China didn&#8217;t go nuclear, it would still unleash unspeakable horrors upon this Earth which would reverberate throughout our collective consciousness for generations.
That horror should be turned away from. And the time to start turning is now.
This article was <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/lets-be-clear-if-ww3-happens-it-will">originally published on Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack.</a>

Let&#8217;s Be Clear: If WW3 Happens It Will Be The Result Of Choices Made By The US Empire

The Ukrainian military continues to commit acts of terrorism against Russia and the people of the Donbass, relying on critical support from the West to perpetrate its crimes. On October 25, 2022, a <a href="https://southfront.org/terrorist-attack-targeted-journalists-in-melitopol-zaporozhie-region/">large car bomb exploded</a> in the southeastern city of Melitopol, next to a building housing the Zaporozhye regional TV company, ZaTV. Miraculously, the attack did not result in any civilian casualties, but the media outlet sustained “significant damage” and emergency responders took five people to the hospital with minor injuries. The car bomb detonated in an area with no nearby military targets.
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Five days earlier, another Ukrainian attack using a US-made HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) missile <a href="https://southfront.org/at-least-4-civilians-killed-by-ukrainian-forces-in-kherson-region/">killed four civilians</a>. The missile also destroyed 12 cars, injuring a dozen others including children who had been attempting to flee across the Dnieper River. These are just two of the hundreds of war crimes that the Kiev regime has committed against civilians in Donbass, since the US installed the Kiev regime in the 2014 Euromaidan coup d&#8217;etat.
Following the events of Euromaidan, the Kiev regime set up an online database called Mirotvorets to identify and target its declared enemies&#8211;many if not most of whom are noncombatants. The <a href="https://medium.com/@deborahlarmstrong/mirotvorets-removes-american-names-96de6a7a2a12">hit list</a> includes prominent figures from Henry Kissinger to Pink Floyd lead singer Roger Waters. Editor-in-Chief of TheRevolutionReport Donald Courter is on the list as well, among other media commentators and citizens of Ukraine, Russia, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other countries.
RELATED: <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/a-life-worth-one-bullet/">Meet the 13-year old on Ukraine&#8217;s open kill list</a>
In August 2022, the Kiev regime carried out a brazen terrorist attack near Moscow, Russia when it used a car bomb to murder the accomplished journalist and political scientist Darya Dugina, daughter of the eminent philosopher Alexander Dugin. President Vladimir Putin hailed Dugina as a &#8220;bright, talented person with a real Russian heart &#8211; kind, loving, sympathetic and open,&#8221; and condemned the &#8220;vile, cruel crime.&#8221; While Kiev has denied any responsibility, even the United States admits it believes that Kiev <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-believes-ukrainians-behind-killing-dugina-russia-nyt-says-2022-10-06/">was culpable for Dugina’s murder.</a> The site Mirotvorets later marked Darya Dugina as having been &#8220;liquidated,&#8221; offering further confirmation, if any more was needed, that the site is in fact a hit list that targets civilians on foreign soil.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3481" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-07-14-05-10-1024x451.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="451" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-07-14-05-10-1024x451.jpg 1024w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-07-14-05-10-300x132.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-07-14-05-10-768x339.jpg 768w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/Screenshot-from-2022-11-07-14-05-10.jpg 1361w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
Civilian infrastructure in the territories liberated by Russia has also been targeted. On October 9, 2022, Ukraine&#8217;s SBU carried out a bombing attack, reportedly <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/10/ukrainian-kerch-bridge/">planned by British spies</a>, on the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/08/europe/crimea-bridge-explainer-russia-ukraine-intl/index.html">Kerch Strait bridge</a> connecting Crimea to the mainland. According to Russian investigative committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko, “a truck was blown up on the automobile part of the Crimean Bridge from the Taman Peninsula [the westbound lanes of the bridge], which led to the ignition of seven fuel tanks of a train traveling toward the Crimean Peninsula. As a result, two car lanes of the bridge partially collapsed.” President Putin condemned the terrorist attack act and three days later announced that authorities had detained eight people in connection with the attacks. The impact of the explosion&#8211; in which the driver, perhaps unwittingly, served as a suicide bomber &#8212; was widely exaggerated and celebrated in the western press. In fact, the bridge closed temporarily; rapid repairs restored it to partial use within days.
The Nord Stream pipelines are the most prominent recent attacks aimed at severing Russia&#8217;s economic relationship with Europe to the benefit of American firms. It now appears that British intelligence had a role in sabotaging the pipelines, at the behest of the United States. Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss while serving as Foreign Secretary appears to have regularly used an unsecured phone to communicate, one much easier to hack. Self-described &#8220;internet freedom fighter&#8221; Kim Dotcom <a href="https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1586737543974121472?s=20&amp;t=E-X95DaMjYT5rMH1B7pr8g">recently alleged</a> that Truss had texted US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken the words, “It’s done,” a minute after the pipelines were successfully sabotaged. The Russian Defense Ministry was forthright in its explanation: “According to available information, representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision, and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year &#8211; blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines.” The United Kingdom has predictably rejected this and sought to blame Russia for destroying the German sections of pipeline. But it is itself damning that several NATO countries have investigated the matter and proceeded to seal their findings from the public on national security grounds. If there were any actual evidence that Russia were involved, we would have heard about it, repeatedly.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
How do the Russians know that the UK blew up the North Stream pipelines in partnership with the US?
Because <a href="https://twitter.com/trussliz?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@trussliz</a> used her iPhone to send a message to <a href="https://twitter.com/SecBlinken?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SecBlinken</a> saying “It’s done” a minute after the pipeline blew up and before anybody else knew?
iCloud admin access rocks!
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) <a href="https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1586737543974121472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 30, 2022</a></blockquote>
Since 2014, civilians in Donbass have endured wave after wave of terrorist attacks. As the Kiev regime grows increasingly desperate, it is difficult to know who and where it will strike next. To put down a country that has now seen fit to behave like a rabid dog, Russia must thoroughly denazify and demilitarize this threat to us all.

Ukraine Continues its Terrorist Attacks Against Russia and the Donbass

As the Kiev regime grows increasingly desperate, it is difficult to know who and where it will strike next.

So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the &#8220;cognitive infrastructure&#8221; of the population. This is according to a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/" rel="">new investigative report by The Intercept</a>, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the &#8220;retooling&#8221; of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting &#8220;misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation&#8221; online.
While the DHS&#8217;s hotly controversial &#8220;<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse?s=w" rel="">Disinformation Governance Board</a>&#8221; was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to &#8220;curb speech it considers dangerous&#8221;:
<blockquote>According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. <a href="https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF">https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF</a>
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) <a href="https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587095890983936000?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2022</a></blockquote>
The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress &#8220;threats&#8221; as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.
&#8220;There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,&#8221; The Intercept reports.
&#8220;Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,&#8221; says The Intercept. &#8220;Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to &#8216;process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.&#8217;”
While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows &#8220;CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,&#8221; while critics argue that &#8220;suggestions&#8221; from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.
“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University&#8217;s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
This is absolutely wild. The government is secretly transforming &#8220;national security&#8221; agencies into a new Narrative Police.
“If a foreign government sent these messages,” said the former ACLU president, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”
Read the story: <a href="https://t.co/9bMjDKSmcd">https://t.co/9bMjDKSmcd</a>
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) <a href="https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1587204372907393025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2022</a></blockquote>
The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as &#8220;our cognitive infrastructure&#8221;:
<blockquote>Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.</blockquote>
Another CISA official <a href="https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587257992449208320" rel="">is seen</a> suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits &#8220;to avoid the appearance of government propaganda&#8221;:
<blockquote>To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”</blockquote>
But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn&#8217;t like there&#8217;d be no qualms about calling it what it is:
<blockquote>“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”</blockquote>
Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America&#8217;s &#8220;cognitive infrastructure&#8221; originated with the &#8220;allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.&#8221; To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
[Thread]
Hundreds of former agents of a notorious Israeli spying organization are now working in key positions at the world’s biggest tech/comms corporations, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
My new investigation for <a href="https://twitter.com/MintPressNews?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MintPressNews</a>: <a href="https://t.co/blv2ieGOmS">https://t.co/blv2ieGOmS</a>
— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) <a href="https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1587175981831290885?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2022</a></blockquote>
Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod&#8217;s <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-former-israeli-spies-working-top-jobs-google-facebook-amazon/282413/" rel="">new report with Mintpress News</a> that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod&#8217;s <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/new-media-are-as-intertwined-with" rel="">ongoing documentation</a> of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and <a href="https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1587082090071433222" rel="">the revelation</a> that The Grayzone&#8217;s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.
RELATED: <a href="https://the-revolution-report.com/articles/u-s-empire-colludes-with-big-tech-to-manipulate-public-sentiment">U.S. Empire Colludes with Big Tech to Manipulate Public Sentiment</a>
We&#8217;re destroying western values to defend western values. To win its much-touted struggle of &#8220;<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/new-study-finds-the-rest-of-the-world" rel="">democracies vs autocracies</a>&#8220;, western civilization is becoming more and more autocratic. <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/15/more-escalations-in-online-censorship/" rel="">Censoring more</a>. <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/28/spooks-mercs-hawks-nafo-troll/" rel="">Trolling more</a>. <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/three-illuminating-quotes-about-the" rel="">Propagandizing more</a>. <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/05/more-police-raids-as-war-on-journalism-escalates-worldwide/" rel="">Jailing journalists</a>. Becoming <a href="https://www.rcfp.org/overclassification-bigger-problem-leak-hunting/" rel="">less and less transparent</a>. <a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-consortium-imposing-the-growing" rel="">Manipulating information</a> and people&#8217;s understanding of truth.
We&#8217;re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we&#8217;re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.
I keep thinking of the (<a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/apr/02/viral-image/no-winston-churchill-didnt-say-what-are-we-fightin/" rel="">fictional</a>) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, &#8220;Then what are we fighting for?&#8221; If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?
Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We&#8217;re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Any journalists or press freedom advocates out there care about a US gov’t ally, Ukraine, pressuring a media conference to cancel two journalists? <a href="https://t.co/sPwaQAIiTV">https://t.co/sPwaQAIiTV</a>
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) <a href="https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1587140697311911936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 31, 2022</a></blockquote>
If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what&#8217;s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they&#8217;ve always wanted to do.
As westerners in &#8220;liberal democracies&#8221; we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.
Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.
The problem with &#8220;western values&#8221; is that the west doesn&#8217;t value them.
In reality, those who best exemplify &#8220;western values&#8221; as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.
Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what&#8217;s the point of defeating autocracy?
This article was originally <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/destroying-western-values-to-defend">published on Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack</a>.

Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold.

President Joe Biden is undermining his party’s congressional prospects through a deeply flawed foreign policy.
Biden believes that America’s global reputation is at stake in the Ukraine War and has consistently rejected a diplomatic off-ramp.  The Ukraine War, combined with the administration’s disruptions of economic relations with China, is aggravating the stagflation that will likely deliver one or both houses of Congress to the Republicans.
Far worse, Biden’s dismissal of diplomacy prolongs the destruction of Ukraine and threatens nuclear war.
Biden inherited an economy beset by deep disruptions to global supply chains caused by the pandemic and by former President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies. Yet instead of trying to calm the waters and repair the disruptions, Biden escalated the U.S. conflicts with both Russia and China.
Biden attacked Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for expressing doubts on another large financial package Ukraine, declaring:
“They [House Republicans] said that if they win, they’re not likely to fund — to help — continue to fund Ukraine, the Ukrainian war against the Russians. These guys don’t get it. It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine — it’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real, serious, serious consequential outcomes. They have no sense of American foreign policy.”
Similarly, when a group of progressive congressional Democrats urged negotiations to end the Ukraine War, they were excoriated by Democrats following the White House line and forced to recant their call for diplomacy.
<h4>Stoked a Proxy War</h4>
Biden believes that American credibility depends on NATO expanding to Ukraine, and if necessary, defeating Russia in the Ukraine war to accomplish that. Biden has repeatedly refused to engage in diplomacy with Russia on the NATO enlargement issue.
This has been a grave mistake. It stoked a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in which Ukraine is being devastated, ironically in the name of saving Ukraine.
The whole issue of NATO enlargement is based on a U.S. lie dating back to the 1990s. The U.S. and Germany promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if Gorbachev would disband the Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance and accept German reunification.  Conveniently — and with typical cynicism — the U.S. reneged on the deal.
In 2021, Biden could have headed off the Ukraine War without sacrificing any single vital interest of the U.S. or Ukraine.  U.S. security absolutely does not depend on NATO enlarging to Ukraine and Georgia.
In fact, NATO enlargement deeper into the Black Sea region undermines U.S. security by putting the U.S. into a direct confrontation with Russia (and a further violation of the promises made three decades earlier). Nor does Ukraine’s security depend on NATO enlargement, a point that President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged on numerous occasions.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3464" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/51989432245_4f6052f097_b.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/51989432245_4f6052f097_b.jpg 1024w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/51989432245_4f6052f097_b-300x200.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/11/51989432245_4f6052f097_b-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
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<div id="attachment_336990" class="wp-caption aligncenter">
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Dec. 7, 2021: U.S. President Joe Biden, on screen during video call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
<hr />
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned the U.S. repeatedly since 2008 to keep NATO out of Ukraine, a region of vital security interests for Russia. Biden has equally, resolutely insisted on NATO enlargement. Putin made one last diplomatic try at the end of 2021 to stop NATO enlargement. Biden completely rebuffed him. This was dangerous foreign policy.
As much as many American politicians don’t want to hear it, Putin’s warning about NATO enlargement was both real and apt.  Russia doesn’t want a heavily armed NATO military on its border, just as the U.S. would not accept a Chinese-backed heavily armed Mexican military on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The last thing the U.S. and Europe need is a long war with Russia. Yet that’s just where Biden’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has brought about.
The U.S. and Ukraine should accept three absolutely reasonable terms to end the war: Ukraine’s military neutrality; Russia’s de facto hold on Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval fleet since 1783; and a negotiated autonomy for the ethnic-Russian regions, as was called for in the Minsk Agreements but which Ukraine failed to implement.
Instead of this kind of sensible outcome, the Biden administration has repeatedly told Ukraine to fight on. It poured cold water on the negotiations in March, when Ukrainians were contemplating a negotiated end to the war but instead walked away from the negotiating table.
Ukraine is suffering grievously as a result, with its cities and infrastructure reduced to rubble, and tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers dying in the ensuing battles. For all of NATO’s vaunted weaponry, Russia has recently destroyed up to half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
<h4>Sanctions Boomeranged</h4>
In the meantime, the U.S.-led trade and financial sanctions against Russia have boomeranged. With the cutoff of Russian energy flows, Europe is in a deep economic crisis, with adverse spillovers to the U.S. economy.
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline further deepened Europe’s crisis.  According to Russia, this was done by U.K. operatives, but almost certainly with U.S. participation. Let us recall that in February, Biden said that if Russia invades Ukraine, “We will bring an end to it [Nord Stream].” “I promise you,” said Biden, “we will be able to do it.”
Biden’s flawed foreign policy has also brought about what generations of foreign policy strategists including Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski warned against: driving Russia and China into a firm embrace. He has done that by dramatically escalating the cold war with China at precisely the same time as he is pursuing the hot war with Russia.
From the start of his presidency, Biden starkly curtailed diplomatic contacts with China, stirred up new controversies regarding America’s long-standing One China policy, repeatedly called for greater arms sales to Taiwan, and implemented a global export ban on high-tech to China. Both parties have rallied to this destabilizing anti-China policy, but the cost is further destabilization of the world, and also the U.S. economy.
In sum, Biden inherited a difficult economic hand — the pandemic, excess Fed liquidity created in 2020, large budget deficits in 2020, and pre-existing global tensions. Yet he has greatly exacerbated the economic and geopolitical crises rather than solved them.
We need a change of foreign policy. After the elections, there will be an important time for reassessment. Americans and the world need economic recovery, diplomacy, and peace.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.greanvillepost.com/2022/11/02/bidens-foreign-policy-sinking-his-party-ukraine/">Greanville Post</a> and <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/11/02/bidens-foreign-policy-sinking-his-party-ukraine/">Consortium News</a>.
<hr />
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development. He has been adviser to three United Nations secretaries-general, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017) and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
</div>

Biden’s Foreign Policy Sinking His Party &#038; Ukraine

Jeffrey D. Sachs says the U.S. president’s dismissal of diplomacy undermines his own party, prolongs the destruction of Ukraine and threatens nuclear war.

Listen to an audio reading of this article below:
<iframe src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1374934258&amp;color=%23ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;show_teaser=true&amp;visual=true" frameborder="no" scrolling="no"></iframe>
<div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc; line-break: anywhere; word-break: normal; overflow: hidden; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif; font-weight: 100;"><a style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" title="Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone" href="https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Going Rogue With Caitlin Johnstone</a> · <a style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;" title="Capitalism Has Failed As Badly As Anything Can Fail" href="https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/capitalism-has-failed-as-badly-as-anything-can-fail" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Capitalism Has Failed As Badly As Anything Can Fail</a></div>
&#8220;No no you don&#8217;t understand, this US war is completely different from all the other US wars. See, the US is intervening in Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. We&#8217;re fighting a bad guy who is an evil dictator that loves war crimes and genocide. Not like all those other interventions.&#8221;
If the US proxy war in Ukraine was meaningfully different from other US wars they would be justifying it using different arguments, not the exact same ones.
The war propaganda is airing reruns.
❖
Western punditry is <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1585762136323522561" rel="">rife with op-eds</a> arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, like its own actions would have nothing to do with it.
If World War 3 does indeed occur, it will be because the drivers of the US-centralized empire continued accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to their inability to relinquish their goal of unipolar planetary domination.
❖
Pointing out the various flaws in historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don&#8217;t move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones we&#8217;re going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We&#8217;ve still got to find a way to change.
Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay. Cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings. Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn&#8217;t magically change the fact that we can&#8217;t keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition.
Leaving aside that many problems with communism have been wildly exaggerated and others are the direct result of sabotage and economic warfare by the capitalist empire, those criticisms never address the problem that capitalism has no solutions for our current existential crises. So we need systems which can address those existential crises. I see no models with any hope of sustainability that don&#8217;t involve a radical transition from competition to collaboration at every level. We will either accomplish that transition or we will go extinct. It really is that simple.
People tell me, &#8220;Capitalism isn&#8217;t perfect, but it&#8217;s the best system we&#8217;ve seen.&#8221;
It&#8217;s literally killing us. It&#8217;s brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That&#8217;s literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you&#8217;ve no other options but to try radical change. That&#8217;s the juncture we&#8217;re at right now.
The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we&#8217;re marching toward dystopia and extinction. It is entirely within the reach of human potential to have a collaboration-based civilization where everyone works together toward human thriving. Our rulers have delivered only competition-based systems which do the exact opposite. They failed the test. Time for something new.
It doesn&#8217;t get any more fail than &#8220;Yeah we&#8217;ve competed ourselves into a situation where there might be a nuclear war that ends literally everything any minute now.&#8221; That&#8217;s the most fail you can have while still being alive enough to acknowledge the failure. The facts are in. They failed.
A system that fails to that extent does not deserve to exist, and should not exist. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we can just shake each other awake from the propaganda-induced coma we&#8217;re all in we can force the creation of much better systems.
❖
Mass media propagandists work so hard to discredit The Grayzone because they know that tomorrow it could be their own emails getting published revealing corrupt collusion with western officials and intelligence insiders.
❖
Let yourself be happy. If you can&#8217;t do it for you then do it for the world. Refusing to let yourself be happy is just keeping that much happiness out of the world. It&#8217;s making it a worse place to live. Be happy.
Refusing to let yourself be happy just deprives the world of that much happiness. Refusing to let yourself be loved just deprives the world of that much love. Refusing to let yourself be at peace just deprives the world of that much peace.
Be happy. Not because you &#8220;deserve&#8221; it or any of that empty narrative fluff, but because the world is a hard place and any spark of happiness is sorely needed.

Capitalism Has Failed As Badly As Anything Can Fail: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we&#039;re marching toward dystopia and extinction.

If you are a parent, there may be times when you think of your kids as little terrorists. At least jokingly. Lovingly.
But 13-year-old Faina Savenkova is considered a REAL terrorist in Ukraine, under the law which equates &#8220;info terrorism&#8221; with all other acts of terrorism.
What did Faina do? Did she blow up a building? Did she hijack a plane? Did she hold people hostage at gunpoint?
No. She voiced her opinions.
And for that, the child-writer from Donbass was placed on the notorious <a href="https://medium.com/@deborahlarmstrong/13-year-old-girl-added-to-ukrainian-hit-list-fb2eb301fb75">Ukrainian kill list</a> known as Mirotvorets, “Peacemaker,” where her personal data — her home address and phone number — have been made public.
After all, to the nationalists who make Ukraine’s laws these days, Faina’s life is only worth one bullet.
I spoke with Faina last Thursday on Skype, along with Mira Terada, the chairwoman of the <a href="https://fondfbr.ru/en/english/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Foundation to Battle Injustice</a>, a Russian humanitarian organization which is dedicated to exposing human rights abuses worldwide and has been investigating the Mirotvorets kill list.
I have grown to know both of these women quite well over the summer. Faina and I message each other almost every day. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that she is only 13. Though she has the seemingly boundless energy children are blessed with, it is tempered with a serious mind and wisdom beyond her years.
But then, Faina has not had a childhood in the normal sense, and neither have any of the kids in the Donbass, who are labeled “Russian separatists” by mainstream media in the West, which dismissed Kiev’s 8-year-bombardment of them without much thought.
Ukraine’s nationalist, neo-Nazi militias have shelled the Donbass with artillery and airstrikes since the Maidan coup first tore the country apart in 2014. And Volodymyr Zelensky, a Western puppet who campaigned on a promise of ending the fighting in the Donbass, did nothing to stop it. In fact, the attacks escalated to the point where Russia finally intervened after years of stonewalled attempts to broker peace diplomatically.
&#8230;
To Believe and to Hope 
by Faina Savenkova (Originally published in The Saker) 
Translated by Scott Humor 
<a href="https://thesaker.is/to-believe-and-to-hope/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://thesaker.is/to-believe-and-to-hope/</a>
Whenever someone asks me to describe life under Ukrainian shelling, I feel lost. Not only because I am still a child, and not simply because I have nothing to say. I just don’t know what they want me to say. Dry and indifferent reports of casualties and destruction? Certainly not. There is news for that. Personal feelings and experiences? That’s more difficult. What is a life during the war? Ordinary, if you don’t remember your peaceful life.
Many people may be horrified to realize that in the twenty-first century in the geographical center of Europe, there are children who don’t remember passenger jets flying high in the sky, walking across an evening city with their parents, or some other cute nonsense that other children don’t even notice.
The no-fly zone and the curfews adjust our lives. That’s why when we read about the riots in some European cities after an introduction of coronavirus curfew, it is puzzling: what is wrong? It’s just a curfew, nothing terrible, why does it bother them that much? The reason for our calmness is actually very simple: everything is known in comparison, and we have nothing to compare.
We are a generation that doesn’t remember a peaceful life. We are a generation that lives by strict rules, the failure of which might result in death. We learned how to determine the direction of the projectiles by ear, so that we know when to worry and when to continue going about our business. We have learned not to ignore the lectures of the Ministry of Emergency Situations on the rules of conduct during attacks, in case of detection of suspicious objects or other recommendations in various situations. And still, no one can guarantee that you won’t accidentally get hit by a shard because you’re just unlucky. Strange? Scared? Everyday life, with a small degree of difference depending on the intensity of the shelling of the territory.
What is life under Ukrainian shelling? It is the evening of June 1st, Children’s Day, when hundreds of paper lanterns soared into the sky at the memorials to commemorate the fallen children of Donbass and light the way for the angels. After all, it is difficult to explain to kids why these angels were robbed of their short lives, deprived of the opportunity to grow up and see the world in our homeland. Now they can only watch from the sky and cry while the adults comfort them.
Almost all of my life and memories are connected to the war, which is why I have no regrets and sadness about the past. I live in the present and occasionally think about the future, in which there is a place for a naive and stupid dream that causes a smile. Quite real, warming and almost tangible, it allows you not to despair even in the most difficult times. I want passenger planes to fly in the skies of Donbass, not paper lanterns. Any dream can turn into a reality. It must be so, and I believe it will be so.
&#8230;
Two weeks short of her 14th birthday, Faina is already an accomplished writer, with four books published, including two novels and two collections of short stories and essays. She is not a poet, though she is often referred to as one, much to her annoyance.
Faina is not shy about voicing her opinions in her writing. She speaks her mind with courage and conviction both in her published work and in her private correspondence. But on camera, she is reserved like many young girls, and she holds herself back. In time, she will grow more accustomed to the spotlight, but I wanted to do my part to make her more comfortable during our interview, so I decided to attempt it speaking Russian.
Unfortunately, my Russian is rather halting these days, and to be honest, it has only ever been conversational at best. Thankfully, Mira Terada was there to interpret what I could not, which was most of it. But Mira says that my stuttering attempt at Russian comforted Faina, so in that case it is worth a little personal humiliation for me to bring you this interview where I invited Faina to read the above essay and one other that she has written, aloud.
I hope that you will watch it despite my many stumblings.

A Life Worth One Bullet

&quot;Info-Terrorist&quot; and &quot;Russian Separatist,&quot; 13-year old Faina Savenkova

On October 24th, 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/garland-hold-news-conference-significant-national-security-cases-rcna53702">announced</a> that the FBI had arrested 13 Chinese citizens on charges including attempted bribery of an FBI official to gather information on an ongoing court case and trying to force other Chinese citizens to repatriate back to China. The court case in question reportedly involves Chinese tech giant Huawei, the world&#8217;s largest workers&#8217; cooperative, which the US and Canada have sought to weaken through sanctions and the nearly three-year-long <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/canadians-released-after-huawei-cfo-resolves-u-s-charges-n1280079">detention</a> of its Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou. The Department of Justice&#8217;s charges of attempted forced repatriation stem from China’s ongoing “Operation Fox Hunt,” an effort to bring back and hold accountable officials convicted or accused of corruption and other crimes who have sought refuge overseas. <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1768993/team-behind-chinas-operation-fox-hunt-revealed">680 criminals were repatriated</a> to China to face justice within the first six months, with countries across the world cooperating with China. The Chinese government&#8217;s effort to root out corruption is of course being spun by western media as another authoritarian crackdown, presumably so that it doesn&#8217;t resonate with Americans, most of whom report that they feel <a href="https://reason.com/2022/07/25/most-americans-think-government-is-corrupt-a-third-say-armed-revolution-may-be-necessary-soon/">their government is corrupt</a>. It is truly the height of hypocrisy for the US government to bemoan legitimate repatriation efforts by China, while at the same time remaining more determined than ever to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/17/uk/uk-julian-assange-extradition-priti-patel-intl-gbr/index.html">extradite Julian Assange</a>.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-3406" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/FfW7mayUUAELU1k.jpeg" alt="" width="715" height="800" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/FfW7mayUUAELU1k.jpeg 715w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/FfW7mayUUAELU1k-268x300.jpeg 268w" sizes="(max-width: 715px) 100vw, 715px" />
The United States in March 2021 <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/16/russia-and-iran-tried-to-interfere-with-2020-election-us-intelligence-agencies-say.html">accused Iran and Russia</a> of meddling in the US election. This year it is the Communist Party of China that is increasingly in the imperial crosshairs as an <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/china-strives-to-ramp-up-election-influence-this-year/ar-AA13r1WJ">alleged meddler</a> in the internal affairs of the United States, instead of the other way around. At a press conference following the arrests, Attorney Garland proclaimed that, “each of these cases lays bare the Chinese government’s flagrant violation of international laws as they work to project their authoritarian view around the world, including within our own borders.” The Attorney General&#8217;s words did not comport with reality, however, given that it is the US and not China that continues to arm and fund neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, has weaponized identity politics to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/09/26/iranian-official-says-us-is-using-hijab-protests-to-weaken-iran-as-demonstrations-spread-globally/?sh=dc778dc5f4df">disrupt an already heavily-sanctioned Iran</a>, and launched another <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/us-to-push-for-multinational-haiti-intervention-force-in-canada-talks/ar-AA13qLIv">military intervention</a> in Haiti to prevent a popular uprising there.
The United States is pursuing the latest national security priorities specified in the <a href="https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3201683/department-of-defense-releases-its-2022-strategic-reviews-national-defense-stra/">National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and Missile Defense Review</a>, which the Pentagon released on October 27, 2022. The recent spying charges against the 13 Chinese nationals arrested recently appears to align with the major goals mentioned in the above report:
“The 2022 NDS identifies four top-level defense priorities that the Department must pursue to strengthen deterrence.
<ul>
<li>Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).</li>
<li>Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners.</li>
<li>Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary – prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, then the Russia challenge in Europe.</li>
<li>Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem. &#8220;</li>
</ul>
The United States is trying to ratchet up the pressure on China in any way it can, with new sanctions affecting <a href="https://table.media/china/en/news/us-government-bans-citizens-from-working-on-chips-in-china/">US citizens working in China</a>, and by arresting Chinese nationals they can target in the United States. Besides banning US citizens from working in the semiconductor field in China, the US is also now trying to pressure other countries not to sell China the materials needed for semiconductors. US and EU sanctions on Russia energy continue to wreak havoc in western Europe. How long until Japan, Australia and other Indo-Pacific nations face similar catastrophe from reduced trade with China as a result of bullying from the United States? The world has witnessed how the United States has cynically used Ukraine to further its geo-strategic interests and it must remain vigilant of the US fomenting a new crisis in Taiwan, one right out of Biden&#8217;s playbook.

Huawei, IFA 2018

FBI Announces Arrest of 13 Chinese &#8220;Spies&#8221;

Biden&#039;s Justice Department charged the Chinese nationals with trying to “unlawfully exert influence in the United States.”

In Manhattan on Saturday, October 15th, 125 mostly young people attended Schiller Institute&#8217;s youth conference, titled &#8220;Build the New Paradigm: Defeat Green Fascism.&#8221; Presenters included Schiller Institute and LaRouche movement members, journalists, and media figures from around the world. The shared message was overall one of hope for the future and optimism about the possibility of building a mass movement to steer our society away from nuclear war and &#8220;degrowth&#8221; toward a more prosperous, peaceful future.
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<h4>&#8220;World Citizens of all countries, unite&#8221;</h4>
The <a href="https://larouchepub.com/hzl/2022/4941-world_citizens_of_all_countrie-hzl.html">keynote speaker</a> of the morning panel was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the International Schiller Institute, presenting virtually from Germany. She advised of the growing danger of nuclear war, which the US and NATO have inflamed by crossing Russia&#8217;s red lines and threatening to balkanize the federation. Invoking a prediction from her late husband Lyndon LaRouche, Zepp-LaRouche warned that if a new economic world order is not soon developed, the planet would escalate to new crises of economic depression, fascism, and a third world war. Her speech framed the rest of the day&#8217;s conference, juxtaposing Xi Jinping&#8217;s vision of a &#8220;shared community of the future of mankind&#8221; with Frederich Schiller&#8217;s concept of a &#8220;world citizen&#8221; and closing with a variation on the famous call from the Communist Manifesto:  “World citizens of all countries, unite &#8212; to stop World War III and create a better world.”
Jackson Hinkle spoke next on the &#8220;green fascism&#8221; driving the &#8220;Great Reset&#8221; agenda. He emphasized the moral imperative we have to increase energy production worldwide and provide universal access to basic essentials. Instead, energy crises are being self-inflicted such as the present in Europe resulting from the all-out economic war against Russia. Other neoliberal policies are laundered as &#8220;green&#8221; but merely increase people&#8217;s economic desperation. Burdened with debt, an energy crisis, and inflation, the average person has limited means or time to oppose such policies or even understand them when the media is controlled by those who benefit most from them.
<h4>&#8220;Why are developing and underdeveloped countries the only ones expected to risk their energy securities?&#8221;</h4>
Another speaker, Princy Mthombeni, founder of Africa4Nuclear, gave her perspective as a South African on on so-called &#8220;green&#8221; policies. African nations will be unable to assert their sovereignty or provide for their people if forced to comply with the G7&#8217;s Net Zero proposal. &#8220;Why are developing and underdeveloped countries the only ones expected to risk their energy securities?&#8221; she asked. She wondered why the US and other G7 countries, which have rejected these same proposals for themselves, would expect South Africans to step up as guinea pigs for their renewable goals. Indeed, as these countries pledged $8.5B to transition South Africa to green energy (with no pledge to increase nuclear power), Western-owned energy companies there continue to export coal to Germany. She emphasized that Africans need energy to industrialize, and the energy generated using only renewable forms is simply insufficient for the task at hand.
Rahma Nantongo, a contributor from Uganda, shared that the EU and environmentalists have been pushing to prevent completion of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1vKLUKVDJA">East African Crude Oil Pipeline</a> (EACOP). This pipeline would radically improve quality of life for many in Uganda, enabling many more households to cook with gas or electricity rather than fire or charcoal. Nantongo started the #<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Youth4EACOP&amp;src=typed_query&amp;f=top">Youth4EACOP</a> hashtag on Twitter to show the strong support among Ugandans and Tanzanians for this new energy source. She is not opposed to clean energy, but added that Ugandans will need access to many diverse sources of energy to best improve living conditions in their country.
<h4>&#8220;If you want to get rich, you need to fix the road first.&#8221;</h4>
Continuing the theme of African infrastructure, Shexiu Huang of Guangdong University spoke on African/Chinese partnership for infrastructure development through the framing of addressing three issues holding back African industrialization: shortage of infrastructure, shortage of skilled labor, and shortage of capital. Both Huang and Mthombeni referenced the African Union&#8217;s <a href="https://au.int/en/agenda2063/overview">Agenda 2063</a>, a concrete plan to create an &#8220;an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena.&#8221; This agenda&#8217;s stated goals include increased standards of living, infrastructure and modernization; increased education and civil institutions, and a united, decolonized, Pan African cultural renaissance. These are strikingly complementary to the Schiller Institute&#8217;s vision for the world as expressed through this conference: the ability for every person alive to develop to their full potential without being held back by poverty or underdevelopment; the development of new classical cultures that increase a sense of beauty and discovery; and global institutions that support peace, development, and sovereignty rather than war, imperialism, and colonization.
The gravity of our current geopolitical crises were not forgotten throughout the day, but the focus was on how those who understand our challenges can step up to address them. Jason Ross, executive director of the LaRouche Organization, and LaRouche Youth Movement members spoke on how their values address this challenges. Ross emphasized the need to develop a &#8220;joy of discovery&#8221; in young people. Children should be praised not for having the &#8216;correct&#8217; views but rather to develop their own, through a process of discovery. Chicago Public Schools music teacher Dana Anex argued in her presentation that one great way to foster this mindset in students is through training in classical music. Children who grow up surrounded by poverty and violence often reach to the conclusion that &#8220;prosperity, safety, and beauty are not for them.&#8221; But Anex testified that she has seen her students develop increased self-discipline, curiosity, and problem-solving abilities with just less than a year of a music education focused on classical structure and fostering creativity.
The final speaker was LaRouche Youth Movement member Ashley Tran, who called on the US to end the Federal Reserve, replacing it with a Hamiltonian national bank; abolish federal agencies; leave NATO &amp; G7 in order to strengthen international cooperative relationships; and ultimately, to join the Belt and Road initiative.
<h4>&#8220;The power of the human spirit to transcend death&#8221;</h4>
Second Panel:
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The second panel focused on the origins of green ideology as well as how to overcome it. The afternoon was opened by keynote speaker and <a href="https://www.sareforsenate.com/">senate candidate</a> Diane Sare, who linked the dark forces behind the 1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom to today&#8217;s mass indoctrination of people to adopt a pessimistic, dissociated view of self and humanity. Sare contended this deception has enabled the US government to lead the world to the brink of nuclear war, perhaps over it, while its citizens remain largely complacent or resigned to the emergency. However, an understanding of &#8220;the power of the human spirit to transcend death&#8221; as was expressed through African American spirituals, can penetrate this catatonia&#8211;arousing people to action, leadership, and radical change.
Sare was followed by Haz Al-Din, Marxist-Leninist influencer from the Infrared Collective, who expressed similar optimism in the human spirit. Al-Din described humanity&#8217;s choice as between whether to march onward, making discoveries and expanding the human species, or to sacrifice the potential of our species in the name of preserving the &#8220;universal subject&#8221; of our humanity. Risking extinction to pursue the highest limits of human possibility would, for Al-Din, be more dignified than limiting growth and industry, sacrificing pursuit of meaning and our very humanity in the process.
Schiller President USA Megan Dobrodt, commentator Fox Green and journalist Sameera Khan all spoke to the ways in which fascism and its eugenicist agenda were not defeated but only rebranded in the guise of putatively progressive, environmentalist politics. When AOC talks about the need to &#8220;decarbonize,&#8221; Khan said, she is talking down to China. Unsurprisingly, green energy policy has become another cudgel used to bash those countries resisting US hegemony and the so-called &#8220;rules based,&#8221; unipolar world order.
<h4>&#8220;End the animalistic liberal ideology&#8221;</h4>
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-3401" src="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-24-at-11.45.08-PM-1024x575.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="575" srcset="https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-24-at-11.45.08-PM-1024x575.jpg 1024w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-24-at-11.45.08-PM-300x168.jpg 300w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-24-at-11.45.08-PM-768x431.jpg 768w, https://api.iiser.org/media/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-24-at-11.45.08-PM.jpg 1268w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
The optimism for the human spirit to defeat green fascism and US hegemony was beautifully conveyed in a video message to the conference by Fouad Al-Ghaffari, a supporter of the Schiller Institute based in Yemen. His video featured a child, presumably Al-Ghaffari&#8217;s son, and was addressed to Helga Zepp-LaRouche as well as the youth across the world who have joined the movement. The message praised the BRICS bloc and the Belt and Road initiative as projects that &#8220;aim to end the animalistic liberal ideology.&#8221; Despite being subjected to a brutal genocidal war and blockade facilitated by the United States, Al-Ghaffari and his son managed to dress in makeshift astronaut uniforms. With beaming smiles, they expressed their devotion to &#8220;playing a creative role in humanity&#8217;s future and civilizational development,&#8221; on earth and in outer space.
The audience showed great appreciation for Jose Vega and Kynan Thistlethwaite, two LaRouche Youth Movement members who recently made national headlines after confronting AOC about her role in leading the US to the bring of nuclear war with Russia. Vega spoke about the imperative to act now, out of love, to change course away from nuclear war and toward a better future.
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While LaRouche the man was smeared as everything from a cult leader to a fascist, and these accusations follow those who continue to spread his ideas, this conference armed participants with powerful ideas about how citizens across the world can better collaborate on mutually-beneficial infrastructure projects, and invigorated by the passion and positivity of the Youth Movement members. The Schiller Institute&#8217;s vision for infrastructure and creative development across the world is an antidote to fascism. It is a project dedicated to human innovation, creativity, and collaboration beyond the wildest dreams of those blinded by a reactionary &#8220;degrowth&#8221; mindset.

Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism: Human Optimism at the Brink of Nuclear War

The Schiller Institute hosted the conference on October 15, in NYC.

Of all the face-meltingly stupid narratives that have been circulated about the US proxy war in Ukraine, the dumbest so far has got to be the increasingly common claim that aggressively escalating nuclear brinkmanship is safety and de-escalation is danger.
We see a prime example of this self-evidently idiotic narrative in a new Business Insider article titled &#8220;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/deal-with-russia-made-under-nuke-threats-could-be-dangerous-2022-10" rel="">Putin&#8217;s nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that&#8217;s &#8216;dangerous.&#8217;</a>&#8221;
&#8220;An understandable desire to avoid a nuclear war could actually make the world more dangerous if it means rushing to implement a &#8216;peace&#8217; in Ukraine that serves Russian interests,&#8221; writes <a href="https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/918862599348830208" rel="">reliable empire apologist</a> Charles Davis. &#8220;Such a move, which some influential figures have called for, risks setting a precedent that atomic blackmail is the way to win wars and take territory troops can&#8217;t otherwise hold, a model that could be copycatted by even the weakest nuclear-armed states, and may only succeed at delaying another war.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Not every day that a headline can fully capture the depravity of US media and political culture: <a href="https://t.co/oMRhBmWFfU">pic.twitter.com/oMRhBmWFfU</a>
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) <a href="https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1581791354094776320?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2022</a></blockquote>
Davis&#8217; sole source for his article is the UN Institute for Disarmament Research&#8217;s Pavel Podvig, who<a href="https://twitter.com/russianforces" rel=""> is very openly biased</a> against Russia.
&#8220;The West supports Ukraine with weapons and financial and moral and political support. Giving that up and saying that, &#8216;Well, you know, we are too afraid of nuclear threats and so we just want to make a deal&#8217; — that would certainly set a precedent that would not be very positive,&#8221; says Podvig. &#8220;If you yield to this nuclear threat once, then what would prevent Russia in the future — or others — to do the same thing again?&#8221;
Like other empire apologists currently pushing the ridiculous &#8220;de-escalation actually causes escalation&#8221; line, Davis and Podvig argue as though nuclear weapons just showed up on the scene a few days ago, as if there haven&#8217;t been generations of western policies toward Moscow which have indeed <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/we-survived-the-last-nuclear-standoff" rel="">involved backing down and making compromises</a> at times because doing so was seen as preferable to risking a nuclear attack. We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because Kennedy <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/" rel="">secretly acquiesced to Khrushchev&#8217;s demands</a> that the US remove the Jupiter missiles it had placed in Turkey and Italy, which was what provoked Moscow to move nukes to Cuba in the first place.
Throughout the cold war the Soviet Union insisted on a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence#:~:text=During%20the%20Cold%20War%2C%20the,Federal%20Republic%20of%20Yugoslavia%2C%20among" rel="">sphere of influence</a> that US strategists granted a wide berth to, exactly because it was a nuclear superpower. Even as recently as the Obama administration <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/" rel="">the US president maintained</a> that &#8220;Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.&#8221;
Nevertheless we&#8217;re seeing this new &#8220;escalation is safety and de-escalation is danger&#8221; narrative pushed with increasing forcefulness by imperial spinmeisters, because it would take a lot of force indeed to get people to accept something so self-evidently backwards and nonsensical.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
All of you who are saying that we have to give in to nuclear blackmail are making nuclear war more likely. Please stop. When you give in to it, you empower dictators to do it again, encourage worldwide nuclear proliferation, and make nuclear war much, much more likely.
— Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) <a href="https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1581004273030086657?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 14, 2022</a></blockquote>
&#8220;All of you who are saying that we have to give in to nuclear blackmail are making nuclear war more likely. Please stop,&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1581004273030086657" rel="">tweeted</a> Yale University&#8217;s Timothy Snyder recently. &#8220;When you give in to it, you empower dictators to do it again, encourage worldwide nuclear proliferation, and make nuclear war much, much more likely.&#8221;
Snyder, who <a href="https://twitter.com/imatviyishyn/status/1568641240874516481" rel="">has been photographed</a> grinning happily with Ukraine&#8217;s President Zelensky, does not actually believe that people tweeting in support of de-escalation and detente will cause a nuclear war. He uses the newfangled buzzword &#8220;nuclear blackmail&#8221; to discredit calls for de-escalation and detente because he wants those who support de-escalation and detente to be silent. He says &#8220;please stop&#8221; solely because he wants peace advocacy to stop.
&#8220;Nuclear war comes because we’ve done too little not too much,&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/AVindman/status/1582004044557869056" rel="">tweeted</a> Alexander Vindman, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vindman" rel="">key player</a> in advancing the Trump-Ukraine scandal, further pushing the narrative that greater escalation is where the safety is.
In response to a tweet by France&#8217;s President Macron saying &#8220;We do not want a World War,&#8221; a <a href="https://www.csce.gov/about-csce/staff/paul-massaro-iii-policy-advisor" rel="">senior policy advisor</a> for the US government&#8217;s Helsinki Commission named Paul Massaro <a href="https://twitter.com/apmassaro3/status/1580506710443462656" rel="">tweeted</a>, &#8220;Precisely this sort of weak, terrified language leads Russia to escalate.&#8221;
Imagine being so warped and twisted that you see that as a sane response to the most normal statement anyone can possibly make.
Meanwhile you&#8217;ve got idiots like Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger <a href="https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1581443119996108800" rel="">acting like they&#8217;re being brave tough guys</a> by welcoming continual nuclear escalation while calling anyone who advocates de-escalation cowards:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Must be a tough existence being so afraid. The <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ukrainians?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Ukrainians</a> started as the underdog but still fought and now will win. Ole snowflake <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidSacks?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DavidSacks</a> is trembling as he blames America for the invasion. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/nafo?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#nafo</a> <a href="https://t.co/1LN15hNzeJ">https://t.co/1LN15hNzeJ</a>
— Adam Kinzinger #fella (@AdamKinzinger) <a href="https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1581443119996108800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2022</a></blockquote>
The Nation&#8217;s Katrina vanden Heuvel somehow pulled off the heroic feat of getting an article advocating de-escalation published in the Washington Post with a piece titled &#8220;<a href="https://archive.ph/yBEYT" rel="">The Cuban missile crisis was 60 years ago, but it’s urgently relevant today</a>.&#8221; Reminding us how close we came to total annihilation and how we only survived getting so recklessly close to nuclear war by &#8220;plain dumb luck,&#8221; she argues that humanity cannot risk going to the brink like that again.
&#8220;Humanity cannot afford to spin the cylinder again in this game of Russian roulette; we must unload the gun. Our only path forward is de-escalation,&#8221; vanden Heuvel writes.
Indeed it is. It&#8217;s absolutely insane that humanity is risking its own extinction over these games of empire-building and planetary domination when we&#8217;ve got so many other existential hurdles we need to focus on clearing.
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This is all completely unnecessary. There&#8217;s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality saying states need to be waving armageddon weapons at each other. There&#8217;s no valid reason not to lay aside these games of global conquest and collaborate together toward a healthy coexistence on this planet.
We could have such a beautiful world. All the energy we pour into competition and conquest could go toward innovation that benefits us all, making sure everyone has enough, eliminating human suffering and the need for human toil. We&#8217;re trading heaven on earth for elite ego games.
There&#8217;s no valid reason we can&#8217;t move from models of competition and domination to models of collaboration and care. Collaboration with each other; care for each other. Collaboration with our ecosystem; care for our ecosystem. We&#8217;re throwing it away in exchange for senseless misery and peril.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-profoundly-stupid-narrative-that">Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack</a>.

The Profoundly Stupid Narrative That Nuclear Brinkmanship Is Safety And De-Escalation Is Danger

Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

Why the linear political spectrum is bankrupt.

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk&#8217;s business ventures which could see the plutocrat&#8217;s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an &#8220;increasingly Russia-friendly stance.&#8221;
Bloomberg <a href="https://archive.ph/Lsrif" rel="">reports</a>:
<blockquote>Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.
US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine &#8212; he said it had cost him $80 million so far &#8212; and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.</blockquote>
The &#8220;group of foreign investors&#8221; the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly <a href="https://archive.ph/Lsrif#selection-4237.137-4237.197" rel="">includes</a> Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a <a href="https://qz.com/519388/this-saudi-prince-now-owns-more-of-twitter-than-jack-dorsey-does" rel="">massive Twitter shareholder</a> for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Scoop: Biden admin officials are discussing whether US should subject some of <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@elonmusk</a>’s ventures to national security reviews, including his deal for Twitter Inc., and the Starlink satellite network, sources tell <a href="https://twitter.com/SalehaMohsin?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SalehaMohsin</a> and me. <a href="https://twitter.com/BloombergTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BloombergTV</a> <a href="https://t.co/pZx1As8RUZ">pic.twitter.com/pZx1As8RUZ</a>
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) <a href="https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1583258922475204608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
&#8220;Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,&#8221; Bloomberg writes. &#8220;One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.&#8221;
&#8220;Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,&#8221; says Bloomberg. &#8220;His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.&#8221;
&#8220;If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,&#8221; <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-elon-musk-twitter-deal-government-national-security-review-report-2022-10" rel="">writes</a> Business Insider&#8217;s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.
Indeed Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1583264626053042176" rel="">has already indicated</a> that he&#8217;d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they&#8217;re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?
Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably &#8220;Russia-friendly stance.&#8221; Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn&#8217;t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn&#8217;t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
BREAKING: Biden is considering blocking Musk’s Twitter deal (due to close 10/28), worried by his threat to stop supplying Starlink to Ukraine and his Russia-friendly “peace proposals.” The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) CAN nix the deal! 🧵
— Duty To Warn 🔉 (@duty2warn) <a href="https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1583425927622852608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/16/biden-administration-completely-kills-the-its-a-private-company-so-its-not-censorship-argument/" rel="">exerting more and more pressure</a> on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that&#8217;s as it should be.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who&#8217;s been paying attention to things like the <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/15/more-escalations-in-online-censorship/" rel="">drastic escalations</a> in <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/defending-freedom-and-democracy-sure?s=w" rel="">online censorship</a> since the war in Ukraine began, <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/20/twitter-to-ramp-up-censorship-of-misinformation-about-the-ukraine-war/" rel="">including on Twitter</a>, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/dont-underestimate-how-badly-the" rel="">were already well underway</a> before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-russia-tiktok-white-house/" rel="">summoned top social media influencers</a> to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/04/30/oh-god-its-going-to-get-so-much-worse/" rel="">assembling a &#8220;disinformation governance board&#8221;</a> to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1415725320381079569" rel="">flagging &#8220;problematic posts&#8221;</a> for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/when-billionaires-and-the-government" rel="">admitted</a> that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.
It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/imperial-narrative-control-has-five" rel="">the imperial narrative control system</a>. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10/11/the-science-of-propaganda-is-still-being-developed-and-advanced/" rel="">the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation</a> to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/censorship-by-algorithm-does-far" rel="">algorithm manipulation</a>, censorship, and sophisticated <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/" rel="">information ops like Wikipedia</a> in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.
Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-government-sees-silicon-valley">Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack</a>.

The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they&#8217;re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.
Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to &#8220;move to Russia&#8221;, even though we&#8217;re the ones advocating the supposed &#8220;western values&#8221; they claim to support while they&#8217;re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://t.co/xptw7tIHpA">pic.twitter.com/xptw7tIHpA</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1584006076235624448?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 23, 2022</a></blockquote>
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Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn&#8217;t the good war, it&#8217;s just the current war.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don&#8217;t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.
The US indisputably <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-not-okay-for-grown-adults-to-2cf" rel="">deliberately provoked this war</a>. The US is indisputably <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/us-rejection-of-moscows-offer-for" rel="">keeping this war going</a>. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he <a href="https://www.slowboring.com/p/joe-biden-is-not-the-impediment-to" rel="">wrote the following</a>:
<blockquote>The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That&#8217;s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of &#8220;everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.&#8221;
Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s easy to oppose the last war. It&#8217;s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone&#8217;s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time. <a href="https://t.co/UsN5YclShF">https://t.co/UsN5YclShF</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1583611828382277633?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2022</a></blockquote>
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The fact that the White House <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-government-sees-silicon-valley" rel="">is weighing a national security review</a> of Elon Musk&#8217;s Twitter purchase because he&#8217;s perceived as having an &#8220;increasingly Russia-friendly stance&#8221; is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.
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There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes &#8220;disinformation&#8221; or &#8220;misinformation&#8221; on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.
This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of &#8220;fact checking&#8221; and &#8220;counter-disinformation&#8221; is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/02/us-state-affiliated-newsguard-targets-consortium-news/" rel="">have ties to status quo power</a>.
The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what&#8217;s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it&#8217;s plainly irrational. In practice it&#8217;s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.
Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We&#8217;ve managed. It&#8217;s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
A regime that points guns at people for wielding cameras is a regime that sees truth as a threat. <a href="https://t.co/SzHaDURKQR">https://t.co/SzHaDURKQR</a>
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) <a href="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1583597040654688256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 21, 2022</a></blockquote>
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Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it&#8217;s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.
If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we&#8217;re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we&#8217;d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.
It&#8217;s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we&#8217;ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.
A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn&#8217;t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein&#8217;s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we&#8217;ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won&#8217;t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/always-opposing-the-last-war-but">Caitlin Johnstone&#8217;s Substack</a>.

Always Opposing The Last War But Not The Current One: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

We&#8217;re being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who&#8217;s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won&#8217;t stop invading and conquering until he&#8217;s stopped by force.
The news media aren&#8217;t telling people about <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-not-okay-for-grown-adults-to-2cf" rel="">the western aggressions</a> which led to this war. They&#8217;re not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the <a href="https://news.antiwar.com/2022/04/25/after-kyiv-visit-lloyd-austin-says-us-goal-is-for-russia-to-be-weakened/" rel="">stated goal of weakening Russia</a> and is <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/13/caitlin-johnstone-us-rejects-moscows-offer-to-talk/" rel="">rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace</a>. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won&#8217;t listen to reason and only understands violence. The world&#8217;s two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.
To participate in this madness is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fictional version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.
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&#8220;No no you don&#8217;t understand, if we weren&#8217;t being told constantly by the media that this proxy war needs our full support and censoring the voices who dispute this and using giant troll armies to swarm and silence anyone who questions this, we might fall victim to propaganda.&#8221;
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&#8220;You&#8217;re not anti-war, you&#8217;re just anti-AMERICAN wars,&#8221; said the person who is loudly cheerleading America&#8217;s proxy war in Ukraine.
Warmongers don&#8217;t like being called warmongers when they support a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US and is being sustained by the funding and facilitation of the US with the explicit goal of weakening a longtime geopolitical rival of the US. They get very upset when you point out the fact that they are doing this, and when people&#8217;s opposition to their warmongering is described as &#8220;anti-war&#8221;:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Calling this deranged nonsense “anti-war” is giving it way too much credit. <a href="https://t.co/mZ4jUiSrU9">https://t.co/mZ4jUiSrU9</a>
— Matt Duss (@mattduss) <a href="https://twitter.com/mattduss/status/1580578653720567808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 13, 2022</a></blockquote>
They very much prefer to pretend that this time the US is on the good and righteous side of a war, because in that imaginary world they&#8217;re the cool anti-fascists standing up to an evil tyrant and those who oppose their warmongering are the real warmongers.
&#8220;This time the US is on the GOOD side of a war! Also, goo goo ga ga I am a little baby with a little baby brain.&#8221;
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The closer we get to nuclear war the less patience I have for sectarian spats between people who are supposed to be opposing war and militarism. Grow the fuck up and get over yourselves. This is more important than you and your ego.
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Don&#8217;t let anyone tell you your criticisms of US warmongering make no difference; if they didn&#8217;t, the empire wouldn&#8217;t work so hard to dissuade you from making them. They work so hard to manufacture public consent for their agendas because they absolutely require that consent.
An entire globe-spanning empire rests on our closed eyelids. Depends on keeping us in a propaganda-induced coma. Circulating ideas and information which discredit and dispute that propaganda poses a direct threat to that empire. That&#8217;s what all the censorship of dissent is about.
Is your one tweet, video or public demonstration going to bring the empire crashing down? Of course not. But it will spread awareness by that much. And all positive changes in human behavior are <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/07/26/consciousness-and-dysfunction-cannot-coexist/" rel="">always preceded by an expansion of awareness</a>. You&#8217;re nudging us all toward awakening to whatever extent you help expand awareness of truth and reality.
We can&#8217;t be the Hollywood hero who single-handedly decapitates the machine, but we can all collectively throw sand in its gears, making it harder and harder for it to function. That&#8217;s what disrupting the imperial propaganda machine accomplishes, because that machine depends on propaganda. The weakest part of an empire that&#8217;s held together by lies and manipulation is its lies and manipulations; that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s such an aggressively protected aspect of its power. And it happens to be the one part that anyone with a voice can attack, and attack effectively.
The <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/our-entire-civilization-is-structured" rel="">nightmare scenario</a> for our rulers is the same as the nightmare scenario for every ruler throughout history: that the masses will get sick of their rule and use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That&#8217;s exactly what <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing" rel="">the propaganda matrix</a> is designed to prevent.
One aspect of this struggle that is a bit like a Hollywood movie is that it kind of is a struggle between light and darkness, because the empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we&#8217;re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That&#8217;s why Assange is in prison. It&#8217;s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant, and why online discussion is swarmed by astroturf trolling ops. Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.

The Revolution Report

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